Executive summary: The post outlines a non-profit organization's theory of change for promoting effective altruism (EA) in the Netherlands, with the ultimate aim of helping people excel at contributing to the greater good, defined tentatively as promoting wellbeing impartially.

Key points:

1. The main challenge is increasing the number of highly-engaged effective altruists (HEAs) in the Netherlands.
2. The target groups are proto-EAs, organizers, and EA-relevant researchers and practitioners.
3. Activities for proto-EAs include courses, events, media, online presence, and local groups to increase EA community involvement and enhance altruistic knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors.
4. For organizers, activities like meetings, knowledge sharing, retreats, and a national workspace aim to improve community building capabilities.
5. For researchers and practitioners, co-working spaces, retreats, and fellowships aim to increase ability to contribute to EA research and practice.
6. Monitoring and evaluation efforts are currently limited but plans exist to improve tracking of program outcomes and overall EA movement growth in the Netherlands.

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Executive summary: The author argues that utilitarianism and effective altruism are neither ill-willed nor unreasonable, and that high-minded critics who claim otherwise are mistaken or irrational.

Key points:

1. Utilitarianism can be seen as the combination of beneficent goals and instrumental rationality, neither of which is inherently objectionable.
2. Critics often make unfair assumptions about utilitarianism that misrepresent its goals and implications.
3. Effective altruism stems from virtuous motivations of impartial benevolence and a desire to effectively help others, which should be praised rather than dismissed.
4. Dismissing effective altruism for failing to prioritize the nearby ignores that the distant poor and future generations also deserve moral consideration.
5. Even if effective altruists ended up being ineffective, their good intentions and virtuous motivations would still be praiseworthy.
6. Criticisms of utilitarianism and effective altruism often reflect an indifference to obvious harms caused by discouraging effective philanthropic efforts.

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Executive summary: The post provides advice for activist movements based on the history of how environmentalism became increasingly partisan in the US, arguing for building alliances across the political spectrum and avoiding mission creep in order to maintain broad-based support.

Key points:

1. Make political alliances with individuals and institutions from both major parties to avoid becoming overly partisan.
2. Don't give up on one side once partisanship starts emerging - continue efforts to maintain bipartisan support.
3. Be cautious about proposing flawed legislation that could provide ammunition for opponents to rally against the movement.
4. Avoid "mission creep" by strictly focusing on the core issues rather than endorsing positions aligned with one political party.
5. Focusing on local issues can facilitate idiosyncratic partnerships across party lines more easily than national/global issues.
6. Use clear messaging that distinguishes empirical claims from normative arguments to maintain public trust.
7. The AI safety movement should aim for bipartisan support by building relationships across the political spectrum.

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Executive summary: A recent study using IVF data from Denmark found no long-term income penalty for women who have children, challenging previous research suggesting a persistent "child penalty" on women's earnings.

Key points:

1. The study used the random success or failure of first IVF attempts to isolate the causal effect of childbirth on women's incomes over 25 years.
2. Women who succeeded on their first IVF attempt had more children but did not experience persistently lower earnings compared to those who failed.
3. The findings contradict previous "event study" analyses that found large, long-lasting earnings penalties for mothers.
4. The authors argue their method avoids biases in event studies by using more plausibly random variation in fertility.
5. External validity is uncertain - results may not generalize beyond Denmark's generous policies or higher-income, older IVF mothers.
6. If valid, it suggests cultural factors beyond career costs drive low fertility, complicating policy responses.

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Executive summary: Working to reduce the risks of nuclear war is one of the highest-impact career paths available due to the catastrophic consequences of a nuclear conflict and the relatively small number of people focused on this issue.

Key points:

1. Nuclear weapons pose an existential risk to humanity, with estimates of around 0.01-2% chance of nuclear war per year.
2. The key goals are reducing accident risk, preventing escalatory weapons, introducing checks on launch authority, anticipating dangerous technologies, promoting arms control, and strengthening non-use norms.
3. High-impact career paths include working in the U.S. government (Congress, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, State Department), research, communication/advocacy, and building the field.
4. Promising roles exist across various governments, international organizations (UN, IAEA), think tanks, and non-profits focused on nuclear risk.
5. The decline of expertise in nuclear policy since the Cold War suggests building the field could have major impact.
6. Example influential roles include government officials who rethought U.S. nuclear strategy and prominent researchers whose ideas shaped policies.

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Executive summary: Brain preservation via chemical fixation and fluid storage is a speculative but potentially cost-effective intervention for saving lives in the long-term, depending on key assumptions about the probability of successful future revival.

Key points:

1. Brain preservation aims to protect the physical structure of the brain after legal death to allow future "revival" if technology advances sufficiently.
2. Chemical fixation followed by fluid preservation is the most affordable long-term storage option, with key assumptions about preservation quality and revival methods.
3. Cost-effectiveness estimates for "lives saved" via brain preservation vary widely based on the subjective probability of successful revival, and could be competitive with other interventions under certain scenarios.
4. Perspectives on the altruistic value of brain preservation differ based on views about research priorities, success probability, and potential societal impacts.
5. Philanthropic funding and advocacy for policy changes could help advance brain preservation given limited conventional research support.
6. Key open questions include the neural correlates of identity, preservation quality, revival pathways, and ethical considerations.

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Executive summary: Advanced AI digital agents will fundamentally change how people consume news in the next 5-10 years, leading to a fragmented, polarized, and decentralized media landscape.

Key points:

1. Foundation AI models will advance to become multimodal digital agents integrated into daily life for most people.
2. People will primarily consume personalized news content via their digital agents rather than directly from media companies or social media.
3. The global media industry will be radically reshaped, with only a few major outlets surviving and local news resurging via individual influencers.
4. Social media platforms will decline as they fail to moderate AI-generated content effectively, causing an exodus of users and advertisers.
5. Information ecosystems will become highly fragmented and polarized as people communicate in private "walled gardens" and inhabit distinct realities shaped by their digital agents.
6. Key assumptions: continued AI progress, rapid adoption, ineffective regulation, reduced AI hallucinations, social media decline, and the rise of private digital spaces. Some of these assumptions are uncertain.

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Executive summary: Partisanship has been detrimental to the environmental movement, leading to decreased public support, difficulty passing legislation, and inconsistent executive actions.

Key points:

1. Polling data shows that as partisanship increased starting in the 1990s, overall public support for environmental issues declined.
2. The frequency of major environmental legislation being passed decreased significantly once the issue became partisan.
3. International environmental treaties stopped being ratified unanimously and some were not ratified at all as partisanship grew.
4. Executive actions on environmental issues fluctuate with the political party in power, leading to inconsistent policies.
5. The environmental movement was most successful in the 1960s-80s when it had bipartisan support.

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Executive summary: The number of farmed animals, especially small animals like fish, shrimp, and insect larvae, is extremely large and raises questions about the scale of animal welfare considerations in agriculture.

Key points:

1. Estimates suggest there are over 2 trillion farmed vertebrate animals alive at any given time, with over 500 trillion killed per year.
2. Farmed shrimp, fish, and insect larvae vastly outnumber farmed mammals and birds.
3. Brine shrimp nauplii, with 1.5 trillion alive at a time and 540 trillion killed per year, challenge expected value reasoning and moral aggregation due to their small size and uncertain sentience.
4. Further research on the mental capacities of small farmed animals like shrimp and insect larvae could be valuable for assessing their moral weight.
5. The scale of animal farming, especially of small animals, raises important questions about the magnitude of animal welfare considerations in agriculture.

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Executive summary: The number of farmed animals, especially small animals like fish, shrimp, and insect larvae, is extremely large and raises questions about the scale of animal welfare considerations in agriculture.

Key points:

1. Estimates suggest there are over 2 trillion farmed vertebrate animals alive at any given time, with over 500 trillion killed per year.
2. Farmed shrimp, fish, and insect larvae vastly outnumber farmed mammals and birds.
3. Brine shrimp nauplii, with 1.5 trillion alive at a time and 540 trillion killed per year, challenge expected value reasoning and moral aggregation due to their small size and uncertain sentience.
4. Further research on the mental capacities of small farmed animals like shrimp and insect larvae could be valuable for assessing their moral weight.
5. The scale of animal farming, especially of small animals, raises important questions about the magnitude of animal welfare considerations in agriculture.

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