Cool post, a couple of questions for you (or others):

1. Your footnote says:

I think this stands for as long as humans are similar enough to each other that our elite can’t conscience hoarding vitae when some people have <1.

In our current world, some elite (eg. billionaires) hoard vitae whilst many people (perhaps most people) have <1, and most seem to conscience it fine. So I'm sceptical that the "redistributive question" is trivial or likely to happen automatically. Agree?

2. Do you think 1 vitae is the same for everyone? For example, you suggest compute and communications bandwidth as parts of the unit. I think these are really important to some people (the average coastal elite) and really unimportant to others (the type of person who fancies living in an off-grid cabin). So is vitae equivalent for all people (you all need compute, whether you like it or not), or is vitae more like a substitute for 'whatever you need to maintain a high quality of life for yourself personally'? If the latter, would a base level of income work instead of vitae, and then the income could be spent by individuals on whatever their preferences are?

3. How come you picked "average American coastal elite" as your bar for the minimum we should aim to move everyone towards? Why not double that quality of life, or half that quality? Off the cuff, I'd be fairly comfortable with something like 0.7 vitae as the bar to aim for (using your units).

Hey Stijn, a few critical points on this.

I'm worried about claiming any specific petitions are "easily thousands of times more effective than most other petitions", for reasons similar to this post.

I'm unsure how you're judging 'tractability' here, but I'm doubtful about the tractable routes to change for some of these. For example, the shrimp change.org petition made for a class project with ~400 signatures. Even if this petition got 10x or 100x the signatures, I don't understand the Theory of Change that results in any person/group/organisation making meaningful change. (For some petitions, like UK Parliament ones, there is a clearer route to impact, but it still requires lots more work and luck for the debate to become actual change).

Even if some petitions are super impactful compared to others, petitions might not be impactful compared to other interventions. This is somewhat offset by petitions being really 'cheap' (low time, non-fungible time, low/no funding costs). However, if you're recommending people sign petitions they don't know much about, they might reasonably want to spent time researching the issues, which increases time from ~10-15 sec to ~10-15 mins, which is a non-trivial amount of time.

Regardless, I made this really simple website to visualise your 10 recommended petitions more clearly (like 2-30 mins with ChatGPT). Would be open to working on this more, depending on yours and other's thoughts/responses to the concerns above!

Hi Brad, really good post, appreciate it! I've got one positive, one question, and one challenge.

Positive: The analysis of which industries are more amenable to Profit for Good seems interesting. It would be great to see more about which are industries are likely best/worst, and especially why (which you have partly done here).

Question: Does this model apply to publicly held companies, or could it be adapted for them? I imagine a large portion of the $100Tn you mentioned is from publicly traded companies. I also assume there's a competitive advantage to public ownership, (but I only think this because lots of the largest companies seem to do it). However, the model you propose seems to require private/foundation ownership.

Challenge: Even if Profit for Good is advantageous in general, it doesn’t mean that the most impactful Profit for Good is advantageous. For example, the most successful companies might focus on causes the public already cares about, like cancer research (which is probably less impactful than, say, GiveWell). This is especially relevant for causes like ending factory farming. Many interventions raise meat prices (intentionally or unintentionally), which might deter customers, and in the worst case could result in a comparative disadvantage.

Would like to hear your thoughts or pushbacks

This is interesting. What generally happens when you point out the ~inconsistency? Do people tend to reject Speciesism, reject anti-humanism, or accept/defend maintaining both? (Or something else!)

I think this idea and article are great. This (decision-relevant/skill-building work as a social group) seems like exactly like what EA Groups should be doing. The article is well-written, clear and potentially important.

I don't have enough knowledge to respond to your questions, but here's some thoughts:

• Digging wells in Niger seems to be cost-effective, however I wouldn't necessarily generalise that digging wells is cost-effective. (You don't do this, just pointing out for others.)
  • As you say, a lot of the country is on a large aquifer. This might make this intervention very good in Niger, but not scalable to other places.
  • Similarly, you've taken maximum values for rate reductions due to Niger having a larger burden. This wouldn't translate to other places.
• There's no data here about the overhead of Wells4Wellness (for example salary costs). This could change calculations.
• With regards to your Question 4: What do you expect the 'major quality of life improvement' to look like?
  • (I ask this both genuinely, my knowledge of this area is poor, and as a 'coaching-style' question to answer your question).

Having said that, do you know if W4W is likely to have room for significantly more funding? It seems like a good organisation to support!

This is a great resource, very detailed and something I think all group organisers should be aware of! Great work on it.

Two questions:

1. How likely do you think it is that this is a complete list? (Or, how likely do you think it is that a relevant organisation isn’t on this list?)
2. Do you have plans to maintain this list as orgs open/close/change, and if so roughly how often?

Hey! Firstly - massive kudos for this post and your marketing efforts. That's a LOT of work done in total. A couple of thoughts:

1. Do you know what the breakdown of attendees by outreach method was? The amount of stuff done might make this an unusually useful sample of what works.
2. Your in-lecture pitches might actually have decreased the number of attendees to a first meeting (in a good way)!
   1. I can imagine last year, several people came to the first meeting thinking "EA sounds potentially interesting, but I don't have enough info to know if I'll like it. Let me go to their first meet and find out."
   2. I can imagine this year, several people heard the pitch, and made the judgement that EA wasn't for them, so they didn't turn up to the first meeting.
3. I think the number attendees at the first meeting is largely unimportant/Goodharting compared to the number of attendees at the (say) fifth meeting.
   1. EA is quite high-commitment as societies go ("Hey, you should come and change your whole life plan to help others"). Heavy-tailed impact and such.
   2. I think the more interesting question is whether increased marketing resulted in a higher quality/fit (ie. likely to stay around and take points really seriously) of attendee, than pure number. The fifth meeting attendance might be a partial datapoint for this.