All of Jakub Stencel's Comments + Replies

Thanks for the info. Subscribed.

Really devastating news. I had a pleasure to meet Steven. His dedication and warmth was deeply inspiring to me, and his down to earth character made him fun to be around. You will be missed. :(

This seems true to me, although I don't have great confidence here.

For some years at times I had thought to myself "Damn, EA is pulling off something interesting - not being an organization, but at the same time being way more harmonious and organized than a movement. Maybe this is why it's so effective and at the same time feels so inclusive." Not much changed recently that would make me update in a different direction. This always stood out to me in EA, so maybe this is one of its core competencies^[1] that made it so successful in comparison to so m... (read more)

Thank you, Ubuntu. I love that post by Max Roser.

Thank you Shakeel, very good criticism.

My title was a bit gimmicky, I flagged it as such, but it was accepted (I think by Ben West to incriminate him). I like such titles, so it may be my bias. Nevertheless, it was built from a very true disappointment (or something along that) of people not mentioning/celebrating the wins of EA when discussing and criticizing it, but I think this "frustration" was built more on reading the external takes rather than the internal ones - which internally was hard to disentangle for me. I think I failed to make this clear in... (read more)

It's a very hard question to answer without much doubt, as I didn't witness how things unfolded in crucial places, like US. My intuition is that it would not be the same, and EA itself had significant contributions, but some of the recent and big wins would still be achieved. This is especially true for wins secured by The Humane League (and probably other major groups, like Compassion in the World Farming at EU level), seeing how laser focused they were. I think someone from more Western countries would be better to answer here though. But I also think th... (read more)

This is incredible (especially Google Docs). Thank you for your great work.

I'm really excited for this. Wishing you all the best in this crucial and neglected work Dustin.

Please make sure to reach out to Anima International to use our resources whenever you'll feel like we could help. We will also happily advertise any open positions here to our staff.

Yeah, this is what I meant in this point, but NunoSempere's comment made me confused about strength of my model here and I interpret this confusion as either me getting something wrongly here or not fully getting his comment. I will think/discuss it more and update the phrasing here just to be sure it's not misguided. Thank you for that.

Thanks for pointing this out Fai!

Seems like a major oversight on my part to not make it clearer. Will edit the blog post.

Thank you Oscar.

I'll use this opportunity to underline again that the biggest push influencing the changes in our organization in this area was Weronika Żurek who made the tremendous work challenging some of the premises held by more senior people. Not to mention that she is very early in her career (still studies) which makes me even more in awe of her reasoning.

Thanks for the comment Michael. It's really informative.

Do you have any good sources that describe your points in more depth? These would be good for us to follow.

In regards to robustness and cluelessness - I agree. This is probably the strongest update based on the new considerations highlighted in the blog post. Similar conclusion was formed, especially among senior campaigners, although we used different phrases for that during discussions.

It was shared here - https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YS3gn2KRR9rEBgjvJ/sense-making-around-the-ftx-catastrophe-a-deep-dive-podcast

Thank you again for this work and posting it on EA Forums. I love the presentation of the research summary.

I was considering writing something similar, but investing time in writing a post is hard, so thank you for writing this.

While I understand emotions we all feel, I'm under an impression that effective altruism community is now reacting in a way that they try to educate public NOT to - to use anecdotal examples and emotional states to guide the decision making. While it's very human to react in such a way I see that I'm growing more and more anxious of this direction observing the discourse.

Of course what happened is devastating and that there is a lot of c... (read more)

I applaud that you wrote how you feel against social incentives.

It seems to me that the main way for our community to avoid allowing future devastating mistakes like with SBF/FTX is to have more posts like this and norms that encourage dissenting opinions and go against hype (anti-hype?).

Especially if it's true that people had heard rumors about some problems or had some reasons to act on pieces of information in regards to SBF character, but silenced themselves. Punishing socially these kind of posts seems like recreating the environment for such moral an... (read more)

This is very helpful and transparent.

Thank you for sharing this with community and emphasizing the role of integrity for effective altruists.

I think this is a good point in itself to distinguish domestication from exploitation (and I upvoted it for this), but I think it doesn't necessarily address what the comment about exploitation is pointing at.

I believe that the argument is that any use of animals in an efficient way will lead to industrialization of breeding, farming, etc. and it's hard then to align incentives to make the results net positive for both humans and other species. At least I believe we have an extremely poor track record here.

I really enjoyed your frankness.

From reading what you wrote I have a suspicion that you may not be a bad person. I don’t want to impose anything on you and I don’t know you, but from the post you seem mainly to be ambitious and have a high level of metacognition. Although it’s possible that you are narcissistic and I’m being swayed by your honesty.

When it comes to being “bad” - have you read Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors? It discusses at length what it means to be a bad actor. You may want to see how much of these applies to you. Note tha... (read more)

Thanks for the answer. I think I got it more and I find the reasoning convincing, but in the end it seems to be then quite dependent on the context.

I find what you said optimal in not-so-ideal psychological safety environment, but with teams high in psychological safety it's not really about things you listed, like

Unfair-feeling criticism

but rather truth-seeking approach to make sure we are really elevating the person. For this two-sided communication performs better.

Anecdotally, from my perspective in public feedback rounds it's not so much defense, b... (read more)

I really admire you have shared personal examples. Makes this way more tangible.

I see you that in the description wrote that you should only say "thank you", but isn't it sometimes a bit risky to not discuss the feedback?

It seems that someone's model of you may be quite off because they miss some context that you have or because of their biases. For example reading the feedback you've received made me think that some of that could be quite distorted by preferences of the giver.

Or do you do discuss it later on?

Thank you Edouard. Really excited to see Our World in Data tracking this. :)

When we track share of vegetarians, vegans, etc. in population there is an ever-present problem of social desirability bias. It seems that people tend to label themselves as vegan or vegetarian even when they are consuming animal-based products on a regular basis.

There is an excellent and rigorous research on this by Saulius Šimčikas - Is the percentage of vegetarians and vegans in the US increasing? from 2018. One of his conclusion regarding consumption was quite striking:

Around

Thanks for writing this Ben.

I find these kind of post with structured line of your reasoning very impactful and I would recommend people here to share it with other people in management roles that may skip this post.

I encountered a lot of examples of organizations doing optimally for themselves when not internalizing this concept. This is especially tricky when outsourcing can give you benefit in the short-term, but is negative in the long-term. I often found this to be case in groups that outsource some legal counseling, people operations, marketing or fu... (read more)

As more EA-aligned funders emerged, they usually request the same data and information, but often using their own methodology. There is a benefit to that, but there is also a cost for organizations that grows with the scale, for example by obtaining information from many countries and configuring it to the specific metrics requested by a funder.

EA Funds seems to have a diverse representation of funding groups in this space. Are funders coordinating in data sharing or thinking about standardizing parts of it, in order to free some capacity for both sides? If not, is there any plan to do so?

Animal advocacy movement is now supported by a number of quite diverse funders with their own nuance - Open Phil, ACE, FAF, EA Funds and few others. What is the comparative advantage of EA Funds in this space? In this context, is there any other approach to funding that you would be excited to see?

Hey Will.

In the first email that I mentioned, we were informed that the funds will be frozen until the current round of evaluations is done by December, so for about 4 months. The reasoning was that ACE wanted to reevaluate Anima International effectiveness with the possibility that they will not release these funds. We were also informed this information will be announced on the ACE website and in their newsletter. The decision was based on the events they observed in regards to CARE that ACE was worried about - Animal Charity Evaluators wanted to investi... (read more)

I’m part of Anima International’s leadership as Director of Global Development (so please note that Animal Charity Evaluators’ negative view of the leadership quality is, among others, about me).

As the author noted, this topic is politically charged and additionally, as Anima International, we consider ourselves ‘a side’, so our judgment here may be heavily biased. This is why, even though we read this thread, we are quite hesitant to comment.

Nevertheless, I can offer a few factual points here that will clear some of the author’s confusion or that people g... (read more)

Thanks Saulius for this, as always a spectacular job, like always from Rethink Priorities.

Few questions or comments.

1. Just like you hinted it looks like people asked about the welfare of fish (or any welfare issue) are possibly not thinking about welfare itself, but trying to use some broad mental model to guess the correct answer that is aligned with their self-identity. It looks like "Salmon" being so high may correspond to the environmental topics. I would be interested in seeing how much people understand the difference between "wild" and "farmed" in

Thanks for sharing this.

I think these downsides of having volunteers are well presented and correct from my experience. I think there is not enough discussion about what does it mean to have a volunteer base and manage it for the organization, especially about the downsides, so I appreciate this post even more.

I think I'm slightly worried about how strong the claim in the linked comment may sound that volunteers are in many cases a net cost (even though later it's stated that it's not a net disadvantage). I would say that in most cases volunteers are benef