Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
We shouldn't actually do this because mastodon is not good software and will probably be obsolete soon, but if that were not the case.
It would be a strategic win for EA to conspicuously fund the development of a community notes feature for Mastodon.
Here's what I think would happen: most mastodon communities would shit on it and refuse to use it because it had EA funding, but not vehemently enough to remove the feature from their forks, so this would just result in them looking incredibly wrong and bad and guilty every time anyone saw a successful community note.
And also: Community notes is the kind of feature that we should expect to actually substantially improve public policy discourse so it's the kind of thing we should be funding in earnest.
But I'm not sure we should work in that area. It's unfortunate that a global forum probably can't rise to prominence if it's received partisan funding, even if it's bi-partisan, as Argumentum ad Aurum is live and well and cavorting all around.