Marcus Abramovitch 🔸

Karma: 2,779

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Aug 17, 2025, 12:14 AM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: PSA for vegan donors: GiveWell not ruling out animal-based aid
I think this is more sensible.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Aug 15, 2025, 9:04 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: PSA for vegan donors: GiveWell not ruling out animal-based aid
While I appreciate your concern for animal welfare, I think it is dubious with a large backfire risk to suggest this. Getting accidental benefits might be expedient in the short term (by accident) but at the risk of not making the requisite advances to get these benefits. I would see it as equivalent to guessing the correct answer to a math question. While it may be correct, you didn’t develop the tools to get there and thus are not likely to get good answers in the future.
As an example, I could imagine Givewell finding that charities that limit human births to be the most cost effective and this would backfire against you.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Aug 15, 2025, 8:49 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Henry Howard🔸’s comment on: Should I have been asked to stop posting about soil animals on Hive’s Slack?
I think a few decades ago, many would have similar objections to trans rights stuff. A few more decades ago and the same would be said about gay marriage. A few more ago, the same would be said about civil rights/women’s suffrage.
Even then though, in small corners of society, these ideas were discussed.
It is, of course, hard to disambiguate between the ideas that eventually became moral progress and those that died off. But it was hard to know those at the time.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Aug 14, 2025, 3:14 AM
4 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Henry Howard🔸’s comment on: Should I have been asked to stop posting about soil animals on Hive’s Slack?
I strongly disagree with this. Lots of ideas that are currently widely accepted in EA were considered absurd at the time, are considered absurd by some/much of the outside world, etc.
Many people find the idea of trans people or gay marriage to be absurd.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jul 15, 2025, 5:30 PM
18 points
7 ∶ 1
on: Is EA still ‘talent-constrained’?
I wouldn’t put much weight on the number of applicants. The job that received 1200+ applicants, I assure you that over 800 and perhaps over 10000 of them were complete nonsense/very low effort applications that have no chance. This is because you get a lot of automated fill outs/copy paste to anything/sites that do this for you.
I generally recommend against a common “come one, come all” hiring round since I think you get a lot more signal from people you know/their recommendations. I think they seem more meritocratic, but you are often filtering for the skill of resume writing.
Job searches are notoriously difficult for many reasons but I would expect to need to fill out >100 to land a job. That’s pretty common in the non-EA world. Don’t get discouraged.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jul 9, 2025, 3:04 PM
16 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Animal farming impacts soil nematodes, mites, and springtails hugely more than directly affected animals?
Despite my criticisms/thoughts below, how has no organization (RP, ACE, AWF, etc.) hired @Vasco Grilo yet? He’s published extremely detailed good quality stuff just in his spare time and with a little bit of guidance/directional thought, I think he would be a great addition to many, many organizations out there.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jul 9, 2025, 2:47 PM
10 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Society for the Protection of Insects Review
Sorry, it’s taken me so long to comment, I’ve been busy. (I’m also writing this quickly)
I am the “anonymous” funder for this review. I never asked or intended to be anonymous and generally think that anonymity has a lot of costs on the community and thus I think it should be used sparingly and only when there are great benefits.
I originally requested this review ~2.5 months ago because I had intended to make a donation to SPI that I had promised, but I had been advised not to do so due to concerns that I wasn’t being informed about. I was already talking with VettedCauses and just offhand asked him to look into them since I was busy and this was taking up a lot of my time and that I would be happy to pay for it. I didn’t ask for a full review, but I’m happy for a full review to be made of any charity.
I eventually found out about what these concerns were, found them to be minor/false and proceeded with the donation about a month and a half ago. I’m fairly happy with my decision.
I’m fairly disappointed in this review and the follow-up. I think the review didn’t engage with the charity in a way that would elicit the effectiveness of what they do, didn’t dive into any concerns people had with the charity, and generally was just lazy. Any effective review will have to talk to the charity, figure out what they do, and go beyond merely publicly available information. I think this kind of review tries to hold charities to the standard of a billion-dollar public company as opposed to a tiny charity. I saw similar patterns with other reviews, and the more these kinds of bad-faith engagement occur with charities, the less I want to trust VettedCauses.
Note that I am, of course, going to follow through on paying for the review as agreed upon but I won’t be further asking for reviews from VettedCauses .

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jul 9, 2025, 2:24 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Animal farming impacts soil nematodes, mites, and springtails hugely more than directly affected animals?
I agree that we should be thinking at the margin.
I suppose I’m saying that I think your beliefs suggest we should try to annihilate the world or try to extinguish all life.
I think hidden in a lot of your analysis is one of the following
1. Negative utilitarianism. I think this is a fine belief to hold but I think it should be stated outright.
2. An assumption that the lives of many/most/all animals is net negative by default and we need evidence that they are positive for them not to be considered net negative.
I think 2 is more likely but I think a lot of the people that think along your lines (maybe someone like Bentham’s Bulldog too), seem to assume that life is likely to be negative and I just don’t see why this assumption should be expected. We don’t really see any animals committing suicide, they clearly show desire/preference to live (they try to escape death at many costs), a lot of life for humans who we consider to usually be net positive is spent on things where we “struggle” to maintain existence and yet most people are fairly happy with their life.
I also agree that we should be highly uncertain about whether soil creatures live positive or negative lives but your analysis more or less assumes that the sign is negative and everything else follows from there.
On death, most of the life of a creature is usually not spent during it’s death. I’m happy for interventions for farmed animals to reduce pain during death (and humans too!) but I think basing a lot of calculations on this doesn’t capture most of the animal’s life.
Last, I think your analysis ignores something I consider to be extremely important and in fact, the main reason I’m (and I think others should be) vegan. Namely, a ~daily reminder that animals matter and a reduction in cognitive dissonance and the effect it has on others. I think my (and any other) individual diet’s direct harm is uncertain, has a lot of crucial considerations, etc. but, I think a lot of rationalists like to pretend they are above usual human thoughts/instincts on this matter. I discuss this more here.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 30, 2025, 2:42 AM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Welfare tech should be developed by welfare people
Strongly upvoted. I think APRI is doing this at least in the sense of developing species that feel less pain. I think this is a promising direction

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 30, 2025, 2:38 AM
11 points
2 ∶ 2
on: Animal farming impacts soil nematodes, mites, and springtails hugely more than directly affected animals?
I’m supportive of doing this kind of thinking, but I think taking your beliefs to their logical conclusion suggests we should be looking to found charities that will end all life on earth; nuclear PROLIFERATION charities, perhaps charities that seek to make and release bioweapons that will kill of small animals, insects, etc. and maybe just charities that start wildfires. Have you given much thought to this?
Also, why does everyone assume that small organisms necessarily live net negative lives?

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 9, 2025, 1:15 PM
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Karl Mechkin’s comment on: Karl Mechkin’s Quick takes
One of the problems with EA is that people are extremely nice and don’t want to tell you that either
1. They don’t like your project and/or don’t think it’s very good
2. They don’t think your project is as good as alternatives and they have limited resources.
3. They don’t care much about this cause area.
There are more but it’s very common to hear this kind of positive feedback but no commitment/further engagement. When people wish you well/luck, this is them being polite/nice and saying they aren’t interested but that sounds too mean. Furthermore, they really do wish you luck as they probably wish most people luck on their projects.
In your case, I expect it to be a mixture of the 3 perhaps, depending on the case. People are being nice to you and don’t want to crush your hopes. Furthermore, if in the EA community, few people care, as a top priority, about climate change.
This also commonly happens in the for profit world. Investors/VCs rarely say they are a no. They will usually give some excuse like it not being the right time or they aren’t in this space and such. This allows them to keep the door open to invest in the future if you defy their expectations or just not be seen as a dick/someone you don’t want to interact with to preserve their reputation or if they change their mind because someone told them the investment is good.
A good motto to go by when raising funds is “fuck yes or no” meaning if it isn’t an enthusiastic yes with clear things they want further for funding or a promise of funding, it’s a no.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 1, 2025, 9:31 PM
2 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: akash 🔸’s comment on: Matthew_Barnett’s Shortform
Right but most of this is her “pre-AI” stuff and I am saying that I don’t think “Pause AI” is very mainstream by EA standards, particularly the very inflammatory nature of the activism and the policy prescriptions are definitely not in the majority. It is in that sense that I object to Matthew calling her prominent since by the standard you are suggesting, Matthew is also prominent. He’s been in the movement for a decade and written a lot of extremely influential posts and was a well known part of Epoch for a long time and also wrote one of the most prescient posts ever.
I don’t dispute that Holly has been an active and motivated member of the EA community for a while

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 1, 2025, 7:35 PM
16 points
11 ∶ 5
in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Matthew_Barnett’s Shortform
I was going to write a comment responding but Neel basically did it for me.
The only thing I would object to is Holly being a “prominent member of the EA community”. The PauseAI/StopAI people are often treated as fringe in the EA community and the she frequently violates norms of discourse. EAs due to their norms of discourse, usually just don’t respond to her in the way she responds to others..

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 1, 2025, 4:09 PM
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason Green-Lowe’s comment on: Please Donate to CAIP (Post 1 of 3 on AI Governance)
Yes, I do recall meeting at EAG two years ago and yes, I wasn’t giving any money to AI safety back then. I don’t have any criticism because I don’t know better about what policies to support and didn’t want to add noise.
I don’t want to be too critical of CAIP here and my original comment might have come off as too harsh. I’m not a big fan of the current funding ecosystem being so private with info and reasoning being so secretive. It’s caused us harm before and I expect will cause us harm again and I expect even greater it is causing passive harm where organizations don’t improve.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸Jun 1, 2025, 12:40 AM
12 points
3 ∶ 1
on: Please Donate to CAIP (Post 1 of 3 on AI Governance)
I really wish donors would write up their reasons for/against funding things like Manifund does. It really doesn’t take long, so I don’t buy the usual “time constraints” argument, but I think the people at CAIP would waste a lot LESS time if they were told “we don’t think your work is good/meets the funding bar. These other orgs are better at it for the cost and would rather scale them up than fund your organization.” It’d waste a lot LESS grantee time. They can just add a disclaimer that this isn’t any way an abdication of their character or something.
That said, I looked at CAIP, and while you say here what you’ve accomplished, it seems hard to verify that. I searched the EA forum and the internet, and only 2 people you list in your staff have posted on the forum here, and one more has an account. I didn’t do the same for LW or AF, but I expect similar there, maybe a bit more. It’s going to be very hard to get 7 figures per year for your non-profit if you aren’t very public about what you are doing. I know that takes time, but if you aren’t advertising the work you do, people won’t know about it.
Here, in this post, you sort of just make a new account and say, “If we don’t get $1.6M soon, we are shutting down”. That’s… a lot of money. It’s hard to overstate how hard it is to make and then donate that amount of money per year. But more importantly, it’d be very weird if this worked. There needs to be a lot more constant communication and updates from organizations if they want to continue to receive funding. It begs the question, what does the “Communications Team” do? I know they are probably primarily responsible for communicating with congresspeople, but at least some of that needs to be communicating with the EA/AIS community.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 25, 2025, 6:37 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ryan Greenblatt’s comment on: The stakes of AI moral status
How soon would you expect to see extremely fast economic growth? Say >20%/year GDP growth.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 24, 2025, 4:53 AM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Anthropic is Quietly Backpedalling on its Safety Commitments
Another great post. I highly recommend this newsletter

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 24, 2025, 2:01 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Seeking an excellent pre-IPO tax law advisor
Shartsis Friese was my law firm for something similar. They were pretty competent.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 23, 2025, 9:31 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: We’re Not Advertising Enough (Post 3 of 6 on AI Governance)
This is a great post. Way too many people in EA want to be able to do remote work behind a computer and not get into the thick of things that actually change things. I agree with your marathons and smores analogy; I don’t think I agree specifically with what you called the Levels for AI work but I digress since I like the main message.
Too often, I think people make the mistake that if they are working up the stack, they are getting a lot of leverage but we need 10x the amount of people at the lower trophic levels and without those, you don’t have any leverage at all. There are few exceptions to this of course, like MATS who produce a bunch of AI safety researchers but that’s directly increasing the number of “level 0” people.

Marcus Abramovitch 🔸May 15, 2025, 8:42 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: Consider not donating under $100 to political candidates
I won’t say who it was (though they can out themselves) but someone convinced me that they do a donation strategy that I approve of. They donate to both sides to be able to lobby their congressperson on AI issues. I think this makes a lot of sense.
#changedmymind