I found this a really clear and useful explanation (though I already had a decent idea how NAO worked)!

If ever you want to reach a broader audience, I think making an animated video based on this content, maybe with the help of Rational Animations or Kurtzgesagt, would work well.

Assuming a key inefficiency of the nasal swabs method is the labour costs of people collecting them, is the process straightforward enough that you could just set up an unmanned sample collection place where in a busy building somewhere people can just swab themselves and drop the sample in a chute or box or something? Hopefully post-Covid people are fairly familiar with nasal swabbing technique.

Thanks for sharing the raw data!

Interestingly, of the 44 people who ranked every charity, the candidates with most last-placed votes were: PauseAI = 10, VidaPlena = ARMoR = 5, Whylome = 4, SWP = AMF = Arthropoda = 3, ... . This is mostly just noise I'm guessing, except perhaps that it is some evidence PauseAI is unusually polarising and a surprisingly large minority of people think it is especially bad (net negative, perhaps). 

Also here is the distribution of how many candidates people ranked:

I am a bit surprised there were so many people who voted for none of the winning charities - I would have thought most people would have some preference between the top few candidates, and that if their favourite charity wasn't going to win they would prefer to still choose between the main contenders. Maybe people just voted once initially and then didn't update it based on which candidates had a chance of winning.

I think the main reason to update one's vote based on the results is if you voted number 1 for a charity that is first or second, but a charity you also quite like is e.g. fourth or fifth, then strategically switching to rank the latter first would make sense. But this was not the case for me.

Overall my guess is the live vote tallies adds to the excitement but doesn't actually contribute much epistemically?

yeah sure, lmk what you find out!

I think I am quite sympathetic to A, and to the things Owen wrote in the other branch, especially about operationalizing imprecise credences. But this is sufficiently interesting and important-seeming that I am noting to read later some of the references you give to justify A being false.

Surely we should have nonzero credence, and maybe even >10% that there aren't any crucial considerations we are missing that are on the scale of 'consider nonhumans' or 'consider future generations'. In which case we can bracket worlds where there is a crucial consideration we are missing as too hard, and base our decision on the worlds where we have the most crucial considerations already, and base our analysis on that. Which could still move us slightly away from pure agnosticism?

Your view seems to imply the futility of altruistic endeavour? Which of course doesn't mean it is incorrect, just seems like an important implication.

I also didn't find it too compelling, I think partly it is the issue of the choice seeming not important or high-stakes enough. Maybe the philanthropist should be deciding whether to fund clean energy R&D or vaccines R&D, or similar.

I don't think I quite agreed with this, or at least it felt misleading:

And you cannot reasonably believe these chaotic changes will be even roughly the same no matter whether the beneficiaries of the donation are dog or cat shelters.

I think it may be very reasonable to think that in expectation the longterm effects will be 'roughly the same'. This feels more like a simple cluelessness case than complex cluelessness (unless you explain why the cats vs dogs will predictably change economic growth, world values, population size etc).

Whereas the vaccines vs clean energy I think there would be more plausible reasons why one or the other will systematically have different consequences. (Maybe a TB vaccine will save more lives, increasing population and economic growth (including making climate change slightly worse), whereas the clean energy will increase growth slightly, make climate change slightly less bad, and therefore increase population a bit as well, but with a longer lag time.)

Also on your question 1, I think being agnostic about which one is better is quite different to being agnostic about whether something is good at all (in expectation) and I think the first is a significantly easier thing to argue for than the second.

Thanks for writing this up, and congrats on having preliminary promising signs!

I left a bunch of more minor comments in the CEA sheet (thanks for making that public).

Are there any interest groups on the other side of this issue? I suppose budget hawks and fiscal conservatives may try to shoot down any new funding plan, particularly given EU budgetary woes. But otherwise, it seems like a good issue in terms of not making powerful enemies (since the Pharma industry is onside).

In the field where you can leave a comment after voting it says the comment will be copied here but not who you voted for, probably some people just missed that info though.

How come LTFF isn't in the donation election? Maybe it is too late to be added now though.