Quick takes

I think Leif Wenar's "Open Letter to Young EAs" has significant flaws, but also has a lot going for it, and I would seriously recommend people who want to think about the ideal shape of EA should read it.

I went through the letter making annotations about the bits I thought were good or bad. If you want to see my annotated version, you can do that here. If you want to be able to comment, let me know and I'll quite likely be happy to grant you permission (but didn't want to set it to "anyone with the link can comment" for fear of it getting overwhelmed).

This is a section of a EAF post I've begun drafting about the question of the community and culture of EA in the Bay Area, and its impact on the rest of EA worldwide. That post isn't intended to only be about longtermism as it relates to EA as an overlapping philosophy/movement often originally attributed to the Bay Area. I've still felt like my viewpoint here in its rough form is still worth sharing as a quick take post.

@JWS 🔸 self-describes as "anti-Bay Area EA." I get where anyone is coming from with that, though the issue is that, pro- or anti-, this ... (read more)

Can we call it the Meat EatING problem?

The currently labelled "meat eater problem" has been referred to a number of times during debate week. The forum wiki on the “meat eater” problem summarises it like this.

“Saving human lives, and making humans more prosperous, seem to be obviously good in terms of direct effects. However, humans consume animal products, and these animal products may cause considerable animal suffering. Therefore, improving human lives may lead to negative effects that outweigh the direct positive effects.”

I think this an important... (read more)

Future debate week topics?

1. Global health & wellbeing (including animal welfare) vs global catastrophic risks, based on Open Phil's classifications.
2. Neartermism vs longtermism.
3. Extinction risks vs risks of astronomical suffering (s-risks).
4. Saving 1 horse-sized duck vs saving 100 duck-sized horses.

I like the idea of going through cause prioritization together on the EA Forum.

I'm grateful for the articles @MichaelStJules writes on the forum. He seems to be motivated by a deep desire to understand what will benefit moral patients.

For example, I particularly value his sequence on the impact of fishing on fish welfare (The moral ambiguity of fishing on wild aquatic animal populations and other articles)

We've just shipped an update to the debate week banner, so you can expand the columns to see more of the distribution, as it's getting a bit squashed. You just have to click on one of the "+N" circles.

(Feel free to downvote this quick take if it hangs around on the Frontpage for too long)

With the debate week discussion thread getting so long, it is now a community service (even more than usual) to sort the comments by "new" and upvote/ downvote or comment. Let's not let quality content get buried!

I would advise being careful with RP's Cross-cause effectiveness tool as it currently stands, especially with regards to the chicken campaign. There appears to be a very clear conversion error which I've detailed in the edit to my comment here. I was also unable to replicate their default values from their source data, but I may be missing something. 

A note on how I think about criticism

(This was initially meant as part of this post,^[1] but while editing I thought it didn't make a lot of sense there, so I pulled it out.)

I came to CEA with a very pro-criticism attitude. My experience there reinforced those views in some ways,^[2] but it also left me more attuned to the costs of criticism (or of some pro-criticism attitudes). (For instance, I used to see engaging with all criticism as virtuous, and have changed my mind on that.) My overall takes now aren’t very crisp or easily summarizable,... (read more)

Anyone know any Earn-To-Givers who might be interested in participating in an AMA during Giving Season? If a few are interested, it might be fun to experiment with an AMA panel, where Forum users ask questions, and any of the AMA co-authors can respond/ co-authors can disagree.

Why? Giving Season is, in my opinion, a really great time to highlight the earn-to-give work which is ongoing all year, but is generally under-celebrated by the EA community. + Earn-to-givers might have good insights on how to pick donation targets during the donation election, and Giving Season more generally. 
 

I really like the vote and discussion thread. In part because I think that aggregating votes will improve our coordination and impact. 

Without trying to unpack my whole model of movement building; I think that the community needs to understand itself (as a collective and as individuals) to have the most impact, and this approach may really help.

EA basically operates on a "wisdom of wise crowds" principle, where individuals base decisions on researchers' and thinkers' qualitative data (e.g., forum posts and other outputs)

However, at our current scale, ... (read more)

The 80,000 Hours team just published that "We now rank factory farming among the top problems in the world." I wonder if this is a coincidence or if this planned to coincide with the EA Forum's debate week? Combined with the current debate week's votes on where an extra $100 should be spent, these seem like nice data points to show to anyone that claims EA doesn't care about animals.