I’m still sceptical about your plan on pursuing two very different careers in parallel. It’s not an issue if EtG is important to you but I’m not seeing what justifies doing two in parallel? Why is it better than one person doing EtG and another doing CS?

On the original question, I think it’s very difficult to tell from the outside. You want to do projects to gain experience that lets you enter certain roles (e.g. entry AI safety roles). The people hiring for such roles are the ones who can tell what they are looking for and how people usually get there.
 

I agree that veganism is getting in the way of animal advocacy. This post makes great points about how veganism alienates the vast majority of humanity. And to me, veganism's effect on the majority of humanity is actually just the tip of the iceberg of the problem of how veganism harms animals: 

To people in the meat, egg, and dairy industries, veganism is worse than alienating. It's a direct threat. To someone who makes their living in animal agriculture, the word "vegan" can sound like an attack. "Vegan" can sound like, "I am boycotting all animal products because I want you, your company, and your entire industry to go out of business. I want you to fail at everything you're trying to achieve and lose your livelihood. I hate you, all your colleagues, and your family. I think you are all fundamentally evil."

That's not a very friendly message to hear. It doesn't open a farmer, farm worker, or ag executive up to want to collaborate with animal advocates. It doesn't open a poultry-industry veterinarian up to want to consider an animal advocate's perspective. Imagine how scary it would feel to hear a message like that. Imagine how little you'd want to network with, collaborate with, or be influenced by, someone who sends you that kind of message.

Meanwhile, the best thing for animals would be maximal collaboration and communication between animal agriculture and animal advocates. Farmers, ag executives, and others in the meat, egg, and dairy industries are the ones who have the most power to influence animals' lives for the better. They are the most important audience for animal advocates to speak with. And they are the most important people for us to learn from. So why should we animal advocates constantly threaten them each time we open our mouths?

Nice post; upvoted. I definitely agree that on the margin it would be helpful for vegans to accept and encourage anyone who wants to help animals, and invoking veganism as a litmus test is almost always counterproductive for that.

That said, the framing of veganism as a curse word seems over-corrective to me. Following the “vegans are monks” analogy, telling someone I’m a “monk” in the right social context is positive signaling about my moral seriousness. Learning someone is a “monk” strongly updates me in favor of their moral seriousness. And yes, there are social situations where if you have a friend who’s the right kind of person, it can be acceptable to ask whether they’re interested in “taking the monastic vows”. Rather than avoiding invoking veganism entirely, I’d suggest people be more deliberate about invoking it only when they think it’s genuinely helpful.

As a non-vegan, if people tell me they're vegan I won't necessarily feel judged but can ensure they get a reasonable choice of food they will feel comfortable eating

Whereas if they describe themselves as a "pro-animal person" it sounds like someone who likes puppies (or if activism is implied, potentially more extreme than vegans, though of course that very much depends on how much they elaborate!). Alternatives like "I prefer plant-based food" sound like a taste preference or fad diet.

"uh-oh, I’m realizing everyone else here is v**n, I probably need to be very cautious about what I reveal about myself, do I need to hide?"

I would say, as a lacto-vegetarian who goes to vegan events, I never felt this way, though I can see how someone could. When asked, "How long have you been vegan?" I clarify that I'm not vegan -- that I've been vegetarian since January, and, sometimes, that I am thinking about going vegan -- and I ask them the question back. Sometimes they're vegan, sometimes they're not! But it's always a nice icebreaker and a fun experience; it's never been negative for me.

I also think a non-vegan answering the question and hearing back, "That's completely fine!" or "Oh, that's cool, I'm flexitarian myself, actually!" shows that the "vegan" community is not just for vegans but for all animal people.

And I do like “animal people” as a term, though. Sounds cool.

I'd also suggest "So, what's your story?" / "What brings you here?" as an icebreaker, where the context of being at an animal-people event makes it clear what you're asking, without assuming much.

in my personal experience people who care about animals and want to help them but eat animal products often show a lot of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning

This sounds plausible to me, though fwiw I also think that this stereotype is another that makes it hard for omnivores to feel fine in animal welfare spaces. I kind of hate people assuming simply from my diet that probably I'm making epistemic mistakes that I refuse to acknowledge, or that I'm pretending to care about animals when I actually don't. 
Obv I agree there's a strong desire not to turn to the cruelty of your own diet. I think figuring out how to allow ourselves and help each other to live with the terrible suffering in the world we're not doing things about is one of the big challenges of effective altruism. 

Executive summary: The author argues that funding decisions for existential risk interventions should rely on practical, estimate-based cost-effectiveness thresholds rather than impracticable ideal methods or unstructured expert judgment, and proposes tentative upper and lower funding thresholds grounded in first-principles reasoning and comparisons with existing interventions.

Key points:

1. Randomized trials and Shapley-value approaches are effectively impossible for existential risk reduction, so evaluators should instead rely on more feasible methods such as estimating intermediate outputs, direct (though speculative) x-risk reduction, and decision thresholds.
2. The author argues that willingness-to-pay thresholds for choosing between existential risk interventions should be based on the marginal cost-effectiveness of available opportunities, rather than the total value of preventing existential catastrophe.
3. A tentative minimum willingness-to-pay threshold of about $5.4M per basis point (0.01%) of existential risk reduction is derived from the idea that the existential risk community should be willing to spend all available funding if it could eliminate the relevant risk.
4. A tentative maximum threshold of roughly $3B per basis point is derived from an upper bound on what humanity could plausibly mobilize against an existential threat; interventions substantially worse than this may indicate gross inefficiency or Pascalian reasoning.
5. The author argues that robust technical AI safety work (such as MATS-style research) may serve as a useful benchmark for evaluating other interventions, while noting important uncertainties about the overall sign, scalability, and diminishing returns of AI safety work.
6. The paper concludes by recommending three complementary thresholds: an ambitious minimum willingness-to-pay threshold for enthusiastic funding, a benchmark based on robust AI safety work for relative comparison, and a maximum willingness-to-pay threshold for quickly rejecting implausibly inefficient interventions, while emphasizing that these estimates are subjective, uncertain, and should be revisable.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

Thanks for the kind words! 

Responding to point 4, I think your response is extremely fair and basically correct, it's a bit unfair for me to criticize EA for not being something that it obviously isn't. But I think my response to that is very relevant to you, which is that you should be thinking about what you want EA to be. Should EA be a library, that doesn't weigh in or put it's resources behind specific interventions? Or on the other end, it could be extremely "active". I think right now it's somewhere in the middle, which isn't necc bad but always confusing to me. Like you could say "look EA isn't going to get political that's out of scope" but isn't choosing who speaks at EAG political? isn't giving resources for fellowships that are at minimum utilitarian adjacent political? Why is the line teaching people applied utilitarianism and not directly being an activist organization? 

Not saying it should be one or the other but hope people keep thinking about this stuff. 

Hey Charlie, you're a legend for this. One thing I will add is for easy video editing is to use CapCut and then auto-generate subtitles. You can export to 1080p and that gives the quality people are used to seeing for your types of videos. 

Not going to lie, a few vids were grainy and almost all of them didn't fit the frame. This is an easy fix if you can spare $10 a month to edit on CapCut. 

Thank you for doing this work. I've been door-knocking to message-test for my advocacy organization. I very much agree there is very little "AI literacy" among most people in the US/the world.

Certain framings work well at activating people, like focusing on Big Tech & political corruption. The goal is, in my opinion, to make sure politicians/law-makers are AI-literate and the general public is directionally in support of AI safety. 

You're very right that advocacy is severely neglected

Actually, we don't downrank them, we just auto-tag them as AI-generated (although this one hasn't run automatically- doh)

Would be interested in seeing a version of this that looks at WELLBYs or otherwise uses moral weights to holistically judge all of the portfolio's effects. But, this piece does seem like a convincing example of the idea the best charities are 100–1000× more effective than the average charity.

why not just try to measure utils instead of QALY?