I am the director of Tlön, an organization that translates content related to effective altruism, existential risk, and global priorities research into multiple languages.
After living nomadically for many years, I recently moved back to my native Buenos Aires. Feel free to get in touch if you are visiting BA and would like to grab a coffee or need a place to stay.
Every post, comment, or wiki edit I authored is hereby licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
I tried to tone down the recent hostile edit, but I agree the current version still leaves much to be desired. Unfortunately, editing the wiki is not a priority for me right now, so somebody else will have to take care of it. As a low-effort alternative, one could revert the page to the last good version: it was just a stub, but it was probably better than nothing. Note that the history page is currently not working well, so I’m not sure how to do the reversion. Tagging @Will Aldred, @Ollie Etherington.
80k has made important contributions to our thinking about career choice, as seen e.g. in their work on replaceability, career capital, personal fit, and the ITN framework. This work does not assume a position on the neartermism vs. longtermism debate, so I think the author’s neartermist sympathies can’t fully explain or justify the omission.
Hello. As it happens, right now I’m editing an interview I conducted with @Jaime Sevilla two months ago. Things got delayed for a variety of reasons, but this episode should be out soon.
Methionine restriction has been shown to increase mean and maximum lifespan in various organisms, particularly rodents. Studies show it can increase lifespan by 30-40% in rats and mice, with effect sizes similar to those of calorie restriction. The lower methionine content of plant-based diets should be seen as a plus rather than a minus, I think.
Thanks for the useful exchange.
It may be useful to consider whether you think your comment would pass a reversal test: if the roles were reversed and it was an EA criticizing another movement, but the criticism was otherwise comparable (e.g. in tone and content), would you also have expressed a broadly positive opinion about it? If yes, that would suggest we are disagreeing about the merits of the letter. If no, it seems it’s primarily a disagreement about the standards we should adopt when evaluating external criticism.
(Note that minutes after posting my comment, I replaced “quality” with “merit”, because it better expresses what I was trying to communicate. However, I don’t think this makes a substantial difference to the point you are raising.)
I think that you managed to articulate clearly what I think is the strongest reason for a certain attitude I see among some EAs, which involves applying different standards to external criticism than to stuff written by members of our community.
Empirically, however, what you say doesn’t ring true to me. My impression is that EA has made progress over time primarily by a process of collective discussion with other EAs, as well as “EA-adjacent” folk like rationalists and forecasters, rather than external critics in the reference class Wenar instantiates. In my opinion, the net effect of such external criticism has, in fact, probably been negative: it has often created polarization and tribalism within the EA community, of the sort that makes it more difficult for us to make intellectual progress, and has misallocated precious community attention, which has in turn slowed down that progress.
So, I’d summarize my position as follows: “Yes, it may be reasonable on priors to expect there to exist critics who can see important problems with EA but who may not be able to articulate that criticism in a way that resonates with us. But our posterior, when we also factor in the evidence supplied by the social and intellectual history of EA, is that there is not much to be gained from engaging with that criticism (criticism that doesn’t seem valuable on its merits), and there is in fact a risk of harm in the form of wasting time and energy on unproductive and acrimonious discussion.”
[I accidentally pressed ‘Comment’ before a previous version of this comment was finished; I have deleted that comment.]
Please remember that the downvote button is not a disagreevote button. Under the circumstances here, it is mainly a reduce visibility / push off the homepage button
I would encourage voters to vote based on your views about the merits of the letter, rather than the effects on its visibility. In general, I think voting based on effects is a kind of “naive consequentialism”, which has worse consequences than voting based on merit when the effects of voting are properly accounted for.
What you call performative open-mindedness (I have been internally referring to it as epistemic virtue signaling) is a very real and important phenomenon, and one I wish people wrote about more and were more aware of.
Do you truly not care that people are accidentally spreading misinformation here?
Why do you attribute to me a view I never stated and do not hold? If I say that one cost is greater than another, it doesn’t mean that I do not care about the lesser cost.
In your original shortform, you listed three separate criticisms, but your reply now focuses on just one of those criticisms, in a way that makes it look that my concerns would be invalidated if one granted the validity of that specific criticism. This is the sort of subtle goalpost moving that makes it difficult to have a productive discussion.
Why are you not more concerned about flawed calculations being spread than about me pointing out that flawed calculations are being spread?
Because there is an asymmetry in the costs of waiting. Waiting a week or so to better understand the alleged problems of a tool that will likely be used for years is a very minor cost, compared to the expected improvement in that understanding that will occur over that period.
(ETA: I didn’t downvote any of your comments, in accordance with my policy of never downvoting comments I reply to, even if I believe I would normally have downvoted them. I mention this only because your most recent comment was downvoted just as I posted this one.)
I think comments like these are valuable when they are made after the relevant parties have all had enough time to respond, the discussion is largely settled, and readers are in a position to make up their minds about the nature, magnitude and importance of the problems reported, by having access to all the information that is likely to emerge from the exchange in question. Instead, your comment cautions people to be careful in using a tool based on some issues you found and reported less than two days ago, when the discussion appears to be ongoing and some of the people involved have not even expressed an opinion, perhaps because they haven’t yet seen the thread or had enough time to digest your criticisms. Maybe these criticisms are correct and we should indeed exercise the degree of caution you advise when using the tool, but it seems not unlikely that we’ll be in a better epistemic position to know this, say, a week or so from now, so why not just wait for all the potential evidence to become available?
Very nice post.
Do you think that size and intensity are reducible to a common factor? Somewhat metaphorically, one could say that, ultimately, there are only atoms of pleasantness and unpleasantness, which may be more or less concentrated in phenomenal space. When the atoms are concentrated, we call it ‘intensity’; when they are dispersed, we call it ‘size’. But when all is said and done, the value of a state of affairs is entirely determined by its net hedonic “quantity” (i.e., the number of pleasantness atoms minus the number of unpleasantness atoms).
Buenos Aires scores well on most of these dimensions. The main exception is cost of living, which has gone up a lot over the past six months or so, albeit from a low baseline. I’d say currently the city is roughly as expensive as Madrid.
I’d be happy to help out EAs who are considering visiting or relocating here. Earlier this year, I moved back to BA permanently (after being nomadic for many years) and I think it would be pretty cool if the city became an EA digital nomad hub.
So recently I’ve found myself not finishing, or even skipping, some of the AI episodes. I see the guests, think I can guess the general perspectives they and Rob/Luisa will take on AI, and don’t think it’ll add too much to my knowledge of the topic. If there are particular episodes that you think this is particularly incorrect about, then please let me know!
I’d be very surprised (and very impressed) if the Carl Shulman episodes did not add much to your knowledge of the topic (relative to how much you learned from the listed episodes).
This does not seem obvious. According to an analysis from Rethink Priorities:
Thanks for drawing this study to my attention. In this context, the truth of the price, taste, and convenience hypothesis is irrelevant, though; what matters is whether consumers of animal products have an intrinsic preference that this food comes from live animals in extreme agony, which is the feature of factory farming by virtue of which we regard it as seriously morally wrong. I have partly crossed out a sentence in my previous comment to make this clear.
Citizens of the Axis powers also did not have an intrinsic preference to cause lots of human suffering.
The claim is not that the Holocaust was morally evil because German citizens supported it. The claim is that the Holocaust was morally evil, to a significant degree, because it consisted of a systematic plan to exterminate all members of an ethnic group. Whether this was intended only by the Nazi leadership or by larger sections of German society is primarily relevant for assessing their degree of moral responsibility and blameworthiness, rather than for evaluating the Holocaust itself.
At the same time, I believe striving to be impartial is good. I value welfare the same regardless of species, country, time or ethnic group.
Me too, but as I said, our intuitive appraisal of the badness of the Holocaust is clearly shaped by the commonsense moral views I described.
do you think factory-farming is less intentional and systematic than the Holocaust?
Yes, because consumers of animal products mainly demand the taste and texture associated with meat, eggs and milk; exceptions aside, people do not have an intrinsic preference that these products come from live animals (let alone sentient beings). Furthermore, even if factory farming could be described as intentional and systematic, it would not be the intentional and systematic extermination of an entire ethnic group, which seems central in the intuition shaping commonsense evaluations of the Holocaust.
I agree with the general reasoning of your comment.
However, I also think that this specific comparison is not very illuminating. You comapre these two moral tragedies along the dimension of QALYs lost. However, commonsense moral intuitions about the Holocaust—which shape our own intuitions, even if we reject commonsense morality—aren’t solely driven by an implicit quantification of its QALY burden. The intentional, systematic, and large-scale effort to exterminate an entire ethnic group also plays a significant role in our intuitive assessment. When multiple dimensions of evaluation influence our grasp of the moral value of something, comparing something else to it along only one of these dimensions may not help us much to internalize how good or bad it really is.
(ETA: I made a few edits to make the comment clearer.)
Here’s another summary. I used Gemini 2.0 Flash (via the API), and this prompt:
Lack of leadership and accountability: He believes EA leadership is causing harm and lacks mechanisms for correcting course.
Emphasis on PR and narrative control: He condemns EA organizations’ risk aversion, guardedness, and attempts to control the narrative around FTX, prioritizing public image over transparency.
Inadequate community health: He laments conformity pressures, fears of reprisal for dissent, and insufficient efforts to cultivate a culture of open disagreement.
Entanglement with FTX: He faults EA leadership, particularly Will MacAskill, for endorsing Sam Bankman-Fried and entangling the movement with FTX despite warnings about SBF’s character.
Hero worship and lack of respect for intellectual leaders: He criticizes the hero worship of MacAskill, contrasting it with MacAskill’s perceived lack of engagement with other intellectual leaders in the community. He sees this as part of a pattern of MacAskill prioritizing popularity and prestige over community health and epistemic integrity.
Misleading communications and lack of transparency: He criticizes CEA for making inaccurate and misleading statements, for omitting crucial context in communications, and for concealing information about funding decisions.
Scaling too quickly and attracting grifters: He worries that EA’s rapid growth and increased funding attract deceptive actors and create perverse incentives.
Overreliance on potentially compromised institutions: He expresses concerns about EA’s deep ties to institutions like Oxford University, which may stifle intellectual exploration and operational capacity.
Ignoring internal warnings about FTX: He reveals that he and others warned EA leadership about Sam Bankman-Fried’s reputation for dishonesty, but those warnings went unheeded. He suggests he personally observed potentially illegal activities by SBF but chose not to share this information more widely.
Flawed due diligence and poor judgment in grantmaking: He feels EA leadership’s due diligence on SBF was inadequate and that they made poor judgments in providing him with substantial resources. He extends this criticism to grantmaking practices more generally.
Unfair distribution of resources: He argues that the current distribution of funds within EA doesn’t adequately compensate those doing object-level work and undervalues their contributions relative to donors. He argues for a system that recognizes the implicit tradeoff many have made in pursuing lower-paying EA-aligned careers.
Centralized media policy and negative experiences with journalists: While supporting a less centralized media policy, he also cautions against interacting with journalists, as they frequently misrepresent interviewees and create negative experiences.