veganhealth.org

Here's the link!

I'd also like to reiterate the arguments Larry Temkin gave against international aid, since the post doesn't cover them. I'm not sure if I'm convinced by these arguments, but I do find them reasonable and worth serious consideration.

• Opportunity cost of local human resources: International aid agencies tend to hire competent local people in the country they operate in (e.g. Sub-Saharan African countries), but these competent people could otherwise serve in important roles for the development of the local society.
• Corruption: Lots of international aid funds are corrupted by government officials and local thugs (and such corruption is often covered up). Often, the corrupted funds then go on to fuel the agenda of thugs or malevolent political actors, which is harmful to the people of the aided nation.
• In addition to the two empirical arguments above, he also gave normative arguments, but those arguments are commonly raised and rather well-known by EAs, so I don't repeat them here.

Comment from author: Note that I lean slightly towards the term "animal advocacy", so it's possible that my analysis contains a slight bias towards this term.

A counter-argument: Here it is argued that the research supporting the 3.5% figure may not apply to the animal advocacy context.

Suggestion: I think building epistemic health infrastructure is currently the most effective way to improve EA epistemic health, and is the biggest gap in EA epistemics.

I elaborated on this in my shortform. If the suggestion above seems too vague, there're also examples in the shortform. (I plan to coordinate a discussion/brainstorming on this topic among people with relevant interests; please do PM me if you're interested)

(I was late to the party, but since Nathan encourages late comments, I'm posting my suggestion anyways. I'm posting the comment also under this post besides the previous one, because Nathan said that "maybe add them to both"; please correct me if that's my misunderstanding)

Proposal: I think building epistemic health infrastructure is currently the most effective way to improve EA epistemic health, and is the biggest gap in EA epistemics.

• My definition of epistemic health infrastructure: a social, digital, or organizational structure that provides systematic safeguards against one or more epistemic health issues, by regulating some aspect of the intellectual processes within the community.
  • They can have different forms (social, digital, organizational, and more) or different focuses (individual epistemics, group epistemology, and more), but one thing that unites them is that they're reliable structures and systems, rather than ad hoc patches.

(note: in order to keep the shortform short I tried to be curt when writing the content below; as a result the tone may come out harsher than I intended)

We talk a lot about epistemic health, but have massively underinvested in infrastructure that safeguards epistemic health. While things like EA Forum and EAG and social circles at EA hubs are effective at spreading information and communicating ideas, to my knowledge there has been no systematic attempt at understanding (and subsequently improving) how they affect epistemic health.

Examples of things not-currently-existing that I consider epistemic health infrastructure: 

• (Not saying that these are the most valuable ones; just that they fall into this category. They are examples and are only examples.)
• mechanisms to poll/aggregate community opinions (e.g. a more systematized version of Nathan Young's Polis polls) on all kinds of important topics, with reliable mechanisms to execute actions according to poll results
• something like the CEA community health team, but focusing on epistemic health, with better-defined duties and workflows, and with better transparency
• EA forum features and (sorting/recommending/etc.) algorithms aiming to minimize groupthink/information cascades
• (Many proposals from other community members about improving community epistemic health also fall into this category. I won't repeat them here.)

I plan to coordinate a discussion/brainstorming on this topic among people with relevant interests. Please do PM me if you're interested!

Apologies for posting four shortforms in a row. I accumulated quite a few ideas in recent days, and I poured them all out.

Summary: When exploring/prioritizing causes and interventions, EA might be neglecting alternative future scenarios, especially along dimensions orthogonal to popular EA topics. We may need to consider causes/interventions that specifically target alternative futures, as well as add a "robustness across future worlds" dimension to the ITN framework.

Epistemic status: low confidence

In cause/intervention exploration, evaluation and prioritization, EA might be neglecting alternative future scenarios, e.g.

• alternative scenarios of the natural environment: If the future world experienced severe climate change or environmental degradation (which has serious downstream socioeconomic effects), what are the most effective interventions now to positively influence such a world? 
• alternative scenarios of social forms: If the future world isn't a capitalist world, or is different from the current world in some other important aspect, what are the most effective interventions now to positively influence such a world? 
• ...

This is not about pushing for certain futures to realize. Instead, it's about what to do given that future. Therefore, arguments against pushing for certain futures (e.g. low neglectedness) do not apply.

For example, an EA might de-prioritize pushing for future X due to its low neglectedness, but if they think X has a non-trivial probability to realize, and its realization has rich implications for cause/intervention prioritization, then whenever doing prioritization, they need to think about "what I should do in a world where X would be realized". This could mean:

• finding causes/interventions that are robustly impactful across future scenarios, or
• finding causes/interventions that specifically target future X.

In theory, the consideration of alternative futures should be captured by the ITN framework, but in practice it's usually not. Therefore it could be valuable to add one more dimension to the ITN framework: "robustness across future worlds".

Also, there're different dimensions on which futures can differ. EA tends to have already considered the dimensions that are related to EA topics (e.g. which trajectory of AI is actualized), but tends to ignore the dimensions that aren't. But this is unreasonable, as EA-topic-related dimensions aren't necessarily the dimensions in which futures have the largest variance.

Finally, note that in some future worlds, it's easier to have high altruistic impact than in other worlds. For example in a capitalist world, altruists seem to be at quite a disadvantage to profit-seekers; in some alternative social forms, altruism plausibly becomes much easier and more impactful, while in some other social forms, it may become even harder. In such cases, we may want to prioritize the futures that have the most potential for current altruistic interventions.

Epistemic status: I only spent 10 minutes thinking about this before I started writing.

Idea: Funders may want to pre-commit to awarding whoever accomplished a certain goal. (e.g. maybe some funder like Open Phil can commit to awarding a pool of money to people/orgs who reduce meat consumption to a certain level, and the pool will be split in proportion to contribution)

Detailed considerations:

This can be seen as a version of retroactive funding, but it's special in that the funder makes a pre-commitment.

(I don't know a lot about retroactive funding/impact markets, so please correct me if I'm wrong on the comparisons below)

Compared to other forms of retroactive funding, this leads to the following benefits:

• less prebuilt infrastructure is needed
• provides stronger incentives to prospective "grantees"
• better funder coordination
• better grantee coordination

... but also the following detriments:

• much less flexibility
• perhaps stronger funding centralization
• potentially unhealthy competition between grantees

Compared to classical grant-proposal-based funding mechanisms, this leads to the following benefits:

• better grantee coordination
• stronger incentives for grantees
• more flexibility (i.e. grantees can use whatever strategy that works, rather than whatever strategy the funder likes)

... but also the following detriments:

• lack of funds to kickstart new projects that otherwise (ie if without funding) wouldn't be started
• perhaps stronger funding centralization
• potentially unhealthy competition between grantees

Important points:

• The goals should probably be high-level but achievable, while being strategy-agnostic (i.e. you can use whatever morally acceptable strategies to achieve the goal). Otherwise, you lose a large part of the value from pre-committed awards - sparkling creativity from prospective grantees.
• If your ultimate goal is too large and you need to decompose it into subgoals and award the subgoals, make sure your subgoals are dispersed across a diverse range of tracks/strategies. For example, if your ultimate goal is to reduce meat consumption, you may want to set subgoals on the alt protein track, as well as on the vegan advocacy track, and various other tracks.
• Explicitly emphasize that foundation-building work will be awarded, rather than awarding only the work that completed the one last step to the goal.
• Attribute contribution using an open and transparent research process. Maybe crowdsource opinions from a diverse group of experts.
  • Such research will be hard. This is IMO one of the biggest barriers to this approach, but I think it applies to other versions of retroactive funding/impact markets too.