On alternative proteins: I think the EA community could aim to figure out how to turn animal farmers into winners if we succeed with alternative proteins. This seems to be one of the largest social risks, and it's probably something we should figure out before we scale alternative proteins a lot. Farmers are typically a small group but have a large lobby ability and public sympathy.

Me: "Well at least this study shows no association beteween painted houses and kids' blood lead levels. That's encouraging!" Wife: "Nothing you have said this morning is encouraging NIck. Everything that I've heard tells me that our pots, our containers and half of our hut are slowly poisoning our baby" Yikes touche... (Context we live in Northern Uganda) Thanks @Lead Research for Action (LeRA) for this unsettling but excellently written report. Our house is full of aluminium pots and green plastic food containers. Now to figure out what to do about it! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pqRUeejiRCX2bXekeZnL0zGi34zbK23w/view

Why don’t EA chapters exist at very prestigious high schools (e.g., Stuyvesant, Exeter, etc.)? It seems like a relatively low-cost intervention (especially compared to something like Atlas), and these schools produce unusually strong outcomes. There’s also probably less competition than at universities for building genuinely high-quality intellectual clubs (this could totally be wrong).

Here’s a random org/project idea: hire full-time, thoughtful EA/AIS red teamers whose job is to seriously critique parts of the ecosystem — whether that’s the importance of certain interventions, movement culture, or philosophical assumptions. Think engaging with critics or adjacent thinkers (e.g., David Thorstad, Titotal, Tyler Cowen) and translating strong outside critiques into actionable internal feedback. The key design feature would be incentives: instead of paying for generic criticism, red teamers receive rolling “finder’s fees” for critiques that are judged to be high-quality, good-faith, and decision-relevant (e.g., identifying strategic blind spots, diagnosing vibe shifts that can be corrected, or clarifying philosophical cruxes that affect priorities). Part of why I think this is important is because I generally think have the intuition that the marginal thoughtful contrarian is often more valuable than the marginal agreer, yet most movement funding and prestige flows toward builders rather than structured internal critics. If that’s true, a standing red-team org — or at least a permanent prize mechanism — could be unusually cost-effective. There have been episodic versions of this (e.g., red-teaming contests, some longtermist critiquing stuff), but I’m not sure why this should come in waves rather than exist as ongoing infrastructure (org or just some prize pool that's always open for sufficiently good criticisms).

"Most people make the mistake of generalizing from a single data point. Or at least, I do." - SA When can you learn a lot from one data point? People, especially stats- or science- brained people, are often confused about this, and frequently give answers that (imo) are the opposite of useful. Eg they say that usually you can’t know much but if you know a lot about the meta-structure of your distribution (eg you’re interested in the mean of a distribution with low variance), sometimes a single data point can be a significant update. This type of limited conclusion on the face of it looks epistemically humble, but in practice it's the opposite of correct. Single data points aren’t particularly useful when you know a lot, but they’re very useful when you have very little knowledge to begin with. If your uncertainty about a variable in question spans many orders of magnitude, the first observation can often reduce more uncertainty than the next 2-10 observations put together[1]. Put another way, the most useful situations for updating massively from a single data point are when you know very little to begin with. For example, if an alien sees a human car for the first time, the alien can make massive updates on many different things regarding Earthling society, technology, biology and culture. Similarly, an anthropologist landing on an island of a previously uncontacted tribe can rapidly learn so much about a new culture from a single hour of peaceful interaction [2]. Some other examples: * Your first day at a new job. * First time visiting a country/region you previously knew nothing about. One afternoon in Vietnam tells you roughly how much things cost, how traffic works, what the food is like, languages people speak, how people interact with strangers. * Trying a new fruit for the first time. One bite of durian tells you an enormous amount about whether you'll like durian. * Your first interaction with someone's kid tells you roughly how old they are, how v