Pigs are ~50% meat by mass, but less than ~0.01% insulin by mass. And animals are pretty well optimized for producing animal bodies with minimal food consumption, so the possible gains are

• factor of ~2 from not producing the rest of the animal
• Small factor from turning food into meat more efficiently than evolved animals
• Small factor from turning energy into food more efficiently than evolved plants
• Large factor from producing energy more cheaply than we produce crops for animal feed

It's 2027, and Redwood has failed to be useful while spending hundreds of person-years of researcher time. What happened?

I think all these groups need to be concerned, but about different things:

• a largely white, educated, western, and male group talking about how to fix everything should (i) not repeat mistakes like racist eugenics, colonialism, etc., historically made by such groups, (ii) also think about other possible problems caused by its members being privileged/powerful
• an uneducated group should not repeat mistakes made by past such groups (perhaps famines and atrocities caused by the Great Leap Forward), and anticipate other problems caused by its demographics by ensuring it has good epistemics, talent, and ways of being taken seriously
• a largely black group should look at mistakes made by other predominantly black groups including black supremacists (perhaps becoming cults), ...
• a group talking about how it's impossible to fix anything should look at mistakes made by past such groups (perhaps Calvinism), ...
• Also, any group that isn't demographically diverse might want to become diverse if they think adding voices makes the direction of the movement better.

Some of these concerns can be easily dismissed (the NAACP doesn't need to try especially hard to not become a black supremacist cult because the prior probability of that is very low). But when thinking about plausible failure modes even a ~3:1 Bayes factor from demographics can be important, until we know about the actual causes of these failures and whether they apply to us.

I want to skill up in pandas/numpy/data science over the next few months. Where can I find a data science project that is relevant to EA? Some rough requirements:

• Takes between 1 and 3 months of full-time work
• Helps me (a pretty strong CS undergrad) become fluent in pandas quickly, and maybe use some machine learning techniques I've studied in class
• About as open-ended as a research internship
• Feels meaningful
  • Should be important enough that I enjoy doing it, but it's okay if it has e.g. 5% as much direct benefit as the highest-impact thing I could be doing
  • I'm interested in AI safety and other long-term cause areas
• Bonus: working with time-series data, because I'm particularly confused about how it works.

I've already looked at the top datasets on kaggle and other places, and don't feel inclined to work on them because they don't seem relevant and have probably been analyzed to death. Also, I've only taken a few ML and no data science classes, so I might not be asking the right questions.

I downvoted this because it contains large claims which are vague and probably false, and also because I don't see any relevance to the EA movement. To single one out, "The skeptical movement seems to be involved to some extent with regards to its branding and possibly research interference" sound like how pseudoscientists claim that controlled experiments interfere with their supernatural powers. Will reverse this vote if there's evidence I'm wrong.

There are efforts to promote geographic diversity in EA, as well as translate and integrate EA ideas to other cultures and do cross-cultural moral research. Furthering any one of these would reduce the effect of any Eurocentric bias the EA community has inherited, and I think they're all better places to look than alternative medicine.

Fixed, thanks.

Some EA-aligned charities listed (use the search function in the bottom right corner):

• Center for Long-Term Risk (listed as Effective Altruism Foundation)
• Founders Pledge
• 80,000 Hours
• Center for Effective Altruism
• Future of Humanity Institute
• Machine Intelligence Research Institute
• AMF
• GiveDirectly
• Animal Ethics

I'm probably missing a ton of global health and animal charities, because I don't know them.

You might find it helpful to look at this ethnography of an EA group. Also relevant is this analysis of the Big Five personality traits of respondents to the Rethink Charity community survey. It has statistical flaws, but one takeaway is that most EAs are high in openness. Finally, there's this Global Optimum Podcast episode on the personality of EAs.

Justification and signalling explanations don't seem especially compelling to me because in some sense, everything is justification and signaling. Also, I'm not sure if you're hinting at this, but it's unlikely that you'll be diagnosed with a mental illness just for being drawn to / believing in EA, unless it significantly impedes your everyday functioning. Since I'm not a therapist, I don't think I can comment further on what a therapist would say.

The link to the survey data (https://github.com/rethinkpriorities/ea-data/tree/master/data) is now broken.

To add to that, if there are concerns about data being de-anonymized, there are statistical techniques to mitigate it.