Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...
When speaking to candidates who are considering working with us at 80,000 Hours, I often hear people worry about replaceability.
The familiar version of the worry is about whether the organisation will hire someone else in your place. If it will, then the difference you make by taking the job is only the difference between you and them.
There are a couple of well-known answers to that. The person hired in your place probably cares about the world too, and would go on to do somethi...
I like the idea of carbon offsets for flights etc, but I think most carbon offset schemes are probably garbage. A year ago I made a personal pledge that whenever I was prompted to pay extra to carbon offset something, I would decline, but then immediately donate the same amount or more to effective environmental funds (in my case, Effective Altruism Australia Environment.) It's easy to remember and easy to do. Perhaps this simple pledge will be similarly sticky for other people :)
My personal (skeptical) benchmark for price per unit of non-garbage carbon offsets comes from Scott Alexander's mention of Climeworks:
Climeworks actually charges more now, at least for their individual subscription pricing: $1,500/ton, no volume discount across subscription tiers.
I like the idea of immediately donating the same amount or more to effective environmental funds, thanks for sharing.