CB🔸

Karma: 1,029

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🔸May 5, 2025, 10:33 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Ethan Spencer’s comment on: Insects Are Not Moderately Important
You’re able to formulate your moral view clearly, which I appreciate.
However, what I have trouble with is understanding the precise quality that makes humans so special that morality should overwhelmingly be focused on them. This makes sense intuitively (we’re surrounded by humans, so we know them well). But for me, the morally most important thing about humans is their ability to feel positive and negative emotions (happiness, suffering), which is not exclusive to our species.
The question about the special trait that makes humans special has been discussed at length, but I don’t have a single resource in mind. I think this has been addressed by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation iirc. His AI can probably express these views : https://www.petersinger.ai/

CB🔸May 1, 2025, 7:50 AM
2 points
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in reply to: tylermjohn’s comment on: EA Funds and CEA are merging
Yes, that’s a good thing. Thanks a lot for your work!

CB🔸Apr 29, 2025, 7:35 AM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Poll: Should people with more forum karma have more powerful votes?
Vote power should scale with karma
I find the content on the Forum exceptionally good when compared to all other online spaces I’ve been to. I don’t know what share the karma votes played in that, but I tend to assume it contributed.

CB🔸Apr 25, 2025, 7:14 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Ethan Spencer’s comment on: Insects Are Not Moderately Important
Regarding moral intuitions, I agree that it’s hard to feel concern for insects, from a gut level. However, it’s entirely possible that we react more easily to factors such as size, numbers and proximity.
On that topic, I suggest reading this excellent post, where the author addresses the mismatch between our gut reaction and the available evidence : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2RdYDcwrnvdCn2SbK/the-case-for-insect-consciousness

CB🔸Apr 24, 2025, 7:44 AM
4 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Insects Are Not Moderately Important
How did you come to these numbers for the P-sentience ? Why not between 1 in 10 and 1 in 100,000,000,000,000 ?
My personal feeling, while reading these kind of numbers, is that they seem conveniently in the ballpark of ‘wide enough that I recognize I am not really sure about what is causing sentience, but low enough that I don’t have anything to do about it’. Maybe this is not how you came up with them, but this is what I would come up with I had to justify not working on the topic.
I understand that it’s possible that insects may have a lower ability to feel suffering, but I don’t see how we can be confident enough to find it unlikely that they are morally relevant.

CB🔸Apr 23, 2025, 3:54 AM
4 points
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on: Mechanisms Behind Breast Cancer Cell Dormancy and Their Subsequent Wakefulness and Metastasis
This is very technical and specific. I have trouble understanding why this has been posted on the EA forum ?

CB🔸Apr 8, 2025, 7:06 AM
4 points
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on: AI for Animals 2025 Bay Area Retrospective
So great to see progress on this topic! Thanks for your inspiring work.

CB🔸Apr 8, 2025, 7:01 AM
12 points
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in reply to: William_MacAskill’s comment on: William_MacAskill’s Shortform
Yes—I once sent a email of appreciation to them since, well, it’s so good they are donating so much! That’s truly altruistic :D
Their willingness to mostly defer to expert really is praiseworthy !
They are among the most impactful people in the world—so I really am grateful that they do what they do !

CB🔸Mar 30, 2025, 5:43 PM
4 points
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on: Should There Be Insect Farming In The UK? (Deadline April 1st)
This is an impactful opportunity, worth dedicating a little amount of time!

CB🔸Mar 29, 2025, 7:53 AM
4 points
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on: How should we adapt animal advocacy to near-term AGI?
Fantastic post, very clear. This is a very important topic.

CB🔸Mar 26, 2025, 5:41 PM
12 points
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in reply to: Carolina Galvani - Sinergia Animal’s comment on: Sinergia (ACE Top Charity) Makes False Claims About Helping Millions of Animals
Thank you for this comment. While I initially found the analysis of Vetted Causes plausible and worth addressing, your comments (and ACE) made me update positively in your favor. They were very clear and constructive. I changed my mind on this topic.
I am now concerned that Vetted Causes 1/ Continues to make strong claims suggesting ill-intent, when this can be explained by honest mistakes from their or Sinergia’s part 2/ Is not trying to discuss these matters with the charity beforehand, which would save a lot of time and reputational harm to everyone (including us readers who have to wait days before getting the position of both sides). This doesn’t look good.

Note: I think you got some downvotes on this comment because you reused the same text four times in this comment thread. This is probably not good for readability. I think next time you can just make this one comment and link to it elsewhere.

CB🔸Mar 23, 2025, 8:37 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Jess Binksmith’s comment on: 80,000 Hours is shifting its strategic approach to focus more on AGI
Great! Good to know.

CB🔸Mar 21, 2025, 4:45 PM
11 points
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in reply to: Luisa_Rodriguez’s comment on: 80,000 Hours is shifting its strategic approach to focus more on AGI
On a personal level, I’ve really loved covering topics like invertebrate welfare, global health, and wild animal suffering, and I’m very sad we won’t be able to do as much of it.
There’s something I’d like to understand here. Most of the individuals that an AGI will affect will be animals, including invertebrates and wild animals. This is because they are very numerous, even if one were to grant them a lower moral value (although artificial sentience could be up there too). AI is already being used to make factory farming more efficient (the AI for Animals newsletter is more complete about that).

Is this an element you considered?

Some people in AI safety seem to consider only humans in the equation, while some assume that an aligned AI will, by default, treat them correctly. Conversely, some people push for an aligned AI that takes into account all sentient beings (see the recent AI for animals conference).

I’d like to know what will be 80k’s position on that topic? (if this is public information)

CB🔸Mar 17, 2025, 7:55 PM
2 points
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on: Discussion Thread: Existential Choices Debate Week
I find it very difficult to determine whether the future will be net-negative or net-positive (when considering humans, factory-farmed animals, wild animals, and possibly artificial sentience).
This makes it very hard to know whether work on extinction reduction is likely to be positive or not.
I prefer to work on things that aim to move the sign towards “net-positive”.

CB🔸Feb 22, 2025, 10:42 AM
7 points
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on: Ditching what we are good at: A change of course for Anima International in France
I followed the whole process and still I am super impressed by the whole approach!
Very few orgs go through the process of looking at everything that can be done and choosing the best opportunity. Especially with suffering reduction as the main goal. I’d love it if more orgs were able to do that.
Excellent post.

CB🔸Feb 20, 2025, 10:28 AM
16 points
15 ∶ 1
on: Sinergia (ACE Top Charity) Makes False Claims About Helping Millions of Animals
Very interesting.

I’d prefer if you pasted the post’s content directly into the forum so I could avoid an unnecessary click (plus, the post isn’t that long).

However, the post makes compelling arguments, and at least based on your data, it seems Sinergia makes overblown claims. Worth digging into.
I’d love to see how ACE and Sinergia respond to this.

CB🔸Feb 4, 2025, 6:22 AM
2 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jamie E’s comment on: Insecticide-treated nets significantly harm mosquitoes, but one can easily offset this?
Really? I haven’t seen that.
I’ve seen rapid joke comments about the killing of mosquitoes, but it’s pretty rare that people talk about the suffering caused by insecticides—especially in an attempt to quantify and compare seriously.
If anybody else has done a serious analysis, I’d be interested. But I don’t expect much more depth than arguments similar to “these AI safety people believe in terminator sci-fi scenarios, how silly”.

CB🔸Feb 3, 2025, 7:00 PM
5 points
5 ∶ 3
on: Insecticide-treated nets significantly harm mosquitoes, but one can easily offset this?
Thanks for writing this.
This is an important consideration that almost nobody has talked about (hence my comment that flagged the topic).
Despite the uncertainty, this might well change completely the expected value of bednets, if they are not accompanied with some actions such as donations to offset the negative effects.

CB🔸Jan 16, 2025, 2:22 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Cost-effectiveness of paying farmers to use more humane pesticides to decrease the suffering of wild insects
That’s close to my conclusion as well, indeed.

CB🔸Jan 15, 2025, 9:10 PM
5 points
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on: Cost-effectiveness of paying farmers to use more humane pesticides to decrease the suffering of wild insects
Thanks a lot for this analysis of a very neglected topic. It sounds like a promising way to reduce suffering without changing population dynamics that much.
I looked at the research by WAI a few years back, and I was curious to know more because it seemed really interesting, so it’s good to know they’re still working on it.
By the way, at some point, I wondered if the insecticide-soaked bednets used by the Against Malaria Foundation were causing a lot of animal suffering.
I checked, and if I understand correctly, they are using pyrethroid^[1], which is among the fastest-to-kill insecticides. So it seems comparatively ok.
1. ^
  They’re using “PBO LLINs that are a newer type of net incorporating piperonyl butoxide (PBO) alongside the pyrethroid insecticide used in other LLINs”.
What links here?
- Insecticide-treated nets significantly harm mosquitoes, but one can easily offset this? by Vasco Grilo🔸 (Feb 3, 2025, 6:03 PM; 29 points)