For you or others reading this, I can really recommend protesting if you’re not already. I also doubt it passes the ITN test (although, I wouldn’t discount it!), but it does provide (a) a good outlet for your feelings and (b) a real sense that you’re not alone, that there are people out there who are gonna fight alongside you. I come back from protests feeling a mix of emotions, but depressed and disempowered is rarely one of them.

A few quotes I wanna speak on:

Richard Hanania specifically was coming, and Hanania was one of the several speakers cited in the Guardian article as like a, person who had like a troubled background.

I just think Hanania himself as a person has been, growing. He recently voiced strong support for the Shrimp welfare project.

I think it’s heavy downplaying—potentially even disingenuous—to leave racism out of the discussion when talking about Hanania. It’s a demonstrable fact that he wrote for neo-Nazi and white supremacist organisations in the past, but when Austin talks about him ‘growing’, it’s not that he has denounced this work (FWIW, he has), but that he now supports animal welfare. It’s a bit of a non sequitur, nobody is arguing he used to be racist against shrimp?

it is the case that we care a lot about things that are outside the traditional overton window, you might say, like modifying, genetics of, embryos, for example, or like doing screening on embryos. It's like a kind of thing that we had people come and talk about, and sometimes it's very controversial

The same goes for the other speakers. They aren’t controversial because of their opinions on embryo selection. They are controversial because they routinely endorse human biodiversity. Austin knows this, because all of the controversy around Manifest was about the topic of human biodiversity.

I think it is probably the case that like, because of the speakers, we chose some people who are more on the, oh, I want to like, argue about race. thought oh, this is the conference for me

I'm worried actually about something like an evaporative cooling effect where people who are more sensitive to this, stop showing up to manifests and people who feel like, oh yeah, I want to argue about, I do, things do show up.

Evidently, Austin understands something about the dynamics here. But the language such as ‘people who are more sensitive to this’ feels indicative that he doesn’t believe that the racism is the problem; rather, it is the reactions of a particular profile of person.

I don’t feel like Austin has internalised that people aren’t merely offended or sensitive to racism; they are harmed by it, and want to both avoid spaces that cause them harm, and prevent future harm caused by spreading those ideas. The difference is that offence is a reaction that you can behaviourally train yourself out of, but harm is a thing that is done to you.

More broadly, Austin repeatedly speaks about trade-offs between ‘winning’ (success, sometimes framed as harmony) and ‘standing up for what’s right’, which is sometimes framed as a form of truth-seeking. But this implicitly frames inquiry into and discussion of human biodiversity as a form of truth-seeking. David Thorstad has already written at length about why that’s harmful, so I’ll defer to his work on that.

Microsoft continue to pull back on their data centre plans, in a trend that’s been going on for the past few months, since before the tariff crash (Archive).

Frankly, the economics of this seem complex (the article mentions it’s cheaper to build data centres slowly, if you can), so I’m not super sure how to interpret this, beyond that this probably rules out the most aggressive timelines. I’m thinking about it like this:

• Sam Altman and other AI leaders are talking about AGI 2027, at which point every dollar spent on compute yields more than a dollar of revenue, with essentially no limits
• Their models are requiring exponentially more compute for training (ex. Grok 3, GPT-5) and inference (ex. o3), but producing… idk, models that don’t seem to be exponentially better?
• Regardless of the breakdown in relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, OpenAI can’t lie about their short- and medium-term compute projections, because Microsoft have to fulfil that demand
• Even in the long term, Microsoft are on Stargate, so still have to be privy to OpenAI’s projections even if they’re not exclusively fulfilling them
• Until a few days ago, Microsoft’s investors were spectacularly rewarding them for going all in on AI, so there’s little investor pressure to be cautious

So if Microsoft, who should know the trajectory of AI compute better than anyone, are ruling out the most aggressive scaling scenarios, what do/did they know that contradicts AGI by 2027?

Just wanted to say I thought the mental health report is really good! I think it does a great job of highlighting where mental health is at as an EA cause area and where the big challenges are. Thanks for shouting out Kaya Guides!

What evidence would you need to see to conclude that an Orbanisation of the US government is beginning, but still early enough to prevent it?

We’re probably already violating Forum rules by discussing partisan politics, but I’m curious to hear how you view Trump’s claim that he is “not joking” about a third term. Is this:

1. A lie (it cannot be hyperbole as the claim he made was very specifically framed)
2. Legal under the constitution, because he would do it via running for Vice President and having the elected President resign, and anything technically legal is not an ‘authoritarian takeover’
3. Illegal under the constitution, but he would legally amend the constitution to remove term limits
4. Something else?

And then, for whichever you believe, could you explain how it isn’t an authoritarian takeover?

(I choose this example because it’s relatively clear-cut, but we could point to Trump vs. United States, the refusal to follow court orders related to deportations, instructing the AG not to prosecute companies for unbanning Tik Tok, the attempts from his surrogates to buy votes, freezing funding for agencies established by acts of Congress, bombing Yemen without seeking approval from Congress, kidnapping and holding legal residents without due process, etc. etc. etc., I just think those have greyer areas)

Heya Vasco, I think I might be missing something here. I’m struggling to see the connection between this post and your recommendation to donate to WAI.

In the past, I’ve heard that wild animal suffering is probably not very tractable. Is that true for both insects and vertebrates? What about WAI sets them up for success here? (You mention they support research into pesticides, but not direct work?)

Richest 1% wealth share, US (admittedly, this has been flat for the last 20 years, but you can see the trend since 1980):

Pre-tax income shares, US:

A 3–4% change for most income categories isn’t anything to sneeze at (even if this is pre-tax).

You can explore the WID data through OWID to see the effect for other countries; it’s less pronounced for many but the broad trend in high-income neoliberalised countries is similar (as you’d expect to happen with lower taxation).

I think it’s tractable, right? The rich had a far greater hold over American politics in the early 1900s, and after financial devastation coupled with the threat of communism, the U.S. got the New Deal and a 90% marginal tax rate for 20 years following the war (well after the war effort had been fully paid off), during the most prosperous period in U.S. history. My sense of these changes is that widespread labour & political organisation threatened the government into a compromise in order to protect liberalism & capitalism from a near-total overthrow. It can be done.

But equally, that story suggests that things will probably have to get much worse before the political will is there to be activated. And there’s no guarantee that any money raised from taxation will be spent on the global poor!

My honest, loosely held opinion here is that EA/adjacent money could be used to build research & lobbying groups (rather than grassroots organising or direct political donations—too controversial and not EA’s strong suit), that would be ready for such a moment if/when it comes. They should be producing policy briefs and papers that, and possibly public-facing outputs, on the same level as the current YIMBY/abundance movement, who are far more developed than the redistributionists on these capabilities. When the backlash hits and taxes get raised, we should already have people well-placed to push for high redistribution on an international and non-speciesist level.

Surely it would be easier to just take the money from them, with taxes

No, but seriously—the U.S. presently has an extremely clear example of the excesses of oligarchy and low taxation. The idea that billionaires need less tax in order to invest more in the economy is laughable when Elon has used his excess money to essentially just enrich himself. I think it would be pretty high leverage to put money, time, and connections into this movement (if you can legally do so); and if the enemy is properly demarcated as oligarchy, it should result in reducing wealth inequality once its proponents take power.