Agreed, I'm always surprised by these low donations numbers.

I keep in mind that EA is one of the movements that helps animals the most in the world, especially farmed and wild animals, which are so important. This is great and much, much more better than the average.

But given that animals are so numerous and often live in terrible conditions, there still is be an important imbalance.

I see no rational reason to spend only 7% of donations on the vast majority of individuals in the world.

Great comment, thanks !

Thanks is for sharing! It's always good to be reminded that the people we can see on national television doing impressive stuff can just be kind of normal people who tried long enough.

Thanks for the analysis, I really like the approach and transparency. This is better that what the vast majority of the charities in France ever attempted.

For reference, regarding the cost effectiveness, can you share what that means compared to Givewell charities ? These are the ones I'm familiar with.

I'm also surprised by the cost-effectiveness threshold of the WHO for high efficiency (one DALY per GDP per capita spent). Does that mean that spending the nations's entire GDP to increase life expectancy by one year (and only for this year) would be considered cost effective by the WHO ?

Great post ! This makes sense.

Great post ! Thanks for highlighting these concerns.

If the impact on animals, wild and farmed wasn't so uncertain and likely important, I'd probably be working on AI safety and would still be donating a bit to Givewell charities. 

But right now, it seems less risky for me to donate farmed animals, at least to welfare reforms with much less impact on wild animals, like cage free campaigns. 

More money to research on the wild animal field is also super important. Wild Animal Initiative seems to do very relevant work to remove some of the uncertainties.

I think this is for the best.

I appreciated what you tried initially, because it is important to have external reviews. And I upvoted you. Some of your points were valid and taken into account.

But I have been very unimpressed and disappointed with the way you handled things. Huw summed it well. Your approach was extremely adversarial and you made huge public accusations based on debatable evidence that could have been clarified with a call in many cases. 

As such, it became very hard to trust you.

Blaming EA practices, as you are doing, is worrying. It sounds like you are pushing mistakes on others. But getting so many downvotes on the forum is rare. And you wouldn't have gotten them with a different, more measured approach.

 Hopefully you learn and improve from the experience.

Fantastic answer, very thoughtful and clear. Thanks!

Good post!

I agree that asking people to give up on beef is a very risky move, since it can lead them pretty easily to switch to chicken and salmon which are causing far, far more suffering. 

Thanks, I understand better the context and where you're coming from. The stylé is easier for me to read and I appreciate that.

I won't have much more time for this conversation, but just two points:

This is precisely why I don't like EA both abandoning global poverty as a cause area

Is this actually true? To me global poverty was still number one in terms of donations, Give well is doing great, and most of the charity entrepreneurship charities are on this topic.

Can you imagine a worse corruption, a worse twisting of this than to allow talk about why Black people are more genetically suited to slavery than white people, or how Europe did Africa a favour by colonizing it, or how Western countries should embrace white nationalism?

Oh, yes, that would be awful. But I'd expect that virtually everybody in the EA forum would be against that.

And so far, in the examples you've given, you don't show that even a sizeable minority of people would agree with these claims. For instance, for Manifold, you pointed to the fact that some EAs work with a forecasting organisation from the rationalist community who did a conference that invited many speakers to speak on forecasting and some of these speakers previously wrote some racist stuff on a topic unrelated to the conference (and even then that lead to quite a debate).

My understanding might be inaccurate, of course, but that's such a long chain that I would consider this as quite far from a prevalent issue which currently has large negative consequences.