Hi and welcome! 

I personally disagree with the proposal because karma allows readers to quickly see what others have found valuable, and hover to the highest value sections immediately. Reading everything to make your own opinion would be super long.

A quick suggestion to improve the post, btw: I think you can cut the section on bugs in your introduction so it's quicker to read and also explain the rationale behind your proposal (why you think the karma system exists in the first place, what issues your solutions would fix and the problems you anticipate, etc).

Oh, and congrats on taking the 10% pledge!

Great post! This is good advice. Donating while building skills and volunteering still allows to have tons of impact.

The graph represents well the career path I followed:

• Not being skilled enough to land an EA job
• Taking the 10% pledge while at my current job
• Volunteering on EA projects for 3-4 years and getting more skilled
• Getting into contact with charities while volunteering and getting an offer to work for several months
• Later launching a charity

I think that's a good approach by default!

Thanks for the list, this is an important topic.

I'd just like to point out that life in the wild might be net negative and contain more suffering than happiness (due to a majority of beings dying closely after birth from hunger and predation). We need more research but that sounds more likely than not - as your point 9 suggests.

In that case, item number 1 on your list might be a better scenario than what is currently happening, and I am not sure we should spend time fighting against it.

But the rest is risky, yes.

Excellent questions!
Personally, I am not really sure what to do on this topic until we have a very good understanding of wild animal welfare (and how what we do isn't swamped by concerns about population dynamics).

I try to do some things. Not walking on them when I spot them. Mercy kill insects that seem like they are in pain. Letting flies get outside when a window traps them. I personally kill spiders (trying to be as quick as possible) since they kill other insects very slowly and painfully. 

Feeling guilty but uncertain since we don't have good data isn't super useful. I think supporting organisations that work on welfare, such as the Arthropodia Foundation, or research, such as the Wild Animal Initiative, is likely to have a significantly higher impact. 

Very well written, thanks for sharing the experience and perspective!

Great post, I agree, these formats tend to do poorly for me, thanks for writing this down.

One especially poor element in both activities is the absence of slides. I'm a visual learner, and I space out pretty quickly without a visual element (it even happened at a panel I was moderating!)

I find that slides are super useful to force the speakers to have a structure and think about how they are going to present their content. The 'panel but everybody has a talk at the beginning' is rather good.

One important element I've read, however, is that people remember much better the information if they interact with the content. Our brain remembers best not when we get the information in, but when it goes out (for instance when we explain it and we have to reformulate). 

So having a section where people have a quizz, or small 1-1 or group discussions, or a question to answer, gives people the opportunity to absorb and interact with the content.

Very inspiring, it's great to see people do such a shift! 
And it's true that it feels good to be in adequation with what we find important (while avoiding burn-out of course). 

Hi Vasco,
I haven't looked at this discussion for many months, and don't exactly remember the technical points. I also don't have a lot of time to dedicate on the topic since they weren't part of my donation portfolio (but mostly because I haven't look into what Synergia do).
 
I think this is an interesting discussion to have to clarify whether there has been an exaggeration, but first in the format of an actual 1-1 discussion with people at Synergia or ACE to understand more quickly whether this is a matter of lower cost-effectiveness, or just the website not being up to date.

As a note, I think you are more qualified to discuss this topic than Vetted Causes, since they directly burned bridges and caused reputational harm to the org based on shaky arguments that might have been dispelled with a 30 minutes discussion (although it's not impossible a few of them are true, looking at your comments). Same for their recent posts on the Society for the Protection of Insects.

Thanks for changing the title of the post; that's a good move as it was indeed saying too much. 

I don't think I'll have the time to engage deeply with the post. But given the obvious effort you put into the post, I felt like pointing out why someone like me, who wanted to assess the solidity of the proposed arguments quickly, had trouble doing so at a glance.

Glad to hear your perspective, Dave! 

Gratitude is indeed something to keep in mind, and you're right that we have much more choice than we would have in most societies.