CB🔸

Karma: 843

I’m living in France. Learned about EA in 2018, found that great, digged a lot into the topic. The idea of “what in the world improves well-being or causes suffering the most, and what can we do” really influenced me a whole lot—especially when mixed with meditation that allowed me to be more active in my life.

One of the most reliable thing I have found so far is helping animal charities : farmed animals are much more numerous than humans (and have much worse living conditions), and there absolutely is evidence that animal charities are getting some improvements (especially from The Humane League). I tried to donate a lot there.

Long-termism could also be important, but I think that we’ll hit energy limits before getting to an extinction event—I wrote an EA forum post for that here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wXzc75txE5hbHqYug/the-great-energy-descent-short-version-an-important-thing-ea

CB🔸 13 Nov 2024 13:00 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Basics of Handling Disagreements with People
Thank you for this article! I found it helpful and very clear.

CB🔸 8 Nov 2024 16:10 UTC
3 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Why you should allocate more of your donation budget to effective giving organisations
This is a convincing post.
I didn’t think often about doing that, but the multiplier effect seems considerable—dedicating fundraising to professional seems like a good bet.

CB🔸 8 Nov 2024 14:27 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Signaling with Small Orange Diamonds
Personally, I’ve added the diamond in my LinkedIn, Forum and local EA slack profile.

People on LinkedIn can check my description if they are curious about it.

Haven’t noticed any downside yet (although it would be hard to know).

It’s just that I feel like the culture of not showing our donations is not a good thing. It leads us to think nobody else donates, so we donate much less than we would have done otherwise. So it’s worth signaling that yes, people are donating.

CB🔸 7 Nov 2024 22:55 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Rick Holland’s comment on: AMA: Rick Holland, Fundraising expert and Director of Confident Philanthropy
Ok, it feels like the DAF and the donor didn’t have to deal with that in the past (and have limited time availability for technical elements).

I’m also asking French charities and getting some feedback since a few apparently dealt with that.

CB🔸 7 Nov 2024 0:04 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AMA: Rick Holland, Fundraising expert and Director of Confident Philanthropy
Hello !
I have a bit of a specific question: Do you know any organisation that could act as a bridge between a US donor and a French non-profit? I’m part of a French organization in such a situation. No problem if you don’t have an answer.
The US donor is donating through a DAF and wants to give to a tax-deductible US 501(c)(3) nonprofit—that would send the money to the French org.
The answers I got so far from asking around:
- One option is asking the US nonprofits I know of to receive and transfer the money.
  - However, this requires on their side to make an Equivalency Determination that certifies the US and French organisations are close enough for the money transfer, which seems a costly and heavy process (this ED is $1500, not sure about this one).
  - An org with Expenditure responsibility could apparently do this as well, but I don’t know any.
    I know a French charity which received money from large funders (ex. EA Funds), and they just had to sign a grant agreement without complicated paperwork—so maybe this is it.
- Another option is getting a fiscal sponsorship. I’ve heard that Ambitious Impact redirects towards PPF (which takes a 6% cut on the donation), there’s also NPT (3-7% cut in our case).
Which of these options seems like the best? I’d be curious to hear about your opinion.

CB🔸 29 Oct 2024 10:53 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Farmed animals may have positive lives now or in a few decades?
Thanks for the answer ! I wish more people thought about these questions.

CB🔸 28 Oct 2024 21:02 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Farmed animals may have positive lives now or in a few decades?
Thanks for the answer !

This is really interesting. Do you think that the fact cows are separated from their child, and arguably really don’t like that, would change significantly the results?

CB🔸 26 Oct 2024 9:55 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Farmed animals may have positive lives now or in a few decades?
Very interesting, thanks a lot !

Do you have any data on pigs or cows ? I know they represent a smaller number of animals, and there is less data from the welfare footprint project, but I’d be curious to know your opinion.

The calculations would also be complicated by the necessary inclusion of veal for cows, and gestation crates for pigs, since these are a necessary part of current systems and certainly bad most of the time.

But since grass-fed cows are likely to be better treated than other animals, it would be good to know if their lives are positive and can maybe provide a template for other forms of animal agriculture (although economic incentives don’t push in this direction).

CB🔸 23 Oct 2024 17:25 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Richard_Leyba_Tejada’s comment on: Successif: helping mid-career and senior professionals have impactful careers
Hi ! In the end I didn’t read about transactional analysis.

But I did try to ‘give permission’ to some people who were thinking of launching a project.

CB🔸 23 Oct 2024 10:08 UTC
2 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Three journeys for effective altruism
Not much to add, this is inspiring !

CB🔸 19 Oct 2024 16:13 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Are Organically Farmed Animals Already Living a Net-Positive Life?
This is an interesting question, and I’d really like to know the answer.

From what I got, chicken have a lot of trouble making hiérarchies when there are a lot of them (e.g. thousands) and it’s something important for them so this might be a negative element. But frankly not sure.

CB🔸 19 Oct 2024 1:35 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Isaac King’s comment on: Value lock-in is happening *now*
Yes, but transport on Earth is mostly cheap, which cancels out a lot of the natural inequalities in geography. Meanwhile, transport to Mars would be super costly.

I think a significant difference with current countries is that having an additional person on Mars would be incredibly expensive compared to living on Earth—in terms of rocket, fuel, shipping stuff from Earth, getting additional supplies, getting super high-tech materials and minerals for maintenance…

CB🔸 18 Oct 2024 15:31 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: jacquesthibs’s comment on: How much I’m paying for AI productivity software (and the future of AI use)
I tried to acquire superwhisper—but it’s only available on mac and iphone, so in the end I couldn’t use it (I’ll look into other speech to text translators)

CB🔸 18 Oct 2024 14:34 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MinusGix’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Interesting. It feel like this still requires a lot of effort to make it usable in the context of alternative proteins (plus marketing, developing incentives, fighting the opposition, etc.), but if it works, that could indeed be a good news.

CB🔸 18 Oct 2024 14:31 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Isaac King’s comment on: Value lock-in is happening *now*
When I talked about the economic incentive, I was mostly asking about what is the economic incentive long-term? What can be done in space cheaper than on Earth ?

Mining seems much more complicated than on Earth, due to lack of water, and the fact that minerals are not being very concentrated, which makes it much more expensive to extract than on Earth.

Interplanetary presence might be more plausible if there’s another space race.

CB🔸 18 Oct 2024 14:24 UTC
4 points
4 ∶ 3
in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: Multiplier Arguments are often flawed
Thanks for taking the time to expose your view clearly here, and explaining why you do not spend a lot of time on the topic (which I respect).
If I understand correctly, the difference in consideration you make between humans and animals seems to boil down to “I can talk to humans, and they can tell me that they have an inner experience, while animals cannot (same for small children)”.

While nobody disputes that, I find it weird that your conclusion is not “I’m very uncertain about other systems”, but “other systems that cannot tell me directly about their inner experience (very small children, animals) probably don’t have any relevant inner experience”. I’m not sure how you got to that conclusion. At the very least, this would justify extreme uncertainty.

Personally, I think that the fact that animals display a lot of behaviour similar to humans in similar situations should be a significant update toward thinking they have some kind of experience. For instance, a pig is screaming and trying to escape when it is castrated, just as humans would do (we have to observe behaviours).

We can probably build robots that can do the same thing, but that just means we’re good at mimicking other life forms (for instance, we can also build LLMs which tell us they are conscious, and we don’t use that to think humans are not sentient).

CB🔸 15 Oct 2024 19:06 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Isaac King’s comment on: Value lock-in is happening *now*
Regarding arguments against A City to Mars, I found the link you gave under titotal’s post pretty interesting. It indeed lowers my credence in this book. Thanks for the link.

However, despite reading the post, I still fail to understand the economics of going to space long term -beyond what SpaceX is ready to fund- since everything would be so expensive, with no significant added value compared to what we can do on Earth. But maybe I missed something here as well.

CB🔸 15 Oct 2024 15:04 UTC
8 points
5 ∶ 3
in reply to: weeatquince’s comment on: weeatquince’s Quick takes
That’s true.

However, even given these incentives, I would have expected more votes/interactions from people favouring global health—given that it is a very established field that feels instinctively good and well-known by most. Animal welfare was supposed to be the underdog here.

Moreover, there were fewer arguments favouring global health, and they felt much less convincing (personal opinion, but this felt reflected in votes).

So, although there is probably a bias to factor in, I still think that most people on the forum genuinely think animal welfare is the better choice for an additional $100m.

CB🔸 15 Oct 2024 11:25 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 2
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Explaining the discrepancies in cost effectiveness ratings: A replication and breakdown of RP’s animal welfare cost effectiveness calculations
That is probably a good idea, although the burden of proof isn’t really on me here. It’s on the proponent of using neuron count as a proxy for moral weight. But it would be interesting if they did that, indeed.

CB🔸 15 Oct 2024 11:13 UTC
2 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Should we register new charities in France/Europe?
Thanks for the post. I think it could be interesting to put a TL;DR at the beginning, to sell immediately the main benefit of doing this (that sweet 66% deduction).