Hmm, have there been applications that are like “what’s your 50th percentile expected outcome?” and “what’s your 95th percentile outcome?”
Raemon
Karma: 2,416
Note: the automatic audio for this starts with what sounds like some weird artifacts around the image title.
I think there’s a reasonable case that, from a health perspective, many people should eat less meat. But “less meat” !== “no meat”.
Elizabeth was pretty clear on her take being:
Most people’s optimal diet includes small amounts of animal products, but people eat sub-optimally for lots of reasons and that’s their right.
i.e. yes, the optimal diet is small amounts of meat (which is less than most people eat, but more than vegans eat).
The article notes:
It’s true that I am paying more attention to veganism than I am to, say, the trad carnivore idiots, even though I think that diet is worse. But veganism is where the people are, both near me and in the US as a whole. Dietary change is so synonymous with animal protection within Effective Altruism that the EAForum tag is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the animal suffering tag. At a young-EA-organizer conference I mentored at last year, something like half of attendees were vegan, and only a handful had no animal-protecting diet considerations. If keto gets anywhere near this kind of numbers I assure you I will say something.
The argument isn’t about that at all, and I think most people would agree that nutrition is important.
It sounds like you’re misreading the point of the article.
The entire point of this article is that there are vegan EA leaders who downplay or dismiss the idea that veganism requires extra attention and effort. It doesn’t at all say “there are some tradeoffs, therefore don’t be vegan.” (it goes out of the way to say almost the opposite)
Whether costs are worth discussing doesn’t depend on how large one cost is vs the other – it depends on whether the health costs are large enough to hurt people, destroy trust, and (from an animal welfare perspective), whether the human health costs directly cause more animal suffering via causing ~30% of vegans to relapse.
Is there a word in the rest-of-the-world that means “everything that supports the core work and allows other people to focus on the core work?”
I hadn’t looked into the details of Windfall Clause proposed execution and assumed it was prescribing something closer to GiveDirectly than “CEO gets to direct it personally.” CEO gets to direct it personally does seem obviously bad.
<3
The “disadvantaged background” thing does turn out to show up in the top several google results, so, does seem like a real thing, although I also had no idea until this moment and would have naively used the term “talent search” in the way you describe.
Another angle on this (I think this is implied by the OP but didn’t quite state outright?)
All the community-norm posts are an input into effective altruism. The gritty technical posts are an output. If you sit around having really good community norms, but you never push forward the frontier of human knowledge relevant to optimizing the world, I think you’re not really succeeding at effective altruism.
It is possible that frontier-of-human-knowledge posts should be paid for with money rather than karma, since karma just isn’t well suited for rewarding it. But, yeah it seems like it distorts the onboarding experience of what people learn to do on the forum.
Recursive Middle Manager Hell
A related, important consideration when Lightcone arranged to buy the Rose Garden Inn (for similar reasons as Wytham Abbey), is that the Inn can also be resold if it turns out not to be as valuable. So thinking of this as “15 million spent” isn’t really right here.
(it’d be handy to have a link in the opening paragraph so if I wanna avoid spoilers I can go do that easily)
I’m not sure what your imagining, in terms of overall infrastructural update here. But, here’s a post that is in some sense a followup post to this:
My slack budget: 3 surprise problems per week.
Where are you expecting to find your audience? (I feel surprisingly ignorant on how journal projects like this bootstrap their way into wider readership)
You probably have set your user to use Markdown, specifically. Go to your user settings, open “site customizations”, and check that you don’t have “use markdown” set.
While I agree with Vaidehi’s comments on whether “value drift” is the right descriptor, I think it’s true that proportion of in-practice-priorities has probably shifted.
As someone who endorses the overall shift towards longtermist priorities, I still do agree with this post. I think it’s important people be thinking for themselves and not getting tugged along with social consensus.
My answer is that you should primarily be focused on saving, so that you have the financial freedom to pivot, change jobs, learn more, or found an organization. Previously, I recommended new EAs (esp. college students) give 1%, save at least 10% (so that they were building at least some concrete altruistic habits, while mostly focusing on building up slack).
I think this remains good practice in the current environment. (Giving 1% is somewhat a symbolic gift in the first place, and I think it’s still a useful forcing function to think about which organizations are valuable to you). But also, as long as you’re concretely setting aside money and thinking about your future, I think that’s a pretty good starting point.
I’d fine it helpful with the spreadsheet to also have people’s usernames listed beside the post.
TL;DR;BNOB
(“but not obviously bad”)