Benjamin M.

Karma: 234

Benjamin M. 28 Nov 2025 2:05 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Benjamin M.’s Quick takes
I was being purposely kind of vague, but let’s say people donating <100k a year? Whatever’s too small for the organizations that advise large donors.

Benjamin M. 26 Nov 2025 22:40 UTC
7 points
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on: Benjamin M.’s Quick takes
Are there any organizations out there that would describe their niche as advising for small/medium-sized donors? I can’t think of any, and I’m wondering why not. I’m not exactly sure what organizations that claim to advise large donors actually do, but it seems plausible that some things are also effective for smaller donors just because there are larger numbers of those. I’m thinking of, for instance:
- tax law advice for effective giving
- will writing advice
- compiling resources on charity evaluations
- conducting charity evaluations

Benjamin M. 26 Nov 2025 22:31 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Jesse Gainsburg’s comment on: 3 doubts about veganism
Yeah I forgot to mention that this seems heavily split by where I knew the people from, your anecdata seem true among younger/more educated people I know.

Benjamin M. 26 Nov 2025 15:45 UTC
1 point
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on: 3 doubts about veganism
Among people who call themselves vegans who I’ve met irl, about a third were actually some form of reducetarian already. One ate dairy and eggs that had some form of ethical certification, one ate fish (I believe only certain wild-caught species) and honey, and another was a strict vegan for a while (I think?) but then shifted to identifying as plant-based and eating chicken. Some of them were more vegan for health reasons than for animal welfare reasons, and for some I know health concerns were why they weren’t strictly vegan. So I think that this is more a debate for highly online/enfranchised vegans, while a lot of people have already gone ahead and adopted looser standards for veganism.

Benjamin M. 16 Nov 2025 6:06 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
I do think there’s also a significant chance of a larger bubble, to be fair, affecting the big AI companies. But my instinct is that a sudden fall in investment into small startups and many of them going bankrupt would get called a bubble in the media, and that that investment wouldn’t necessarily just go into the big companies.

Benjamin M. 15 Nov 2025 22:26 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
What is the probability that the U.S. AI industry (including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and others) is in a financial bubble — as determined by multiple reliable sources such as The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, or The Economist — that will pop before January 1, 2031?
I’m not exactly sure about the operationalization of this question, but it seems like there’s a bubble among small AI startups at the very least. The big players might be unaffected however? My evidence for this is some mix of not seeing a revenue pathway for a lot of these companies that wouldn’t require a major pivot, few barriers to entry for larger players if their product becomes successful, and having met a few people who work in AI startups who claim to be optimistic about earnings and stuff but can’t really back that up.

Benjamin M. 12 Nov 2025 15:56 UTC
2 points
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on: Effective Altruists Should Promote Frugality More
I think you’re right that frugality is good, but I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that it isn’t discussed any, although it maybe could use a bit more discussion on the margin. I also think the main con is that it would alienate people who aren’t willing to be particularly frugal, but will donate some anyways. The personal finance tag has some posts you might be interested in.

Benjamin M. 12 Nov 2025 15:50 UTC
10 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Cause prio cruxes in 2026?
This might not fit the idea of a prioritization question, but it seems like there are a lot of “sure bets” in global development, where you can feel highly confident an intervention will be useful, and not that many in AI-related causes (high chance it either ends up doing nothing or being harmful), with animal welfare somewhere in between. It would be interesting to find projects in global development that look good for risk-tolerant donors, and ones in AI (and maybe animal welfare or other “longtermist” causes) that look good for less risk-tolerant donors.

Benjamin M. 11 Oct 2025 3:54 UTC
9 points
2 ∶ 3
on: Effective altruism in the age of AGI
Not really a criticism of this post specifically, but I’ve seen a bunch of enthusiasm about the idea of some sort of AI safety+ group of causes and not that much recognition of the fact that AI ethicists and others not affiliated with EA have already been thinking about and prioritizing some of these issues (particularly thinking of the AI and democracy one, but I assume it applies to others). The EA emphases and perspectives within these topics have their differences, but EA didn’t invent these ideas from scratch.

Benjamin M. 30 Aug 2025 1:03 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Noah Birnbaum’s comment on: Noah Birnbaum’s Quick takes
For me at least, that implies an institute founded or affiliated with somebody named Petrov, not just inspired by somebody, and it would seem slightly sketchy for it not to be.

Benjamin M. 19 Aug 2025 2:06 UTC
1 point
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on: August ’25 EA Newsletter Poll: I’d be doing less good if I hadn’t heard of EA.
I’d be doing less good with my life if I hadn’t heard of effective altruism
The only thing I think EA has actually done counterfactually for me is encourage me to cut out eggs from my diet. I’m pretty confident that everything else I could have gotten from non-EA sources; a class my freshman year taught by somebody who afaik isn’t an EA but had independently come to agree with a lot of the principles was pretty impactful on my life since it led to me changing my major.
Edit: Oh and I’ve won small-ish amounts of money in random Metaculus contests, which I probably heard about through EA?

Benjamin M. 21 Jul 2025 3:59 UTC
11 points
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on: Benjamin M.’s Quick takes
I wrote up something for my personal blog about my relationship with effective altruism. It’s intended for a non-EA audience—at this point my blog subscribers are mostly friends and family—so I didn’t think it was worth cross posting as I spend a lot of time trying to explain what effective altruism is exactly, but some people might still be interested. My blog mostly is about books and whatnot, not effective altruism, but if I do write some more detailed stuff on effective altruism I will try to post it to the forum also.

Benjamin M. 10 May 2025 11:54 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Looking for for evidence of AI impacts in the age structure of occupations: Nothing yet
I think this is a good analysis and I agree with your conclusions, but I have one minor point:
If younger people are disproportionately not taking jobs that are more exposed to AI, there are two possibilities:
1. They can’t get the jobs because firms are using AI instead.
2. They don’t try to enter those fields because they expect that there will be decreased demand due to AI.
Your claim seems to be that a decrease would be due to point 1, but I think it could be equally well due to point 2. Anecdotally, people who are interested in translation and interpretation do tend to think seriously about whether there will be declining demand due to computer systems, so I think point 2 would be plausible were we to see an effect. I might also want to compare the proportion of young workers in AI affected occupations to those in AI-proof occupations (physical labor? heavily licensed industries?) over time, to make sure that any effects aren’t due to overall changes in how easy it is for young people to enter the labor force. But this is really interesting and my comments are mostly moot since we aren’t seeing an effect in the main data.

Benjamin M. 2 May 2025 2:18 UTC
12 points
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on: Community Polls for the Community
There exists a cause which ought to receive >20% of the EA community’s resources but currently receives little attention
Possible candidates:
- We’re severely underrating tractability and importance (specifically in terms of sentience) for wild animals
- We’re severely underrating neglectedness (and maybe some other criteria?) for improving data collection in LMICs
- We’re severely underrating tractability and neglectedness for some category of political interventions
- Something’s very off in our model of AI ethics (in the general sense, including AI welfare)
- We’re severely underrating tractability of nuclear security-adjacent topics
- There’s something wrong with the usual EA causes that makes them ineffective, so we get left with more normal causes
- We have factually wrong beliefs about the outcome of some sort of process of major political change (communism? anarchism? world government?)
  None of these strike me as super likely, but combining them all you still get an okay chance.

Benjamin M. 1 May 2025 0:28 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 0
on: Debate: should EA avoid using AI art outside of research?
Should EA avoid using AI art for non-research purposes?
I’m unconvinced by the arguments for first-order harms (environment, copyright) being sufficiently big, but I think it’s worthwhile to send a signal that EA is anti-giving-AI-too-much-power. Also I think it’s mostly mediocre, but I’m only a mild agree vote because it’s not really something worth policing. Maybe this is what people mean by disagree reacting the post itself?

Benjamin M. 29 Apr 2025 11:52 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benjamin M.’s comment on: Three polls: on timelines and cause prio
Hmm it seems like the Metaculus poll linked is actually on a random selection of benchmarks being arbitrarily defined as a weakly general intelligence. If I have to go with the poll resolution, I think there’s a much greater chance (not going to look into how difficult the Atari game thing would be yet, so not sure how much greater).

Benjamin M. 28 Apr 2025 18:01 UTC
1 point
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on: Three polls: on timelines and cause prio
Bioweapons are an existential risk
I don’t buy the Parfitian argument, so I’m not sure what a binary yes-no about existential risk would mean to me.

Benjamin M. 28 Apr 2025 17:57 UTC
1 point
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on: Three polls: on timelines and cause prio
AGI by 2028 is more likely than not
I agree with a bunch of the standard arguments against this, but I’ll throw in two more that I haven’t seen fleshed out as much:
1. The intuitive definition of AGI includes some physical capabilities (and even ones that nominally exclude physical capabilities probably necessitate some), and we seem really far behind on where I would expect AI systems to be in manipulating physical objects.
2. AIs make errors in systematically different ways than humans, and often have major vulnerabilities. This means we’ll probably want AI that works with humans in every step, and so will want more specialized AI. I don’t really buy some arguments that I’ve seen against this but I don’t know enough to have a super confident rebuttal.

Benjamin M. 12 Apr 2025 19:33 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes
Cats’ economic growth potential likely has a heavy-tailed distribution, because how else would cats knock things off shelves with their tail. As such, Open Philanthropy needs to be aware that some cats, like Tama, make much better mascots than other cats. One option would be to follow a hits-based strategy: give a bunch of areas cat mascots, and see which ones do the best. However, given the presence of animal welfare in the EA movement, hitting cats is likely to attract controversy. A better strategy would be to identify cats that already have proven economic growth potential and relocate them to areas most in need of economic growth. Tama makes up 0.00000255995% of Japan’s nominal GDP (or something thereabouts, I’m assuming all Tama-related benefits to GDP occurred in the year 2020). If these benefits had occurred in North Korea, they would be 0.00086320506% of nominal GDP or thereabouts. North Korea is also poorer, so adding more money to its economy goes further. Japan and North Korea are near each other, so transporting Tama to North Korea would be extremely cheap. Assuming Tama’s benefits are the same each year and are independent of location (which seems reasonable, I asked ChatGPT for an image of Tama in North Korea and it is still cute), catnapping Tama would be highly effective. One concern is that there might be downside risk, because people morally disapprove of kidnapping cats. On the other hand, people expressing moral disapproval of kidnapping cats are probably more likely to respect animal’s boundaries by not eating meat, thus making this an intervention that spans cause areas. In conclusion: EA is solved, all we have to do is kidnap some cats.

Benjamin M. 26 Mar 2025 12:32 UTC
3 points
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on: EA Survey 2024: How People Get Involved in EA
It seems like, from the chart in the appendix, that more active outreach sources produce higher-engagement EAs. Is this actually true, or does it reflect a confounder (such as age)? If true, it seems very surprising; I would have expected that people who sought out EA on their own would be the most engaged, because they want something from EA specifically. Maybe this has something to do with how engagement was measured (i.e. it seems high on sources that active outreach tries to get people to do, like contact with the EA community, rather than EA-endorsed behaviors like charitable donations)