Larks

Karma: 16,481

Larks 25 Oct 2025 14:41 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Retroactive Funding for Alignment
I’m not aware of anyone working on this presently. There is a lot of previous discussion of similar ideas under ‘Certificates of Impact’.

Larks 18 Oct 2025 17:45 UTC
18 points
6 ∶ 0
on: What If EA Actually Picked One Goal?
Effective altruism has become a think tank of endless debate—people arguing about which cause deserves the top spot while the world keeps burning.
This seems quite false to me? My impression is most people are busy working on their specific cause areas. Relatively little time is spent arguing for one major cause area over another. (This post, of course, fits into that category).
We need to align on one clear, shared goal—something tangible that unites the major cause areas and shows what coordinated altruism can actually do. Otherwise, this movement will slip into obscurity.
This also seems false to me. EA has not had one single object-level objective for the previous 15 years and it does not seem to have caused obscurity slippage thus far, and it’s not clear why we should expect this to change.

Larks 18 Oct 2025 3:24 UTC
5 points
2 ∶ 0
on: If We Can’t End Factory Farming, Can We Really Shape the Far Future?
I feel like you switch back and forth a bit here between causal and evidential:
- failure to end factory farming is evidence that future steering efforts will go badly
vs
- failure to end factory farming will cause future steering efforts to go badly

Larks 15 Oct 2025 15:06 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: osmarks’s comment on: Moving banks as a neglected cause area
You’re right, I had forgotten that retail customer deposits count as stable funding under the liquidity regulations.

Larks 15 Oct 2025 0:52 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: Henry Stanley 🔸’s comment on: EA needs more “rooms of one’s own”
It could be the case—but I’m not aware of much evidence to support this. Over the last hundred years we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people on sinecures and a collapse in the selectiveness—e.g. the rise of state pensions, unemployment insurance, disability insurance. There are a few successes (JK Rowling credits state benefits with allowing her to write Harry Potter, for example) but clearly a much lower rate than under the prior model.

Larks 14 Oct 2025 23:56 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 3
on: EA needs more “rooms of one’s own”
Charles Darwin spent decades at Down House, financially secure from family wealth, meticulously gathering evidence for evolution without any professional obligations. Adam Smith received a pension from the Duke of Buccleuch that let him spend nearly a decade writing The Wealth of Nations. The 1956 Dartmouth workshop that founded the field of AI was enabled by a modest Rockefeller Foundation grant that gave researchers freedom to explore.
Largely, it’s people who happen to have financial bandwidth—those with inherited wealth, tech industry windfalls, academic positions with light teaching loads, or partners who can support them. This is a privilege filter that operates invisibly. We don’t notice how much of EA’s “independent thinking” comes from people who can afford to do it.
It seems a bit strange to me to hold up family wealth and elite patronage as historically very beneficial features for allowing bandwidth for independent innovation and then complain that in EA this bandwidth is only available to those with family wealth or elite patrons.

Larks 14 Oct 2025 23:50 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 1
on: Moving banks as a neglected cause area
Presumably customer deposits are typically invested in short term government paper and reverse repos rather than corporates. I would expect this to be similar across all banks.
(Also I disagree with classifying defence companies as immoral. This is the sort of thinking that leads the west to be vulnerable to aggressive dictatorships).

Larks 4 Oct 2025 16:20 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Paul Gomberg’s comment on: EA and peasant empowerment
Here are some recent headlines from the La Via Campesina website:
La Via Campesina calls on the governments of the world, and in particular progressive governments and those of the South, to do everything in their power to end apartheid and Israel’s colonization.
Brazil: Why should we fight agribusiness?
The fight for land justice in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and across the Global South is not just a local struggle – it is a global one
International Day of Action against WTO and Free Trade Agreements
Solidarity with Palestine and the Sumud and Freedom Flotillas to break the blockade of Gaza
… among the world’s most diverse and significant gathering of representatives of small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, food chain workers, daily wage and migrant laborers in urban and rural areas, feminist and climate justice movements, advocates for social and solidarity economies and health for all, consumer groups, other service and manufacturing sector workers – is set to bring the agenda of a ‘systemic transformation’ back on the table in an emphatic way.
I really don’t see how this is not a leftist group.

Larks 1 Oct 2025 23:23 UTC
7 points
2 ∶ 2
on: EA and peasant empowerment
If the topic is literally “do EAs help peasants” then the answer is presumably yes since all x-risk related work and much global health work benefits peasants. (Some animal welfare work may harm peasants I guess). Normally EAs don’t really use the term ‘peasant’ though.
These groups in particular I have not seen discussed, but they seems to be basically anti-capitalist groups, and the broader topic of “why doesn’t institutional EA support my favoured leftist groups” is a frequently discussed one.

Larks 30 Sep 2025 23:52 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: On the Temporal and Spatial Dimensions of Long-Termism: A Decision-Making Philosophy Grounded in Lifecycle Value
However, this often occurred at the expense of the environment—effectively borrowing from the future to pay for the present, a strategy that is inherently unsustainable.
...
For instance, the World Bank’s 2016 report, *The Cost of Air Pollution*, found that the welfare losses due to air pollution exceed 6% of global GDP.
This sounds pretty sustainable to me! 6% of current GDP of total cost in order to unlock roughly 10,000% growth since the start of the industrial revolution is a great deal.

Larks 25 Sep 2025 1:02 UTC
27 points
12 ∶ 3
in reply to: Ben Stevenson’s comment on: Launching the $10,000 Existential Hope Meme Prize
This line of reasoning seems very shortsighted to me. Historically intellectual innovation, popularization and outreach have sometimes yielded extremely high returns; it can be prudent to invest rather than consuming all your seed corn immediately. It could be a bad investment, but the mere counterfactual possibility of donating to AMF doesn’t automatically discredit anything upstream.

Larks 25 Sep 2025 0:58 UTC
30 points
13 ∶ 3
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Launching the $10,000 Existential Hope Meme Prize
One hundred dollars for a single tweet is a huge reward when you compare it to the amount of effort that goes into it
This seems misleading and false?
- It is not $100 in expectation, you have to divide by the number of entrants.
- The ask is for a meme comparable to P(doom) or 1984, not for a random tweet. Tweets can express memes but the two are very different and the latter is much more valuable.
- Ideally we should expect the winning entry to take many hours of work.
  - If someone spent an entire year and managed to produce a cultural reference of similar significance to 1984 I would consider this a very well spent year.
- PR firms are typically paid much more than this.

Larks 13 Sep 2025 0:43 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Estimating the cost-effectiveness of an intervention to reduce child sexual abuse (CSA)
Thanks for sharing this!
My first reaction is that 30/20*10% = 0.15 years of avoided CSA per £100 training seems implausibly effective.

Larks 13 Sep 2025 0:38 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: My talk on AI risks at the National Conservatism conference last week
Congratulations, seems like you did a great job at this very important project!

Larks 10 Sep 2025 2:56 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Homicide Reduction—A Potential EA Cause Area?
Related: [Cause Exploration Prizes] Crime Reduction

Larks 6 Sep 2025 0:43 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 0
on: $1-a-Day Nutrition: Exploring an Ultra-Low-Cost, Shelf-Stable Approach to Global Hunger
I’d recommend talking to the Mealsquares team about their experience building a similar product.

Larks 4 Sep 2025 3:08 UTC
20 points
6 ∶ 4
on: Is Now an Unusually Good Time to Pursue Political Interventions in the UK?
Some interesting ideas, thanks for sharing.
It does seem a bit perverse to me to note that there is a new political party, with a relatively nascent policy framework and shallow bench, that nonetheless is polling as if it will win the next general election… and conclude that we should focus on building relationships with a different party.

Larks 4 Sep 2025 3:02 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Decoupling vs Contextualizing Norms
I think this is often a useful distinction to keep in mind, but it’s a mistake to regard ‘contextualisers’ as one close grouping in the same way that ‘decouplers’ are. There is only one truth, so in some sense all decouplers are the same, but depending on your political and social objectives there can be many kinds of context that one might feel have not been shown sufficient respect by a statement.

Larks 31 Aug 2025 23:39 UTC
2 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Declan McKenna 🔷’s comment on: Deco ’s Quick takes
I prefer the original FYI.

Larks 31 Aug 2025 18:20 UTC
6 points
4 ∶ 3
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: The ‘community’ tag is problematic
As a general principle I think the forum team should reject ~ all requests for additional bureaucracy.