Here’s a direct link to the form for people who don’t want to hunt through the twitter thread https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfitym3vRQKDjEMNaK3j5D7SCYVbIhBruIMClUaK0DkP9uO-g/viewform
Thank you for this post and the context on the credibility and impact of this effort!
Given the recent post on the marketability of EA (which went so far as to suggest excluding MIRI from the EA tent to make EA more marketable—or maybe that was a comment in response to the post; don’t remember), a brief reaction from someone who is excited about Effective Altruism but has various reservations. (My main reservation, so you have a feel for where I’m coming from, is that my goal in life is not to maximize the world’s utility, but, roughly speaking, to maximize my own utility and end-of-life satisfaction, and therefore I find it hard to get excited about theoretically utility maximizing causes rather than donating to things which I viscerally care about—I know this will strike most people here as incredibly squishy, but I’d bet that much of the public outside the EA community probably has a similar reaction, though few would actually come out and say it)
I like your idea about high-leverage values spreading.
The ideas about Happy Animal Farm / Promoting Universal Eudaimonia seem nuts to me, so much so that I actually reread the post to see if this was a parody. If it gains widespread popularity among the EA movement, I will move from being intrigued about EA and excited to bring it up in conversation to never raising it in conversations with all but the most open-minded / rationalist people, or raising it in the tone of “yeah these guys are crazy but this one idea they have about applying data analysis to charity has some merit… Earning to Give is intriguing too....” I could be wrong, but I’d strongly suspect that most people who are not thoroughgoing utilitarians find it incredibly silly to argue that creating more beings who experience utility is a good cause, and this would quickly push EA away from being taken seriously in the mainstream.
The humane insecticides idea doesn’t seem AS silly as those two above, but it places EA in the same mental category as my most extreme caricature of PETA (and I’m someone who eats mostly vegan, and some Certified Humane, because I care about animal welfare). I don’t think insects are a very popular cause.
Just my 2 cents.