I found this a bit hard to read maybe because my biology literacy isn't strong enough. I also skipped the details...

I didn't quite understand why iron deficiencies are "very bad". Here's how I understood it. Is this what op refers to as very bad? 1)

Successful iron supplementation led to improvements averaging >0.5 standard deviations in attention, learning, and memory Iron supplementation

2. Iron supplementation increases endurance.

Do you mean bad on a society scale or is it pointed at the reader?

Thanks for the update! It would be interesting to get more statistics on CEA. Like

• by how many people CEA has grown with. (I guess it's something between 15 and 35 but there's quite a big difference)
• how big a budget do you have?
• how do you allocate employees/budget/hours between the projects/areas and how has this changed?

(Maybe these exist elsewhere?)

The last four paragraphs are well said👌

Thanks for writing this post! Very interesting

Here is now EA Finland's Start a Mini EA Group in Finland document. Tried to make it as detailed as possible to make it easy to do and added some more bonus activities like setting up posters at your campus. 

Great idea! Somehow I hadn't thought about the value of inactive groups vs no group.

I know a few university cities in Finland with only 1-2 EAs who don't have time to commit to running a group many hours a week. I will ask them if they'd be interested in this and do a ~10-step manual on how to set up a mini group and how EA Finland can support them. (Maybe calling it a contact group 🤔) Maybe an incentive to start the group (in addition to having a bigger impact) could be that they automatically get invited to EA Finland's organizers only-events and retreats.

Adding to Yonatan Cales comment, I think I would add just a few bullet points in the manual on what to do (or not do) to avoid having a negative impact. There are lots of good posts and EA community building resources about what could go wrong and how to avoid that but I think most of them are relevant only later, when a group is committing >1 hour a month to community building.

How would technological change make current biodiversity efforts irrelevant? And by irrelevant, do you mean that the technologies reduce environmental burden and degregation e.g. by being more resource efficienct or that they would be actual new solutions aimed at reducing biodiversity loss?

We discussed this post in one of our article reading club meetings and I thought I would share some of the discussions we had around the topic in bullet points. As a disclaimer, I am writing this comment 6 weeks after the meeting so I have probably misinterpreted some of my notes.

- How are these kinds of models built? Operalization was a new concept for a few participants. 

- What do we think is the most important for well-being looking at the answers the different models provided? We mostly talked about meaningfulness, mental health and relationships.

- What is the definition of self-respect? Do we need other people's respect if we already respect ourselves?

- Are the indicators relative to the standard of each of our experiences or something else? Does the scale (e.g. 1-5) vary a lot across indicators? E.g. going from 1 to 2 in one indicator might be a larger increase in wellbeing than in another.

- Are these theories too western-focused? Most theories seemed to stem from USA/Europe. Talked a bit about Buddhism.

- We also discussed stoicism, saving lives playfully and doing everything we have in our power (to improve the world or reach our goals) without taking it too seriously. How big a role does one's own attitudes and personality play in increasing well-being independently of the circumstances?

- Sometimes individual wellbeing can conflict with societal wellbeing

- How can we increase wellbeing the most using the resources we have and the theories in this post? It is easier to think about one's own life but how about e.g. trying to maximize the quality of relationships for as many as possible? We didn't have any ideas about this yet. 

Thank you for writing this post David!

External controlling factors such as rewards, salary, grades, controlling praise, and punishment almost always undermine autonomous motivation (Deci et al., 2001)

What do you think about the this? Does it mean we shouldn't thank volunteers for the work they are doing and at the same time suggest another project we think would be a good fit for them? Or that the writing competitions with financial incentives can actively harm autonomous motivation unless people have already internalised the values. But in that case do we need the financial reward? I also wonder if this suggests rewarding organisers with gift cards or job certificates undermines autonomous motivation.

I'm wondering why so few of the theories involve physiological needs