Views expressed are my own.
lukasb
RISC at UChicago is Seeking Ideas for Improving Animal Welfare
Personally, I don’t have a problem with the title. It clearly states the central point of the post.
Thanks for writing this! It seems like you’ve gone through a lot in publishing this. I am glad you had the courage and grit to go through with it despite the backlash you faced.
I like this framing a lot. I particularly like the idea of replacing the phrase “doing good” with “helping others” and “maximization” with “prioritization.”
I understand the impulse to mention volunteering before donations and careers because people naturally connect it with doing good. But I think it would be misleading for the following reasons:
As you said, there is currently very little emphasis on volunteering in EA
In most cases, individuals can do much more good by changing their career path or donating
I think we should be as accurate as we can when communicating EA. Being inaccurate might give people the wrong idea and make the movement seem dishonest.
I help a run a university group and in that context mentioning careers first is probably best choice, because
American undergrads often want to have an impactful career, so “helping others with your career” isn’t a strange concept to them
It’s probably the most important thing for individuals to focus on
It’s what our club focuses on the most
But things might be different if you aren’t talking to undergrads.
Hm, yeah I guess my intuition is the opposite. To me, one of the central parts of effective altruism is that it’s impartial, meaning we shouldn’t put some people’s welfare over other’s.
I think in this case it’s particularly important to be impartial, because EA is a group of people that benefitted a lot from FTX, so it seems wrong for us to try to transfer the harms it is now causing onto other people.
What does TUA stand for?
[Question] How should longtermists think about eating meat?
If taking your lawyer’s advice, in this case, means being silent for 5-7 years, it seems like some people should speak openly and bear the costs.
[Question] Should local EA groups support political causes?
I agree that there is an analogy to animal suffering here, but there’s a difference in degree I think. To longtermists, the importance of future generations is many orders of magnitude higher than the importance of animal suffering is to animal welfare advocates. Therefore, I would claim, longtermists are more likely to ignore other non-longtermist considerations than animal welfare advocates would be.
For context here’s a LessWrong post talking about the Paxlovid situation.
What is the best leadership structure for (college) EA clubs?
A few people in the EA group organizers slack (6 to be exact) expressed interest in discussing this.
Here are some ideas for topics to cover:
The best overall structure (What positions should there be etc.
Should there be regular meetings among all general members/ club leaders?
What are some mistakes to avoid?
What are some things that generally work well?
How to select leaders
I envision this as an open discussion for people to share their experiences. At the end, we could compile the result of our discussion into a forum post.
Why are so many people disagreeing with this?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding bank runs, but as I understand it, they happen because
the institution that is holding other people’s money doesn’t have all that money in liquid form
they are unable to give it back if everybody tries to deposit it at once
when this happens, the institution runs out of money and many people, who didn’t withdraw their cash in time, lose all their deposits
I think the reason Richard listed #2 as a preference is that there might still be hope that FTX doesn’t run out of money in the first place and no one loses their deposits.
However, it might be FTX will run out of money either way. In that case, speeding up the bank run will lead some people to get more their money back, but only because they pick it up before other people do. In the end it’s a zero-sum game, because FTX only has a limited amount of liquid currency. If my model is correct, then there is no net benefit in speeding up the bank run.
This seems like a good idea.
I submitted the following comment:
I urge the FDA to schedule its review of Paxlovid and to make the timeline 3 weeks or less, as it did with the COVID vaccine.
1000 people are dying of COVID in the US every day. With an efficacy of 89%, Paxlovid could prevent many of these deaths. The earlier Paxlovid is approved, the more lives will be saved.
Thank you for your consideration.
I wasn’t sure what topic to put it under so I chose “Drug Industry—C0022.”
Thanks!
[Comment pointing out a minor error] Also, great post!
I’d be interested to hear what you think is going wrong with Paul’s writing style, if you want to share.
Or better yet, at Y Combinator.