CB🔸

Karma: 1,210

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🔸 2 Mar 2026 8:49 UTC
10 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Don’t scale up your lifestyle
Completely agree! We get used to changes in our lifestyle so fast. Our brain tends to take a ton of stuff for granted.

I know that if I buy a large apartment or a fancy car, I’ll get used to it in a few weeks. So why bother ? Donating it seems the right choice.

CB🔸 15 Feb 2026 7:43 UTC
5 points
2 ∶ 0
on: What is Love ft. Claude & VascoBot
I love this, what a fun read ❤️
And the opinion of the bot on Vasco is quite wholesome as well

CB🔸 14 Jan 2026 8:53 UTC
4 points
4 ∶ 1
on: EA is underfunding animal advocacy according to our own preferences
Agreed, I’m always surprised by these low donations numbers.
I keep in mind that EA is one of the movements that helps animals the most in the world, especially farmed and wild animals, which are so important. This is great and much, much more better than the average.
But given that animals are so numerous and often live in terrible conditions, there still is be an important imbalance.
I see no rational reason to spend only 7% of donations on the vast majority of individuals in the world.

CB🔸 1 Jan 2026 19:17 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Pato’s comment on: You can just leave EA
Great comment, thanks !

CB🔸 22 Dec 2025 7:33 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: My friend is in jail, and the world is our playground
Thanks is for sharing! It’s always good to be reminded that the people we can see on national television doing impressive stuff can just be kind of normal people who tried long enough.

CB🔸 22 Dec 2025 7:27 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: How I Attempted to Measure the Impact of My Japan Nonprofit’s Youth Suicide Prevention Program
Thanks for the analysis, I really like the approach and transparency. This is better that what the vast majority of the charities in France ever attempted.
For reference, regarding the cost effectiveness, can you share what that means compared to Givewell charities ? These are the ones I’m familiar with.
I’m also surprised by the cost-effectiveness threshold of the WHO for high efficiency (one DALY per GDP per capita spent). Does that mean that spending the nations’s entire GDP to increase life expectancy by one year (and only for this year) would be considered cost effective by the WHO ?

CB🔸 24 Nov 2025 8:17 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Caring about Bugs Isn’t Weird
Great post ! This makes sense.

CB🔸 15 Nov 2025 7:49 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 1
on: If wild animal welfare is intractable, everything is intractable.
Great post ! Thanks for highlighting these concerns.
If the impact on animals, wild and farmed wasn’t so uncertain and likely important, I’d probably be working on AI safety and would still be donating a bit to Givewell charities.
But right now, it seems less risky for me to donate farmed animals, at least to welfare reforms with much less impact on wild animals, like cage free campaigns.
More money to research on the wild animal field is also super important. Wild Animal Initiative seems to do very relevant work to remove some of the uncertainties.

CB🔸 12 Nov 2025 14:15 UTC
10 points
3 ∶ 0
on: The End of Vetted Causes
I think this is for the best.
I appreciated what you tried initially, because it is important to have external reviews. And I upvoted you. Some of your points were valid and taken into account.
But I have been very unimpressed and disappointed with the way you handled things. Huw summed it well. Your approach was extremely adversarial and you made huge public accusations based on debatable evidence that could have been clarified with a call in many cases.
As such, it became very hard to trust you.
Blaming EA practices, as you are doing, is worrying. It sounds like you are pushing mistakes on others. But getting so many downvotes on the forum is rare. And you wouldn’t have gotten them with a different, more measured approach.
Hopefully you learn and improve from the experience.

CB🔸 12 Nov 2025 8:55 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JamesÖz 🔸’s comment on: Are we wrong to stop factory farms?
Fantastic answer, very thoughtful and clear. Thanks!

CB🔸 10 Nov 2025 8:17 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Protein Problem
Good post!
I agree that asking people to give up on beef is a very risky move, since it can lead them pretty easily to switch to chicken and salmon which are causing far, far more suffering.

CB🔸 27 Oct 2025 10:14 UTC
9 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
Thanks, I understand better the context and where you’re coming from. The stylé is easier for me to read and I appreciate that.
I won’t have much more time for this conversation, but just two points:
This is precisely why I don’t like EA both abandoning global poverty as a cause area
Is this actually true? To me global poverty was still number one in terms of donations, Give well is doing great, and most of the charity entrepreneurship charities are on this topic.
Can you imagine a worse corruption, a worse twisting of this than to allow talk about why Black people are more genetically suited to slavery than white people, or how Europe did Africa a favour by colonizing it, or how Western countries should embrace white nationalism?
Oh, yes, that would be awful. But I’d expect that virtually everybody in the EA forum would be against that.
And so far, in the examples you’ve given, you don’t show that even a sizeable minority of people would agree with these claims. For instance, for Manifold, you pointed to the fact that some EAs work with a forecasting organisation from the rationalist community who did a conference that invited many speakers to speak on forecasting and some of these speakers previously wrote some racist stuff on a topic unrelated to the conference (and even then that lead to quite a debate).
My understanding might be inaccurate, of course, but that’s such a long chain that I would consider this as quite far from a prevalent issue which currently has large negative consequences.

CB🔸 26 Oct 2025 12:49 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
Thanks for the answer; it explains things better for me.
I’ll just point out that another element that bugged me about the post was the lack of balance. It felt that things were made with an attitude that tries to judge everything in a negative light, which doesn’t make it trustworthy in my opinion.
Two examples:
The key context for that comment is that an extremely racist email by the philosopher Nick Bostrom was published that used the N word and said Black people are stupid
The email was indeed racist, but Nick Bostrom said this in an email that was 26 years old, for which he apologised since (the apology itself may be discussed, but this is still important context missing).
The commenter responded harshly against CEA’s statement and argued a point of view that, in context, reads as the view that Black people have less moral value than white people.
The comment literally states the opposite, and I did provide quotes. It really feels like you are trying to interpret things uncharitably.
So far, I feel like the examples provided are mostly debatable. I’d expect more convincing stuff before concluding there is a deep systemic issue to fix.
The CEA’s former head of communications’ quote is more relevant evidence, I must admit, though I don’t know how widespread or accurate their perception is (it doesn’t really match what I’ve seen).
I’d also appreciate some balance by highlighting all the positive elements EA brings to the table, such as literally saving the lives of thousands of Black people in Africa.
What links here?
- Sharmake's comment on Yarrow’s Quick takes by Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 (26 Oct 2025 14:54 UTC; 14 points)

CB🔸 26 Oct 2025 11:00 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
I think the issue is that, from my standpoint, there is a combination of harsh language, many broad claims about EA and LessWrong, which are both very negative and vague, and a lack of specific evidence in the text.
I expect few people here to be swayed by this kind of communication, since you may simply be overreacting and having an extremely low threshold to use terms like “racism”. It’s the discourse I tend to see on Twitter.
As an example of what I’d call an overreaction, when you say that someone did something “unbelievably foolish and unbelievably morally wrong,” I am thinking of very bad stuff, like doing fraud with charity money.
I am not thinking about a comment where someone said that “I value people approximately equally in impact estimates” (instead of “absolutely equally”). The lack of evidence means I can’t base myself on the commenter’s specific intentions.
What links here?
- Sharmake's comment on Yarrow’s Quick takes by Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 (26 Oct 2025 14:54 UTC; 14 points)

CB🔸 26 Oct 2025 7:19 UTC
15 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
A possible explanation for why this post is heavily downvoted:
- It makes serious, inflammatory, accusative, broad claims in a way that does not promote civil discussion
- It rarely cites specific examples and facts that would serve to justify these claims
  - You linked to an article by Reflective Altruism, but I think it would have been beneficial to put links to specific examples directly in your text.
- Two of the specific examples you use do not seem to be presented accurately:
About the post about genetically editing Africans to overcome poverty: “That post can receive a significant amount of approval and defense from people in EA. [...] Effective altruism as a movement probably deserves to fail for that, if it can’t correct it”
You’re talking about that post. However, you’re failing to mention that it currently has negative karma and twice as much disagreement as agreement. If anything, it is representative of something that EA (as a whole) does not support.
“When the CEA published a brief statement that affirmed the equality of Black people in response to the publication of a racist email by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, the most upvoted comment was from a prominent rationalist that started, ‘I feel really quite bad about this post,’ and argued at length that universal human equality is not a tenet of effective altruism. This is unbelievably foolish and unbelievably morally wrong.”
Your claim implies that the commenter said that because of racist reasons. However, they say in that very comment that “I value people approximately equally in impact estimates because it looks like the relative moral patienthood of different people, and the basic cognitive makeup of people, does not seem to differ much between different populations, not because I have a foundational philosophical commitment to impartiality.” And much of their disagreement centred on the form of the statement.
Why did you not specify that in your post?
What links here?
- Sharmake's comment on Yarrow’s Quick takes by Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 (26 Oct 2025 14:54 UTC; 14 points)

CB🔸 21 Sep 2025 19:12 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Karma bias
Hi and welcome!
I personally disagree with the proposal because karma allows readers to quickly see what others have found valuable, and hover to the highest value sections immediately. Reading everything to make your own opinion would be super long.
A quick suggestion to improve the post, btw: I think you can cut the section on bugs in your introduction so it’s quicker to read and also explain the rationale behind your proposal (why you think the karma system exists in the first place, what issues your solutions would fix and the problems you anticipate, etc).
Oh, and congrats on taking the 10% pledge!

CB🔸 7 Sep 2025 8:24 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Rejected from all the “EA” Jobs you applied for? - What to do now?
Great post! This is good advice. Donating while building skills and volunteering still allows to have tons of impact.
The graph represents well the career path I followed:
- Not being skilled enough to land an EA job
- Taking the 10% pledge while at my current job
- Volunteering on EA projects for 3-4 years and getting more skilled
- Getting into contact with charities while volunteering and getting an offer to work for several months
- Later launching a charity
I think that’s a good approach by default!

CB🔸 4 Sep 2025 6:41 UTC
15 points
3 ∶ 1
on: What failure looks like for animals
Thanks for the list, this is an important topic.
I’d just like to point out that life in the wild might be net negative and contain more suffering than happiness (due to a majority of beings dying closely after birth from hunger and predation). We need more research but that sounds more likely than not—as your point 9 suggests.
In that case, item number 1 on your list might be a better scenario than what is currently happening, and I am not sure we should spend time fighting against it.
But the rest is risky, yes.

CB🔸 29 Aug 2025 15:14 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Not stepping on bugs
Excellent questions!
Personally, I am not really sure what to do on this topic until we have a very good understanding of wild animal welfare (and how what we do isn’t swamped by concerns about population dynamics).

I try to do some things. Not walking on them when I spot them. Mercy kill insects that seem like they are in pain. Letting flies get outside when a window traps them. I personally kill spiders (trying to be as quick as possible) since they kill other insects very slowly and painfully.

Feeling guilty but uncertain since we don’t have good data isn’t super useful. I think supporting organisations that work on welfare, such as the Arthropodia Foundation, or research, such as the Wild Animal Initiative, is likely to have a significantly higher impact.

CB🔸 26 Aug 2025 7:10 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Most of the World Is an Adorably Suffering, Debatably Conscious Baby
Very well written, thanks for sharing the experience and perspective!