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I'd like feedback on an idea if possible. I have a longer document with more detail that I'm working on but here's a short summary that sketches out the core idea/motivation:
Potential idea: hosting a competition/experiment to find the most convincing argument for donating to long-termist organisations
Brief summary
Recently, Professor Eric Shwitzgebel and Dr Fiery Cushman conducted a study to find the most convincing philosophical/logical argument for short-term causes. By ‘philosophical/logical argument’ I mean an argument that attempts to persuade readers to donate to short-term causes through reasoning by logic, which often involves basing the arguments on certain philosophical underpinnings, rather than relying on evoking emotion (i.e. pictures of starving children etc.). The authors were motivated by the hypothesis that arguments that appealed to people through logical/philosophical reasoning would not be an effective tool at persuading people to donate, compared to a control condition (reading a passage from a Physics textbook). Shwitzgebel and Cushman ran a competition for submissions from the public. The winners were awarded $1000 ($500 to the author and $500 to the author’s choice of charity).
The authors measured the ‘persuasiveness’ of an argument by the highest average donation given by participants in an experiment to six selected short-termist charities (all of which had a global development/public health focus). Participants in the experiment read different passages of text depending on the experimental condition they were in. They were then informed that they had a 10% chance of receiving a $10 bonus, and that they would be given an opportunity to donate a portion of that bonus to one of the six charities. The winning argument was submitted by Peter Singer and Matthew Lindauer, which had the highest average mean donation amount, beating all the other arguments and the control group.
I found this experiment very intriguing. I suggest here that something similar should be done but for long-termist causes. To my knowledge, something along the lines of this has not been conducted previously. Extending the framework of the Shwitzgebel and Cushman study, I would find the most convincing argument by hosting a competition to elicit submissions for persuasive arguments on long-termism. After narrowing these down, I’d then proceed to run an experiment on participants to see which of the remaining arguments results in the highest average contribution.
This is an interesting idea. You might need to change the design a bit; my impression is that the experiment focused on getting people to donate vs not donating, whereas the concern with longtermism is more about prioritisation between different donation targets. Someone's decision to keep the money wouldn't necessarily mean they were being short-termist: they might be going to invest that money, or they might simply think that the (necessarily somewhat speculative) longtermist charities being offered were unlikely to improve long-term outcomes.
Question: Imagine we could quantify the amount of suffering the average person does by eating meat and the amount of environmental damage that comes from eating this meat. How much would they need to donate to the most effective charities (climate change and animal suffering) in order to off-set their meat-eating habit?
People have tried to estimate similar figures before. See Jeff Kaufman on dairy offsets or Gregory Lewis on meat-eating (searching the term "moral offset" will help you find other examples I haven't linked).
Some people also think this idea is conceptually bad or antithetical to EA.
Curated and popular this week
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Advanced AI could unlock an era of enlightened and competent government action. But without smart, active investment, we’ll squander that opportunity and barrel blindly into danger.
Executive summary
See also a summary on Twitter / X.
The US federal government is falling behind the private sector on AI adoption. As AI improves, a growing gap would leave the government unable to effectively respond to AI-driven existential challenges and threaten the legitimacy of its democratic institutions.
A dual imperative
→ Government adoption of AI can’t wait. Making steady progress is critical to:
* Boost the government’s capacity to effectively respond to AI-driven existential challenges
* Help democratic oversight keep up with the technological power of other groups
* Defuse the risk of rushed AI adoption in a crisis
→ But hasty AI adoption could backfire. Without care, integration of AI could:
* Be exploited, subverting independent government action
* Lead to unsafe deployment of AI systems
* Accelerate arms races or compress safety research timelines
Summary of the recommendations
1. Work with the US federal government to help it effectively adopt AI
Simplistic “pro-security” or “pro-speed” attitudes miss the point. Both are important — and many interventions would help with both. We should:
* Invest in win-win measures that both facilitate adoption and reduce the risks involved, e.g.:
* Build technical expertise within government (invest in AI and technical talent, ensure NIST is well resourced)
* Streamline procurement processes for AI products and related tech (like cloud services)
* Modernize the government’s digital infrastructure and data management practices
* Prioritize high-leverage interventions that have strong adoption-boosting benefits with minor security costs or vice versa, e.g.:
* On the security side: investing in cyber security, pre-deployment testing of AI in high-stakes areas, and advancing research on mitigating the ris
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In our recent strategy retreat, the GWWC Leadership Team recognised that by spreading our limited resources across too many projects, we are unable to deliver the level of excellence and impact that our mission demands.
True to our value of being mission accountable, we've therefore made the difficult but necessary decision to discontinue a total of 10 initiatives. By focusing our energy on fewer, more strategically aligned initiatives, we think we’ll be more likely to ultimately achieve our Big Hairy Audacious Goal of 1 million pledgers donating $3B USD to high-impact charities annually. (See our 2025 strategy.)
We’d like to be transparent about the choices we made, both to hold ourselves accountable and so other organisations can take the gaps we leave into account when planning their work. As such, this post aims to:
* Inform the broader EA community about changes to projects & highlight opportunities to carry these projects forward
* Provide timelines for project transitions
* Explain our rationale for discontinuing certain initiatives
What’s changing
We've identified 10 initiatives[1] to wind down or transition. These are:
* GWWC Canada
* Effective Altruism Australia funding partnership
* GWWC Groups
* Giving Games
* Charity Elections
* Effective Giving Meta evaluation and grantmaking
* The Donor Lottery
* Translations
* Hosted Funds
* New licensing of the GWWC brand
Each of these is detailed in the sections below, with timelines and transition plans where applicable.
How this is relevant to you
We still believe in the impact potential of many of these projects. Our decision doesn’t necessarily reflect their lack of value, but rather our need to focus at this juncture of GWWC's development.
Thus, we are actively looking for organisations and individuals interested in taking on some of these projects. If that’s you, please do reach out: see each project's section for specific contact details.
Thank you for your continued support as we
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Our Mission: To build a multidisciplinary field around using technology—especially AI—to improve the lives of nonhumans now and in the future.
Overview
Background
This hybrid conference had nearly 550 participants and took place March 1-2, 2025 at UC Berkeley. It was organized by AI for Animals for $74k by volunteer core organizers Constance Li, Sankalpa Ghose, and Santeri Tani.
This conference has evolved since 2023:
* The 1st conference mainly consisted of philosophers and was a single track lecture/panel.
* The 2nd conference put all lectures on one day and followed it with 2 days of interactive unconference sessions happening in parallel and a week of in-person co-working.
* This 3rd conference had a week of related satellite events, free shared accommodations for 50+ attendees, 2 days of parallel lectures/panels/unconferences, 80 unique sessions, of which 32 are available on Youtube, Swapcard to enable 1:1 connections, and a Slack community to continue conversations year round.
We have been quickly expanding this conference in order to prepare those that are working toward the reduction of nonhuman suffering to adapt to the drastic and rapid changes that AI will bring.
Luckily, it seems like it has been working!
This year, many animal advocacy organizations attended (mostly smaller and younger ones) as well as newly formed groups focused on digital minds and funders who spanned both of these spaces. We also had more diversity of speakers and attendees which included economists, AI researchers, investors, tech companies, journalists, animal welfare researchers, and more. This was done through strategic targeted outreach and a bigger team of volunteers.
Outcomes
On our feedback survey, which had 85 total responses (mainly from in-person attendees), people reported an average of 7 new connections (defined as someone they would feel comfortable reaching out to for a favor like reviewing a blog post) and of those new connections, an average of 3
I'd like feedback on an idea if possible. I have a longer document with more detail that I'm working on but here's a short summary that sketches out the core idea/motivation:
Potential idea: hosting a competition/experiment to find the most convincing argument for donating to long-termist organisations
Brief summary
Recently, Professor Eric Shwitzgebel and Dr Fiery Cushman conducted a study to find the most convincing philosophical/logical argument for short-term causes. By ‘philosophical/logical argument’ I mean an argument that attempts to persuade readers to donate to short-term causes through reasoning by logic, which often involves basing the arguments on certain philosophical underpinnings, rather than relying on evoking emotion (i.e. pictures of starving children etc.). The authors were motivated by the hypothesis that arguments that appealed to people through logical/philosophical reasoning would not be an effective tool at persuading people to donate, compared to a control condition (reading a passage from a Physics textbook). Shwitzgebel and Cushman ran a competition for submissions from the public. The winners were awarded $1000 ($500 to the author and $500 to the author’s choice of charity).
The authors measured the ‘persuasiveness’ of an argument by the highest average donation given by participants in an experiment to six selected short-termist charities (all of which had a global development/public health focus). Participants in the experiment read different passages of text depending on the experimental condition they were in. They were then informed that they had a 10% chance of receiving a $10 bonus, and that they would be given an opportunity to donate a portion of that bonus to one of the six charities. The winning argument was submitted by Peter Singer and Matthew Lindauer, which had the highest average mean donation amount, beating all the other arguments and the control group.
I found this experiment very intriguing. I suggest here that something similar should be done but for long-termist causes. To my knowledge, something along the lines of this has not been conducted previously. Extending the framework of the Shwitzgebel and Cushman study, I would find the most convincing argument by hosting a competition to elicit submissions for persuasive arguments on long-termism. After narrowing these down, I’d then proceed to run an experiment on participants to see which of the remaining arguments results in the highest average contribution.
This is an interesting idea. You might need to change the design a bit; my impression is that the experiment focused on getting people to donate vs not donating, whereas the concern with longtermism is more about prioritisation between different donation targets. Someone's decision to keep the money wouldn't necessarily mean they were being short-termist: they might be going to invest that money, or they might simply think that the (necessarily somewhat speculative) longtermist charities being offered were unlikely to improve long-term outcomes.