An ex­cerpt on go­rilla sign lan­guage for emo­tions and mem­o­ries from this pa­per (bold mine):

Which non­hu­man an­i­mals may be near-per­sons like Jenny? Re­view­ing the ev­i­dence, Varner ar­gues that the cat­e­gory in­cludes great apes, cetaceans, elephants, and, per­haps, corvids and par­rots. To defend his claim that great apes do not have the kind of epi­sodic mem­ory re­quired to have a bi­o­graph­i­cal sense of one’s past, he ex­am­ines the ev­i­dence pro­vided for be­liev­ing that Koko, the go­rilla, has nar­ra­tive and uses it to com­mu­ni­cate deeply emo­tional per­sonal mem­o­ries from the dis­tant past.

Koko was five years old in July, 1976. Ac­cord­ing to Francine “Penny” Pat­ter­son, who worked more closely with Koko than any­one, in 1976 Koko nar­rated an event that had hap­pened three days prior:

(P = Pat­ter­son; K = Koko)

P: What did you do to Penny?

K: BITE.

P: You ad­mit it? (Koko had ear­lier called the bite a SCRATCH.)

K: SORRY BITE SCRATCH. (Penny shows the mark on her hand; it does re­sem­ble a scratch.)

K: WRONG BITE.

P: Why bite?

K: BECAUSE MAD.

P: Why mad?

K: DON’T KNOW

(Pat­ter­son & Cohn, 1994, p.282)

Koko’s one and two word re­sponses here, drawn from her knowl­edge of more than a thou­sand Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage (ASL) signs, clearly show an un­der­stand­ing of con­cepts, words, and causal re­la­tions (What did you do to Penny? BITE). How­ever, as Varner notes, there is no ev­i­dence here of epi­sodic mem­ory, in which one re­mem­bers one­self at a par­tic­u­lar place at a par­tic­u­lar time. Koko is us­ing ASL which, Varner tells us, does not in­clude tenses. Con­se­quently, he ob­serves, “tem­po­ral refer­ences must gen­er­ally be in­ferred from the con­text, and in these stud­ies, that con­text is pro­vided by the English sen­tences ut­tered by the hu­man train­ers” (Varner, 2012, p.155). Varner has his doubts about whether Koko is here com­mu­ni­cat­ing a con­scious mem­ory of what hap­pened three days ago. Rather, Koko may sim­ply be mak­ing signs she knows will suc­ceed in elic­it­ing the re­sponses Koko de­sires from Pat­ter­son.

But if Koko is not ca­pa­ble of ex­press­ing mem­o­ries of events three days in the past, she is able to com­mu­ni­cate her emo­tions. When asked, “How do you feel?” she will re­spond ap­pro­pri­ately, for ex­am­ple, with FINE, or HUNGRY, or SAD. In chil­dren, in­ter­nal im­me­di­ate-state lan­guage re­port­ing one’s mood emerges in the third and fourth years. We are on firm ground, then, in think­ing Koko has words and con­cepts, so­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion, ra­tio­nal­ity in the sense of cause and effect think­ing, emo­tions, aware­ness, and be­liefs and de­sires. But she does not seem to have the sec­ond-or­der de­sires, ex­ec­u­tive con­trol, or au­ton­omy re­quired for a bi­o­graph­i­cal sense of self.

Varner is similarly cau­tious about long-term mem­o­ries allegedly re­counted by a go­rilla, Michael, who was cap­tured by poach­ers as an in­fant. Pat­ter­son made a video of Michael allegedly re­count­ing this mem­ory of the in­ci­dent in which Michael’s mother was kil­led. In the record­ing we see Michael’s sign­ings ren­dered in the fol­low­ing cap­tions pro­vided by Pat­ter­son: “SQUASH MEAT GORILLA. MOUTH TOOTH. CRY SHARP-NOISE LOUD. BAD THINK-TROUBLE LOCK-FACE. CUT/​NECK LIP(GIRL) HOLD” (The Go­rilla Foun­da­tion, n.d.). Varner, not­ing the am­bi­guity of the string of words, ob­serves that “even Pat­ter­son’s sym­pa­thetic co-au­thor Eu­gene Lin­den doubts her claim that Michael was tel­ling the story about his mother’s death” (Ibid, pp.155–156). Varner con­cludes that in spite of such anec­dotes and Pat­ter­son’s claim that Michael told her this story on sev­eral oc­ca­sions, there is “no good ev­i­dence that apes un­der­stand or use lan­guage to ex­press thoughts about the non-im­me­di­ate past” (Ibid, pp.156). If Varner is wrong and Michael is re­count­ing an epi­sodic mem­ory, Michael has an im­por­tant claim to per­son­hood. If Varner is right, per­haps Michael is just mak­ing signs he thinks Pat­ter­son is sub­con­sciously nudg­ing him to make, per­haps in Clever Hans fash­ion. In that event, Michael may not have epi­sodic mem­o­ries of the trau­matic events. Rather, he may only be sign­ing in se­quences he has learned satisfy Pat­ter­son’s prompt­ings.

Also, for an­other com­par­i­son, chil­dren only re­ally start pass­ing the mir­ror test at around 2 years old.

(Maybe this com­ment would be more ap­pro­pri­ate on an­other one of the posts of the se­ries, per­haps this one or this one, but I’ve de­cided to leave it here since this is the most re­cent post about sen­tience across species. This is mostly spec­u­la­tive and sug­ges­tive of ar­eas for fur­ther re­search and ques­tions that could in­form our cre­dences in con­scious­ness.)

I haven’t been able to find the pa­per, un­for­tu­nately, but I thought this might be pretty good ev­i­dence for con­scious­ness:

Another way to tap into an an­i­mal’s emo­tions is to train them to com­mu­ni­cate how they feel. A group of re­searchers from Lon­don taught pigs to give one re­sponse when they felt nor­mal and a differ­ent re­sponse when they were anx­ious (in this case they were given a drug de­signed to in­duce tem­po­rary anx­iety). Not only could the pigs dis­crim­i­nate be­tween these two states, but later they made the same “anx­ious” re­sponse when ex­posed to novel events such as an un­fa­mil­iar pig or a new pig pen. It seems that, since pigs are smart enough to tell re­searchers how they feel, they could be trained to un­der­stand that al­though a rou­tine hus­bandry pro­ce­dure might be fright­en­ing, it could be over rel­a­tively quickly and painlessly.

If an an­i­mal can dis­crim­i­nate be­tween their own emo­tions and be taught to re­act to them in differ­ent ways (and not just to ex­ter­nal stim­uli or rep­re­sen­ta­tions thereof), is this a sign of some kind of higher-or­der con­scious­ness? Their learn­ing sys­tems are tak­ing their own emo­tions as in­put to learn about, rather than just as fi­nal sig­nals (e.g. re­in­forcers) for learn­ing, and their emo­tions are be­ing passed through their learn­ing sys­tems and not just di­rectly to changes out­side their brains (tail wag­ging, growl­ing, stress hor­mones in the blood, etc.).

More re­cently, there’s the dog who was trained to press but­tons that play words. At about 4:00, af­ter a but­ton didn’t work, the dog pressed “No” and “Help”.

And then cows may be able to re­act emo­tion­ally to their own learn­ing, speci­fi­cally, to their progress on a prob­lem. Maybe this kind of learn­ing is dis­tinct from the kind of learn­ing pigs and dogs seem to do about their own emo­tions.

To­gether (al­though I’m gen­er­al­iz­ing be­tween species), this may sug­gest these an­i­mals can:

1. learn about their own emo­tional re­ac­tions, and

2. re­act emo­tion­ally to their own learn­ing.

I sup­pose learn­ing might not im­ply “know­ing”, though. Many sim­pler forms of life seem to be able to learn with­out “know­ing” any­thing, ac­cord­ing to RP’s re­view. So the pigs and dog seem to be able to learn about their emo­tions, but do they “know” their emo­tions? The cows seem to re­act to their own learn­ing/​progress, but do they “know” that they’re learn­ing/​mak­ing progress?

On the other hand, how far is this kind of be­havi­our from non­hu­man pri­mates be­ing able to com­mu­ni­cate us­ing sign lan­guage and how good was that as ev­i­dence for non­hu­man pri­mate con­scious­ness? I sup­pose non­hu­man pri­mates seem to have learned to com­mu­ni­cate more than just their emo­tions, in­clud­ing per­haps past events (skep­ti­cism here, though), which would be ev­i­dence for epi­sodic mem­ory.

But maybe even rats have epi­sodic mem­ory and perform men­tal time.[1][2] It seems worth in­ves­ti­gat­ing whether or not these mem­ory re­play events are as­so­ci­ated with emo­tions similar to the origi­nal events; if that’s the case, that would be a good sign that they’re ac­tu­ally ex­pe­rienc­ing the “simu­la­tion”. I’d imag­ine that when a dog runs in their sleep, they’re simu­lat­ing ex­pe­riences and ac­tu­ally ex­pe­rienc­ing the simu­la­tion, emo­tions and all, al­though that dreams are ac­tu­ally ex­pe­rienced while they’re hap­pen­ing in hu­mans if not lu­cid—rather than at re­call—is de­bated in philos­o­phy. Some re­lated read­ing: [3][4][5]

It also seems worth look­ing into in­ten­tion­al­ity here: do they ever con­sider al­ter­na­tives (e.g. run mul­ti­ple simu­la­tions) and then make a de­ci­sion based on the al­ter­na­tives? Can they choose to re­call or run simu­la­tions in the first place?

I would think hard about what the rele­vant re­sources are that you’re trad­ing off against each other. Are your hob­bies im­por­tant for your well-be­ing and re­lax­ation? Is it pos­si­ble that by start­ing to mon­e­tize your hob­bies, you might get less en­joy­ment out of them? Maybe it will also cre­ate some im­bal­ance as you spend more time on them than you oth­er­wise would? Or per­haps it’s the op­po­site and mon­e­tiz­ing your hob­bies would ac­tu­ally in­crease the qual­ity of your leisure time? Per­haps you can run a time-limited ex­per­i­ment to find out.

Also, as a full-time on­line en­trepreneur my opinion is that nei­ther blog­ging nor stream­ing are par­tic­u­larly good in­come streams un­less you have rea­son to think you would be ex­cep­tion­ally good in ei­ther of these.

Also, have you read this? https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/​​pur­chase-fuzzies-and-utilons-sep­a­rately

I don’t think there’s any­thing nec­es­sary or in­evitable about it! My sen­ti­ments re­flect things I’ve seen other peo­ple say (e.g. “I don’t know if I count as an ‘effec­tive al­tru­ist’, I’m new here/​don’t have be­lief X”), but how peo­ple feel about this and other iden­tity ques­tions is (of course) all over the map. And as I said, I have no prob­lem with any­one refer­ring to them­selves as an effec­tive al­tru­ist—I just don’t have a prob­lem with the op­po­site, ei­ther.

To use the church anal­ogy: If some peo­ple at a church call them­selves “Chris­ti­ans”, oth­ers “South­ern Bap­tists”, oth­ers “re­li­gious seek­ers”, oth­ers “spiritual”, and still oth­ers “ag­nos­tic/​un­cer­tain”, I wouldn’t ex­pect that to make things less com­fortable for new­com­ers. (Though at­tend­ing Uni­tar­ian church as a kid might have left me bi­ased in this area!)

I agree that there are many rea­sons some­one might feel un­com­fortable at a con­fer­ence or com­mu­nity event, and I think we both see the par­tic­u­lar ques­tion of when to use “effec­tive al­tru­ist” is just one tiny facet of com­mu­nity co­he­sion.

Wel­come to the EA Fo­rum! Ku­dos to you for your gen­eros­ity! You’ve prob­a­bly already joined Giv­ing What We Can, but you may also be in­ter­ested in Bolder Giv­ing (giv­ing high per­centages, but not fo­cused on effec­tive giv­ing).

Since you can deduct state taxes and in­ter­est on a mort­gage, I would guess you are already ex­ceed­ing the $14,000 stan­dard de­duc­tion. So then I think it would be im­por­tant to donate ev­ery year to make sure you are sav­ing taxes on the money you make in the top bracket. Here is a post that might be helpful. There are also quite a few posts (e.g. this re­cent one) on in­vest­ing with an EA mind­set.

Maybe you could choose to only vote in a party’s pri­mary if you also pre­com­mit to vot­ing for your cho­sen can­di­date in the gen­eral elec­tion if they win the pri­mary.

Thanks for writ­ing this! I am com­ing some­what late to the party , but I wanted to add my sup­port for what you have both writ­ten here. I back the con­certed re­search effort you pro­pose and be­lieve it some­what likely that it will have the benefits you sug­gest are prob­a­ble.

I was dig­ging through the Pritch­ett pa­per in hopes of do­ing my own anal­y­sis, and I do have a ques­tion: how did you calcu­late the me­dian figure for Viet­nam that you refer­ence in sec­tion 4 ($6,914 GDP per cap­ita)? I’ve been look­ing at the Pritch­ett pa­per and I can’t quite figure it out. It seems close to the me­dian ab­solute growth in $PPP pre­sented in Pritch­ett’s Table 4, but I imag­ine that’s not right since Table 4 only lists the top 20 growth epi­sodes from the full set of about 300. When I look at the those figures in Ap­pendix A, though, it seems like the me­dian growth epi­sode (de­pend­ing on how you calcu­late it) is some­where around Ecuador’s nega­tive growth in 1978. This ob­vi­ously doesn’t line up with your figure, so some di­rec­tion on this front would be greatly ap­pre­ci­ated.

Your com­ment helped me un­der­stand this dis­cus­sion bet­ter. It seems I was in­deed as­sum­ing causal­ity in the stronger sense, though I now see there wasn’t much jus­tifi­ca­tion for this as­sump­tion. As you point out, the stronger sense would fail to vin­di­cate many re­la­tion­ships we gen­er­ally take to be causal.

I still feel re­luc­tant to as­sert that mar­riage causes death from the data you pro­vided. Maybe it’s be­cause I’m not sure what type of link ex­ists be­tween mar­riage and higher rates of child­birth. Though it seems clear that mar­ried peo­ple have more chil­dren, I’m not sure it’s cor­rect to say that mar­riage causes peo­ple to have more chil­dren. Peo­ple of­ten get mar­ried be­cause they want to have chil­dren. Even when this is not the ini­tial mo­ti­va­tion, it seems odd to say that mar­riage ex­plains why these peo­ple have chil­dren. By con­trast, the link be­tween smok­ing and can­cer seems much more tight.

I haven’t thought much about whether the causal at­tri­bu­tions we make in so­cial sci­ence tend to be more similar to “mar­riage causes higher rates of child­birth” or to “smok­ing causes higher rates of can­cer”.

I sub­tracted the refer­ence to mar­t­in­gales from my pre­vi­ous com­ment be­cause: a) not my ex­per­tise, b) this dis­cus­sion doesn’t need ad­di­tional com­plex­ity.

I’m sorry for hav­ing raised is­sues about para­doxes (per­haps there should be a God­win’s Law about them); I don’t think we should mix edge cases like St. Peters­burg (and prob­lems with un­bounded util­ity in gen­eral) with the op­ti­mizer’s curse – it’s already hard to an­a­lyze them sep­a­rately.

In line with the spirit of your com­ment, I be­lieve, I think that it’s use­ful to recog­nise that not all dis­cus­sions re­lated to pros and cons of prob­a­bil­ities or how to use them or that sort of thing can or should ad­dress all po­ten­tial is­sues. And I think that it’s good to recog­nise/​ac­knowl­edge when a cer­tain is­sue or edge case ac­tu­ally ap­plies more broadly than just to the par­tic­u­lar mat­ter at hand (e.g., how St Peters­burg is rele­vant even aside from the op­ti­mizer’s curse). An ex­am­ple of roughly the sort of rea­son­ing I mean with that sec­ond sen­tence, from Tarsney writ­ing on moral un­cer­tainty:

The third worry sug­gests a broader ob­jec­tion, that con­tent-based nor­mal­iza­tion ap­proach in gen­eral is vuln­er­a­ble to fa­nat­i­cism. Sup­pose we con­clude that a plu­ral­is­tic hy­brid of Kan­ti­anism and con­trac­tar­i­anism would give lex­i­cal pri­or­ity to Kan­ti­anism, and on this ba­sis con­clude that an agent who has pos­i­tive cre­dence in Kan­ti­anism, con­trac­tar­i­anism, and this plu­ral­is­tic hy­brid ought to give lex­i­cal pri­or­ity to Kan­ti­anism as well. [...]

I am will­ing to bite the bul­let on this ob­jec­tion, up to a point: Some value claims may sim­ply be more in­trin­si­cally weighty than oth­ers, and in some cases ab­solutely so. In cases where the agent’s cre­dence in the lex­i­cally pri­ori­tized value claim ap­proaches zero, how­ever, the situ­a­tion be­gins to re­sem­ble Pas­cal’s Wager (Pas­cal, 1669), the St. Peters­burg Lot­tery (Bernoulli, 1738), and similar cases of ex­treme prob­a­bil­ities and mag­ni­tudes that be­devil de­ci­sion the­ory in the con­text of merely em­piri­cal un­cer­tainty. It is rea­son­able to hope, then, that the cor­rect de­ci­sion-the­o­retic solu­tion to these prob­lems (e.g. a dis­mis­sal of “ra­tio­nally neg­ligible prob­a­bil­ities” (Smith, 2014, 2016) or gen­eral ra­tio­nal per­mis­sion for non-neu­tral risk at­ti­tudes (Buchak, 2013)) will blunt the force of the fa­nat­i­cism ob­jec­tion.

But I cer­tainly don’t think you need to apol­o­gise for rais­ing those is­sues! They are rele­vant and very wor­thy of dis­cus­sion—I just don’t know if they’re in the top 7 is­sues I’d dis­cuss in this par­tic­u­lar post, given its in­tended aims and my cur­rent knowl­edge base.

I am an im­mi­gra­tion lawyer and I have trou­ble tak­ing any­one se­ri­ously when they pro­pose “de­crim­i­nal­iz­ing the bor­der”, be­cause it’s so ir­rele­vant to the ac­tual le­gal is­sues most im­mi­grants face. Peo­ple usu­ally don’t get pros­e­cuted for cross­ing the bor­der ille­gally, and when they do the con­se­quences are pretty minor. The gov­ern­ment does it once in a while to make a point but the re­ally in­hu­mane stuff hap­pens on the civil side of im­mi­gra­tion en­force­ment, where you can still be de­tained in­definitely and the pro­ce­du­ral pro­tec­tions of crim­i­nal law don’t ap­ply. If it were a choice, I’d MUCH rather be pros­e­cuted for ille­gal en­try than have a de­por­ta­tion case brought against me.

The other things are fine as far as they go. I’m pro-open bor­ders but since I don’t see it hap­pen­ing any­time soon I’d pre­fer to see a more se­ri­ous at­tempt at re­forms that could ac­tu­ally go some­where.

Re: cli­mate re­fugees your point about re­fugee quo­tas is right, but the stan­dards for asy­lum are ex­actly the same as the stan­dards to be a re­fugee; it’s just about whether you’re in the US or out at the time you ap­ply. And there are no quo­tas for asylees so re­vis­ing the el­i­gi­bil­ity stan­dards there is mean­ingfully helpful. I would pre­fer to see a broader “eco­nomic re­fugee/​asylee” cat­e­gory but I think ac­cept­ing cli­mate re­fugees/​asylees is a good prac­ti­cal step in that di­rec­tion. Some­one like me can prob­a­bly twist the hell out of that in court to ba­si­cally cre­ate a broader “eco­nomic asylee” cat­e­gory but I need that crack in the door so I can pry it open.

Hmm, so to be ex­plicit, the claim I’m mak­ing is that mar­riage has a causal effect on mor­tal­ity, me­di­ated through com­pli­ca­tions in child­birth.

In Pearl’s do-calcu­lus, this is

1. Mar­riage → greater rates of child­birth → Death.

I haven’t fully es­tab­lished this con­nec­tion. The main way this ar­gu­ment falls is if it turns out mar­riage does not in­crease rates of child­birth. I as­sumed that mar­riage in­creases child­birth, but I ad­mit to not look­ing into it.

I think when peo­ple are think­ing about a strong causal re­la­tion­ship be­tween mar­riage and mor­tal­ity, they are mostly think­ing of other me­di­at­ing vari­ables (weak claim, since most things are not child­birth). So:

2. Mar­riage → (col­lec­tion of other me­di­at­ing vari­ables) → Death.

How­ever, based on your and Liam’s com­ments, I’m start­ing to sus­pect that both of you mean causal­ity in a much more di­rect sense. In that frame­work, per­haps the only re­la­tion­ship that will be con­sid­ered “causal” should be:

3. Mar­riage → Death (no me­di­at­ing vari­able).

If that is the case for your defi­ni­tion of causal­ity, I agree that #3 is pretty un­likely. I also think it’s too strong since it prob­a­bly rules out eg, smok­ing caus­ing death (since you can’t use the me­di­at­ing vari­able of lung can­cer).

am DIFFO Frédéric, Ph.D stu­dent in uni­ver­sité d’Ar­tois. I am do­ing fran­co­phone com­par­a­tive liter­a­ture and my su­per­vi­sor is pro­fes­sor Anne Gaelle We­ber. My re­search topic is based in im­mi­gra­tion and rep­re­sen­ta­tion of al­ter­ity in some se­lected sub­sa­har­ian and maghrebian

am DIFFO Frédéric, Ph.D stu­dent in uni­ver­sité d’Ar­tois. I am do­ing fran­co­phone com­par­a­tive liter­a­ture and my su­per­vi­sor is pro­fes­sor Anne Gaelle We­ber. My re­search topic is based in im­mi­gra­tion and rep­re­sen­ta­tion of al­ter­ity in some se­lected sub­sa­har­ian and maghrebian

If “hu­man-com­pat­i­ble” means any­thing non-speciesis­tic, then I agree that it is an un­for­tu­nate phrase, since it is mis­lead­ing. I also think it is mis­lead­ing to call ideal­ized prefer­ences for “hu­man val­ues,” since hu­mans don’t ac­tu­ally hold those prefer­ences, as you cor­rectly point out.

You write that

“Which eth­i­cal sys­tem is cor­rect?” isn’t writ­ten in the stars or in Plato’s heaven; it seems like if the an­swer is en­coded any­where in the uni­verse, it must be en­coded in our brains (or in log­i­cal con­structs out of brains).

Let X be the claims, which you deny in this quote. If X is taken lit­ter­ally, then it is a straw man, since no one be­lieves in it. If X is metaphor­i­cal, then it is very un­clear what its sup­posed to mean or whether it means any­thing. The claim that “ethics is en­coded some­where in the uni­verse” is also un­clear. My best at­tempt to as­cribe mean­ing to it is as fol­lows “there is some en­tity in the uni­verse, which con­sti­tutes all of ethics,” but claims seems false. The most ba­sic eth­i­cal prin­ci­ples is, I be­lieve, in some ways like log­i­cal prin­ci­ples. The val­idity of the ar­gu­ment “p and q, there­fore p” is not con­sti­tuted by any fea­ture of the uni­verse. To see this, imag­ine an al­ter­na­tive uni­verse, which differs from the real in ba­si­cally any way you like. It’s gov­erned by differ­ent laws of na­ture, con­tains differ­ent life­forms (or per­haps no life at all) has a differ­ent cos­molog­i­cal his­tory etc. If this uni­verse had been real, then “p and q, there­fore p” would still be valid. Ba­sic eth­i­cal prin­ci­ples like the claim that the suffer­ing is bad, seems just like this. If hu­man prefer­ences (or other fea­tures of the uni­verse) where to be differ­ent, then suffer­ing would still be bad.

It’s also posted here on the fo­rum—https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​posts/​​43aMk2mYoch9c3aM5/​​james-snow­den-the-evolu­tion-of-givewell-s-re­search :)

It’s also posted here on the fo­rum—https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​posts/​​43aMk2mYoch9c3aM5/​​james-snow­den-the-evolu­tion-of-givewell-s-re­search :)

OK, thanks for ex­plain­ing how this works!

Ex­cel­lent ques­tion, thank you! I am delighted to hear that peo­ple en­joyed the event. Our ob­jec­tives were pri­mar­ily to cel­e­brate the progress since the ini­tial launch of The Life You Can Save in 2009, fur­ther strengthen our re­la­tion­ships with our net­works, and cre­ate new ones. As an or­ga­ni­za­tion we place a huge value on these re­la­tion­ships as much of what we do re­lies on them to be suc­cess­ful. On at­ten­dees, I think this is an ex­am­ple of a pos­i­tive con­se­quence of the di­ver­sity of the back­grounds of our team mem­bers that Jon men­tioned above. Our or­ga­niz­ing team con­tacted their net­works which led us to a mix of at­ten­dees all of whom were ex­cited to be there. Per­son­ally, I spent around 10-20 hours, pri­mar­ily dur­ing EA Global in Lon­don, invit­ing peo­ple and ask­ing my net­works for ad­vice. In­clud­ing peo­ple already in­volved and lead­ers of the EA com­mu­nity meant that we had a group of re­ally en­thu­si­as­tic at­ten­dees who were will­ing to dis­cuss what they find in­spiring about effec­tive giv­ing and Effec­tive Altru­ism and guide at­ten­dees who were per­haps ear­lier in their jour­neys. Our Lon­don-based recom­mended non­prof­its also at­tended which al­lowed us to high­light the prac­ti­cal con­se­quences of our work which is nat­u­ral to lose sight of if you aren’t do­ing di­rect, in-coun­try work. Since the event, we have had a sig­nifi­cant amount of great feed­back, in­clud­ing from our largest donor which is ob­vi­ously re­ally im­por­tant for us. I also like to think that peo­ple will reach out to us in the fu­ture more will­ingly now they know more about our team and guid­ing val­ues but I think it prob­a­bly a lit­tle too soon to tell. We have some new leads com­ing out of the event, but ex­pect it to take time to learn what the re­sults might be. On costs, we spent £5,425 hard costs. There are other costs that you men­tion like staff time. An in­cred­ibly back-of the en­velope calcu­la­tion would be <£10,000. Over­all, we are pleased with the event, learnt alot, and, of course, are very grate­ful to our net­works for helping make it a suc­cess.

there’s liter­ally a strong causal re­la­tion­ship be­tween mar­riage and hav­ing a shorter lifes­pan.

What causal re­la­tion­ship are you al­lud­ing to? As far as I can tell, the data you men­tion three com­ments above es­tab­lishes a cor­re­la­tion be­tween mar­riage and mor­tal­ity, not cau­sa­tion. More­over, that data also ap­pears to show that the mechanism im­pli­cated in this cor­re­la­tion is com­pli­ca­tions dur­ing child­birth, which rules out mar­riage as the causal fac­tor.

Has ac­tive agents, namely to­bacco com­pa­nies, that push against in­ter­ven­tions in this space

I won­der if that’s so bad: con­sid­er­ing we are play­ing a zero-sum game against this com­pa­nies, each $ we make them spend to defend them­selves against pub­lic poli­cies will im­pact the price of their product—and, given price-elas­tic­ity, will de­ter con­sump­tion.