Thank you @Adrianne L. for your reflections and @Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 for highlighting the discomfort of feeling ineffective. I am graduating and searching for high impact opportunities, which feels like a tug-of-war between direct or indirect influence, and which area represents the greatest impact, while finding a match for my skills and interests.

I am glad the EA community offers a lens to find my own path, but I am concerned I may ultimately fail to make the world a slighlty better place...

Thank you for your insights @matthes @Citrit !

As I get more familiar with EA and will soon enter the workforce, I am considering how to decide on impactful future donations. I have been a vegetarian for 6 years and am greatly preoccupied by animal farming. Although the abolitionist perspective is attractive, it does not seem achievable to me, so I wish to orient donations towards animal welfare. This post makes me concerned about the lack of research and fake promises.

Hello, I am relatively new to EA (came in through the academic sibling "Effective Thesis"), but this post is truely enlightening about the original values and goals of the community!

To be honest, it is the EA's PR actions that brought me to this side of the internet... I did find an alignment with my values, and opted to pursue incremental engagement. As I was focusing on political violence and, back then, considered it was the most impactful and urgent societal issue to address on my scale. 

I hope I will be able to do as much good as possible (as a researcher and recent graduate), and participate to the mission of EA while bringing fresh ideas to the discussion that are not systematically AGI oriented ~

Hi Bella, yes it is a fascinating read, and thank you for your moderate comment. Although, my first thought was slightly different, I went slightly further than "one could become the consequence of the other"...

Wouldn't extinction, in itself, be an event where suffering would be short then end? Rather than, for instance, enduring extreme concentration of power (building loyalty, distrusting people around oneself, etc.) or living under a superior intelligence (emulating the harmful dynamics humans had with animals).

I could see it as a hierarchy of anxieties 

Hello, thank you for this insightful perspective. I am curious about the alternative you would consider to governance in the absence of institutions centralising authority. There exist many frameworks that seldom have been experimented with, except in small scale, among others:
> Direct democratic representation could exist in small city-states, as long as citizens spend a consequential share of their time fulfilling civic duties, thus sacrificing other activities for the sake of being involved in the governance process.
> A state of anarchy (with no socio-political hierarchy), where communities/families would be self-governing and autonomous, assuming they would be peaceful enough to maintain the balance.

Are there other options that could stand human psychological biases, and practically cope with modern-time capacities (such as with the internet, complex interdependent global markets, etc.)?