Ugg.. something smells fishy here.. : ) The numbers seem completely outlandish.. 1 - 10 billion for recreational fishing in the US? There are, what.. 300 - 500 million total population in the US, I believe? Even assuming 10% are into fishing, would they consume 1 billion bait fish?

I'm extremely skeptical of this and strongly inclined to make a bet against this info being accurate. Currently considering what exactly I'd be willing to put money down against. My intuition is that these figures might be off by a factor of ten or more.

I'd be happy to join a slack channel. (I'm already on the .impact slack).

I think there's some sort of RSS feed produced by FB groups. I'm going to look into subscribing to that, although I don't know if there's a way to write back to the group with that interface.

Does EA need [a] reputation system[s]?

Reputation systems are typically used by on-line platforms to help enable higher levels of trust between users.

1) My sense is that within EA there is a norm that we Do Favors For Each Other; ie, EAs often seem to have the subgoal 'try to help other EAs, within reason'. This is both correct and lovely.

2) This norm may come under significant pressure as the community continues to scale. Will it be sustainable when the community has grown 10x? 100x? 1000x?

If both of these propositions are correct, then an EA reputation system may be worth thinking about. EA presents some interesting challenges as a big-tent social movement, spread across many different on- and off-line platforms. Some initial ideas of what a reputational system could look like:

• Yet Another Webpage: eahub.org already supports profiles pages for EAs, with links to FB, this forum, lesswrong, etc. If most EAs have a page on eahub, with up-to-date links to their other on-line personas, maybe that's enough?

• A Score: something like karma or the rep systems reddit/stack-exchange use, but able to deal with the multi-platform nature of EA. There are significant technical and social challenges with scoring systems even when they are only on a single platform.

• A web of trust: something like the PGP web-of-trust, where EAs could essentially vouch for each other.

+1 this. Hate FB. EA is the only reason I semi-regularly think about returning.

@Richard_Batty, I'd be interested finding out more about what's needed for EA-SE proposal. I'll also shoot Oliver a email about this.

I've so far only looked at sections 5 and 6, because those were the most immediately interesting.

I think the critique of the Wild Animal Suffering research is very much on target. I've always thought that at best, WAS work should be relegated to basic questions that can be tackled in biology or ecology.

All of the WAS interventions I've seen discussed seem deeply wacky, misguided and likely to be radioactive for the movement.

Nope, the Moon has none of the resources required for sustaining a spacefaring civilization, except sunlight and water.

Well. This might be a bit of an over-statement -- we don't really have a good idea of what's up there. There is good evidence for Titanium and there may be Platnium Group metals up there. Who knows what else?

The moon, mars, or colonies inside hollowed out asteroids certainly doesn't make sense as x-risk mitigation in the near or medium term, but at some point they're going to be necessary.

“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.

@rowborg/@kbog, this is a great thread, and I'm only going to dip my toe in, here, minimally, to +1 this point that rowborg has made. Employment isn't just about exchanging labour for a wage, it's a major source of meaning in people's lives. The assertion that standards of living in the US have risen is probably correct, even for people at the bottom of the income distribution. But this standard of living increase can't explain the incredibly sour mood of a huge chunk of people. Obviously it's going to take a lot of time for researchers to unpack that, but the meaningless-employment story seems like a pretty plausible component: if people feel what they do doesn't have any meaning, and particularly if they feel their children don't have prospects for meaning-ful employment then despair and anger seem like totally to-be-expected reactions.

Normally I would not double-post an item, but I'd like to increase the chance people see this, and I don't know if it warrants a front-page posting.

EA Toronto

I just created the Effective Altruism Toronto meetup. I'm already in touch with the organizers of LW Toronto. My goal is to reach a monthly meeting tempo over the next 3 - 6 months with a small core of regulars, and then reach a twice-monthly tempo.

Please spread the word to anyone who might be in the GTA!

Promotion help

If anybody has suggestions about how to best promote/spread the word, that would be super-great. I'm one of those tin-foil hat Facebook holdouts, but I'm willing to blow the dust off my account to do some promo for this. Pointers to FB groups/highly-connected-individuals/whatever, as well as non-FB related ideas would be really appreciated.

Inspired by this, I just created the Effective Altruism Toronto meetup. I'm already in touch with the organizers of LW Toronto. Please spread the word to anyone who might be in the GTA!