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:
...
We shouldn't actually do this because mastodon is not good software and will probably be obsolete soon, but if that were not the case.
It would be a strategic win for EA to conspicuously fund the development of a community notes feature for Mastodon.
Here's what I think would happen: most mastodon communities would shit on it and refuse to use it because it had EA funding, but not vehemently enough to remove the feature from their forks, so this would just result in them looking incredibly wrong and bad and guilty every time anyone saw a successful community note.
And also: Community notes is the kind of feature that we should expect to actually substantially improve public policy discourse so it's the kind of thing we should be funding in earnest.
But I'm not sure we should work in that area. It's unfortunate that a global forum probably can't rise to prominence if it's received partisan funding, even if it's bi-partisan, as Argumentum ad Aurum is live and well and cavorting all around.