JoA🔸
Bio
Participation3
Volunteer spread over multiple animal welfare orgs, freelance translator, and enthusiastic donor. Reasonably clueless about what interventions are impartially good. Past experiences include launching an animal ethics university group, coordinating small campaigns in animal advocacy, and designing automated workflows in that context.
"We have enormous opportunity to reduce suffering on behalf of sentient creatures [...], but even if we try our hardest, the future will still look very bleak." - Brian Tomasik
How I can help others
Happy to give feedback on projects, or get on a call about anything to give advice and share contacts.
Posts 6
Comments79
I think this point is potentially significant, but the post is clearly LLM-generated, and thus, most of the paragraphs don't add much beyond the initial point of "there's no Script of Truth and it depends on the person's context". In practice, I have no clear examples of people making wrong choices based on overconfident EA advice - in fact, my experience has been the opposite: people don't want to give high-level advice, because they think it depends too much on the options that are available to me, and they couldn't choose from there. Sure, counterexamples could exist, but this post hasn't convinced me of this.
I'd have found the post much more valuable if it had a few anonymized examples, rather than LLM-generated text to complete the main post.
Strongly agree with this post! EA Connect has been more useful to me than the two in-person EA conferences I've attended, and I estimate I've been far more useful (as a mentor, but not only) at EA Connect than at these other conferences.
No awesome afterparty
I wonder if say, links to post-conference games of Gartic Phone and the like could be a low-cost way to recreate that moment where everyone winds down (esp since the online conference feels more serious and formal) for those who would be interested. (Not confident it's a good idea, just throwing it out there.)
(20% Wild Animal Welfare)
Nice poll, but tough call! With the little we know, the effects of interventions on wild animals seem likely to outweigh those on farmed animals. However, we do not have a clear notion of how current wild animal interventions (even field-building and research) will affect wild animals in the long run (though this is also true of interventions that don't aim to help wild animals).
I do not think a "robust" and "safe" pick in animal welfare exists yet (that we're aware of): under the current state of my uncertainties, I'm voting with my dollars on invertebrate welfare interventions (though those are still probably outweighed by effects on wild invertebrates). Though I'm gradually seeing the appeal of funding more research (especially on small wild animals).
Slightly in favor of wild animal welfare here, because it seems likely that if we gain enough knowledge to find a robust intervention in animal welfare, it will target wild animals directly or indirectly (since they're probably the dominant group of moral patients).
Great post! It's quite common to see solid ideas like this on the EA Forum, but seeing them executed is rare. And it's a nice change to see a more in-person kind of outreach for effective giving, in particular for animals. I'm interested to see a follow-up learned on what you'll have learned after giving season!
Were I to pick only one that's at once rigorous and accessible, I'd say the first post in Anthony DiGiovanni's sequence on Unawereness (20m read officially, but has some references and charts, so I'd say it probably takes 10 minutes to read it: 1. The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance: Introduction
Hi! My superficial understanding is that grantmakers in s-risks have a certain bar for what they're open to funding, and that they generally have the capacity to fund a marginal independent researcher if their work is sufficiently promising. If, in the future, you seem like an individual with a track record that is good enough in funders' views (maybe that can come through doing independent research, applying to fellowships, doing non-S-risk related research at AI labs, etc.), then receiving funding will be possible, as money does not seem to be the primary constraint (at leas that's not what grantmakers in the field seem to think). But that is a high bar to pass.
If you actually manage to save a 150,000$ per year, Macroscopic can advise you in donations to reduce S-risks, which would be a considerable contribution to a cause you seem to care about a lot. (I have no ties to Macroscopic, the information is publically available on their website)
Shrimp Welfare Project, charities working on insect farming for feed, among others. Currently quite uncertain about the impact of this and may give the remainder of my donation budget to research.