Meta- but this thread has some good ideas in. Feel free to nick them and submit them here!

Reminder that you can check out your post stats (for individual posts and overall). I personally find this very cool - I get a lot more readers on the Forum than I do on Substack. 
 

PS- LMK if there are stats you'd like to see that you can't currently access. Can't promise to add anything in particular, but we'll consider. 

+1 I would love an EA to be working on this. 

Generally I curate posts from the last few weeks. This post is from 12 years ago. I'm doing this because I've had a few discussions recently about how much evergreen content there is on the EA Forum, and how it is surfaced too rarely. 

I'd like present-day commenters to feel encouraged to comment on this post. Specifically, I think it's interesting to look at this post more than a decade after it was written, and ask - was our allocation of resources correct in that decade? Should we in fact have focused more on building funding, power, generalist expertise, community size and cohesion? 

Here's a poll that gets at one slice of that question:
 

Over the last decade, we should have invested more in community growth at the expense of research.

disagree

agree

(Apologies @Lizka for the 'EA Should')

Would you say your skepticism is mainly tied into the specific framing of "offsetting" as opposed to just donating? How would your answer change if the offset framing was dropped and it was just a plain donation ask?

I think if it is just donating then there isn't anything very revolutionary here... animal welfare charities don't only market to vegetarian/vegans. 

I both take it to be true that offsetting is the new and exciting angle here, and that common sense morality doesn't have much of a place for offsetting. 

On the identity thing - I think there is something there, though for 'membership' to work we'd need to somehow change the identity of members quite a bit. A non veggy/vegan farm animal welfare member is a bit like an NRA member who doesn't allow guns in the house, or a Sierra Club member who drives a gas guzzler and doesn't recycle. Consequentially not that contradictory, but identity-wise, a bit dissonant. 

We should present veganism as commendable, and offsetting as a legitimate stopping point for individual supporters.

I like the concept here, though I'm a little sceptical that it'll lead to the best consequences because Veganism might just be a simpler idea than Offsetting. 

AFAIK the idea of offsetting was first shared in reference to emissions from flights. My (non quantitative) take is that this wasn't very successful. A lot of flights offer some sort of charity donation at the end of the purchasing process, but they don't usually make the claim that you are offsetting your specific flight, and I don't think it would commonly be accepted by people who care about the climate that it is morally neutral to take a flight if you offset it. If anything it would generate more ire - you are covering your ass. 

I'm hopeful that this could go better with Veganism, but this scepticism (and my falsifiable take on the non-success of offsets for flights) mean I'm only a weak agree. 

My understanding was that the administration hadn't changed the appropriations, they'd just ensured that those appropriations couldn't be spent on anything (i.e. they did everything through the executive, not congress). I'm hoping I can be happy about this, but it reads to me like status quo. 

The global fund bit is maybe more of an update. 

(I'm aware I could just ask an LLM but I thought there may be value in being confused in public, in case anyone else feels the same)

Hey Dylan, would you mind putting each of these in different answers so people can vote separately? 

I'll take this post off the frontpage later today. This is just a quick note to say that you can always message me (or use the intercom feature - chat symbol on the bottom right of your desktop screen) if you'd like to make suggestions or give feedback about the EA Forum.

That would be fantastic! Let me know if you'd like any tips or feedback.