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This post is co-authored with Ben Garfinkel. It is cross-posted from the CEA blog. A PDF version can be found here.
Summary: Some strategic decisions available to the effective altruism m...
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TL;DR: I'm releasing a website that ranks philanthropists according to EA principles and research, and allows users to re-rank the list using their own assumptions. I'd like feedback and help making it better. I'd especially like ideas for how to make the results more trustworthy. Funding may be available.
I recently built Impact List (impactlist.xyz), a site which ranks people by their positive impact via donations.
The goal is t...
Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I’m writing this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement by CEA.
Agency - the realisation that you really can just do things.
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Biosecurity needs people (of any background) who are agentic and have a high execution velocity and track record....
Recent opportunities to take action
It seems prima facie plausible to me that interventions that save human lives do not increase utility on net, due to the animal suffering caused by saving human life. Has anyone in the broader EA community looked into this? I'm not strongly committed to this, but I'd be interested in seeing what people have reasoned about this.
Yeah there have been a sporadic musings about this one the forum. If you search " Vasco Grilo' he has a bit of interesting stuff on this.
My broad personal opinion is that in Uganda when I live at least, most animals (apart from battery hens) have net positive lives as they are not intensively farmed. Unfortunately this is changing fast
Because of this I don't think saving lives in this country is going to increase net animal suffering (or not very much). Whether we should just optimise for utility anyway it's obviously another question.
Others will disagree, it's an in interesting if a bit dark topic...
See the meat-eater problem tag and the posts tagged with it. That being said, wild animal effects can complicate things.
Globally, there are around 20 billion farmed chickens alive at any moment, mostly factory farmed, so about 3 per human alive, higher in high-income countries and lower in low-income countries. There are also probably over 100 billion fish being farmed at any moment, so over 12 per human alive. See Šimčikas, 2020 for estimates.