wow this really mind blowing for me as i think what you’re calling “flourishing” and what I’ve been calling “living risk” are pointing at the same neglected frontier. We’ve rightly invested enormous effort into ensuring survival into not dying, not being permanently disempowered. But survival is not the same as life, and we risk mistaking the floor for the ceiling.

If humanity makes it through this century but ends up culturally hollow, emotionally arid, or morally locked into a narrow vision, then we’ve technically survived but failed to flourish. That’s the danger of living risk: not extinction, but the quiet erosion of joy, awe, depth, and meaning. And this isn’t a luxury concern. It’s exactly the kind of issue that the EA framework was built to flag massive in scale, profoundly neglected, and worth testing for tractability.

Survival secures the possibility of a future. Flourishing and avoiding living risk secures the value of that future. The challenge ahead is to safeguard both conditions: survive, yes, but also preserve the capacity to live lives that future generations will find truly worth inheriting.

Reading this, the idea of the “EA Spark” resonates. I can picture someone with that mix of altruism, analytical habits, and willingness to update quickly. But as a newcomer to the EA In-Depth Program, I’m not sure I should or could embody all of these traits immediately. What’s encouraging is that many of them seem trainable: reasoning transparency, alliance mentality, and clear communication feel like skills to practice, not fixed traits. This makes me hopeful that growth in EA is about learning and iterating, not arriving fully formed.

At the same time, I see the risk of idealizing a “type” that can feel exclusionary. I hope the community recognizes that impact comes in diverse forms, and that the spark doesn’t have to be fully lit to contribute meaningfully. My goal in this program is to explore which traits I can realistically develop, test myself against these ideals, and remember that quieter, less-networked contributions can be just as valuable as the more obvious EA “core skills.”

Thank for bringing this up @tobiasleenaert 

One challenge I notice in our movement is that many vegans (myself included at times) lean heavily on moral outrage and emotion when talking to the public. It comes from a real place  the suffering of animals is unbearable, and that drives the urgency. But when communication is mostly emotional, it risks losing clarity and persuasiveness. The message can get lost in the translation of the narrative because it feels more like an expression of personal pain than a grounded argument that someone outside the movement can follow.

Without balancing emotion with logic, strategy, and evidence, the communication often doesn’t land. It convinces those who already feel the same, but it rarely shifts people who are indifferent, defensive, or simply pragmatic in their worldview. That’s where I see Tobias’s point about research and incrementalism mattering: not because the emotional voice is wrong, but because by itself it isn’t strong enough to carry the broader public along.

Africa's coastline measures approximately 30,500 km, while the combined coastline of Latin America and the Caribbean is substantially shorter, at roughly 22,000 km.

Africa's land area is about 30,365,000 km² (11,724,000 sq mi). Latin America and the Caribbean together have a total land area of approximately 20,139,378 km² (7,775,854 sq mi)

So i also think Africa would relatively be a best fit for implementation. 

also eagerly waiting for the research report. 

We should prioritize slowing the spread of industrial animal agriculture in future high-production regions over investing in advocacy in currently high-production regions that remain neglected in terms of farmed animal advocacy. Studies project that over 60% of the growth in global meat demand by 2050 will come from Africa and Asia, meaning early interventions in these regions could spare billions of animals from industrial confinement, whereas retrofitting entrenched systems in the US or EU has proven vastly more costly and politically resistant

You’re right that rule based ethics can’t generate real altruism, and that virtue ethics does better by rooting it in compassion and moral character. Without honesty and humility as lived virtues, altruism slides into manipulation or shallow compliance. A movement that sacrifices integrity for impact risks hollowing itself out from within.

Still, the dilemmas I raised pandemic messaging, climate framing, AI timelines show that groups need more than individual virtue. They also need decision rules for crises, where outcomes and constraints both matter. The balance, I think, is cultivating virtue as the culture, using deontological side-limits to guard against drift, and applying consequentialist reasoning to act effectively under pressure. That mix is messy, but it keeps us from either rigid legalism or expedient deceit.

Wow thanks this give a reflection about many projects that seemed not progressive yet its the reporting that was not progressive. 

Really appreciate you @mal_graham🔸  thinking out loud on this. Watching from Uganda, I totally get the frustration the US climate feels increasingly hostile to science and progressive work like wild animal welfare. So yeah, shifting more focus to the UK/EU makes sense, especially if it helps stabilize research and morale. That said, if you’re already rethinking geography and community building, I’d gently suggest looking beyond the usual Global North pivots. Regions like East Africa are incredibly underrepresented but ecologically critical and honestly, there’s a small but growing base of people here hungry to build this field with proper support. If there’s ever a window to make this movement more global and future-proof, it might be now. Happy to chat more if useful.

Replacing general EA conferences with cause-area-specific ones would enable deeper collaboration, better-aligned networking, and more focused problem-solving by concentrating expertise and attention on the most pressing challenges within each field.