All of Holly Morgan's Comments + Replies

Agreed. I've relied on this as my main source of EA news for the past 6 years.

Happy 10th Anniversary, Jo!! :)

A lot of pop, a lot of musicals... I'd like to say that my music taste has become a lot more sophisticated over the past 12 years, but that would be false.

And shout-out to this old favourite from @Raemon ✨.

Am I right in thinking that you are no longer EA-specific? Just a generic mental health website?

Yeah I was guessing more like 40:35:15:10 environment:health:welfare:other for UK in general, but that Veganuary had probably been pushing more welfare-heavy messaging so were getting a higher proportion of welfare folks, but still didn't expect twice environment/health :)

Found it! https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt > click on "and 7 more links" in the little bio > click on "View email address" > do the CAPTCHA (I've also DM'd it to you)

Thanks for sharing!

Personal highlight: "When Veganuary asked participants about their number one motivation for taking part, 18% said the environment, and 21% said their health – but 40% said animal welfare." I think I would have estimated something more like 25% animal welfare.

Thank you so much for crossposting this!

1,157 corporate pledges are now fully implemented, 89% of the pledges that came due by last year.

!!

So if:

• Saulius' 2019 estimates were otherwise correct i.e. cage-free campaigns do in fact affect 75 chicken-years per dollar (updating 64%-->89% follow-through gives 54-->75 chicken-years)
• A free-range egg costs 11 cents more than a caged egg
• Modern commercial hens produce 300 eggs a year

Then: It's ~2,500 times more cost-effective to donate to a cage-free campaign than to buy cage-free eggs instead of caged eggs.^[1]

W... (read more)

While these issues are serious, it’s normal for social movements to go through crisis – what’s more important is how we respond to that crisis.

I like CEA's timely addition last summer of collaborative spirit to the other three values you have here (which they called impartial altruism, prioritization, and open truthseeking).

With apologies for not managing to be quite as eloquent/professional as the others: I have nothing but love, respect and gratitude for you, Nick; you've always been so warm, insightful and supportive. I may always think of you primarily as one of the three founding pillars of CEA/EV, but I'm excited to see what you do next :-)

I like this post so much that I'm buying you a sandwich (check your email).

Thank you for sharing! I love hearing "origin stories" from like-minded people and I found this post both clear and inspiring :-)

There's also an EA for Christians group - if you haven't already come across them, might be worth checking out!

Thanks for adding a bio, Wes, and welcome!

Feel free to reach out to me for any "help with the 8-week course on 80,000 hours" :-)

Thanks Toby - so, so exciting to see this work progressing!

One quibble:

The value of advancements and speed-ups depends crucially on whether they also bring forward the end of humanity. When they do, they have negative value

...when the area under the graph is mostly above the horizontal axis?

Even if you assign a vanishingly small probability to future trajectories in which the cumulative value of humanity/sentientkind is below zero, I imagine many of the intended users of this framework will at least sometimes want to model the impact of interventions in wo... (read more)

I also hope that some of the (what I perceive to be) silent majority will chime in and demonstrate that we’re here and don’t want to see EA splintered, rebranded, or otherwise demoted in favor of some other label.

🙋‍♀️

This is one of my favourite posts on this forum and I imagine the large majority of EAs I know IRL would largely agree with it (although there's definitely a selection bias there). Thank you! I feel like there have been several moments in the past year or so where I've been like, "Man, EA NYC seems really cool."

Re "best EA win," I couldn't pi... (read more)

All done :-) (already had a solar/crank charger+radio). Thank you!

Huh, maybe not.

Might be worth buying a physical copy of The Knowledge too (I just have).

And if anyone's looking for a big project...

If we take catastrophic risks seriously and want humanity to recover from a devastating shock as far and fast as possible, producing such a guide before it’s too late might be one of the higher-impact projects someone could take on.

That was my first thought, but I expect many other individuals/institutions have already made large efforts to preserve such info, whereas this is probably the only effort to preserve core EA ideas (at least in one place)? And it looks like the third folder - "Non-EA stuff for the post-apocalypse" - contains at least some of the elementary resources you have in mind here.

But yeah, I'm much more keen to preserve arguments for radical empathy, scout mindset, moral uncertainty etc. than, say, a write-up of the research behind HLI's charity recommendations. M... (read more)

Asking for a friend - will email now :)

So exciting, thank you!! And what a team!

Quick question: Do you know if you can provide funding for studies e.g. PhDs?^[1]

1. ^{^}

   The website sounds promising: It says you've already provided funding for a "PhD salary supplement" and also "We support regrants to registered charities and individuals. For-profit organizations may also be eligible, pending due diligence. As a US-registered 501c3, we do not permit donations to political campaigns." But I think that funding tuition fees can sometimes be a bit trickier...

And Claim (46) seems plausible but uninteresting, given that "Scholars of the American movement find that [nonhuman animal rights] activists are overwhelmingly women at about 80 per cent (Gaarder 2011)."

This tweet told me a lot:

Not sure about Tuna.

Some thoughts from me (as a big fan of MoreGood):

I really don't like the name MoreGood. It's a direct callback to LessWrong. I don't want to have to endorse LW to endorse EAF, or EA more generally, or the causes we care about, and this name change would signal that. Yes, there's some shared intellectual history, but I don't think LW-rationalism is inherent to or necessary for EA.

I don't think it would signal this to many people.

For people new to/interested in EA, they'll probably search for "EA" or "Effective Altruism". They wouldn't know the rebrand or na

I definitely think there's a "generational" thing here. For those of us who've been around long enough to see how everything came from nothing but people doing things they thought needed to be done, it's perfectly obvious. But I can very much see how if you join the community today it looks like there are these serious, important organizations who are In Charge. But I do think it's still not really true.

+1.

I was slow to realise that, over the period of just a few years of growth, this bunch of uncertain, scrappy, loosely coordinated students had come to be... (read more)

Oh I didn't read Will as proposing multiple forums (although what he says is compatible with that proposal).

I thought he was saying that the name should better reflect how representative the forum is of EA thought at large. (The 'decentralisation' aspect being moving from the impression of 'This forum is the main hub of all EA thought' to 'This forum is the main hub of Extremely Online EA thought'.)

This is honestly the best idea I've heard in a long time!

"It might be helpful for there to be a summary post outlining the different investigations/projects that are aiming to "implement reforms at EA organizations,""

Joris P mentions this in another comment: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KTsaZ69Ctkuw6n4tu/overview-reflection-projects-on-community-reform

HTH

I think it would be nice to know what is the marginal value of my personal spending, increasing my reserves, and donating.

I found this discussion of how much to save vs donate helpful when I was reviewing my finances recently.

Can you fund PhDs?

In case you haven't seen the comment below, aogara links to Katja's counterarguments here.

And fwiw, I quite like your 'backwards compatibility' argument - it makes me think of evidential decision theory, evo psych perspectives on ethics, and this old Daoist parable.

Exciting! Thank you for sharing your broad plans! And thank you to Hilary for getting GPI to where it is today.

(Readers, this is Eva Vivalt - Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto.)

~30,000 lives at ~$4,500 a life? (https://www.givewell.org/cost-to-save-a-life)

Thank you so much for sharing this (I also saw a lot of familiar names in the Acknowledgements, yourself included ❤️). I love posts on here that remember key contributors to the movement and I feel like there's a growing interest in the history of EA.

Again, maybe next time include a Google Form where people can ask questions anonymously that you'll then post in the thread a la here?

It's April 1st.

:)

"A focus on excellence rather than perfection."

I really like this.

(And I feel like it completes the aphorism "Perfect is the enemy of the good," which I believe you told me in 2010 when I was overstretching myself.)

"How do people actually find motivation without hope? This isn’t a rhetorical question. I hope you offer some ideas in the comments."

1. Let yourself get incredibly emotionally invested in what you're fighting for.

2. Wait until your mounting failures explode into a full-blown existential crisis.

3. Remember when you used to take epistemology seriously. (I imagine "Remember that acid trip" might also do the job.)

4. Go full-on Daoist/Buddhist/nihilist, pick your flavour. Forget goodness, forget truth, notice beauty. Slow down. Chill out. Drift...

5. Remember wh

This is so perceptive, relevant and respectfully written, thank you.

people on "both sides" feel in the minority and fighting against a more powerful majority

I've noticed this too and I think another common dynamic is where "both sides" feel like the other side obviously "started it" and so feel justified in responding in kind.

I've also noticed in myself recently this additional layer of upset that sounds something like, "We're supposed to be allies!" I think I need to keep reminding myself that this is just what people do, namely fight with people very muc... (read more)

EA Peer Support group on Facebook?

(I don't understand the downvotes by the way 🤷 Maybe there's some broader context I'm missing.)

Thank you so much for offering this - "counseling and facilitation training" and familiarity with "~both sides of the current EA culture war" seems like a very rare and valuable set of credentials.

🙏

But I think "karma magnet" is probably factually wrong about the main motivation behind this post

Strong agree. I had a few calls with the OP last year and they came across as having an incredibly sweet and authentic character.

Thanks for this, isabel. I've only just become interested in this topic but your post is the second most useful thing I've read on it so far.

As for the most useful thing I've read, you say:

So far, even taking the claims at face value, average sperm counts everywhere are still within the healthy range and not indicative of trouble conceiving ^[11]. But if the decline is real and it continues, this will eventually stop being true, and in the interim infertility will rise. 

While I’ll confidently dismiss the claim that sperm counts (in the West?

Similarly, there's "Against Malaria Foundation" and "Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)"

Pre-mortem i.e. "Imagine I make this decision and end up regretting it. What went wrong?"

I think it's helpful to think about a few things you're grateful for in the community

Your forum contributions in recent months and this thread in particular 🙏🙏🙏