I know the FIRE community floats 25x your annual spend in savings as a target for retirement. At your income and "frugal even compared to those under poverty line", it would take you less than year to hit that target. Taking what you say as true, it means you are prioritizing one less year of working far more than altruistically helping others. That is discordant with the median attitude in the community, who imagine themselves working effectively half a decade or more solely for the benefit of others. I don't want to focus too much on the money. Its the relative self vs. others prioritization. That's a tension that is always going to exist between the FIRE community and the EA community.

As for outreach, that's been studied: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/r8XoHhKKzmQgxm2Lf/ea-survey-2024-how-people-get-involved-in-ea#The_effect_of_outreach Most people find EA on their own. Having been an organizer in several groups and given lots of EA presentations, I found active outreach to be unproductive. The D.C. group once held a 800+ person heavily-advertised Peter Singer-headlined event that resulted in just 1 new person coming to the next meetup who didn't come back. My group now routinely gets new people passively who heard about it on a podcast, through 80k, or through the vegan community. The movement's utilitarianism and universalism across time, place, and species doesn't fit well with personal value systems based on justice/prioritarianism, self-interested libertarianism, or racial/cultural/religious tribalism. Altruism is (unfortunately) rare, and it's easier for those people to find the EA community than for the EA community to find them.

"Personally, my partner and I donate on average ~$10k USD every year (plus employer matching for the most part), which is only ~1% of my income". I think this is where the disconnect comes from. At a ~$1 million/yr income, it seems you are prioritizing early retirement and a luxurious lifestyle over EA causes and giving. That's normal preference expression for the ultra-wealthy. It's just going to seem discordant for many in EA making $50-$150k/yr and giving 10%+ who place (relatively) higher priority on giving. There's a difference between what you value and prioritize and most people in the movement. I'm not trying to make a normative statement; just pointing out a difference that is likely causing the outsider feeling. It's a good thing you're donating, and thinking about how to give effectively.

On the diamonds next to peoples names and holier-than-thou attitude: Having been in the movement a while, I often encounter the cult-like and holier-than-thou perception of EA. Even from from friends and family. The perception usually comes from a deep skepticism that people could be fundamentally motivated by altruism. It's easier to assume that it's either cult brainwashing that implies a loss of rational thinking and agency, a way to feel superior over others, or that is a all a virtue signaling facade for reputational benefit. Knowing many people in the movement - most do have an intrinsic altruistic motivation. That such a motivation could exist is alien, even threatening to many people. I'm not sure what to say about that beyond I hope skeptics can adjust their mental model of the world to include those who genuinely care about making it better.

If you are arguing for increasing agricultural land, there are many other ways to accomplish that. You could promote the use of biofuels. Suggest more people get horses as companion animals. Or many other methods. Hyper-focusing on eating cows is weird. At this point is seems like a way to self-rationalize that eating cows is not just ok but on net preferable.

P1: "This 90 year old is about to send a spam message to 100 million people. That will cause ~2000 years of annoyance and suffering. They have only ~4 years of expected mediocre life left, so it would be better to kill them so they can't send the message."

P2: "Why not just take away their phone?"

You've proposed a false dilemma.

Mild downvote here. The conclusions ("I recommend increasing the consumption of beef") do not not follow from the premises ("soil animals have negative lives"), even if true. And the premises are highly uncertain and speculative.

There are perhaps other ways to improve or mitigate soil animal lives, and certainly many other ways to increase agricultural land that do not involve killing and eating cows.

Because of that, it feels like the post is intentionally contrarian for the sake of aggravating others, rather than an earnest attempt to improve the lives of soil animals. I appreciate the detail and raising issues many haven't considered. I'd upvote it if it was framed as raising an issue noting the uncertainty and invitation for consideration, rather than a strong recommendation for something that doesn't follow from the premises.

I understand you are trying to recast the Christian dominion interpretation, but it is worth mentioning that as an ideology it has long been overwhelming opposed or indifferent to animal welfare. Most popular dominion interpretations are in the mold of Rene Descartes, who thought animals automatons. The dominion framing is so severe that the most popular shocking vegan film is named after it.

Furthermore, the modern animal welfare movement is highly correlated with atheism, or at least skeptical approaches to understanding our relationship with non-human animals. It may be easier to push non-religious framings around animals rather than trying to re-interpret dominionism. I'm not sure how successful that will be depending on the culture where you live.

It seems like a fundamental problem is the lack of a moral realist foundation, as "human intentions toward sentient beings" and "what is moral" are different things. Can someone recommend some reading on whether alignment is even a coherent ask, either from a moral realist or moral anti-realist perspective?

The salient question for me is how much does reducing extinction risk change the long run experience of moral patients? One argument is that meaningfully reducing risk would require substantial coordination, and that coordination is likely to result in better worlds. I think it is as or more likely that reducing extinction risk can result in some worlds where most moral patients are used as means without regard to their suffering.

I think an AI aligned to roughly to the output of all current human coordination would be net-negative. I would shift to thinking addressing extinction risk is more important if factory farming stopped, humanity was taking serious steps to address wild animal suffering, all sustainable development goals were met within 5 years of the initial timeline, and global inequality was reduced to something like <0.25 GINI coefficient.

The USDA secretary released a strategy yesterday on lowering egg prices. Explained originally as a WSJ opinion (paywall). Summarized here without the paywall.

Five points to the strategy:

• $500 million for a biosecurity program to limit transmission of avian flu
• $400 million to farmers to recover after an outbreak
• $100 million for vaccines
• Look to ease regulations, especially overriding California Proposition 12 that banned the sale of eggs from caged hens.
• Look to allow temporary imports of eggs

Key concerns:

• Enacting a key-goal of the EATS act to override state humane treatment regulations without legislation
• Imports from lower-welfare countries
• All companies that have committed to going cage-free this year using the USDA response as an excuse to delayed or revoke their commitment.

I'm curious where the non-cage free eggs are going. From my naive position, it seems like the grocery stores and restaurant chains listed here should cover a majority of egg use, and are well above 40% cage-free in aggregate. Do non-chain restaurants explain the difference? Hotels? Food manufacturers? Schools and other public places with cafeterias?