Great that you’ve taken the time to write this up even though the conclusion was not to recommend

Also, as Karen Levy pointed out in her ep on the 80k podcast, adoption by LMIC governments effectively means the taxpayers of these countries are the ones to pay. Sustained service by an internationally funded charity represents a desirable wealth transfer to LMICs. Better than the charity graduating from being funded by EAs to being funded by LMIC governments would be for it to graduate to being funded by big funders with cheap counterfactuals like USAID.

(To play devil’s advocate to myself: If government adoption means capacity building in LMIC healthcare systems then that’s great compared to dependence on sustained service from international NGOs. Maybe the best of both worlds is government adoption with ongoing technical assistance and international funding?)

“There's no life bad enough for us to try to actively extinguish it when the subject itself can't express a will for that” - holding this view while also thinking that it’s good to prevent the existence of factory farmed chickens would need some explaining IMO.

Also, the claim that Michael’s line of reasoning is “weird and bad” seems to imply that it being “weird” should count against it in some way, just as it being “bad” should count against it. But why/how exactly? After all, from most people’s perspective caring about shrimp at all is weird.

Hello, member of the incubation program team here! There has been no change in our thinking on the optimal number of co-founders. This is a rare scenario where 3 makes sense :) The reasons it made sense in this case are idiosyncratic to the individuals involved and their career plans, so I won’t speak to that here, but I’m sure they’d be happy to explain the context 1:1 if you’re interested!

Fantastic work! It’s awesome to see a national EA chapter taking on such an ambitious project and having the follow through to make it happen.

I just want to clarify what you mean when you say “most of our research is empirical and quasi-experimental designed (and RCTs when possible) based on the outputs of each nonprofits”: I assume this means that your research uses existing empirical (preferably quasi-experimental or better yet RCT) evidence . You don’t mean you’re actually conducting or funding any primary research, right? I ask because that would be insanely cheap and fast

Manifold is a lot lower than I expected given it's a tech platform that presumably requires a bunch of dev hours!

Nice stuff! In particular I think “Finalists will also get to talk to other incubatees from that cohort about what it was like to work with your future co-founder” is an excellent feature.

What is the theory of change for the EA forum?

Good stuff Jona! I agree on all fronts. 

Re: #2, at Charity Entrepreneurship for example, we should have ToCs for our Incubation Program, Grantmaking Program and Research Training Program, but we don't yet. We have a fairly polished one for the Incubation Program, and a few different ones drafted for the new Research Program we're planning, but we haven't written one down for our Grantmaking Program, so here I am again not practicing what I preach. Looks like we have work to do :) 

I'm broadly in favour of automation and against jobs for jobs' sake, so I agree with this post :)

However I do think that we need to invest heavily in making sure that the transition to a jobless or low-job society goes well. Currently, many people's identity and self-worth is tied up in their jobs... having a job is a prerequisite for getting a romantic partner in a lot of the world etc. I'd like to see more ideas about how to manage this transition. 

Meanwhile, small quibble: I don't agree that thinking is uniquely human (what about non-human animals, and in the future, digital minds?)