Rían O'M

• Rían O'M Feb 24, 2025, 8:40 AM

  19 points

  8 ∶ 0

  on: The EA move­ment needs to be able to di­s­own rogue “sup­port­ers”, start­ing with Musk

  And if he is still giving money to official EA causes, it should be loudly and swiftly returned.

  In cases where a person has donated money they secured through crime, it seems right to reject it, but rejecting someone’s money because one doesn’t like their politics seems like a bad idea.

  Suppose a hypothetical medicine-distribution charity that had been funded by Musk announced they would forgo accepting his future donations and would distribute fewer pills as a result. What exactly would this achieve? Maybe they would succeed in pleasing people who share their politics, but their beneficiaries (the very people they are supposed to help) would suffer.

  I personally think it would be good if people who’s politics I dislike donated more to EA causes.

[Linkpost] Will MacAskill coau­thors new book ti­tled “An In­tro­duc­tion to Utili­tar­i­anism”, with Richard Chap­pell and Dar­ius Meissner

• Rían O'M Oct 14, 2024, 3:10 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  People frequently do things like taking Rethink’s moral weights project (which kinda skips over a lot of hard philosophical problems about measurement and what we can learn from animal behavior, and goes all-in on a simple perspective of total hedonic utilitarianism which I think is useful but not ultimately correct), and just treat the numbers as if they are unvarnished truth

  Can you point to specific cases of that happening? I haven’t seen this happen before. My sense is that most people who quote Rethinks moral weights project are familiar with the limitations.

  The animal welfare side of things feels less truthseeking, more activist, than other parts of EA

  Can you say more on this?

• Rían O'M Aug 29, 2024, 10:56 AM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform

  Similar for the Apollo 11 Moon landing: average age in the control room was 28.

• Rían O'M Aug 28, 2024, 2:00 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: How do you deal with the “meat eater” problem

  This makes me think that countries who as of yet don’t have an entrenched factory farming lobby/​industry would benefit advocacy groups similar to Shrimp Welfare Project (work in the reverent countries with stakeholders to improve the wellbeing of farmed animals).

  I began wondering if any org was approaching this similar to SWP. There seem to be two EA groups working on this:

  • Animal Advocacy Africa

  • Education for Africa Animal Welfare

• Rían O'M Aug 27, 2024, 10:25 AM

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: CEA will con­tinue to take a “prin­ci­ples-first” ap­proach to EA

  It would have made sense for there to be a bit more discussion about ethical side-constraints, but including transparency in the list of core principles would honestly be just weird because transparency isn’t distinctly EA. Beyond that, the importance of transparency is significantly complicated by the concept of infohazards in areas like biohazards or AI safety. I really don’t see it as CEA’s role to take a side in these debates. I think it makes sense for CEA to embrace transparency as a key organisational value, but it’s not a core principle of EA in general and we should accept that different orgs will occupy different positions on the spectrum.

  I agree that absolute transparency is not ideal. That said, there is a version of transparency (i.e ‘reasoning transparency’) that is a somewhat distinct EA value.

• Rían O'M Jun 20, 2024, 5:28 AM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Against the Guardian’s hit piece on Man­i­fest

  is filled with bizarre factual errors, one of which was so egregious that it merited a connection.

  Small nitpick; this is a typo or ‘connection’ is something I’m not familiar with in this context.

EA Éire So­cial @ Mo­tel one

• Rían O'M Apr 23, 2024, 2:53 PM

  29 points

  9 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sean_o_h’s comment on: Fu­ture of Hu­man­ity In­sti­tute 2005-2024: Fi­nal Report

  I don’t think the global optimal solution is an EA forum that’s a cuddly little safe space for me.

  I agree with this, but also think the forum “not being cuddly for Sean” and “not driving contributors away” aren’t mutually exclusive. Maybe I am not seeing all the tradeoffs though.

• Rían O'M Apr 23, 2024, 11:54 AM

  46 points

  14 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sean_o_h’s comment on: Fu­ture of Hu­man­ity In­sti­tute 2005-2024: Fi­nal Report

  I am going to engage less with EA forum/​LW as a result of this and a few similar interactions, and I am especially going to be more hesitant to be critical of EA/​LW sacred cows.

  This makes me sad as I enjoy reading your comments and find them insightful. That said, I understand and support your reasoning. I feel as though some amount of “mistake mindset” has disappeared a little in the two years I’ve been reading the forum.

Vir­tual Fireside Chat /​ Q&A with Jeff Kauf­man of the Nu­cleic Acid Ob­ser­va­tory

• Rían O'M Mar 24, 2024, 11:56 PM

  7 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Up­dates on Com­mu­nity Health Sur­vey Results

  I appreciate the effort to make the general consensus around trust towards EA-orgs more legible.

  
  Given the criticism that the three mentioned receive (much of it directed towards CEA), it’s interesting (and IMO good) to see that most people emailed are broadly trusting of them.
  

EA Éire So­cial @ Tea Gar­den

Vir­tual Fireside Chat /​ Q&A with Cameron Meyer Shorb of Wild An­i­mal Initiative

Vir­tual Fireside Chat /​ Q&A with Dr. Bal Dithal of LEEP

• Rían O'M Jan 27, 2024, 1:38 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Surgery Works Well Without The FDA

  Thanks for sharing your post!

  Pharmaceutical companies won’t go and release hundreds of dud or dangerous drugs just because they can. That would ruin their brand and shut down their business.

  I briefly skimmed through the wikipedia list of withdrawn drugs. I looked at those withdrawn in the US or worldwide since 2007 (only eleven).

  As far as I could tell (and I easily could have missed something) none of the associated pharma companies seem to have been financially ruined. The only ones who no longer existed (Wyeth and Celltech) were bought out by other pharma companies for princely sums (Wyeth by Pfizer for $68billion and Celltech by UCB for £1.5billion) before the recalls happened.

  I guess doesn’t seem clear to me that pharma companies face threatening risks of ruining their brands and shutting down their business if they produce more inefficient or even more dangerous drugs than already. Even thalidomide didn’t destroy its parent company (Grünenthal).

  I’m sure someone who knows more can correct me, but the only example of this happening in recent times Purdue Pharma.

• Rían O'M Jul 18, 2023, 3:39 PM

  1 point

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Job Rejections

  Some useful advice I was once given:

  ->Try and apply to enough jobs /​ opportunities so that when the rejection letters /​ emails come in you no longer remember applying

  I hope this is somewhat helpful!

• Rían O'M Jul 11, 2023, 3:07 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform

  Ah, thank you!

  I searched for that comment. I think this is probably the one you’re referencing.

• Rían O'M Jul 11, 2023, 2:22 PM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform

  I haven’t read too much into this and am probably missing something.

  Why do you think FTXFF was receiving grants via north dimension? The brief googling I did only mentioned north dimension in the context of FTX customers sending funds to FTX (specifically this SEC complaint). I could easily have missed something.

• Rían O'M Jun 1, 2023, 10:41 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Mas­ter­docs of EA com­mu­nity build­ing guides and resources

  Thank you for putting this together!

  I’d discussed with another organizer how so many useful EA resources were scattered around in different hidden google docs. You’ve done something worthwhile linking many of them in one place.