Seconding Guy Raveh on transparency, thank you!

I'm curious how many people are accepted for general admission but are then unable to attend because there isn't enough travel funding, and to what extent the amount other attendees paying for tickets affects this?

There's some evidence humans are also likely to fabricate post-hoc reasons for doing something. For example:

• Split brain patients have behaved in a way consistent with input to their right eye, but give verbal explanations based on input to their left eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain.
• Giving people a small incentive to lie about enjoying a task has resulted in them report liking it more later than giving them a larger incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_compliance_theory
• Korsakoff syndrome is a syndrome where patients have severe memory deficits, and often confabulate–eg. answering questions they can't know the answer to with a made up answer
• Some experiments have shown people asked to choose between two identical items will come up with a reason for their choice; other experiments have shown that people asked to choose between two options will come up with a coherent reason for their "choice" even if they're presented with the option they didn't choose. https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/confabulation-why-telling-ourselves-stories-makes-us-feel-ok/ ; https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-choice-blindness-2795019 

I don't view cause prioritisation as the primary choice here. 

To illustrate, consider only 'farmed animal welfare' charities: Shrimp welfare project, EA Animal Welfare Fund, Arthropoda Foundation, the Humane League, Hive, Legal Impact for Chickens, Animetrics, Veganuary, Sentient, Fish Welfare Institute. Here are the most relevant questions that would influence which organisation I would prioritise.

1. What is the track record of each organisation, or the people in the organisation, or other organisations which seem similar to each organisation?
2. How effective do I think interventions in: community building, policy advocacy, the law, public advocacy, vegan advocacy, research, data improvements, etc. are, relative to one another?
3. How much do I think success or failure in each of those classes of interventions is predictive of future success or failure?
4. What will each organisation fund on the margin?
5. What factors do I think play into the "moral weight" of different groups of animals, and how do different animals score on these factors?
6. How much can each charity do about the above factors?

Of these, I would consider only question (5), maybe (6), to be "cause prioritisation" questions. In this election, information relating to questions (1) and (4) is more easily available to me than usual, and I'm forced to consider the range of interventions discussed in (2) and (3) if I want to produce a full ranking, where in most circumstances I would just go with the intervention I think is most effective and not think about how the rest are ordered.

Can people who are downvoting this say why? I feel like roboton has provided useful information about why they have voted a certain way, even if its not very detailed information

• Can you say more about why you're opposed to most animal rights / what you mean more specifically by "animal rights"? At risk of sounding facetious, I assume you aren't eg. a proponent of torturing animals for no reason?
• Can you explain why you think its completely implausible that PauseAI "feeds capabilities" but plausible that The Midas Project does? I can think of many similar ways PauseAI and The Midas Project can both backfire (mostly gaining public attention in an undesirable way), and have a hard time imagining either of them directly contributing to capabilities improvements.

I noticed my view of these charities splits roughly into three categories: a) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a good chance (>30%) of being more effective than givedirectly, b) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a low chance of being more effective than givedirectly (<10%), and charities, and c) I wish I knew more about this charity.

I added those in category a) to the top of my list, in no particular order for now.

I'm kind of confused why I don't think anything is range 10-30%, but it seems I don't...

I think we should celebrate doing things which are better than not doing that thing, even if we don't know what the counterfactual would have been. For example:

• When a friend donates to charity, I show appreciation, not ask him how sure he is that it was the best possible use of his money
• When my relative gets a good grade, I congratulate her - I don't start questioning if she really prioritised studying for the right subject
• When a server is nice to me, I thank them - I don't ask them why they're talking to me instead of serving someone else

I appreciate that transparency might never be on the top of your to do list, and that might be the correct decision. But when an organisation is transparent, that's a public good - it helps me and the community make better decisions about how I want to do good, and I want them to know it helped me. 

Public goods have this slightly annoying feature of being disincentivised, because they helps everyone, often at the cost of those providing the good. In an ideal world EAs would all do it anyway because we're perfect altruists, but we still respond to incentives like everyone else. This is why I don't think we need to go around asking eg. who has sent the best funding applications, even though that can often be more important than being transparent. 

I'd love to talk about other important public goods that we should celebrate!

Would you be up for making your "deaths of effective altruism" article available in a way that isn't paywalled?

In terms of EA charities most commonly cited in these areas only, I think global health charities are much more well evidenced.

I think the most effective animal welfare interventions are probably more effective, I'm just much less sure what they are.