I wonder if GiveDirectly has so good results not (just) because cash transfers are transformative but because digital payments on cellphones are.

- Voluntary human challenge trials
- Run a real money prediction market for US citizens
- Random compliance stuff that startups don't always bother with: GDPR, purchased mailing lists, D&I training in california, ...

Here are some illegal (or gray-legal) things that I'd consider effectively altruistic though I predict no "EA" org will ever do:
- Produce medicine without a patent
- Pill-mill prescription-as-a-service for certain medications
- Embryo selection or human genome editing for intelligence
- Forge college degrees
- Sell organs
- Sex work earn-to-give
- Helping illegal immigration

A gripe I have with EA is that it is not radical enough. The american civil rights movement of 1950-1960s was very effective and altruistic, even though it's members were arrested, and it's leaders were wiretapped by the FBI and assassinated in suspicious ways. Or consider the stonewall riots.
More contemporarily, I think Uber is good for the world counterfactually. It's good that Nakamoto made bitcoin. It's good that Snowden leaked the NSA stuff. (probably, I'm less sure about the impact of these examples.)

Most crime is bad, and most altruistic crime is ineffective or counterproductive. But not all.

I think swapcard is pretty bad and it's better to just move off of it entirely. Manifest is trying to use discord + airtable's calendar. we'll see if it's better

Wow venues seem really expensive! It might be cheaper to acquire large tracts of real estate just for running large events. For instance Italy is giving away free castles to people willing to upkeep them and use them for some public, productive purpose.

Unfortunate. I find the author's first two sections weak but I find the third section about animal consciousness to be interesting, concrete, falsifiable, written clearly, and novel-to-me.

To me, inconvenience sounds like costs in time or attention, rather than in status or feelings. But I can't find a good word for tangential personal psychosocial costs. gpt-4 suggests vibes.

An underrated solution here is for the busy person to simply charge for their time. Some professionals already do this - my coworker recently paid a few hundred dollars for an hour of time from someone who built a successful social media app.
It can be as easy as turning on the Stripe integration on your Calendly.