This was a great piece and I have it saved now as one of my "go-tos" for global health stuff. It makes a lot of great points about why cash benchmarking is great and the instances you might expect it to underperform

Not by default. I think humans by in large, don't care much about animals enough for this to work

I obviously can't prove I am not biased in such a way, but I don't think that is a fair assumption.

I don't think my reasoning is around wanting to stay sane at all. Most of my reasoning revolves around base rates, examining current systems, and assessing current progress.

I think I'm in this peculiar position where I have ~medium (maybe many reading this would consider them to be long) timelines and fairly low "p(doom)", and I still think AI risk is among the most important things to work on.

I'm not sure. I definitely think there is a chance that if I earnestly believed those things, I would go fairly crazy. I empathize with those who, in my opinion, are overreacting.

I don't think the probability of AGI this year is above 10%, nor do I think that doom, given AGI is above 10%

I made a similar comment here so I wont re-hash all of it but I still haven't seen a compelling case for caring about biodiversity. I dont want the EA community to be closed off, especially to people who are trying to do good in the world, but I think there needs to be a much stronger reason to care about biodiversity inherently. Otherwise, it feels hard to distinguish this from high impact projects to improve the Toronto Raptors and talking about basketball analytics.

Nice comment. One follow-up.

The only cases I see where I deviated heavily from the process and it went well was when I had worked extensively with the person before and knew them quite well 

Do you think this basically supports "hiring people you know to be good" and using your network and previous interactions with people not in an interview setting to seek out good candidates?

I feel like I might pull back on (1) by maybe 20% or so but the general ethos I still want to convey.

The part I didn't do as good a job of conveying is that most people won't donate out of risk aversion or keeping their options open and I think people are also far overestimating their odds of pivoting their career into a government role, especially in the next 3 years.

Even if you accept that the Trump administration wouldn't hire anyone who has ever donated to a Democrat, this is the first time this has happened and thus you shouldn't assume this type of thing is going to be common. 

All in all, I think it's going to be quite rare that someone shouldn't make political donations.

Thanks for not deleting the comment. Apology accepted, all good.