Very good question. Usually I tend to recommend Giving Green-recommended charities such as the Good Food Institute, but that doesn't seem to match your criteria.

But, if I can indulge in some self-promotion, we at the National Observatory on Insect Farming are working on identifying the limits of a new industry that tends to have significant climate impacts. In a recent study, insect meal has been shown to have 5 to 13 times the climate impact of soybean meal. There are also significant biodiversity concerns were genetically selected insects to escape.

Of course, we're new and haven't been vetted by Giving green or similar orgs, but I thought I'd share.

More detail on our work here (and you can contact me by MP for more detail) : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jb5aovXeAarw69hN7/insect-farming-new-media-coverage-on-the-hidden-challenges

I'm not convinced by this way of looking at the Easterlin paradox.

The thing I see is not necessarily that people want to feel superior to their neighbour - it's rather that they have a 'quality of life' threshold they consider 'normal' (mostly defined by what they see around them when they grow up - in their neighbours, télévision, cinéma, social media) and feel less good if they feel left out. 

For instance, I'm used to having a smartphone, video games, microwavable food, Uber eats and my own room because of where I live. I'm frankly not convinced that societies where these elements don't exist would be unhappier. But me not having them when everyone else does is not something that feels good.

Moving to another country doesn't solve that. For most people, they want to get above the 'normal' threshold. That's why changing neighborhood doesn't appear like an option for most people. If I have a PS3 and everyone around me has a PS5, moving to a country where people can't afford more than a PS1 doesn't do the trick.

I agree that there is a correlation with income and happiness, because some elements that money buys do improve happiness (food, medicine, leisure time with your family). But increasing income is less and less effective at increasing happiness over time. Most charts indicating that countries with higher GDP have higher happiness use log scales - the result is much less impressive after some threshold using a linear scale.

Great post ! 

It's very good that you've been able to receive a list of charities from ACE on that extremely important topic.

Very useful, I will check it!

I also was on a plateau with breath-work meditation (although it did bring good benefits). And different people resonate differently to different meditation techniques, so it's worth trying a lot of them. This one sounds very promising.

I won't be able to attend this one, but I could do the one after the summer. Do they have a "stay notified for future session" link?

Interesting position though very curious - one on side, I understand, because evolution favoured these intuitions for quite some time. 
On the other side, I find really strange the ability to recognise the value of a position intellectually, but not being able to adopt it at a gut level (I mean, it's common, it's just that most people do that in an unconscious way).

But props to you for recognising that. I hope you have a nice week. 

You're able to formulate your moral view clearly, which I appreciate.  

However, what I have trouble with is understanding the precise quality that makes humans so special that morality should overwhelmingly be focused on them. This makes sense intuitively (we're surrounded by humans, so we know them well). But for me, the morally most important thing about humans is their ability to feel positive and negative emotions (happiness, suffering), which is not exclusive to our species. 

The question about the special trait that makes humans special has been discussed at length, but I don't have a single resource in mind. I think this has been addressed by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation iirc. His AI can probably express these views : https://www.petersinger.ai/

Yes, that's a good thing. Thanks a lot for your work!

Vote power should scale with karma

I find the content on the Forum exceptionally good when compared to all other online spaces I've been to. I don't know what share the karma votes played in that, but I tend to assume it contributed.

Regarding moral intuitions, I agree that it's hard to feel concern for insects, from a gut level. However, it's entirely possible that we react more easily to factors such as size, numbers and proximity.

On that topic, I suggest reading this excellent post, where the author addresses the mismatch between our gut reaction and the available evidence : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2RdYDcwrnvdCn2SbK/the-case-for-insect-consciousness

How did you come to these numbers for the P-sentience ? Why not between 1 in 10 and 1 in 100,000,000,000,000 ?

My personal feeling, while reading these kind of numbers, is that they seem conveniently in the ballpark of 'wide enough that I recognize I am not really sure about what is causing sentience, but low enough that I don't have anything to do about it'. Maybe this is not how you came up with them, but this is what I would come up with I had to justify not working on the topic. 

I understand that it's possible that insects may have a lower ability to feel suffering, but I don't see how we can be confident enough to find it unlikely that they are morally relevant.