I took Giving What We Can pledge in May 2022.
Miguel Lima Medín
European citizens’ initiative for vegan meal registered by EU Comission
Hi Steve,
I feel a contradiction in these messages:In this reply you recognize that applicants are the bottleneck, and you encourage more applicants
In your blog post Most common reasons people do not get into the program you explain that each year you get several thousand applications for an incubation program with 20-40 seats
So it seems that less than 1% of applicants will be accepted, but you still feel that applicants is the bottleneck. Please let me know if I misinterpreted some information.
Many thanks for your time answering our questions and for your great incubation program!
I work since 2003 for an automotive company. We manufacture several components for the engine and drivetrain. We also produced and donated some PPEs in the early phases of covid, as other companies in your examples, taking advantage of our advance engineering and industrial capacity.
I don’t think “EA is neglecting physical goods”. I guess EAs think physical goods are provided by the market and don’t see a competitive advantage to take care of the manufacturing. As an example, Against Malaria Foundation considered buying their bed nets locally, coming to the conclusions published here:
https://www.againstmalaria.com/NewsItem.aspx?newsitem=Where-do-we-buy-our-nets-fromThis is for the regular provision of goods in standard market conditions. If you are worried specifically in pandemic preparedness or other existential risks which may require an extremely fast escalation of production, I also see this as an area of concern. But the intervention to get better prepared should be advocacy, so the governments and companies proactively take these scenarios into account and invest in flexible equipment that let them quickly adapt the existing production capacity to PPEs or whatever might be needed. I don’t really see the value of having a few dozen/hundred of individual EAs with manufacturing skills when we will require billions of masks. They will be valuable if they are very well positioned in the chain of command of existing industrial companies and can influence their upfront decisions. A kind of earning to give and influence approach, by taking roles of high responsibility not only to donate but also to influence the decisions of companies to become more aligned to EA values. But this more of a management career path than a hands-on career path.
I’m not sure if I understood properly your exact proposal.
I find this format very useful. The Challenges and Co-founder fit sections help us to understand our personal fit for each one of the charity ideas. The three level summaries let the reader decide how much time she/he wants to spend.
A heads-up: in your Sign up: Charity Entrepreneurship Online Talk (Top ideas 2023) form you list the salt fluoridation program but it is not described in this post. I wonder if this is an error on the form or whether you missed to copy its details into this post.
You may want to update your post including a link to the court document with the conversations.
The document is linked only in a couple of the articles published in the news, but it is much easier to find if you include it in the post.
Will McAskill conversation starts on page 87. This was a very fast review from my end, I may have missed something else before page 87, if you want to be completely sure please have a second look.
https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/ro.xehDmXvHk/v0
I agree the baseline scenario is that current trends will go on.
In geology the resources availability trend (for both fossil energy and mining) follows the Hubbert’s curve. It doesn’t follow a straight line up to the infinite. After a period of going up, it follows a period of going down, once we pass the peak. The peak doesn’t mean that the resource is completely depleted, but it means that the amount we can extract this year is less than previous year.
To the date I’m not aware of any other scientific explanation better than Hubbert’s curve, and this should be our baseline.
It is more difficult to predict exactly where we are in the Hubbert’s curve for each resource and whether the peak will happen this decade, but it is a fact that it will take place.
I’m sorry to read about your personal experiences.
I didn’t know about the suicide in 2018, this is terrible ☹
I’m very concerned about the reports that misogyny is so common. I’m quite new to EA and I live in a small city without an EA circle.
affected EA circles – Next steps by men
Complaints included in this post are a call for men on these circles to react. There must be a deep reflection individually and collectively by all men.
Am I paying attention to what my female colleagues report? Am I sure I’m behaving appropriately? What can I do to make my group and my community more welcoming to women? Do I suspect of any inappropriate behavior by any male colleague? Am I telling him that it is not acceptable?
Code of conduct
I’m fully onboard with the need for a code of conduct. Your suggestions make sense to me.
Abuse of power
This is a sensitive and important topic. I’m not sure how this can be incorporated in the code of conduct or what other measures can be taken but given the situations you report it must be addressed by the community.
I my opinion to say “continued to do work on charities that would reduce human populations” is very unfair referring to a proposal on family planning.
Congratulations! Great job by CE and all these founders.
I’m impressed by the “sodium taxation policy advocacy to control hypertension to be 190,927 DALYs per USD 100,000, which is around 300x as cost-effective as giving to a GiveWell top charity” cited in the Centre for exploratory altruism research site.
Hi,
I was quite afraid when I read that there are jobs listed for career capital. I’m glad to read that actually there is a combination of impact and capital. I hope all jobs posted have a significant positive impact.
In my mind “High Impact” should be the first priority. If we have to add other considerations I would also go for “EA Community Expansion and Diversity” as more important than “Career Capital”.
Let’s assume we have already listed all the High Impact opportunities we can find. As the next step I would go for listing the second job position in China rather than the 301st in San Francisco, even if the second one is better for career capital.
Note: I edited my original post to make it more clear.
Earth is an open system in terms of energy but a closed system regarding materials.
We receive from the sun much more energy than we are transforming today into usable energy. I think the limiting factor to create devices (be them renewal energies, fusion, …) that transform this sun’s energy into usable energy are land, materials, and available energy (mainly fossil) to build the devices in the first place. So, it would be impossible to create something on infinite scale.
But let’s assume we can create an energy transformation device that overweighs so much the energy we can consume that we can call it in practice an “infinite” energy source. Even in this (in my mind far away) scenario we would see then the bottleneck in materials and economic growth will not be able to go on forever.
At some point on time humanity will face the moment “OK, from now on we will be less humans and/or have less per capita”.
This is in addition to @Corentin Biteau concerns on whether keep growing the energy we can use is a good thing or not.
Effects of growth/degrowth in short term and long term
What you call “economic growth” I would call it “consumption growth and resources degrowth”. The consumption growth has a positive effect in the short term while the resources depletion and ecosystems degradation have a negative effect in the long term. Therefore, I prefer to talk about growth/degrowth as both consumption growth (GDP) and resources degrowth goes together.
Recent consumption growth rate is correlated with many good things, as you show in several charts. But this short-term improvement based on huge material and energy consumption is reducing drastically the opportunities for future beings. If we would plot the evolution of minerals, energy resources and ecosystems available for future generations what we would see is a rapid degrowth in the last decades.
In my mind the focus of the 4 person-year research about growth should be on how to replace GDP as a misleading KPI by other KPIs which take into account the future. My only concern is whether 4 people will really add something, as the UN report they already have >100 people working in a concept https://seea.un.org/ecosystem-accounting
Many thanks Ben Stevenson and jojo_lee for sharing your responses! It was useful for inspiration and to save time.
I add a couple of answers which I think were missing in your lists. Please note my English will probably contain errors as I’m not a native speaker.
23. Should the written origin of food be accompanied by a national flag or other symbol?
There should be a symbol for countries with animal wellfare standards similar or higher than those of the UK, and a symbol for countries with lower standards or no standard at all.
73 Please share any further comments on the monitoring and enforcement proposals.:
Cameras with public streaming should be mandatory on animal factories and slaughterhouses. This would make the conditions more transparent for the consumer, and would reduce the costs of auditing and monitoring by the government as the public can also participate and report non-compliance.
The mandatory requirement for Spanish slaughterhouses to install video surveillance systems can be used as a starting point for legislation in UK.
Charity Entrepreneurship identified many ways to use entrepreneurship to improve the world, but decided to focus specifically in charities.
Are you aware of any organization equivalent to CE but focused on identifying for-profit entrepreneurship opportunities aligned with EA values and goals, and supporting EA for-profit entrepreneurs? I’m not sure if the concept makes sense, but I’m curious to understand if there is anyone already working on it.
Thanks again for your time!
“If having forever more material goods is not an option”
If we believe the second law of thermodynamics, then infinite comsuption of materials is not an option, as recycling will never hit 100%.
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics—The gaping hole in the middle of the circular economy
”then we’ll have to learn how to live happily in a constrained world, in a truly sustainable way.”
I agree this is the natural consequence and the path to follow for Effective Altruism when it comes to longtermism: the needs of future beings shouldn’t be limitted by our egoist excesive present comsuption of energy and materials.
On your comment about Part A: “it’s not the most relevant to animal welfare”, I think there are some questions which are relevant, such as:
18. If we did not use a list approach, please describe any alternative approaches you would propose to define which minimally processed meat products are included?All products derived from animals should be included, irrespective of the extent of processing after slaughter. The criteria for labeling should be based on how the animals are treated during their lives, rather than on how much the industry transforms the meat after slaughter.
I don’t see how processing more or less the meat has any influence to the wellbeing of the animals used.
Other explanation of the investors’ expectations for 2033 is that they have seen the words “peak oil demand” written more and more frequently in the latest reports by IEA and other energy forecasters.
Oil demand can decrease by a combination of economic slowdown and oil intensity improvement. Oil intensity defined as the volume of oil needed to produce a fixed economic output. If we replace oil by other energy sources or increase the efficiency of our energy use we will improve the oil intensity. If we improve the oil intensity fast enough then we won’t see a significant economic impact. I guess the main point of Corentin’s argumet is about the speed of this transition.
Other possible question for this FAQ:
How much of EA’s money came from FTX Future Fund?
As per the post Historical EA funding data from August 2022, the estimation for 2022 was:
* Total EA funds: 741 M$
* FTX Future Fund contribution: 262 M$ (35%)
If anyone has more up to date analysis, or better data, please report it.
And many thanks for the very clear and useful summary. Well done.
Thanks for the clarification!
I was expecting an answer like this, but it is great to have your confirmation. I will definitively apply!
Lorenzo, I agree the expert traders and investor have more technical skills about investment. But it seems to me that MacAskill and FTX Future Fund board had more direct information about the personality of SBF and the personal connections among the leaders and the group dynamics. So, when it comes to your statement “having access to way less information”, I don’t think this is the case.