Personally I'm very happy that long termists have a special bias towards humans. I think your  statement here probably only holds if your are a pure hedonistic utilitarian, which many of us are not.

 "II’m highly uncertain, but if I had to guess, humanity has had a net negative impact to date due to the immense scale of suffering on factory farms."

I don't think the bias is very hidden either. My not-, very-considered take would be I don't think we necessarily need to "change course, but I think a truly impartial school of philosophy is useful and important too.. I would maybe favor 2 separate schools of thought and research about the future. 

1. A school that explicitly favors human and serves human interests.
2. A school that tries to be completely impartial like you discuss.

I've never been able to find a heuristic for this exactly. We have made many decisions which we don't love to call sacrifice, in fact many of them brought deep satisfaction and connection. These were made to live in better solidarity and community with those around us. For example for us this involved cooking on a charcoal stove, not having running water inside and eating a lot of local food which is often great but I don't always love.

Almost all of these were made at the cost of efficiency in our work to some extent. Life without a gas stove and running water just takes longer and is a bit more tiring. Not nearly as big a deal as most people would think tho...

The closest we had to a "heuristic" was asking ourselvesevery 6 months, is this lifestyle...

1) Satisfying to me
2) Appropriate lifestyle that matched our community around us. We've always chosen to live among less well-off communities because I think it grounds our work in reality, keeps it real and helps us learn what actually makes people tick. (which I personally think is often critical to designing effective GHD interventions)
3) Allowing me to do my work well

As OneDay Health and my Wife's work grew, I needed more time. No. 3 started to take precedence. We became more "bougie". A water tap outside, more eating out (still local food). Now after having a kid we have a gas stove. It doesn't feel great to move further away from our community lifestyle, but I think its worth it for the impact - as long as we don't feel too disconnected from those around us.

Love this great work! I think we need more careful, thorough but straightforward explanations like this. Understanding why some charities are better than others can often be harder than we think to people outside our bubble.

For me this is the crux and the key line."Climate’s SROI becomes competitive with GHD when accounting for high-risk, lower-certainty effects like tipping points and endogenous growth"

If you're the kind of person who both has a high risk appetite, and believes we have some plausible control now over low certainty events in the far future then I would agree with the thesis that we should put more money into climate stuff.

Personally I think the medium-far climate future might be as difficult to predict as the trajectory of AI. We have political uncertainty (e.g. Trump scrapping wind), economic uncertainty (e.g. solar became unexpectadly cheap), potential AI tech progress, potential rogue actors (someone could release sulfur). We could be at net zero by 2040 or never.

Anyway I think the uncertainty with climate is so large that you need to be a certain kind of giver for that to make sense - especially with the "existential risk" component perhaps not being there.

I don't find much solace and meaning in error bars that wide - but many others do.

Thanks for this great write up, and it all sounds very reasonable. I really respect that the orgs here didn't go crazy claiming they could spend ludicrous amounts of money straight away. I agree with @MichaelDickens that is crazy how little funding there is in this area, and that's from someone who might rate animal welfare stuff 1000x less important than him haha.

As a rule of thumb in the global health world at least, I think there are few orgs it's where it makes sense to increase spending than 2x - 3x funding year on year, scaling up orgs and operations isn't easy. 

I think I said this on another post, but in the wild animal welfare space I would love to see a couple of clear practical wins, even if really small to show that change is possible here, and learn how to make change. Even if it's more token than meaningful. Most of these orgs seem heavily focused on research which is helpful, but I think we can learn a lot as well from doing things and seeing what happens. 

Kudos for the economist for my favourite mainstream news article on the Anthropalypse yet 

https://www.economist.com/international/2026/08/13/silicon-valleys-ai-boom-is-remaking-american-charity

(Behind a paywall)

I think it outlines the issues very well, and you won't see a mainstream news article start as smart as this very often.

"EACH DOLLAR given to charity may soon do less good. In the coming years the marginal cost of saving a child’s life from disease or starvation could jump from about $5,000 to $15,000, or more. This sounds worrying. In fact it is good news, argues Alexander Berger of Coefficient Giving, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential grantmakers. Non-profits like his spend on cheap, scalable interventions first—say, by buying malaria nets before malaria vaccines. If an influx of donations pays for all the inexpensive ways of doing good, then the rest flows into costlier acts of altruism that can save yet more lives."

I read this just because of this into "every 5 minutes while writing this post, I had to stop to do 13 push-ups, and when I could no longer complete my required number, I had to upload it. 

And I can't believe you did 468 pushups that's crazy. I would have published after maybe 10 minutes under these rules?

Good reminder to be a bit more focused with my podcasts/reading. I like to have broad understanding, but its probably going too far that way.

Yeah it might not increase that much or at all (although perhaps lightcone folks are more connected to doers the fund might be funding, which would increase conflict of interest). My point was that especially in AI grantmaking where the field is small, I think it might always be too strong/incorrect to say there might not be even "the perception of conflict of interest"

Conflict of interest is not necessarily a big problem and probably completely unavoidable in the AI safety sphere, but I think it's good to be honest that it's a reality.