That's fair, no need to take it. 

The criticism, if there is one, would be that Scott's concept doesn't add anything to the work done by academics

Stuart Armstrong (author of the OP in the link above) seems to think it was academically inspiring, cf. the passage starting with

Academic Moloch

Ok, now to the point. The "Moloch" idea is very interesting, and, at the FHI, we may try to do some research in this area (naming it something more respectable/boring, of course, something like "how to avoid stable value-losing civilization attractors").

The project hasn't started yet, but a few caveats to the Moloch idea have already occurred to me. ...

Not sure if that counts for you.

(I'm not socially tied to Luke in any way. I had the same misconception as you a long time ago, remember reading that comment as clarifying, and thought you would appreciate the share.)

Not really, "coordination failure due to positional arms race" is better.

No? cf. this dialogue between Jason Crawford and Clara Collier, Max Daniel's post (and this thread with Jason), Jason's attempt to find the crux between PS and x-risk communities, etc  

Thanks for the pointers, much appreciated. 

What did you think of the GiveWell policy advocacy CEAs & BOTECs I linked? I shared them in response to your "...but Givewell doesn't analyse cost-effectiveness of advocacy work" so I wondered if you had a different take.

I'd strongly disagree with a claim like:

• It would be better to spend an extra $100M in the next two years on animal welfare than on global health

Do any of these megaproject suggestions change your mind? Some of them could absorb amounts of funding potentially nearing or exceeding that $100M bar just by themselves, e.g. the advance market commitments for alt proteins idea (cf. the $925M carbon removal AMC Stripe led), or subsidizing alternatives to conventionally produced meat, or funding think tanks to do policy research at scale for which we (quote) "could spend £100m+ easily on this", or funding "10+ very large RCTs/population-wide studies, especially in Asia" (many ideas in the list), or "Healthier Hens x1000" as one example of many in the list of "GiveDirectly for animals: reasonably cost-effective, massively scalable, very strong evidence-base, and almost guaranteed impact", etc. 

b. I think it's worth reminding that animal welfare interventions are less cost-effective than they were when Simcikas conducted his analysis.

Admittedly I haven't been following work on animal welfare cost-effectiveness analysis closely, but this is news to me; can you point me to further readings on this?

c. I generally feel much more comfortable standing behind Givewell's estimates but Givewell doesn't analyse cost-effectiveness of advocacy work. My biggest misgivings about cost-effectiveness estimates are due to the difficulty of assessing advocacy work. I think we should make a lot more progress on this.

I agree with the need for the latter; I'm thinking in particular of Animal Ask's systematic review finding "insufficient evidence to break down overall policy success into the baseline rate of success and the counterfactual impact of lobbying". I default to the evaluative framework in Founders Pledge's guide to evaluating policy advocacy organisations but would be keen to learn how to improve upon it. 

re: the former, here are some GiveWell policy advocacy-related CEAs:

• 2017 CEA of the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention (grant writeup, 2018 blog post where they explained their reasoning in considering policy advocacy orgs in general), and 2021 skeleton BOTEC of the same org (grant writeup)
• 2021 BOTEC of Vital Strategies (grant writeup) to reduce harms of excessive alcohol consumption in LMICs. 

For both BOTECs GiveWell explicitly mentioned that they rely"on a number of difficult best-guess assumptions and judgment calls about modeling structure. It therefore contains less information value than cost-effectiveness estimates for our top charities, which limits its comparability", so I'm not sure you'd feel as comfortable standing behind these estimates as with the top charity CEAs. And none of the models address the counterfactual estimation issue Animal Ask identified, again at a quick skim—correct me if I'm wrong on this.

(None of this changes my general sense that funding top animal welfare interventions are more cost-effective on the margin than GHW.)

Artemisinin-based combination therapies. Quoting RP's report:

Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) are currently recommended by WHO as the first-line treatment for Plasmodium falciparum malaria.¹¹ ACTs are a combination of an artemisinin derivative (e.g., artesunate) and a partner drug.¹² Both compounds in ACTs function to eliminate the Plasmodium parasites from the bloodstream (WHO website, 2022).

ACT drugs are viewed as a “prime suspect for counterfeiting” since artemisinin is significantly more expensive to produce compared to older, synthetic forms of malaria medicine (Nyqvist, 2020, p. 7; Kaur et al., 2016, p. 1).

Hi Moritz :) Thanks for articulating this take, which I think is novel and quite daring in arguing that we should be deeply uncertain whether most sentient lives are worth living. I agree with quite a lot of object-level stuff you say. I also have scattered half-thoughts that unfortunately haven't cohered, hopefully you find at least some of them useful or interesting:

1) re: your first argument for doubting whether most sentient lives are worth living, I'm reminded of the neutral point debate, and in particular footnote 31: "Some people I’ve spoken to have suggested it’s bad to save lives solely on the grounds those in the developing world lead lives belows the neutral point." I intuitively emphatically disagree with the strong version of this, but couldn't justify it on purely SWB grounds unless the neutral point could justifiably be set lower than (say) that of Afghanistan, the lowest country in the WHRs. And there is some justification. That said...

2) I used to be ~all in on happiness & SWB for altruistic decision guidance, persuaded by arguments such as HLI's, but find myself putting more weight on valuism & capabilitarianism recently, after much introspection on my own pursuits ("100% generalizable to others!") coupled with arguments such as Jason Crawford's contra HLI. I think this reduces the force of your second argument even though I agree with your perspectives supporting that, and (because value-fulfillment is necessarily objective, as Crawford explains) lets us be a bit more rational in evaluating value of life vs subjective assessments, which partly reduces the force of your first one. (As an aside, animals arguably have central capabilities too.) That said, I don't know how to calculative cost-effectiveness from a valuism / capabilitarianism perspective... 

I shared your sense in #3 initially, but 2 things changed my mind: the fact that Open Phil has already granted ~$100M/yr in 2021 and 2022 (h/t MichaelStJules' comment for bringing this to my attention), and Megaprojects for animals, a longlist of "projects that further research might reveal would cost-effectively absorb $10M+/year", your idea re: funding research included, which seems to promise shovel-ready opportunities for scale-up beyond $100M/yr (let alone $100M granted over an arbitrary period of time, as the problem statement asks).

His response is so uncharitable and demeaning I'm not sure it's worth Larks' time and effort to respond. For instance: 

I don't understand what the title has to do with the body of the text. 'Meme' either means a unit of cultural information or a funny picture with text; EA is definitely not 'just' the latter, and it is the former to the same extent that environmentalism or any other movement is.

I can say these sentences certainly are memes.

That's the entirety of his response to what Larks pointed out, a confusion I share. 

There are many great criticisms-of-EA writeups on the forum; here are some from the criticism of EA tag which I've personally appreciated:

• Objections to Value-Alignment between Effective Altruists
• Effective altruism’s odd attitude to mental health
• My highly personal skepticism braindump on existential risk from artificial intelligence
• The motivated reasoning critique of effective altruism
• Critique of the notion that impact follows a power-law distribution 

On a more meta level, your friend might sharpen his critiques by reading e.g. Critiques of EA that I want to read and Motivation gaps: Why so much EA criticism is hostile and lazy (the latter written by an EA skeptic by the way), but given his lack of charity I'm not optimistic on this front.