Amazing website! This does fill a need; now I have a simple, single-link resource to share with other animal activists/EAs/etc with whom I’d like to convey the importance of wild animal suffering.
Damin Curtis
“Don’t worry too much about overlap. Chances are there is demand for many organizations doing the same thing or that you’ll fill a slightly different niche than the original organization.”
I think this is good advice. There’s a lot of (justified) focus on neglectedness in EA, but this is often confused with one-of-a-kind-ness, when in reality there can be multiple organizations providing the same service and it is still neglected/in short supply. EAs who want to help can found new projects that are basically just using a pre-existing template in another context/niche.
Thanks for sharing, I definitely have the same feeling. Especially on the “but I can’t code” bit. I’m gonna read through that Blue Dot course curriculum, it seems like a good step for people in this stage of thinking.
Very cool, thanks for making this! Where does the data come from? How is it decided which orgs are included?
Yeah I say keep doing this, once a month tops/once a quarter minimum :)
Awesome work, Dustin! So glad that this exists.
This brought tears to my eyes, thank you for posting. The Yad Vashem Museum is so beautiful and heavy. Looking for common denominators among the exceptional few who became rescuers seems like a high potential value pursuit for EA.
Wow! How exciting. Thanks for the update!
Nice! These kinds of solutions often seem the most effective and neglected, almost by default. Excited to see where this goes!
I do this all the time when I realize I’m not gonna get a full night’s sleep, so I just say “screw it, might as well keep staying up”. This is completely irrational of me and this post is a welcome reminder that 5 hrs of sleep is still much better than 4!
Super glad to see this. Demonstrating how EA fits into different schools of islamic thought does sound like a huge undertaking, but hopefully one with important and scaling returns. I would be very interested to know more about EA uptake rates in different (islamic) national contexts, like growth of EA Malaysia vs any efforts to bring EA to gulf countries.
Is there a central group, slack, or task force thinking about/working on bringing EA to muslims and vice versa? Thanks for writing up this post!
I’m so glad you made this post.
This is so exciting, I can’t wait to try it! Big congrats & thanks to all the researchers, advocates, funders, etc who got this done. Monumental.
This was a super motivating post. I saved many bits & pieces in a separate google keep note to look back on as I apply. I especially needed to hear the stuff about getting less attached to each application and needing to have a numbers-game mindset. Thank you for writing such a great piece!
Thanks for this, lab safety deserves so much attention and zooming in on regional contexts might be really high impact.
“Establish a non-punitive accident reporting system” seems really important, and very interesting because getting those incentives right seems difficult (punishing malpractice vs incentiving hiding issues from authorities). But it’s probably better to air on the side of not discouraging reporting!
Drew is a personal friend of mine, as is a nonlinear employee not mentioned in this post, so I am saddened to read this. I am waiting to see Nonlinear’s response.
Thanks for your comment & questions! These are great questions for further research. I don’t know enough to comment on the first question. But as for the second, we’re lucky that right now, the advanced chip supply chain has multiple tight bottlenecks, and is largely controlled by US-allied advanced democracies (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Netherlands, UK, US, etc). This is part of why the US was able to effectively cut off China’s access to obtaining the most advanced chips. So there is a window of opportunity, where the most important countries could agree to require their companies to implement this framework, and require certain buyers to comply with the framework as well. Countries generally can require their companies to manufacture a certain way, and can also set import/export restrictions on chips to ensure transactions are compliant.
I agree that increasing compensation to a happy price might be better than relying on altruism, and that selecting for altruistic individuals might mean selecting for those with high opportunity costs.
However, I don’t like the language or sentiment behind calling non-EAs “normies” especially in a context like this. I think both the nomenclature and the blanket sentiment is bad epistemics, bad for the EA brand, and potential evidence of a problematic worldview.
Very interesting write-up, thank you for it.
As pointed out in an earlier comment, raising the compensation for challenge trials and/or seeking out participants with lower ‘willing participation price’ seems promising as a way to get enough participants.
I would be interested to see an analysis on the “donation equivalent” of participation.
E.G. if it would cost 10k to pay a willing participant, and an EA were willing to do it for free for social good, is this the “equivalent” of a 10k donation to an effective health cause? If not, approximately how much would it be worth? Putting a number on this would be interesting, and could help individuals decide whether to participate (comparing to their opportunity costs, etc).
Heck, maybe if we had a number, individuals who track donations could even log challenge participation as a number amount towards their donation goal (e.g. for those who donate 10% of their incomes), though that’s probably a whole different conversation.
“None of this progress was inevitable. It was mostly the result of sustained and focused advocacy, much of it done and funded by all of you.”
This is so important to remember. Unlike progress in tech, economic growth, etc, which often feel like the inevitable trends of progress (sometimes our efforts even focus on figuring out ways to slow progress, like in AI), animal welfare runs the risk of falling by the wayside. It’s very important for us to be proactive and not take any change for granted. Most (all?) of these corporate pledges were due to hard-fought, strategic pressure from effective animal advocacy groups.