All of RavenclawPrefect's Comments + Replies

Thanks so much for this post - I'm going to adjust my buying habits from now on! 

My impression is that e.g. Vital Farms is still substantially better than conventional egg brands, and if I need to buy eggs in a store that doesn't offer these improved options it still probably cuts suffering per egg in half or more relative to a cheaper alternative. Does that seem right to you?

What are the limitations of the rodent studies? Two ways I could imagine them being inadequate:

• Rodent eyes are smaller and the physical scale of relevant features matters a lot for how damaging far UV-C is (although I would naively guess that smaller eyes are if anything worse for this, so if the rodents do fine then I'd think the humans would too).
• Rodents can't follow detailed instructions or provide subjective reports, so some kinds of subtle vision impairments we wouldn't be able to notice.

Do either of these apply, or are the limitations in these studies from other factors?

Since no one has said anything in reply to this comment yet: I suspect it is getting downvotes because it doesn't seem especially relevant to the current discussion and feels like it would fit better as a standalone post or an Intercom message or something.

1. I'm lazy; I am not immune to the phenomenon where users reliably fail to apply optimization to their use of a website, despite their experience improving when such changes are made for them. (I suspect this perspective is underrepresented in the comments because fewer people are willing to admit it and it's probably more common among lurkers.)
2. I consume content weighted in large part by how many upvotes it has, because that's where the discussion is and it's what people will be talking about. (Also because in my case most of my EA Forum reading comes from k

I read the original comment not as an exhortation to always include lots of nuanced reflection in mostly-unrelated posts, but to have a norm that on the forum, the time and place to write sentences that you do not think are actually true as stated is "never (except maybe April Fools)".

The change I'd like to see in this post isn't a five-paragraph footnote on morality, just the replacement of a sentence that I don't think they actually believe with one they do. I think that environments where it is considered a faux pas to point out "actually, I don't think... (read more)

it doesn't seem good for people to face hardship as a result of this

I agree, but the tradeoff is not between "someone with a grant faces hardship" and "no one faces hardship", it's between "someone with a grant faces hardship" and "someone with deposits at FTX faces hardship". 

I expect that the person with the grant is likely to put that money to much better uses for the world, and that's a valid reason not to do it! But in terms of the direct harms experienced by the person being deprived of money, I'd guess the median person who lost $10,000 to unre... (read more)

I assume you mean something like “return the money to FTX such that it gets used to pay out customer balances”, but I don’t actually know how I’d go about doing this as an individual. It seems like if this was a thing lots of people wished to do, we’d need some infrastructure to make it happen, and doing so in a way that led to the funds having the correct legal status to be transferred back to customers in that fashion might be nontrivial.

(Or not; I’m definitely not an expert here. Happy to hear from someone with more knowledge!)

What level of feedback detail do applicants currently receive? I would expect that giving a few more bits beyond a simple yes/no would have a good ROI, e.g. at least having the grantmaker tick some boxes on a dropdown menu. 

"No because we think your approach has a substantial chance of doing harm", "no because your application was confusing and we didn't have the time to figure out what it was saying", and "no because we think another funder is better able to evaluate this proposal, so if they didn't fund it we'll defer to their judgment" seem like useful distinctions to applicants without requiring much time from grantmakers.

Opening with a strong claim,  making your readers scroll through a lot of introductory text, and ending abruptly with "but I don't feel like justifying my point in any way, so come up with your own arguments" is not a very good look on this forum. 

Insightful criticism of the capital allocation dynamics in EA is a valuable and worthwhile thing that I expect most EA Forum readers would like to see! But this is not that, and the extent to which it appears to be that for several minutes of the reader's attention comes across as rather rude. My gut re... (read more)

Alexey Guzey has posted a very critical review of Why We Sleep - I haven't deeply investigated the resulting debate, but my impression from what I've seen thus far is that the book should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism.

It seems to me that there are quite low odds of 4000-qubit computers being deployed without proper preparations? There are very strong incentives for cryptography-using organizations of almost any stripe to transition to post-quantum encryption algorithms as soon as they expect such algorithms to become necessary in the near future, for instance as soon as they catch wind of 200- and 500- and 1000- bit quantum computers. Given that post-quantum algorithms already exist, it does not take much time from worrying about better quantum computers to protecting a... (read more)