Congrats! These are great results and it looks like you're scaling really well for a very early-stage org :)

I'm curious about that 9-point PHQ-9 reduction goal. How did you decide on it? Do you think it's achievable (especially since you saw a much larger reduction in your pilot)? Why do you think you saw such a large difference in reductions between the pilot and now? And finally, do you think focusing on increasing effect size will take effort away from cost-reduction efforts?

This is clearly an outstanding issue for a non-negligible proportion of the community. It doesn't matter if some people consider the issue closed, or the investigation superfluous; this investigation would bring that closure to the rest of EA. Everyone here should be interested in the unity that would come from this.

What beings are inside and outside of your moral circle these days? If your views (e.g. on insects) have meaningfully changed recently, why?

With that criteria, you would be extremely hard pressed to find any global health charities that avoid the meat-eater problem (or, for that matter, any GCR charities, since those would save the lives of rich people).

However, I would suggest a focus on culturally vegetarian countries such as India could still meet that criteria. Kaya Guides operate there currently.

I looked into this a number of years ago and it doesn't seem like Founders Pledge's methodology has changed since then. You can read their Cause Area Report for more depth, but the primary metric they rate on is tonnes of CO2-equivalent pollutants averted per year per U.S. dollar (CO2-equivalent uses simple weights to compare between different greenhouse gases, such as methane). They have somewhat strong estimates per charity, such that in 2018, the Clean Air Task Force and Coalition for Rainforest Nations came out ahead—but with the proviso that this extrapolated past performance into the future, which isn't a given with lobbying organisations.

I agree that GWWC could use more depth here, and at the same time I tend to agree that they're right to recommend Founders Pledge first.

Microsoft have backed out of their OpenAI board observer seat, and Apple will refuse a rumoured seat, both in response to antitrust threats from US regulators, per Reuters.

I don’t know how to parse this—I think it’s likely that the US regulators don’t care much about safety in this decision, and nor do I think it meaningfully changes Microsoft’s power over the firm. Apple’s rumoured seat was interesting, but unlikely to have any bearing either.

Piggybacking off this:

• How do you evaluate an opportunity once you have it?
• How do you decide whether to invite Jimmy to make something a main channel video vs a Beast Philanthropy video?
• What kinds of charities perform the best in terms of views? What about funds raised? (Do either of these metrics influence what charities you pick?)

Feels like we’re talking past each other—I was explaining why a government might want to behave this way because I felt like it was missing from the discussion. Specifically, I think at the very least that reasonable people can disagree on whether a government with the goal of minimising suffering would paradoxically take longer to develop & test a vaccine (and also I wanted to suggest that the evidence is consistent with the German government having this in mind when shutting it down, rather than, say, the desire to establish their authority for its own sake).

I didn’t pass comment on whether it’s morally justified; that depends on your conception of personal liberty (which we clearly disagree on, but I doubt I’m gonna persuade you here).