Kasey Markel

Karma: 95

Kasey Markel 31 Aug 2026 19:57 UTC
1 point
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on: Charity Entrepreneurship’s 2020 research plans
I recently wrote a biofortification related post, and realized it was probably worth looking through the forum to see what else the community has done in that space.

To my surprise, this was the only other hit—“running an information campaign on biofortification” as a promising idea.

Did you ever run that campaign, or is there any writeup of why you thought it was promising, results, etc? I’m realizing this may be a much more neglected area than I had thought. I think most EAs are familiar with at least golden rice, thus the surprise that nobody seems to have written about it (or at least not using the widely-used technical term).

Is mild lifelong acne really worse than stunted growth?

Kasey Markel27 Aug 2026 22:54 UTC

86 points

0 comments9 min readEA link

Kasey Markel 7 Aug 2026 0:08 UTC
4 points
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on: Should we avoid using AI images in activism?
AI companies are not transparent enough about the environmental cost of generating images, so it is possible that I should stop using these tools.
I wouldn’t worry much about this, those costs on a per-user basis are incredibly low, almost certainly much lower than other things you won’t worry about. Andy Masley is a great source on the topic: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about

That said, many (most?) parts of society have a strong anti-AI preference, and strategically it doesn’t make sense to anger your audience.

I think it is worth separating “don’t do this because it’s morally wrong” from “don’t do this because it’s not effective for winning hearts and minds”.

Kasey Markel 25 Oct 2023 0:10 UTC
10 points
2 ∶ 2
on: Go Mobilize? Lessons from GM Protests for Pausing AI
Interesting post, certainly an interesting comparison and an existence proof that technology that’s somewhat difficult to create but trivial to distribute and reproduce can be regulated to oblivion in large sections of the world for decades.

A point conspicuous by its absence: the overregulation of GM crops was (and remains) a mistake, or at the least is nearly universally agreed to be so by the people with the most technical knowledge (e.g. people with PhDs in plant biology).

I understand whether it was wise to grossly curb deployment of GM crops was not the point of the post, merely whether it was politically feasible starting with a relatively small contingent of protesters. I’m still miffed that the anti-science and overall almost certainly negative-EV-ness of the GM overregulation wasn’t mentioned, especially given quotes like “This coincided with key ‘trigger events’ like Mad Cow Disease and the arrival of GM crops in March 1996” which would suggest a causal connection between the two.