I thought this was a great post, thanks for sharing! I think you're unusually productive at identifying important insights in ethics and philosophy, please keep it up!

I strongly upvoted this. I don't endorse all your claims, but this is really easy to engage with, a very important topic and I admire how you charitably worked within the framework Shapira offered while ending up in a very different place.

Thanks. In the original quick take, you wrote "thousands of independent and technologically advanced colonies", but here you write "hundreds of millions".

If you think there's a 1 in 10,000 or 1 in a million chance of any independent and technologically advanced colony creating astronomical suffering, it matters if there are thousands or millions of colonies. Maybe you think it's more like 1 in 100, and then thousands (or more) would make it extremely likely.
 

probably near 100% if digital sentience is possible… it only takes one

Can you expand on this? I guess the stipulation of thousands of advanced colonies does some of the work here, but this still seems overconfident to me given how little we understand about digital sentience.

I found this moving and enlightening, thanks for sharing. Looking forward to the series!

• EAGx undergraduate acceptance rate across 2024 and 2025 = ~82%
• EAGx first-timer undergraduate acceptance rate across 2024 and 2025 = ~76%

Obvious caveat that if we tell lots of people that the acceptance rate is high, we might attract more people without any context on EA and the rate would go down.

(I've not closely checked the data)

I'd feel pretty gaslit if someone said EA was going swimmingly and unaffected by the tribulations of the last couple of years, perhaps less so if they think there's been a bounce back after an initial decline but, you know, I'd want to see the data for that.

I agree with this fwiw, that seems fair

Thanks for adding more here :) I think that evidence is more persuasive, though still reads a little vibe-y and data-free, and involves reading intention into some actions that might not be there.

Ever since November 2022, the EA movement has only seemed to know criticism and scandal. Some have even gone so far to declare that EA is dead or dying,^[1] or no longer worth standing behind,^[2] or otherwise disassociate themselves from the movement even if outside observers would clearly identify them as being 'EA'.^[3] This negative environment that EA finds itself in is, I think, indicative of its state as a social movement in decline.

I don't think the claim "EA is in decline" is well-defended in this post. You link to a few naysayers here, but I don't think that's good evidence. "EA is in decline" is also self-fulfilling—it might decline if everyone's saying it's declining—so I expect some people say this because they want it to happen, not because they've reviewed the evidence and have concluded this is what's happening.

Colleagues of mine can pull together more evidence against, but as two examples that are salient to me:

• EA Global London 2025 is on track to be the biggest EA conference ever.
• We expect to welcome more people to EA events (EAG, EAGx, EA Summits) this year than ever before.

I find that hard to square with "EA is in decline". To be clear, I think the claim might be true, but it's an important enough question that it deserves some more thoughtful study and data, rather than vibes on Twitter.

I can pass this request on to the EA Nigeria team