Thanks for this very interesting article.
One quick suggestion: assuming that 100% of distributed cups are used seems quite aggressive to me. Using a 7.5 year average life I think suggests you are implicitly selecting on very enthusiastic adopters; I would imagine a lot are distributed and then discarded.
To be honest it sounds like he doesn’t know what the phrase ‘death cult’ means.
Thanks for sharing! Could we see the full time series on a daily frequency over the whole interval? This would help us see if the effect is a true annual heartbeat, or if there are smaller spikes on July 1st and October 1st as well.
My first guess: could this be related to regulatory balance sheet constraints for companies with a offset fiscal year?
Just as our ancestors experienced before us, we face the prospect of losing the world we know in exchange for material progress and prosperity.
Your ancestors who adopted agriculture did so because they thought that they and their children would get to eat the bread, not that they were sowing the seeds of their own destruction. If they had known that planting crops would lead to invasion and replacement they likely would not have done it. This rather large dis-analogy makes me think your use of the word ‘just’ is a bit of a stretch here.
The article described Thiel attempting to persuade people to leave the pledge, but not that he has actually succeeded.
A lot of people seem to conflate ‘democracy’ with ‘status quo institutions and center-left parties’, but in many cases these are deeply illiberal and undemocratic. I think you would benefit from considering institutional / center-left threats to democracy, which quite glossed over in this essay.
When I think about threats to democracy, I think of things like:
Cancelling or repeatedly delaying elections if your party is expected to lose.
Preventing opposition legislators from being allowed to vote.
None of these violations of individual rights or the ability of the people to affect policy through political change were enacted by populist or extremist parties—they were enacted by generally respected and left-wing incumbents.
Thanks for writing this up, nice post. A few quick thoughts:
The motivation of praise seems quite weak. I think a lot of people would prefer no praise and no oversight over subjecting to any degree of audit. Though I guess if you are just checking with the charities that doesn’t require subjecting the donor to anything directly.
It’s strange to me that governments don’t do more to praise high tax payers. In general their relationship with the highest tax payers seems very adversarial… yes audits make sense, but why not also be publicly grateful, give honours, invite to special events and so on? If donating to a university will have them name a building after you, maybe the government should name some bridges after its top funders.
At least until people accept that “oh the AI wrote that bit, I don’t exactly mean that” is unacceptable. If you post it, you should stand behind every word.
But after the first 50 customers, I run out of jackfruit, and the rest of the customers don’t get to try the tacos. How do you think those customers would feel about my restaurant?
Quite possibly they infer this must be the most exciting new product, feel FOMO, and arrive even earlier the next day? Restaurant behaviour is weird—see for example how long lines are seen as a sign of success rather than mispricing.
The context of this quote, which you have removed, is discussion of the reasonableness of wages for specific people with specific skills. Since neither Nate nor Eliezer’s counterfactual is earning the median global wage, your statistic seems irrelevant.
Thanks for sharing this. Do you have a sense for how cruxy your perspective is that long run replacement of humanity by AI is not a bad thing for you conclusion?
Thanks for writing this up! Despite the title I found it very informative and interesting.
It might be helpful if you could share what types of data you are able to collect, and your best-effort at producing a BOTEC for your cost-effectiveness so far.
If the phenomena you are highlighting is that Animal Welfare gets a smaller share of funding than people would prefer, it seems very strange to ‘blame’ AI messaging, since AI risk also gets a smaller share of funding that the surveys suggest would be preferred. Based on your methodology, the phenomena to explain is why does global welfare get so much more.
No-one in this thread is the target audience for the campaign. And you are clearly attacking another group’s effort right here!
Because the author’s objective is to promote animal welfare. They are jettisoning that which is unnecessary, but you need the payload.
There doesn’t seem to be anything gained by being negative about veganism though, and not doing that would seem robustly better.
Being seen as honest about the problems with veganism raises their credibility with their other recommendations. “Oh yes, we’re not like those annoying people you’ve already rejected, we have a different view”.
This feels like a very negative take on a lighthearted campaign that is trying to get across an important point. It’s important to do outreach to people who disagree with you—even people who think vegans are annoying.
If donors thought the other thing was more valuable than GiveWell, they should donate there instead, and that other group could then pay higher salaries and attract the talent.
I realise I am arguing with ChatGPT here, but you are equivocating between EA and the US government. We (EA) are preparing for having more money, and this doesn’t in any way contradict the fact that we (USG) already have a lot and we (USG) have chosen absurd kidney market restrictions.