A few theses that may turn into a proper post:
 

1. Marginal animal welfare cost effectiveness seems to robustly beat global health interventions. It may look more like 5x or 1000x but it is very hard indeed to get that number below 1 (I do think both are probably in fact good ex ante at least, so think the number is positive).

To quote myself from this comment: 

@Laura Duffy's (for Rethink Priorities) recently published risk aversion analysis basically does a lot of the heavy lifting here (bolding mine):

Spending on corporate cage-free campaigns for egg-laying hens is robustly^[8] cost-effective under nearly all reasonable types and levels of risk aversion considered here. 

1. "Using welfare ranges based roughly on Rethink Priorities’ results, spending on corporate cage-free campaigns averts over an order of magnitude more suffering than the most robust global health and development intervention, Against Malaria Foundation. This result holds for almost any level of risk aversion and under any model of risk aversion."

2. The difference in magnitude of cost effectiveness (under any plausible understanding of what that means) between MakeAWish (or personal consumption spending for that matter) and AMF is smaller than between AMF (or pick your favorite) and The Humane League or AWF. 

So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.

At least to me, this seems counterintuitive, contrary to vibes and social/signaling effects, and also robustly true.

3. What people intuitively think of as the "certainty" that comes along with AMF et al doesn't really exist. To quote my own tweet:

Yes, you can get robust estimates for "E[short run human deaths by malaria prevented per marginal dollar]" but the 2nd, ...,nth order effects don't disappear (or cancel out by default!) just bc u choose not to try to model them

4. The tractability of the two cause areas is similar...

5. But animal welfare receives way less funding. From the same comment as above:

Under standard EA "on the margin" reasoning, this shouldn't really matter, but I analyzed OP's grants data and found that human GCR has been consistently funded 6-7x more than animal welfare (here's my tweet thread this is from)

From Reuters:

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 25 (Reuters) - ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is working on a plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation that will no longer be controlled by its non-profit board, people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a move that will make the company more attractive to investors.

I sincerely hope OpenPhil (or Effective Ventures, or both - I don't know the minutia here) sues over this. Read the reasoning for and details of the $30M grant here. 

The case for a legal challenge seems hugely overdetermined to me:

• Stop/delay/complicate the restructuring, and otherwise make life appropriately hard for Sam Altman
• Settle for a large huge amount of money that can be used to do a huge amount of good
• Signal that you can't just blatantly take advantage of OpenPhil/EV/EA as you please without appropriate challenge

I know OpenPhil has a pretty hands-off ethos and vibe; this shouldn't stop them from acting with integrity when hands-on legal action is clearly warranted

Thanks and I think your second footnote makes an excellent distinction that I failed to get across well in my post.

I do think it’s at least directionally an “EA principle” that “best” and “right” should go together, although of course there’s plenty of room for naive first-order calculation critiques, heuristics/intuitions/norms that might push against some less nuanced understanding of “best”.

I still think there’s a useful conceptual distinction to be made between these terms, but maybe those ancillary (for lack of a better word) considerations relevant to what one thinks is the “best” use of money blur the line enough to make it too difficult to distinguish these in practice.

Re: your last paragraph, I want to emphasize that my dispute is with the terms “using EA principles”. I have no doubt whatsoever about the first part, “genuinely interested in making the world better”

Thanks, it’s possible I’m mistaken over the degree to which “direct resources to the place you think needs them most” is a consensus-EA principle.

Also, I recognize that "genuinely interested in making the world better using EA principles” is implicitly value-laden, and to be clear I do wish it was more the case, but I also genuinely intend my claim to be an observation that might have pessimistic implications depending on other beliefs people may have rather than an insult or anything like it, if that makes any sense.

There's a question on the forum user survey:

How much do you trust other EA Forum users to be genuinely interested in making the world better using EA principles?

This is one thing I've updated down quite a bit over the last year. 

It seems to me that relatively few self-identified EA donors mostly or entirely give to the organization/whatever that they would explicitly endorse as being the single best recipient of a marginal dollar (do others disagree?)

Of course the more important question is whether most EA-inspired dollars are given in such a way (rather than most donors). Unfortunately, I think the answer to this is "no" as well, seeing as OpenPhil continues to donate a majority of dollars to human global health and development^[1] (I threw together a Claude artifact that lets you get a decent picture of how OpenPhil has funded cause areas over time and in aggregate)^[2]

Edit: to clarify, it could be the case that others have object-level disagreements about what the best use of a marginal dollar is. Clearly this is sometimes the case, but it's not what I am getting at here. I am trying to get at the phenomenon where people implicitly say/reason "yes, EA principles imply that the best thing to do would be to donate to X, but I am going to donate to Y instead." I'm guessing this mostly takes the form of people failing to endorse that they're donations are optimally directed rather than that they do a bunch of ground-up reasoning and then decide to ignore the conclusion it gives, though.

1. ^{^}

    See Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare for a sufficient but not necessary case against this.

2. ^{^}

   Data is a few days old and there's a bit of judgement about how to bin various subcategories of grants, but I doubt the general picture would change much if others redid the analysis/binning

A couple takes from Twitter on the value of merch and signaling that I think are worth sharing here:

1) 

2) 

FYI talks from EA Global (or at least those that that are public on Youtube) are on a podcast feed for your listening convenience!

• Spotify (with video)
• Apple Podcasts
• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/e2a05734/podcast/rss

This was mentioned a few weeks ago but thought it was worth advertising once more with the links and such in a top-level post. 

Recently updated the feed with a few dozen from the recent EA Global London and EAGxAustralia 2023. Comments and suggestions welcome of course

Boy do I have a website for you (twitter.com)!

(I unironically like twitter for the lower stakes and less insanely high implicit standards)

On mobile now so can’t add image but https://x.com/aaronbergman18/status/1782164275731001368?s=46

Banger from @Linch 

Yes! 

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/e2a05734/podcast/rss