Roman Ross
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I would like to know more about the tractability of economic growth research and interventions in low-income nations. It seems like it has the potential to be much more effective than traditional global health interventions, but there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding it.
I've done very little research into this, but I would also like to know if economic growth reduces the risk of large-scale anthropogenic violence. Perhaps people living rich and happy lives are much less likely to do things that increase the risk of various global catastrophes occurring. Perhaps the opposite is true.
EA is something like a brand, and you should be somewhat careful about how you communicate about EA in order to not harm the brand (Thinking like this helped me understand why it was not an universally accepted truth that everybody should tell everybody about EA by all means and immediately. I think a lot of new people in EA go through this “tell everyone” phase, because EA can be super exciting.)
Can you elaborate on this a little bit? What should I not be telling people?
Quick math: In terms of total expected suffering averted, inviting a group of friends to a barbecue where the main meat is beef is probably more impactful than eating a vegan meal by yourself.
According to Faunalytics' Animal Product Impact Scales, a serving of chicken requires approximately 10 times as many days of animal life to produce as a serving of beef (not adjusted for quality of life or moral weights). Additionally, most seafood is much, much worse than this. If this meal prevents your friends from going and eating those other foods, tricking them into eating beef will likely do more good than eating a vegan meal by yourself.
Still, this may not be as impactful as saving your money and donating it directly to impactful charities. Saving a single dollar on food and donating it to the SWP will probably do more to reduce suffering than hosting a barbecue.
Also, you might expose yourself to various forms of value drift by hosting a barbecue, but I could see this happening in a net positive (hosting more barbecues in the future) or a net negative (giving up on veganism entirely/permanently failing to convince any of your friends to give up meat) direction.