Potential Animal Welfare intervention: encourage the ASPCA and others to scale up their FAW budget

I’ve only recently come to appreciate how large the budgets are for the ASPCA, Humane World (formerly HSUS), and similar large, broad-based animal charities. At a quick (LLM) scan of their public filings, they appear to have a combined annual budget of ~$1Bn, most of which is focused on companion animals.

Interestingly, both the ASPCA and Humane World explicitly mention factory farming as one of their areas of concern. Yet, based on available data, it looks lik... (read more)

I found this a very readable explainer of a core insight. Thank you!

Hi Joel - in this case the positive sentiment towards mental health is indeed probably driven quite a bit by domestic mental health concerns. We actually provide an example or two for each cause and the mental health one notes improving or increasing access to mental health in the U.S.. Given it is the only mental health thing we have done so far in Pulse I think it would be hard to tease out with current data as you suggest. 

But yes there could be opportunities to add something in upcoming rounds - feel free to DM or reach out by email to discuss mor... (read more)

Thanks for the reply.

Firstly, it should be noted that the overall ratio used for the 2025 SADs was 1000x not 7x.

Right. There was a weight of 45 % on a ratio of 7.06, and of 55 % on one of 62.8 k (= 3.44*10^6/54.8), 8.90 k (= 62.8*10^3/7.06) times as much. My explanation for the large difference is that very little can be inferred about the intensity of excruciating pain, as defined by the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI), from the academic studies AIM analysed to derive the pain intensities linked to the lower ratio.

Just as an example this study on 37 wom

Thanks, Wladimir. That makes sense. I look forward to your future work on this. Let me know if funding ever becomes bottleneck, in which case I may want to help with a few k$.

Excellent post - I enjoyed reading it, and find the mental framework useful!

Two comments:

1. In evolutionary analysis, there are challenges with properties that are mainly relevant in life-or-death situations. Many of the organisms faced with such circumstances will not survive the immediate situation, and of those left, many will not reproduce. This slows down or completely stops development of certain properties. For example, there are well-suntantiated claims for the deterioration of our immune system at old age due to this - we are no longer reproductively

Here is the crosspost on the EA Forum. Rob preferred I shared it myself.

The AI Eval Singularity is Near

• AI capabilities seem to be doubling every 4-7 months
• Humanity's ability to measure capabilities is growing much more slowly
• This implies an "eval singularity": a point at which capabilities grow faster than our ability to measure them
• It seems like the singularity is ~here in cybersecurity, CBRN, and AI R&D (supporting quotes below)
• It's possible that this is temporary, but the people involved seem pretty worried

Appendix - quotes on eval saturation

Opus 4.6

• "For AI R&D capabilities, we found that Claude Opus 4.6 h

This is beautiful, thank you! This has definitely planted some seeds in my mind. Perhaps the most interesting points to me have been the prevalence of cockfighting and the dominance of ethics centered around virtues

Let  be the number of parameters in the model,  be the number of data tokens it is trained on,  be the number of times the model is deployed (e.g. the number of questions it is asked) and  be the number of inference steps each time it is deployed (e.g. the number of tokens per answer). Then this approximately works out to:^[9]

Note that scaling up the number of parameters, , increases both pre-training compute and inference compute, because you need to use those parameters each time you run a forward pass in your model.

Several variables a... (read more)

Browser extensions are almost^[1] never widely adopted.

Whenever anyone reminds me of this by proposing the annotations everywhere concept again, I remember that the root of the problem is distribution. You can propose it, you can even build it, but it wont be delivered to people. It should be. There are ways of designing computers/a better web where rollout would just happen.

That's what I want to build.

Software mostly isn't extensible, or where it is, it's not extensible enough (even web browsers aren't as extensible as they need to be! Chrome have sta... (read more)

Vox piece about Foege's work.

While EA is not fully at the table yet, EcoResilience Initiative is an EA group trying to answer exactly those questions: 

"What are the problems we're trying to solve?" "What are the most neglected aspects of those problems?" and "What is the most cost-effective way to address those neglected areas?"

So far we're 1) maintaining a big list of biodiversity interventions (not just protecting land!), 2) investigating which of these  are the most effective types of interventions, 3) identifying ways people can donate to projects working on those highly... (read more)

Thanks for the post! It seems like CEA and EA Funds are the only entities left housed under EV (per the EV website); if that's the case, why bother spinning out at all?

I don't mean to sound too negative on this - I did just say "a bit sad" on that one specific point.

Do I think that CE is doing worse or better overall? It seems like Coefficient has been making a bunch of changes, and I don't feel like I have a good handle on the details. They've also been expanding a fair bit. I'd naively assume that a huge amount of work is going on behind the scenes to hire and grow, and that this is putting CE in a better place on average.

I would expect this (the GCR prio team change) to be some evidence that specific ambitious approac... (read more)

Hi Jamie and David, 

Really cool work. It's striking how much higher mental health is in importance and support than GHD. Do you have any insight into why this is and what people are imagining when they're referring to mental health? 

I interpret this as very weak evidence that there's an audience for global mental health / mental health related EG that is non-overlapping with GHD (that is, there are MH givers that wouldn't otherwise give to GHD). But of course 1. most philanthropy is domestically oriented, and presumably that's what people mostly ... (read more)

Thanks a lot, Vasco — and thanks for the upvote!

You’re absolutely right to push us toward the practical question of how to compare affective capacity across species. That’s ultimately where this line of work needs to go. At the same time, we’ve been deliberately cautious here, because we think this is one of those cases where moving too quickly to numbers or rankings risks making the waters muddier rather than clearer.

Our sense is that the comparison of affective capacity across species hinges on a set of upstream scientific questions that are still poorly... (read more)

Thanks a lot for the kind words, Jim — and for the thoughtful pushback.

I think your point holds if we assume that the only way to implement a very strong alarm is via extreme felt intensity — but that assumption is exactly what we’re questioning.

I agree that in genuinely catastrophic situations, evolution should tolerate very “loud” alarms. The open question, though, is whether those alarms need to be implemented as extreme affective states, rather than through non-affective or lower-intensity control mechanisms.

On the benefit side, there seem to be two di... (read more)

by the founder of Jhourney: https://stephenzerfas.substack.com/p/jhanas-are-human-not-buddhist

Rob has a thoughtful reply here.

The critical question is whether shrimp or insects can support the kinds of negative states that make suffering severe, rather than merely possible.

I think suffering matters proportionally to its intensity. So I would not neglect mild suffering in principle, although it may not matter much in practice due to contributing little to total expected suffering.

In any case, I would agree the total expected welfare of farmed invertebrates may be tiny compared with that of humans due invertebrates' experiences having a very low intensity. For expected individual w... (read more)

I know the OP may not read this comment. I made it on his Substack post and I'm sharing it here in case it's of interest to others on the Forum.
 

Thanks for your post, Rob. Meghan Barrett and I have a detailed reply to Eisemann et al. 1984 in the Quarterly Review of Biology. You can see it here:

journals.uchicago.edu/d…

Short version, very little in that paper has stood the test of time and the particular passage you quote has many problems. I’d encourage you to reconsider including it!

Hi Rob. A few more thoughts. I grant you that the evidence for sentie... (read more)

Good idea, I reposted the article itself here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GyenLpfzRKK3wBPyA/the-simple-case-for-ai-catastrophe-in-four-steps 

I've been trying to keep the "meta" and the main posts mostly separate so hopefully the discussions for the metas and the main posts aren't as close together.

And even granting the usual EA filters—tractability, neglectedness, feasibility, and evidential robustness—the scale gradient from shrimp to insects (via agriculture-related deaths) is so steep that these filters don’t, by themselves, explain why the precautionary logic should settle on shrimp. All else equal, once you shift to a target that is thousands of times larger, an intervention could be far less effective [in terms of robustly increasing welfare in expectation] and still compete on expected impact.

I very much agree. Moreover, I do not even know wh... (read more)

i love your framing nice job crafting it! would have been easier if you had put it in the text of this post though ha!

Cool (:

I'm specifically interested in automating filtering EA-related opportunities and events to write our weekly announcements.

I think with a bit of tweaking that would be a public good for EA community building and might be re used by many groups.

Hi Oli, I appreciate your thoughtful reply and share much of your sentiment. Indeed, we must protect the flame. The inner fire I have for positive impact (especially animal welfare) is equally critical, but I find it's sometimes hard to give both the attention they need. Personally, I think it would improve my art to attend to both simultaneously, but probably not improve my impact (unless I come up with some better ideas). 

Personally I don't think Sam Altman is motivated by money. He just wants to be the one to build it.

I sense that Elon Musk and Dorio Amodei's motivations are more complex than "motivated by money", but I can imagine that the actual dollar amounts are more important to them than to Sma.

Hi Vasco. Firstly, it should be noted that the overall ratio used for the 2025 SADs was 1000x not 7x. The updated 2026 ratio based on more extensive research is 50x.

Secondly on "I do not see how one would be indifferent between these". You might be surprised if it does not match your personal experience, but many people are indifferent between relatively extreme levels of pain, including people who have been through quite extreme pain. Just as an example this study on 37 women who have just gone through labour, roughly one third of them would prefer a 9/10... (read more)

TBH my sense is that GiveWell is just being polite.

A perhaps more realistic motivation is that admitting animal suffering into GiveWell's models would implicitly force them to specify moral weights for animals (versus humans), and there is no way to do that without inviting huge controversy leaving at least some groups very upset. Much easier to say "sorry, not our wheelhouse" and effectively set animal weights to zero.

FWIW I agree with this decision (of GiveWell's).

That's an interesting way to connect these. I suppose one way to view your model is as making clear the point that you can't cost-effectively use models on tasks that much longer than their 50% horizons — even if you are willing to try multiple times — and that trend of dramatic price improvements over time isn't enough to help with this. Instead you need the continuation of the METR trend of exponentially growing horizons. Moreover, you give a nice intuitive explanation of why that is.

One thing to watch out for is Gus Hamilton's recent study suggesti... (read more)

Should GiveWell offer Animal Welfare regrants on an opt-in basis?

The GiveWell FAQ (quoted below) suggests that GiveWell focuses exclusively on human-directed interventions primarily for reasons of specialization—i.e., avoiding duplication of work already done by Coefficient Giving and others—rather than due to a principled objection to recommending animal-focused charities. If GiveWell is willing to recommend these organizations when asked, why not reduce the friction a bit?

A major part of GiveWell’s appeal has been its role as an “index fund for charities... (read more)

Hey, cool toy model (:

I bet there's not enough data on METR about how messy are the tasks to include it here, but I would expect it to have real world consequences and to tug in the direction of agents being less viable outside of well defined domains.

Hi! I made a BOTEC model on AI agents economic feasibility in the near term. You can find it here.
It combines the half-life analysis of agent reliability with real inference costs. The core idea is that if agent cost per successful outcome scales exponentially with task length, and human cost scales linearly, it creates a sharp viability boundary that cost reductions alone cannot meaningfully shift. The only parameter that matters much is the agent's half-life (reliability horizon), which is precisely the thing that requires the continual learning breakthr... (read more)

I really appreciate how this piece treats Operations, not as a nice-to-have, but as a bottleneck that can quietly cap an organization's impact. It reminded me of Goldratt’s The Goal: if you don’t explicitly identify and elevate your constraint, the whole system stalls. The rubric feels like a practical diagnostic tool which we can use, reflect and equip ops capacity, A+ orgs are the ones that treat ops capacity, specialist support, and process design as the constraint to manage!

Are you thinking about humans as an aligned collective in the 1st paragraph of your comment? I agree all humans coordinating their actions together would have more power than other groups of organisms with their actual levels of coordination. However, such level of coordination among humans is not realistic. All 10^30 bacteria (see Table S1 of Bar-On et al. (2018)) coordinating their actions together would arguably also have more power than all humans with their actual level of coordination.

I agree it is good that no human has power over all humans. H... (read more)

Deeply appreciate this Kristof. Interesting that at a broad level (what are the best charities, how to help more people), it cites credible and evidence-based resources.

Then when discussing animals and Africa - i.e. more long-tail keywords - it does not. 

There is probably low-hanging opportunity here for charities to write up more indexable FAQs and blogposts that match the language a user would use when asking an LLM a question (or even Google). 

""[...] not getting a reward may create frustration, which is nothing but another form of pain." From my human experience, I can be living "net positive" while being extremely frustrated about something. 

In general I think direct observation of individuals is a fantastic way forward. Maybe even the only way forward here. Theoretical arguments make so many assumptions I fee llike I could argue all sides here.

I'm amazed EAs haven't funded some individual animal observation stuff. Put a small cam and a fitbit on a deer or other prey animal and see what they get up to? My guess is that the life would look more positive than we expect.

Cracking work! Love the initiative of you extending this. Interesting to hear that Claude is EA-pilled, but that its animal welfare opinions are still more vibes-based than taking the same, rigourous stance

Extinction perhaps not, but I think eternal autocracy is definitely possible.

I'm going to guess the total donated will be 30% of this by EA funders, and a low percentage by the rest. I think your conservative number is WAY too low based on previous pledge fulfillment rates. I get that it's just a claude generation though

But that's still 2 billion dollars at least, so I've updated positively on the amount of money that might go to good causes. Thanks for this @Ozzie Gooen strong upvote.

By power I mean: ability to change the world, according to one's preferences. Humans clearly dominate today in terms of this kind of power. Our power is limited, but it is not the case that other organisms have power over us, because while we might rely on them, they are not able to leverage that dependency. Rather, we use them as much as we can.

No human is currently so powerful as to have power over all other humans, and I think that's definitely a good thing. But it doesn't seem like it would take much more advantage to let one intelligent being dominate all others.

Hi Guy. Elon Musk was not the only person responsible for the recent large cuts in foreign aid from the United States (US). In addition, I believe outcomes like human extinction are way less likely. I agree it makes sense to worry about concentration of power, but not about extreme outcomes like human extinction.

Elon Musk has already used this power to do actions which will potentially kill millions (by funding the Trump campaign enough to get to close down USAID). I think that should worry us, and the chance of people amassing even more power should worry us even more.

Mental health support for those working on AI risks and policy?

During the numerous projects I work on relating to AI risks, policies, and future threats/scenarios, I speak to a lot of people who bring exposed to issues of catastrophic and existential nature for the first time (or grappling with them for the first time in detail). This combined with the likelihood that things will get worse before they better, makes me frequently wonder: are we doing enough around mental health support?

Things that I don’t know exist but feel they should. Some may sound OTT ... (read more)

Gracias, David! We've had a busy last few months, focused on sharpening our strategic focus, devising a brand, commissioning and performing high-impact research, building relationships across the Americas - including with leading screwworm scientists - and onboarding our new Executive Director and core team. You can support our efforts right now by boosting this call, including on LinkedIn, or by sharing our Every.org donation page with people in your network who might be interested in learning more, or supporting us with resources. Thank you again! 

My first attempt went pretty poorly but I'm not giving up yet. I'm making some adjustments and will try again in 2026. 

I think you’re right that they’ve not accounted for this. Their current calculation assumes a baseline new donation rate of zero, which seems very unlikely. If the question is how much additional giving did this campaign generate, then credible attribution requires at least an estimate of the counterfactual, which here could be approximated using pre-period donations. This would be more defensible than just counting post-campaign donations.

This is great news and good timing! A few days ago I was wondering what your org was up to.

I'm afraid I'm quite unqualified to do this screw worm research myself but please let me know if there's any other way I can support this effort

Very interesting critique. I've seen this kinds of comments in academic circles doing evals work, and there have been attempts to improve the situation such as the General Scales Framework:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06378

Think of it as passing an IQ test instead of a school exam, more predictive power. It's not percect ofc but thankfully some people are really taking this seriously.

I agree the thread direction may be unhelpful, and flame wars are bad.

I disagree though about the merits of questioning motivations, I think its super important.

 In the AI sphere, there are great theoretical arguments on all sides, good arguments for accelleration, caution, pausing etc. We can discuss these ad nauseum and I do think that's useful. But I think motivations likely shape the history and current state of AI development more than unmotivated easoning and rational thought. Money and Power are strong motivators - EA's have sidelined them at t... (read more)

@Yonatan Cale posted a demo last week of an app he’s building in the EAG Bay Area Slack.

Do you think this is evidence that OpenPhil's GCR staff/team is doing less cause prioritization now than they were before? The specific things you say don't seem to be much evidence either way about this (and also not much evidence about whether or not they actually need to be doing more cause prioritization on the margin). Maybe you have further reason to believe this is bad?

I imagine there must have been a bunch of other major changes around Coefficient that aren't yet well understood externally. This caught me a bit off guard. 

What makes you expect this and why (assuming you do) do you expect these changes to be negative? 

I've now written it here, thanks for all the feedback! :) https://linch.substack.com/p/simplest-case-ai-catastrophe

It is popular to hate on Swapcard, and yet Swapcard seems like the best available solution despite its flaws. Claude Code or other AI coding assistants are very good nowadays, and conceivably, someone could just Claude Code a better Swapcard that maintained feature parity while not having flaws.

Overall I'm guessing this would be too hard right now, but we do live in an age of mysteries and wonders. It gets easier every month. One reason for optimism is it seems like the Swapcard team is probably not focused on the somewhat odd use case of EAGs in general (... (read more)

Great post, I have heard the same observations before (I live in Brussels). The examples you give are spot on. It is very very difficult to change EU policy on a political level, but I have heard of people working in the commission for less than 4 years being responsible for determining how to distribute millions of euros of developmental aid. Just having a person who asks "can I see the evidence behind the different interventions?" would make a massive difference.

In this context, I sometimes one if the single biggest opportunity is not to turn many more E... (read more)

This is a great resource, kudos!

In case of interest, here's a piece I wrote which looks into potential policy/governance approaches to digital minds, and argues that we ought to try to prevent the creation of artificial sentience: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9adaExTiSDA3o3ipL/we-should-prevent-the-creation-of-artificial-sentience

In case of interest, relating to a point in section 1 of your post, here's a piece I wrote which argues that we should try to prevent the creation of artificial sentience: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9adaExTiSDA3o3ipL/we-should-prevent-the-creation-of-artificial-sentience

Thank you, this is the correct link: https://unjournal.pubpub.org/pub/evalsumleadexposure/

I need to check what's going on with our DOIs !

I had my Claude system do some brainstorming work on this. 

https://www.longtermwiki.com/knowledge-base/models/intervention-models/anthropic-pledge-enforcement/

It generated some more specific interventions here.
 

The link seems to be broken

Thanks for sharing, James.

I've been experimenting recently with a longtermist wiki, written fully with LLMs.

Some key decisions/properties:
1. Fully LLM-generated, heavily relying on Claude Code.
2. Somewhat opinionated. Tries to represent something of a median longtermist/EA longview, with a focus on the implications of AI. All pages are rated for "importance".
3. Claude will estimates a lot of percentages and letter grades for things. If you see a percentage or grade, and there's no citation, it might well be a guess by Claude.
4. An emphasis on numeric estimates, models, and diagrams... (read more)

Brilliant work — thanks for sharing.

On the costs of high-intensity affective states, which you suggest are high (such that we'd need a special explanation for why they exist):

In affective neuroscience, core emotions are understood as whole-organism control states that recruit neuroendocrine, autonomic, and motivational systems, reorganizing behavior and physiology in ways that may be adaptive in the short term but biologically consequential if prolonged (Panksepp, 1998; McEwen, 2007). Prolonged or poorly regulated aversive states can interfere with feeding

Thanks, fixed the link

This is awesome! Claude does have an incognito mode so I tested your queries there and made a copy of your doc with its responses along with my ratings included:

 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qlq9hTLQ4U7BPdMNN7Rsxxo4A8GLDv0tfYjll4MKkW4/edit?gid=0#gid=0

It did a bit better than ChatGPT and Gemini but still below Grok. I'm pretty impressed with how "EA-pilled" it was overall.

In the US, Instacart has a "dietary preferences" setting where you can opt to have more shown to you from categories like vegan, vegetarian, organic, etc. But when I tried it, it seemed to show me basically the same as usual.

Quickly:
1. I think there's probably good work to be done here!
2. I think the link you meant to include was https://www.longtermwiki.com/knowledge-base/organizations/funders/giving-pledge/
3. To be clear, I'm not directly writing this wiki. I'm using Claude Code with a bunch of scripts and stuff to put it together. So I definitely recommend being a bit paranoid when it comes to specifics!

That said, I think normally it does a decent job (and I'm looking to improve it!). On the 36%, that seems to have come from this article, which has a bit more, which basical... (read more)

love this idea I'm in, see you next week.

I'm not sure whether these have been improving a lot over time but I feel like they usually miss a lot of items that are vegan? I was shopping with Ocado every week up until October last year and I never found the filter to be very good so I'd still check ingredients myself.

I'm curating this post. 

This seems to me to be a persuasive selection of considerations against a notion I didn't realise I held. In that sense, it's directly valuable. 

Also, I have always admired Lukas's clear style and careful argument, and it's great to see a post from him on the Forum again.

The low EA awareness findings from Pulse prompted us to commission Dutch-specific research to test whether we face a similar situation here. In the meantime, we’ve already shifted some resources toward targeted awareness-raising - the data suggested our funnel may be constrained at the top rather than further down, so we’re testing whether reaching new audiences is higher leverage than deeper engagement with existing ones.

There doesn't seem to be any discussion about what would happen if there is no intelligence explosion. I could easily see a scenario where everyone is waiting around for a singularity that never comes, and neglecting accumulated dangers arising from gradual AI progress. I could also see a case where the "intelligence explosion" gets declared early according to AI progress meeting some benchmark, when clearly AI progress is not exploding. 

Going up one level: You may believe that an intelligence explosion is inevitable, but most people, including world ... (read more)

Thanks for the relevant post, Wladimir and Cynthia. I strongly upvoted it. Do you have any practical ideas about how to apply the Sentience Bargain framework to compare welfare across species? I would be curious to know your thoughts on Rethink Priorities' (RP's) research agenda on valuing impacts across species.

It seems like a worthwhile project to ask/pressure Anthropic's founders to make their pledges legally binding. 

Anthropic's founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth. Ozzie Gooen estimates that in a few years this could be worth >$40 billion.

As Ozzie writes, adherence to the Giving Pledge (the Gates one) is pretty low: only 36% of deceased original pledgers met the 50% commitment. It's hard to follow through on such commitments, even for (originally) highly morally motivated people.

Thanks for the great post, Lukas. I strongly upvoted it. I also agree with your concluding thoughts and implications.

UPDATE: The notice for the AD5 competition was published today - Deadline is 10 March 2026. You should fill in the initial application thoroughly, with correct dates for all work experiences and diplomas (studies, languages, etc.). You will need to submit those should you be successful.

1490 people will make it to the reserve list (from which you can be directly recruited as a lifetime civil servant), as opposed to 147 in the last such competition in 2019. Assuming a similar number of applicants as in 2019 (~25k) the probability of making it onto the reserve list would be a lot higher for this competition, around 5%. 

Thank you all for the very interesting discussion.

I think addressing the greatest sources of suffering is a promising approach to robustly increase welfare. However, I believe the focus should be on the greatest sources of suffering in the ecosystem, not in any given population, such that effects on non-target organisms can be neglected. Electrically stunning farmed shrimps arguably addresses one of the greatest sources of suffering of farmed shrimps, and the ratio between its effects on target and non-target organisms is much larger than for the vast majo... (read more)

Thanks, Zoë. I see funders are the ones deciding what to fund, and that you only provide advice if they so wish, as explained below. What if funders ask you for advice on which species to support? Do you base your advice on the welfare ranges presented in Bob's book? Have you considered recommending research on welfare comparisons across species to such funders, such as the projects in RP's research agenda on valuing impacts across species?

Q: Do Senterra Funders staff decide how funders make grant decisions?

A: No, each Senterra member maintains full autono

"All kinds of compute scaling are quite inefficient on most standard metrics. There are steady gains, but they are coming from exponentially increasing inputs."

Is this kind of the opposite of Moore's law lol?

Wait, I just found this in YouTube's algorithm. One of the funnier comments about Peter:

Did Ronny just interview Klepper with a glue-on beard?

Have you considered trying to offer this on food delivery apps? India has a lot of infrastructure for making it easy to find vegetarian products in their apps, I’ve found it very useful :)

Is this primarily meant for people who are already veg*n/sympathetic or a wider audience?

If the latter, it is worth rethinking if the word "vegan" should be used at all, as there are a bunch of studies that show that the public is negatively biased towards the term and alternate terms are received more positively (see this, for instance).

This is a fantastic list and I strongly resonate as the leader of a rapidly growing organisation with some of the challenges as fixes that you have shared. 

One half-baked thought that I have is that often the skills that make individuals great at entrepreneurship are orthogonal to the skills that may make someone good at building the operational backbone of an organisation. For examples - entrepreneurs need to be comfortable with rapid and often ad hoc decision making, failing fast, comfort with risk and uncertainties, and generally a cowboy / cowgirl... (read more)

By the way, the paper "Existential risk and growth", which seems relevant to this post, was evaluated by The Unjournal – see https://doi.org/10.21428/d28e8e57.51c89928. Please let us know if you found our evaluation useful and how we can do better – contact@unjournal.org

The key point, though, is that cases like Ocado and Albert Heijn are exceptions, not the norm.

As a partial pushback (and for reference for any vegans!), 6/8 biggest UK supermarkets which allow online shopping have these sort of filters. (Proof here)

These are definitely different to the 'whole website vegan toggle' option, and only available on some subset of pages. They also miss the 'norm-building' impact of having a very visible 'vegan toggle'. However, I'd tentatively doubt supermarkets would consider having the toggle, considering how crammed supermark... (read more)

Hi Vasco, Senterra Funders' FAQ should answer your questions.

Thanks for sharing these Annika and Sam!

I'd recommend you (and anyone using these resources) check out the EA Groups Resources page on the approach to politics and polarised issues, so you can check out some considerations of when/how to raise such issues in your group

https://resources.eagroups.org/approach-to-politics-and-political-issues 

It is important to know that, in the US (and lots of other countries)

charities or organizations funded by charities are NOT allowed to engage in political campaigning.
Including

• financial support for a campaign, inclu

The next PauseAI UK protest will be (AFAIK) the first coalition protest between different AI activist groups, the main other group being Pull the Plug, a new organisation focused primarily on current AI harms. It will almost certainly be the largest protest focused exclusively on AI to date.

In my experience, the vast majority of people in AI safety are in favor of big-tent coalition protests on AI in theory. But when faced with the reality of working with other groups who don't emphasize existential risk, they have misgivings. So I'm curious what people he... (read more)

I want to signal-boost this conversation between you and @Wei Dai (and others), and see whether you have any further thoughts on the matter

I question the view that there are so few people with an EA mindset in the European Commission. In particular in the health-related and environmental directorate-generals, you find (and could find for decades) quite many very idealistically motivated persons that are not really different from EA persons, though maybe not being aware of the EA movement. The high percentage of persons with an EA-like mindset was the reason why some of the idealistically motivated persons even went into other directorate-generals to make more of a difference. The downside of ... (read more)

Thanks for the great post, Srdjan. I strongly upvoted it.

This post was recommended to me by a friend in EA and I was pleasantly surprised to see you were the author. Such great advice and guidance for those of us searching for jobs in the EA space. Thank you for the tips and the section on imposter syndrome. I am going to listen to the 80000 hours podcast on mental health. The journey to being hired is a deliberate practice and I am determined to find a role.

Thank you!

By the way, the paper "How Much Would Reducing Lead Exposure Improve Children's Learning in the Developing World?", which seems relevant to this post, was evaluated by The Unjournal – see https://doi.org/10.21428/d28e8e57.532ce8e3. Please let us know if you found our evaluation useful and how we can do better – contact@unjournal.org

By the way, the paper "How Much Would Reducing Lead Exposure Improve Children's Learning in the Developing World?", which seems relevant to this post, was evaluated by The Unjournal – see here - fixed link.

 Please let us know if you found our evaluation useful and how we can do better – contact@unjournal.org

By the way, the paper "Advance Market Commitments: Insights from Theory and Experience", which seems relevant to this post, was evaluated by The Unjournal – see https://doi.org/10.21428/d28e8e57.652a843a. Please let us know if you found our evaluation useful and how we can do better – contact@unjournal.org