Thanks for sharing, Peter! Have you considered making the doc available for reading even if people do not make a copy? I wonder whether a few people would only check it this way, even though a copy can easily be deleted.

Here are some links shared in the doc which many may find useful regardless of whether they do quarterly reviews, although you note "the point is to do a review and plan!".

Appendix A: Get Inspired

Read…

• The 5-Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life
• Humans are not automatically strategic
• How to be successful
• How to work hard
• There is no speed limit
• If you want to follow your dreams, you have to say no to all the alternatives
• Staring into the abyss
• You and your research
• The work-rest fractal
• Notes and Reflections on “Deep Work” by Cal Newport
• Notes on "A World Without Email", plus my practical implementation
• High density fun
• The Fifteen Commitments of Conscious Leadership
• List of my Favorite Named Adages, Aphorisms, Dictums, Laws, Maxims, and Rules to Live By

Though remember not to get too distracted here! Just read enough to get inspired and then stop. The point is to do a review and plan!

I see. I guess the probability over the next 10 years of something like what I described is lower than 0.001 %. I remain open to bets against short AI timelines, or what they supposedly imply, up to 10 k$. Do you see any that we could make that is good for both of us considering we could invest our money, and that you could take loans?

No worries!

I agree the absolute value of the total welfare of wild invertebrates may well be much larger than that of wild vertebrates. For exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, I get an absolute value of the total welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes ranging from 0.459 (= 0.0189/0.0412) to 2.60 k (= 977*10^3/376) times that of wild birds, mammals, and finfishes. However, my point was that the total welfare of humans may easily be much larger than the absolute value of the total welfare of wild animals including vertebrates and invertebrates.

I think the focus should be on cost-effectiveness, and the absolute value of the total welfare. These will be lower than suggested by animals killed because a higher number of these tends to be associated with animals with fewer neurons and welfare proxies. For exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, and only accounting for effects on target beneficiaries, I estimate the cost-effectiveness of the Shrimp Welfare Project's (SWP's) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) has been 0.0114 (= 2.06*10^-5/0.00180) to 29.4 (= 20.6/0.701) times that of cage-free corporate campaigns (the graph below has my results for more interventions and exponents). So I do not know whether the interventions which most cost-effectively increase the welfare of wild shrimps are more or less cost-effective than the ones which most cost-effectively increase the welfare of chickens

Accounting for effects on soil animals and microorganisms, I have very little idea about whether any intervention, including SWP's HSI which gets more farmed shrimps to be electrically stunned, increases or decreases welfare (in expectation).

Thanks for doing this, Myles! I strongly upvoted your post.

I do not know whether improving the conditions of farmed animals, and mitigating global warming, habitat destruction, and plastic waste increase or decrease welfare due to potentially dominant uncertain effects on soil animals and microorganisms. However, I still think offseting the effects of personal consumption by funding the most cost-effective interventions is a good norm to spread.

Hi Clara. Here are the EA Forum posts with the tag "Meat-eating problem". I especially like this one.

Tristan and Sergio, I added a few tags to your post. It only had the tag "Effective giving".

Hi Michael. Are you assuming the deployment of ASI will be analogous to an omnipotent civilisation with values completely disconnected from humans suddenly showing up on Earth? I agree human extinction would be a real possibility in this case. However, that would be very much at odds with historical gradual technological development shaped by human values.

That makes sense, Abraham. Here are some graphs I made illustrating that wild animals are neglected compared with farmed animals.

On the other hand, I think people advocating for a greater focus on helping wild animals, including myself in the past, often overestimate the robustness of their best guess that the absolute value of the total welfare of wild animals is much larger than that of humans. For individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to "number of neurons"^"exponent", and exponents from 0.5 to 1.5, I got an absolute value of the total welfare of:

• Wild birds, mammals, and finfishes ranging from 0.0412 to 376 times the total welfare of humans.
• Soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes ranging from 0.0189 to 977 k times the total welfare of humans.

For an exponent of 1.5, the absolute value of the total welfare of each of the above 2 groups of wild animals is much smaller than that of humans.

Great post, Aaron! I very much agree. I think your points also apply to people who are not public intellectuals.