Ah, today I learned! thanks for correcting that. For what it's worth I was vegan for two years, and have been vegetarian for 6.

Do you happen to know about the bioavailability claims of animal versus plant protein?

They literally don't. Animal proteins contain every essential amino acid, whereas any plant protein will only have a subset.

I'm quite excited about cricket protein! Nutritionally it's superior to vegan protein supplements, especially for people who are otherwise vegan and won't get animal protein.

My intuition is that it very much comes down to whether one views an undisturbed cricket life as net-positive or negative. A cricket farm breeds millions of crickets in a 6 week cycle where the crickets are frozen to death not long before they naturally would die of old age.

Rethink Priorities recently incubated the insect institute who I think are exploring insect sentience. They're more qualified to speak on this than I am.

EDIT: turns out I don't know shit about crickets or nutrition. Rethink has a cool report on insect farming, also points out my claim on their death being soon before natural old age is likely wrong. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ruFmR5oBgqLgTcp2b/insects-raised-for-food-and-feed-global-scale-practices-and#Cricket_farming_practices_and_conditions

Bravo! This really sets a bar for the quality of inquiry we should strive for in this community.

Forgive me for having the IQ of a shrimp, but could you spell out a concrete problem that the odyssean process could be used to solve?

ie:

problem: "People disagree over what colors the new metro line should be"

hypothetical process: "12 people sit in a room and hypothesize on color palettes. Those colour palettes are handed out to a panel of 100 randomly picked citizens to deliberate and then finally voted upon"

I skimmed through the report and am pretty confused as to what concretely the process is.

That's a really cool point, do share those sources!

Are there any studies on which calories get cut when people go on semaglutide? I imagine it's the empty carbs that would go before the beef, but maybe that's already calculated into the estimation?

The latest reports of CEARCH might be of interest to the new team:

Hypertension reduction through salt taxation:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R2ul47NtD-dJ7D7rcHFZ0z7h0JqcFxK_/view

Diabetes through sugar-soda tax:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UrYZUGbLn5LeTRVRZYdiY2EorsmXxQwR/view

Givedirectly goes into detail in this blogpost: https://www.givedirectly.org/drc-case-2023/

The founder of Givedirectly also the fraud case in this 80k podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4yKwimUbdzPeg9MWTuJOoI?si=0eb1f2d942914963

Perhaps some of his motivation was to keep OpenAI from imploding?

For those who agree with this post (I at least agree with the author's claim if you replace most with more), I encourage you to think what you personally can do about it.

I think EAs are far too willing to donate to traditional global health charities, not due to them being the most impactful, but because they feel the best to donate to. When I give to AMF I know I'm a good person who had an impact! But this logic is exactly what EA was founded to avoid.

I can't speak for animal welfare organizations outside of EA, but at least for the ones that have come out of Effective Altruism, they tell me that funding is a major issue. There just aren't that many people willing to make a risky donation a new charity working on fish welfare, for example.

Those who would be risk-willing enough to give to eccentric animal welfare or global health interventions, tend to also be risk-willing enough with their donations to instead give it to orgs working on existential risks. I'm not claiming this is incorrect of them to do, but this does mean that there is a dearth of funding for high-risk interventions in the neartermist space.

I donated a significant part of my personal runway to help fund a new animal welfare org, which I think counterfactually might not have gotten started if not for this. If you, like me, think animal welfare is incredibly important and previously have donated to Givewell's top charities, perhaps consider giving animal welfare a try!