Martin Gould's Five insights from farm animal economics over at Open Phil's FAW newsletter points out that (quote) "blocking local factory farms can mean animals are farmed in worse conditions elsewhere": 

Consider the UK: Local groups celebrate blocking new chicken farms. But because UK chicken demand keeps growing — it rose 24% from 2012-2022 — the result of fewer new UK chicken farms is just that the UK imports more chicken: it almost doubled its chicken imports over the same time period. While most chicken imported into the UK comes from the EU, wh

I really liked several of the past debate weeks, but I find it quite strange and plausibly counterproductive to spend a week in a public forum discussing these questions.

There is no clear upside to reducing the uncertainty on this question, because there are few interventions that are predictably differentiated along those lines.

And there is a lot of communicative downside risk when publicly discussing trading off extinction versus other risks / foregone benefits, apart from appearing out of touch with > 95% of people trying to do good in the world ("a... (read more)

This is a small appreciation post for the deep and prompt community engagement from the 80k team after their announcement of their new strategic direction.

No organization is under any obligation to respond to comments and criticisms about their strategy, and I've been impressed by the willingness of so many 80k staff members to engage in both debate and reassurance - at least 5 people from the organization have weighed in. 

It has both helped me understand their decision better and made the organization feel more caring and kind then if they had just d... (read more)

Counting people is hard. Here are some readings I've come across recently on this, collected in one place for my own edification: 

1. Oliver Kim's How Much Should We Trust Developing Country GDP? is full of sobering quotes. Here's one: "Hollowed out by years of state neglect, African statistical agencies are now often unable to conduct basic survey and sampling work... [e.g.] population figures [are] extrapolated from censuses that are decades-old". The GDP anecdotes are even more heartbreaking
2. Have we vastly underestimated the total number of people on E

I think it would be really useful for there to be more public clarification on the relationship between effective altruism and Open Philanthropy. 

My impression is that:
1. OP is the large majority funder of most EA activity. 
2. Many EAs assume that OP is a highly EA organization, including the top.
3. OP really tries to explicitly not take responsibility for EA and does not claim to themselves be highly EA.
4. EAs somewhat assume that OP leaders are partially accountable to the EA community, but OP leaders would mostly disagree. 
5. From the poi... (read more)

I want to see a bargain solver for AI alignment to groups: a technical solution that would allow AI systems to solve the pie cutting problem for groups and get them the most of what they want, for AI alignment. The best solutions I've seen for maximizing long run value involve using a bargain solver to decide what ASI does, which preserves the richness and cardinality of people's value functions and gives everyone as much of what they want as possible, weighted by importance. (See WWOTF Afterwards, the small literature on bargaining-theoretic approaches to... (read more)

I want to see more discussion on how EA can better diversify and have strategically-chosen distance from OP/GV.

One reason is that it seems like multiple people at OP/GV have basically said that they want this (or at least, many of the key aspects of this). 

A big challenge is that it seems very awkward for someone to talk and work on this issue, if one is employed under the OP/GV umbrella. This is a pretty clear conflict of interest. CEA is currently the main organization for "EA", but I believe CEA is majority funded by OP, with several other clear st... (read more)

The World Happiness Report 2025 is out!

Finland leads the world in happiness for the eighth year in a row, with Finns reporting an average score of 7.736 (out of 10) when asked to evaluate their lives.

Costa Rica (6th) and Mexico (10th) both enter the top 10 for the first time, while continued upward trends for countries such as Lithuania (16th), Slovenia (19th) and Czechia (20th) underline the convergence of happiness levels between Eastern, Central and Western Europe.

The United States (24th) falls to its lowest-ever position, with the United Kingdom (23rd)

Has the past two months seen more harm done (edit: by the new administration) than the totality of good EA has done since it's existence? 

I realized that the concept of utility as a uniform, singular value is pretty off-putting to me. I consider myself someone who is inherently aesthetic and needs to place myself in a broader context of the society, style and so on. I require a lot of experiences— in some way, I need more than just happiness to reach a state of fulfillment. I need to have aesthetic experience of beauty, the experience of calmness, the anxiety of looking for answers, the joy of building and designing. 

The richness of everyday experience might be reducible to two dimensions: positive and negative feelings but this really doesn't capture what a fulfilling human life is.