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.

I feel like recognising the potential harms of going too far with utilitarianism such as "the ends justify the means" is something that is regularly done in the movement? 

I don't know if you were around during the FTX scandal, but people here felt betrayed that SBF committed massive fraud, and heavily criticised it (this is one of the highest-rated posts on the forum).

Several of the posts you use that mention the risks come from very influential EA people (like Holden Karnofsky). Are you sure that this is something that is ignored by the movement?

Great post ! Thanks for sharing.

Something I wish I could have learned earlier is that you can indeed get much better at most thing by learning from the best, trying stuff and asking for feedback to skilled people. 

But maybe I have actually learned that by experience, by actually trying to learn more things and get into projects a bit beyond my current skill level, but not too much.

I appreciate that you wanted to contribute, but I must admit that I have found it too difficult to extract quickly the main arguments supporting your position for the post.

As it stands, the post is very, very long, and the executive summary made claims that were quite strong to believe without the evidence. I skimmed though the post to quickly find the evidence, but it's hard to find it - there are many arguments but I have trouble seeing if they are all important enough to claim that EA is ineffective (for the toaster example, I really don't think any of the EAs in France would do that, and I know most of them).

To claim that EA is "ineffective" is a high bar - is there any movement that has accomplished more with the same amount of resources ?

Let's take animal welfare. The effective animal advocacy movement has helped billions of animals in the last ten years, with a stark contrast with the results from the 2000s. EA (as a general thing) isn't responsible for all of that of course (the Humane League's work predates that) but it brought a lot of funding and important considerations into the mix. Charities like the Shrimp Welfare Project probably wouldn't exist, and they already helped around 4 billion shrimp (see their 'shrimpact').

That's not to say there's nothing to criticize, of course there are issues - the CEA even paid people to write 'let's red-team EA' posts, with many relevant results. But from skimming your write up I don't really know what you want the movement to do.

It would also be helpful to think of who, exactly, should do things a certain way to improve: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pz7RdMRouZ5N5w5eE/ea-should-taboo-ea-should

Also, your personal experience at the end moved me a bit, I must admit.