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...
TL;DR:
The movement has an evidence problem. To solve it, for each intervention we need to know:
* What types of evidence that intervention needs
* What types of evidence different sources can give us
In this post, we outline a framework for evidencing an intervention through five stages:
...
I, like probably most reading this, am someone who strongly values reason and believes that helping others is a good thing.
This is why many people choose to 'join' EA: They find EA somewhere, think that the ideas make sense and seem true, presumably because it aligns well with their values and consider it right. The reason-based approach makes sense to them.
But isn't the procedure similar for following any community? Imagine I am looking for meaning, so when I stumble upon a guru which aligns with (some of) my values, I integrate myself into that community. Similarly so for political parties, a football club, a weekly art gathering, etc.
I might as well have different beliefs and values. So these questions follow:
Does EA seem like the right movement to me because there is something inherently right about EA, or just because EA fits my initial values and beliefs? In other words, is EA just built on the belief in potentially arbitrary assumptions (e.g helping others is good), or is there actual substantiation for these assumptions?
I'm curious to hear thoughts about this, I might dig much deeper into this and potentially create a post for the Red Teaming Contest. There seems to be a lot more to be said and I've already got some ideas, but I wanted to find out whether this would be fruitful.