Podcasts about rethink priorities

Or on the types of prioritization, their strengths, pitfalls, and how EA should balance them The cause prioritization landscape in EA is changing. Prominent groups have shut down, others have been founded, and everyone is trying to figure out how to prepare for AI. This is the first in a series of posts examining the state of cause prioritization and proposing strategies for moving forward. Executive Summary Performing prioritization work has been one of the main tasks, and arguably achievements, of EA. We highlight three types of prioritization: Cause Prioritization, Within-Cause (Intervention) Prioritization, and Cross-Cause (Intervention) Prioritization. We ask how much of EA prioritization work falls in each of these categories: Our estimates suggest that, for the organizations we investigated, the current split is 89% within-cause work, 2% cross-cause, and 9% cause prioritization. We then explore strengths and potential pitfalls of each level: Cause [...] ---Outline:(00:37) Executive Summary(03:09) Introduction: Why prioritize? Have we got it right?(05:18) The types of prioritization(06:54) A snapshot of EA(16:45) The Types of Prioritization Evaluated(16:57) Cause Prioritization(20:56) Within-Cause Prioritization(25:12) Cross-Cause Prioritization(30:07) Summary Table(30:53) What factors should push us towards one or another?(37:27) Possible Next Steps(39:44) Conclusion(40:58) Acknowledgements(41:01) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Modern geometric logo design with text RETHINK PRIORITIES(41:55) Appendix: Strengths and Pitfalls of Each Type(42:07) Within-Cause Prioritization Strengths(42:12) Decision-Making Support(42:37) Comparability of Outputs(44:18) Disciplinarity Advantages(45:45) Responsiveness to Evidence(46:48) Movement Building(48:06) Within-Cause Prioritization Weaknesses and Potential Pitfalls(48:12) Responsiveness to Evidence(50:54) Decision-Making Support(52:45) Cross-Cause Prioritization Strengths:(53:06) Decision-Making Support(54:49) Responsiveness to Evidence(56:08) Movement Building(56:22) Comparability of Outputs(56:45) Decision-Making Support(57:14) Cross-Cause Prioritization Weaknesses and Potential Pitfalls(57:20) Comparability of Outputs(58:01) Disciplinarity Advantages(58:41) Movement Building(59:09) Decision-Making Support(01:00:27) Cause Prioritization Strengths(01:00:32) Decision-Making Support(01:02:01) Responsiveness to Evidence(01:02:52) Movement Building(01:03:28) Cause Prioritization Weaknesses and Potential Pitfalls(01:04:28) Decision-Making Support(01:06:08) Responsiveness to EvidenceThe original text contained 23 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 16th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZPdZv8sHuYndD8xhJ/doing-prioritization-better-2 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

Rethink Priorities has been conducting a range of surveys and experiments aimed at understanding how people respond to different framings of Effective Altruism (EA), Longtermism, and related specific cause areas. There has been much debate about whether people involved in EA and Longtermism should frame their efforts and outreach in terms of Effective altruism, Longtermism, Existential risk, Existential security, Global priorities research, or by only mentioning specific risks, such as AI safety and Pandemic prevention (examples can be found at the following links: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8). These discussions have taken place almost entirely in the absence of empirical data, even though they concern largely empirical questions.[1] In this post we report the results of three pilot studies examining responses to different EA-related terms and descriptions. Some initial findings are: Longtermism appears to be consistently less popular than other EA-related terms and concepts we examined, whether presented just as a [...] ---Outline:(01:52) Study 1. Cause area framing(05:13) Demographics(07:15) Study 2. EA-related concepts with and without descriptions(10:58) Demographics(11:31) Study 3. Preferences for concrete causes or more general ideas/movements(15:04) Demographics(15:29) Manifold Market Predictions(16:43) General discussionThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. The original text contained 18 images which were described by AI. --- First published: November 7th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qagZoGrxbD7YQRYNr/testing-framings-of-ea-and-longtermism --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Rethink Priorities has been conducting a range of surveys and experiments aimed at understanding how people respond to different framings of Effective Altruism (EA), Longtermism, and related specific cause areas. There has been much debate about whether people involved in EA and Longtermism should frame their efforts and outreach in terms of Effective altruism, Longtermism, Existential risk, Existential security, Global priorities research, or by only mentioning specific risks, such as AI safety and Pandemic prevention (examples can be found at the following links: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8). These discussions have taken place almost entirely in the absence of empirical data, even though they concern largely empirical questions.[1] In this post we report the results of three pilot studies examining responses to different EA-related terms and descriptions. Some initial findings are: Longtermism appears to be consistently less popular than other EA-related terms and concepts we examined, whether presented just as a [...] ---Outline:(01:52) Study 1. Cause area framing(05:40) Demographics(08:12) Study 2. EA-related concepts with and without descriptions(12:51) Demographics(13:31) Study 3. Preferences for concrete causes or more general ideas/movements(17:35) Demographics(18:07) Manifold Market Predictions(19:20) General discussionThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. The original text contained 18 images which were described by AI. --- First published: November 7th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qagZoGrxbD7YQRYNr/testing-framings-of-ea-and-longtermism --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Subject in Subjective Time: A New Approach to Aggregating Wellbeing (paper draft), published by Devin Kalish on September 17, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. What follows is a lightly edited version of the thesis I wrote for my Bioethics MA program. I'm hoping to do more with this in the future, including seeking publication and/or expanding it into a dissertation or short book. In its current state, I feel like it is in pretty rough shape. I hope it is useful and interesting for people as puzzled by this very niche philosophical worry as me, but I'm also looking for feedback on how I can improve it. There's no guarantee I will take it, or even do anything further with this piece, but I would still appreciate the feedback. I may or may not interact much in the comments section. I. Introduction: Duration is an essential component of many theories of wellbeing. While there are theories of wellbeing that are sufficiently discretized that time isn't so obviously relevant to them, like achievements, it is hard to deny that time matters to some parts of a moral patient's wellbeing. A five-minute headache is better than an hour-long headache, all else held equal. A love that lasts for decades provides more meaning to a life than one that last years or months, all else held equal. The fulfillment of a desire you have had for years matters more than the fulfillment of a desire you have merely had for minutes, all else held equal. However, in our day to day lives we encounter time in two ways, objectively and subjectively. What do we do when the two disagree? This problem reached my attention years ago when I was reflecting on the relationship between my own theoretical leaning, utilitarianism, and the idea of aggregating interests. Aggregation between lives is known for its counterintuitive implications and the rich discourse around this, but I am uncomfortable with aggregation within lives as well. Some of this is because I feel the problems of interpersonal aggregation remain in the intrapersonal case, but there was also a problem I hadn't seen any academic discussion of at the time - objective time seemed to map the objective span of wellbeing if you plot each moment of wellbeing out to aggregate, but it is subjective time we actually care about. Aggregation of these objective moments gives a good explanation of our normal intuitions about time and wellbeing, but it fails to explain our intuitions about time whenever these senses of it come apart. As I will attempt to motivate later, the intuition that it is subjective time that matters is very strong in cases where the two substantially differ. Indeed, although the distinction rarely appears in papers at all, the main way I have seen it brought up (for instance in "The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence[1]" by Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky) is merely to notice there is a difference, and to effectively just state that it is subjective time, of course, that we should care about. I have very rarely run into a treatment dedicated to the "why", the closest I have seen is the writing of Jason Schukraft[2], with his justification for why it is subjective time that matters for Rethink Priorities' "Moral Weights" project. His justification is similar to an answer I have heard in some form several times from defenders: We measure other values of consciousness subjectively, such as happiness and suffering, why shouldn't we measure time subjectively as well? I believe without more elaboration, this explanation has the downside that it both gives no attention to the idea that time matters because it tells us "how much" of an experience there actually is, and has the downside that it seems irrelevant to any theory of wellbeing other than hedonism. It also, crucially, fails to engage with the question of what exactly subje...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2024, published by OllieBase on September 11, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This week, the CEA events team will be running the 2024 edition of the Meta Coordination Forum (MCF) in California. We're bringing together ~40 people leading EA community-building organizations and projects to foster a shared understanding of some of the biggest challenges facing our community and align on strategies for addressing these problems. This is a short post to provide the wider community with a sense of the event's goals and who will be attending. Goals and themes The Meta Coordination Forum aims to: Build a shared understanding among attendees of some of the biggest challenges facing the EA community. Provide space for attendees to discuss, get feedback on, and develop strategies for addressing these challenges. Foster more collaboration among people leading EA meta-organizations and projects. While we're encouraging attendees to prioritize one-on-one meetings and private conversations, our structured sessions will focus on two key themes: Brand: what's the current state of the EA brand, what outcomes do we want, and how can we achieve them? Funding: what's the current state of the funding landscape in EA, what strategies should we use to diversify funding, and what steps should we take? At the event, we'll also be conducting a survey similar to the one we ran in 2019 and 2023, and which 80,000 Hours ran in 2017 and 2018. We're partnering with Rethink Priorities on this survey. We hope this survey will provide CEA, attendees at the event, and the wider community with a better sense of the talent gaps that organizations face, as well as insights into some key questions facing the community. Attendees We invited attendees based on their ability to contribute to and implement strategies addressing our core themes. While we aimed for a balanced representation across the meta work that is going on, our primary focus was on individuals best positioned to drive progress on behalf of the community. We acknowledge that others might take a different approach to inviting attendees or have thoughts on who was omitted and welcome suggestions for future events. Below is the list of attendees who've agreed to share that they're attending the event. This list makes up the majority of attendees at the event - some preferred not to have their attendance made public. Alexander Berger Howie Lempel Marcus Davis Amy Labenz Jacob Eliosoff Max Daniel Anne Schulze Jessica McCurdy Melanie Basnak Arden Koehler JP Addison Michelle Hutchinson Bella Forristal JueYan Zhang Mike Levine Claire Zabel Julia Wise Nicole Ross Devon Fritz Karolina Sarek Patrick Gruban Eli Rose Kelsey Piper Simran Dhaliwal Emma Richter Lewis Bollard Sjir Hoeijmakers George Rosenfeld Luke Freeman Will MacAskill Zachary Robinson This is not a canonical list of "key people working in meta EA" or "EA leaders." There are plenty of people who are not attending this event who are doing high-value work in the meta-EA space. Note that we have a few attendees at this year's event who are specialists in one of our focus areas rather than leaders of an EA meta organization or team (though some attendees are both). We'll also encourage attendees to share their memos on the forum and think about other updates we can share that will aid transparency and coordination. A note on comments: we'll be running the event this week, so won't have capacity to engage in the comments. However, we will be reading them, and that can inform discussions at the event. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Fungal diseases: Health burden, neglectedness, and potential interventions, published by Rethink Priorities on September 4, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Editorial note This report is a "shallow" investigation, as described here, and was commissioned by Open Philanthropy and produced by Rethink Priorities from January to February 2023. We revised the report for publication. Open Philanthropy does not necessarily endorse our conclusions, nor do the organizations represented by those who were interviewed. Our report focuses on exploring fungal diseases as a potential new cause area for Open Philanthropy. We assessed the current and future health burden of fungal diseases, provided an overview of current interventions and the main gaps and barriers to address the burden, and discussed some plausible options for philanthropic spending. We reviewed the scientific and gray literature and spoke with five experts. While revising the report for publication, we learned of a new global burden study ( Denning et al., 2024) whose results show an annual incidence of 6.5 million invasive fungal infections, and 3.8 million total deaths from fungal diseases (2.5 million of which are "directly attributable" to fungal diseases). The study's results align with this report's estimate of annual 1.5 million to 4.6 million deaths (80% confidence) but were not considered in this report. We don't intend this report to be Rethink Priorities' final word on fungal diseases. We have tried to flag major sources of uncertainty in the report and are open to revising our views based on new information or further research. Executive summary While fungal diseases are very common and mostly mild, some forms are life-threatening and predominantly affect low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The evidence base on the global fungal disease burden is poor, and estimates are mostly based on extrapolations from the few available studies. Yet, all experts we talked to agree that current burden estimates (usually stated as >1.7M deaths/year) likely underestimate the true burden. Overall, we think the annual death burden could be 1.5M - 4.6M (80% CI), which would exceed malaria and HIV/AIDS deaths combined.[1] Moreover, our best guess is that fungal diseases cause 8M - 49M DALYs (80% CI) per year, but this is based on our own back-of-the-envelope calculation of high-uncertainty inputs. Every expert we spoke with expects the burden to increase substantially in the future, though no formal estimates exist. We project that deaths and DALYs could grow to approximately 2-3 times the current burden until 2040, though this is highly uncertain. This will likely be partly due to a rise in antifungal resistance, which is especially problematic as few treatment classes exist and many fungal diseases are highly lethal without treatment. We estimate that only two diseases (chronic pulmonary aspergillosis [CPA] and candidemia/invasive candidiasis [IC/C]) account for ~39%-45% of the total death and DALY burden. Moreover, a single fungal pathogen (Aspergillus fumigatus) accounts for ~50% of the burden. Thus, much of the burden can be reduced by focusing on only a few of the fungal diseases or on a few pathogens. Available estimates suggest the top fungal diseases have highest burdens in Asia and LMICs, and that they most affect immunocompromised individuals. Fungal diseases seem very neglected in all areas we considered (research/R&D, advocacy/lobbying, philanthropic spending, and policy interventions) and receive little attention even in comparison to other diseases which predominantly affect LMICs. For example, we estimate the research funding/death ratio for malaria to be roughly 20 times higher than for fungal diseases. Moreover, fewer than 10 countries have national surveillance systems for fungal infections, an...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Time preferences for impact in the EA community (data from the 2023 EA Survey Supplement), published by Jamie Elsey on August 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. As part of ongoing research into EA community attitudes and priorities, a supplemental EA community survey was fielded from December 2023 to January 2024. This survey included a number of questions requested by EA decision-makers and researchers. One such question concerned EA community attitudes regarding time preferences for impact. The question requested was: Putting aside issues of tractability, what are your time preferences with respect to the altruistic impacts of your actions? I am at least roughly indifferent between benefiting someone today and benefiting someone to an equal extent indefinitely far in the future. I value benefiting someone today more than benefiting someone to an equal extent in the future, and the value I place on future benefits declines roughly exponentially per year by ___%. I value helping someone today less than helping someone to an equal extent in the future, and the value I place on future benefits rises roughly exponentially per year by ___%. I am at least roughly indifferent between current and future benefits among members of a given generation, but I value helping members of the current generation substantially more than members of future generations (holding the sizes, but not necessarily the identities, of future generations fixed). I am at least roughly indifferent between current and future benefits among members of a given generation, but I value helping members of the current generation substantially less than members of future generations (holding the sizes, but not necessarily the identities, of future generations fixed). My time preferences are not described by any of these. In total, 377 respondents provided answers to this question. The most endorsed attitude (44%) was to be roughly indifferent between benefiting someone today relative to indefinitely far in the future. This was followed by preferring to help current people, with a specified 'decay' of value into the future (endorsed by 25% of respondents). A further 17% reported being indifferent with respect to time when helping within a generation of people, but preferring helping the current generation of people more than future generations. Finally, 11% of respondents reported that none of the specified attitudes matched their preferences. All other views received less than 2% endorsement. Within those who reported preferring to help people now, we received 88 responses that provided a specific percentage of decay per year. The two plots below show, firstly, the number of people giving different percentage values, and secondly, the cumulative probability of giving different percentages. Over 50% of these respondents had a value at or less than 5%, and 90% of people reported a percentage decline of 10% or less. However, there was substantial variation. A handful of people reported very high percentages such as 80% or 100%. The mean of the distribution was 6.8, with the single most endorsed percentage decline being 5% (n = 21), followed by 1% (n = 19). Precise percentages given by each respondent are shown in the table below: Only three people who selected the 'increasing' value into the future option provided percentages, and one of these selected 0, so we do not display values for that response option. When interpreting the substantive meaning of these responses, it is important to remember that the question stipulated that responses should be 'putting aside issues of tractability'. Respondents' attitudes may differ when taking into account tractability. It should also be noted that the question was quite complex, and may have been challenging for respondents to answer. Rethink Priorities is a thi...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AMA: Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team, published by Bob Fischer on July 31, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team (WIT) will run an Ask Me Anything (AMA). We'll reply on the 7th and 8th of August. Please put your questions in the comments below! What's WIT? WIT is Hayley Clatterbuck, Bob Fischer, Arvo Munoz Moran, David Moss, and Derek Shiller. Our team exists to improve resource allocation within and beyond the effective altruism movement, focusing on tractable, high-impact questions that bear on strategic priorities. We try to take action-relevant philosophical, methodological, and strategic problems and turn them into manageable, modelable problems. Our projects have included: The Moral Weight Project. If we want to do as much good as possible, we have to compare all the ways of doing good - including ways that involve helping members of different species. This sequence collects Rethink Priorities' work on cause prioritization across different kinds of animals, human and nonhuman. (You can check out the book version here.) The CURVE Sequence. What are the alternatives to expected value maximization (EVM) for cause prioritization? And what are the practical implications of a commitment to expected value maximization? This series of posts - and an associated tool, the Cross-Cause Cost-Effectivesness Model - explores these questions. The CRAFT Sequence. This sequence introduces two tools: a Portfolio Builder, where the key uncertainties concern cost curves and decision theories, and a Moral Parliament Tool, which allows for the modeling of both normative and metanormative uncertainty. The Sequence's primary goal is to take some first steps toward more principled and transparent ways of constructing giving portfolios. In the coming months, we'll be working on a model to assess the probability of digital consciousness. What should you ask us? Anything! Possible topics include: How we understand our place in the EA ecosystem. Why we're so into modeling. Our future plans and what we'd do with additional resources. What it's like doing "academic" work outside of academia. Biggest personal updates from the work we've done. Acknowledgments This post was written by the Worldview Investigation Team at Rethink Priorities. If you like our work, please consider subscribing to our newsletter. You can explore our completed public work here. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Data from the 2023 EA Forum user survey, published by Sarah Cheng on July 26, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The purpose of this post is to share data from a survey that the EA Forum team ran last year. Though we used this survey as one of many sources of information for internal analyses, I did not include any particular takeaways from this survey data in this post. I leave that as an exercise for the reader. Overview In August 2023, the EA Forum team ran a survey to learn more about how people use the Forum and how the Forum impacted them. We got 609 valid responses. Thank you to everyone who responded - we really appreciate you taking the time. The results have been important for helping us understand the ways that the Forum creates value and disvalue that are otherwise hard for us to track. We've used it to evaluate the impact of the Forum and the marginal impact of our work, update our team's strategy, and prioritize the work we've done in the past 12 months. The person who ran the survey and wrote up the analysis is no longer at CEA, but I figured people might be interested in the results of the survey, so I'm sharing some of the data in this post. Most of the information here comes from that internal analysis, but when I use "I" that is me (Sarah) editorializing. This post is not comprehensive, and does not include all relevant data. I did not spend time double checking any of the information from that analysis. We plan to run another (updated) survey soon for 2024. Some Forum usage data, for context The Forum had 4.5k monthly active and 13.7k annually active logged in users in the 12 months ending on Sept 4 2023. We estimate that the total number of users was closer to 20-30k (since about 50% of traffic is logged out). Here's a breakdown of usage data for logged-in users in those 12 months: 13.7k distinct logged in users 8.5k users with 3 distinct days of activity 5.7k users with 10 distinct days of activity 3.1k users who were active during of all months 1.7k users who were active during of all weeks 388 users who were active during on of all days 4.4k distinct commenters 171 distinct post authors It's important to note that August 2022 - August 2023 was a fairly unusual time for EA, so while you can (and we have) used this survey data to estimate things like "the value the Forum generates per year", you might think that August 2023 - August 2024 is a more typical year, and so the data from the next survey may be more representative. Demographic reweighting[1] Rethink Priorities helped us with the data analysis, which included adjusting the raw data by weighting the responses to try to get a more representative view of the results. All charts below include both the raw and weighted[2] data. The weighting factors were: 1. Whether the respondent had posted (relative to overall Forum usage) 2. Whether the respondent had commented (relative to overall Forum usage) 3. How frequently the respondent used the Forum (relative to overall Forum usage) 4. The respondent's EA engagement level (relative to the Forum statistics from the 2020 EA Survey) 5. The respondent's gender (relative to the Forum statistics from the 2020 EA Survey) Some effects of the reweighting: A significantly higher proportion of respondents have posted or commented on the Forum, relative to actual overall Forum usage, so reweighting decreases those percentages and the percentages of other actions (such as voting on karma). A plurality (around 45%) of respondents said they visit the Forum about 1-2 times a week. This is more frequent than the overall Forum population, so reweighting decreases things like the percentage of users who applied for a job due to the Forum, and the mean rating of "significantly changed your thinking". Overall, respondents tended to be more highly engaged than the ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Evidence of Poor Cross-Cultural Interactions in the EA community, published by Yi-Yang on July 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary In this project, I investigated non-Western EAs' perception of CCIs they had with Westerners, specifically: 1. How often non-Westerners experienced CCI issues; 2. What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced; 3. How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings. To do that, I collected an array of evidence from seven sources (e.g., anecdotes from interviews and a focus group, and some statistics from three surveys not done by me). And based on the evidence on CCIs I have collected so far, I believe that poor CCIs are likely to be a common but minor problem for most non-westerners in the EA community. At the organisational or community level, I would not flag CCI issues as something to be heavily prioritised (moderate confidence), but I would recommend EA-aligned organisations and organisers to start or maintain interventions that are sensible or if the trade-offs are acceptable, like some of the ones listed here by AmAristizabal. At the individual level, I recommend: 1. Checking out some of the vignettes shared by non-Western EAs here and here 2. Read more examples of SAEs here 3. Read some of my low-confidence takes on what non-Western and Western folks could do to improve CCIs Background I noticed that I was feeling annoyed in some of my cross-cultural interactions (CCIs) in the EA community, but I couldn't tell for sure whether these interactions had exclusionary elements in them. These are more subtle, and are not the overt racist behaviours that I'm more familiar with. Hence, I started this investigation out of a desire to sanity check myself ("Am I misinterpreting things? Or has anyone else experienced the same thing?"). I would also be happy if this project is useful to others too, perhaps by making non-Western folks feel less perplexed or less alone. In this project, I investigated non-Western EAs' perception of CCIs they had with Westerners, specifically: 1. How often non-Westerners experienced CCI issues; 2. What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced; 3. How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings. This investigation was done pretty informally and in a non-strategic way (e.g. I wasn't really explicitly thinking about this in a Bayesian probability way), but it does consist of an array of evidence from seven sources that I think, when combined, are pretty informative. Evidence compiled Evidence that might indicate less negative CCIs 1. EA Survey 2022 According to the Rethink Priorities team who lead the EA Survey 2022 project, survey respondents who identified as more non-Western scored slightly better than survey respondents who identified as more Western in terms of: Satisfaction (mean): 7.55 (N=219) versus 7.17 (N=2251) out of 10.00 points Retention (mean): 5.51 (N=144) versus 5.42 (N=1736) out of 7.00 points Mental health (mean): 3.49 (N=143) versus 3.27 (N=1528) out of 5.00 points The above three metrics aren't exactly what I'm looking for, that is belongingness. It might be the case that non-Westerners do experience CCI issues but still get a lot of value from EA or belongingness in their local EA groups. Evidence that might indicate more negative CCIs 1. My personal experience Firstly, I've noticed Western folks "hijacking" (most likely unconsciously or unintentionally) norms in spaces where non-Western folks traditionally belong, are the majority, or a mix of both. I've noticed at least one such behaviour in an EA setting before. Here are a few non-EA-related examples (to preserve anonymity): A discussion group in Malaysia I was a part of has a norm about raising one's hands and letting the moderator pick the next speaker to make speaking time more ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Webinar: How to use Rethink Priorities' new effective giving tools, published by Rethink Priorities on July 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Introducing the tools How can we optimize our charitable giving while accounting for complex factors about effectiveness and philosophy? Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigations Team developed two free tools to help address this question: 1. The portfolio builder 2. The moral parliament simulation Both tools are described in the new Charitable Resource Allocation Frameworks and Tools (CRAFT) Sequence, which is a part of the Team's ongoing efforts to improve resource allocations. Learn more Join Rethink Priorities' Senior Research Manager Bob Fischer and Researcher Arvo Muñoz Morán for a virtual workshop on how to use these new tools. The one-hour event will cover: • An overview of why the CRAFT Sequence tools were developed. • A virtual walkthrough of the Portfolio Builder Tool and the Moral Parliament Tool. • A practical session on how you can apply these tools to your own giving strategies. • A question-and-answer session to address your questions and provide further insights. Come explore how the Portfolio Builder and Moral Parliament tools can help you build effective giving portfolios and make informed philanthropic decisions! Details The webinar will be held on Monday, August 5 at noon PT / 3 pm ET / 8 pm BT / 9 pm CET. Please register here to receive the Zoom link to join the event. If you cannot attend but would like a recording of the discussion, reach out to henri[at]rethinkpriorities.org. Note: For a sneak peek, check out a recorded 2-minute intro ( moral parliament, portfolio builder) or 5-minute intro ( moral parliament, portfolio builder). Rethink Priorities (RP) is a think-and-do tank that addresses global priorities by researching solutions and strategies, mobilizing resources, and empowering our team and others. Henri Thunberg wrote this post. Thank you to Rachel Norman for her input. We invite you to explore more RP research via our database and stay updated on new work by subscribing to our newsletter. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Taking Uncertainty Seriously (or, Why Tools Matter), published by Bob Fischer on July 19, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Executive Summary We should take uncertainty seriously. Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool, for instance, highlights that whether a worldview favors a particular project depends on relatively small differences in empirical assumptions and the way we characterize the commitments of that worldview. We have good reason to be uncertain: The relevant empirical and philosophical issues are difficult. We're largely guessing when it comes to most of the key empirical claims associated with Global Catastrophic Risks and Animal Welfare. As a community, EA has some objectionable epistemic features - e.g., it can be an echo chamber - that should probably make us less confident of the claims that are popular within it. The extent of our uncertainty is a reason to build models more like the Portfolio Builder and Moral Parliament Tools and less like traditional BOTECs. This is because: Our models allow you to change parameters systematically to see how those changes affect allocations, permitting sensitivity analyses. BOTECs don't deliver optimizations. BOTECs don't systematically incorporate alternative decision theories or moral views. Building a general tool requires you to formulate general assumptions about the functional relationships between different parameters. If you don't build general tools, then it's easier to make ad hoc assumptions (or ad hoc adjustments to your assumptions). Introduction Most philanthropic actors, whether individuals or large charitable organizations, support a variety of cause areas and charities. How should they prioritize between altruistic opportunities in light of their beliefs and decision-theoretic commitments? The CRAFT Sequence explores the challenge of constructing giving portfolios. Over the course of this sequence - and, in particular, through Rethink Priorities' Portfolio Builder and Moral Parliament Tools - we've investigated the factors that influence our views about optimal giving. For instance, we may want to adjust our allocations based on the diminishing returns of particular projects, to hedge against risk, to accommodate moral uncertainty, or based on our preferred procedure for moving from our commitments to an overall portfolio. In this final post, we briefly recap the CRAFT Sequence, discuss the importance of uncertainty, and argue why we should be quite uncertain about any particular combination of empirical, normative, and metanormative judgments. We think that there is a good case for developing and using frameworks and tools like the ones CRAFT offers to help us navigate our uncertainty. Recapping CRAFT We can be uncertain about a wide range of empirical questions, ranging from the probability that an intervention has a positive effect of some magnitude to the rate at which returns diminish. We can be uncertain about a wide range of normative questions, ranging from the amount of credit that an actor can take to the value we ought to assign to various possible futures. We can be uncertain about a wide range of metanormative questions, ranging from the correct decision theory to the correct means of resolving disagreements among our normative commitments. Over the course of this sequence - and, in particular, through Rethink Priorities' Portfolio Builder and Moral Parliament Tools - we've tried to do two things. First, we've tried to motivate some of these uncertainties: We've explored alternatives to EV maximization's use as a decision procedure. Even if EV maximization is the correct criterion of rationality, it's questionable as a decision procedure that ordinary, fallible people can use to make decisions given all their uncertainties and limitations. We've explored the problems and prom...

Link to tool: https://parliament.rethinkpriorities.org (1 min) Introductory Video (6 min) Basic Features Video Executive Summary This post introduces Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool, which models ways an agent can make decisions about how to allocate goods in light of normative uncertainty. We treat normative uncertainty as uncertainty over worldviews. A worldview encompasses a set of normative commitments, including first-order moral theories, values, and attitudes toward risk. We represent worldviews as delegates in a moral parliament who decide on an allocation of funds to a diverse array of charitable projects. Users can configure the parliament to represent their own credences in different worldviews and choose among several procedures for finding their best all-things-considered philanthropic allocation. The relevant procedures are metanormative methods. These methods take worldviews and our credences in them as inputs and produce some action guidance as an output. Some proposed methods have taken inspiration from political or market processes involving agents [...] ---Outline:(00:24) Executive Summary(02:18) Introduction(03:47) How does it work?(04:21) Worldviews(08:07) Projects(10:45) Metanormative parliament(12:11) The Moral Parliament Tool at work(12:16) (How) do empirical assumptions matter?(12:20) Uncertainties about scale(14:13) How much does scale matter?(16:10) An example project: The Cassandra Fund(19:15) What would an EA parliament do?(19:21) Normative uncertainty among EAs(21:17) Results(24:12) Takeaways(26:40) Getting Started(27:04) AcknowledgmentsThe original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. The original text contained 17 images which were described by AI. --- First published: July 17th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HxphJhSiXBQ74uxJX/rethink-priorities-moral-parliament-tool --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethink Priorities' CEO announcement, published by Rethink Priorities on July 18, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Rethink Priorities (RP) is excited to announce that Marcus A. Davis is now RP's sole CEO. Former Co-CEO Peter Wildeford will remain at RP, focusing on projects in artificial intelligence. He will also continue his work as Chief Advisory Executive at the RP-sponsored think tank, the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS). Since 2018, co-founders Marcus Davis and Peter Wildeford have served as Co-CEOs of RP. Their joint leadership has grown RP from a two-person research team into an international research organization with 60+ staff working around the world. Their guidance has helped expand RP's research areas to include animal welfare, global health and development, and artificial intelligence policy. The decision to transition to this new leadership structure comes after discussions around the opportunities for RP's future growth, Peter's expertise and interests, and developments in the artificial intelligence landscape. For further information, please refer to RP's website. Rethink Priorities is a think-and-do tank dedicated to informing decisions made by high-impact organizations and funders across various cause areas. We invite you to explore our research database and stay updated on new work by subscribing to our newsletter. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool, published by Derek Shiller on July 17, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Link to tool: https://parliament.rethinkpriorities.org (1 min) Introductory Video (6 min) Basic Features Video Executive Summary This post introduces Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool, which models ways an agent can make decisions about how to allocate goods in light of normative uncertainty. We treat normative uncertainty as uncertainty over worldviews. A worldview encompasses a set of normative commitments, including first-order moral theories, values, and attitudes toward risk. We represent worldviews as delegates in a moral parliament who decide on an allocation of funds to a diverse array of charitable projects. Users can configure the parliament to represent their own credences in different worldviews and choose among several procedures for finding their best all-things-considered philanthropic allocation. The relevant procedures are metanormative methods. These methods take worldviews and our credences in them as inputs and produce some action guidance as an output. Some proposed methods have taken inspiration from political or market processes involving agents who differ in their conceptions of the good and their decision-making strategies. Others have modeled metanormative uncertainty by adapting tools for navigating empirical uncertainty. We show that empirical and metanormative assumptions can each make large differences in the outcomes. Moral theories and metanormative methods differ in their sensitivity to particular changes. We also show that, taking the results of the EA Survey as inputs to a moral parliament, no one portfolio is clearly favored. The recommended portfolios vary dramatically based on your preferred metanormative method. By modeling these complexities, we hope to facilitate more transparent conversations about normative uncertainty, metanormative uncertainty, and resource allocation. Introduction Decisions about how to do the most good inherently involve moral commitments about what is valuable and which methods for achieving the good are permissible. However, there is deep disagreement about central moral claims that influence our cause prioritization: How much do animals matter? Should we prioritize present people over future people? Should we aim to maximize overall happiness or also care about things like justice or artistic achievement? The answers to these questions can have significant effects on which causes are most choiceworthy. Understandably, many individuals feel some amount of moral uncertainty, and individuals within groups (such as charitable organizations and moral communities) may have different moral commitments. How should we make decisions in light of such uncertainty? Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool allows users to evaluate decisions about how to allocate goods in light of uncertainty over different worldviews. A worldview encompasses a set of normative commitments, including first-order moral theories, values, and attitudes toward risk.[1] We represent worldviews as delegates in a moral parliament who decide on an allocation of funds to a diverse array of charitable projects. Users can configure the parliament to represent their own credences in different worldviews and choose among several procedures for finding their best all-things-considered philanthropic allocation. How does it work? The Moral Parliament tool has three central components: Worldviews, Projects, and Allocation Strategies for making decisions in light of worldview uncertainty. It embodies a three-stage strategy for navigating uncertainty: What are the worldviews in which I place some non-trivial credence? What do they individually recommend that I do? How do I aggregate and arbitrate among these recommendations...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethink Priorities' Portfolio Builder Tool, published by arvomm on July 10, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Link to the tool: https://portfolio.rethinkpriorities.org 2-min Introductory Video: 5-min Tool Features Walkthrough Video: Executive Summary This post introduces Rethink Priorities' Portfolio Builder Tool. This interactive tool is designed to help individuals and organizations optimize their philanthropic giving portfolios by evaluating the cost-effectiveness of different cause areas. It leverages empirical estimates, simplified cost curves, and tailored decision-theoretic assumptions to help users explore optimal portfolio compositions. The Portfolio Builder Tool has two primary functions: (1) finding the optimal portfolio based on user-defined parameters, and (2) assessing the value of a specified portfolio under different decision procedures. The tool integrates cost-effectiveness analysis with decision-making models like Expected Value (EV), Difference-Making Risk Averse Expected Utility (DMREU), Weighted-Linear Utility Theory (WLU), and Tails-Excluded EV, enabling philanthropists to explore the impact of various combinations of empirical assumptions and risk attitudes. If the user is uncertain about decision procedures, the tool offers a way to build portfolios given a distribution of credences across decision procedures. The tool's insights reveal patterns that could significantly influence funding strategies. For example, while EV maximization can favor prioritizing existential risk mitigation, even slight risk aversion tends to shift allocations toward Global Health and Animal Welfare. By calibrating different inputs, users can refine their understanding of portfolio optimization, uncovering trends that should inform resource allocation. The nuances of risk, utility, and decision theories are crucial when trying to maximize impact across Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and Existential Risk Mitigation. The Portfolio Builder Tool facilitates our understanding of these nuances. As a result, it can help philanthropists better align their portfolios with their beliefs and risk preferences. Intro If we want to do as much good as we can, we need to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of particular cause areas. To establish our priorities, we need our best empirical cost-effectiveness estimates and, crucially, we must also make decision-theoretic assumptions. In the CURVE Sequence, RP's Worldview Investigation Team investigated the cost-effectiveness of a wide array of philanthropic actions, including how well they fare under various kinds and levels of risk aversion. However, evaluating cause areas one at a time leaves out something important: namely, how various interventions fare in combination with one another. Most philanthropic actors, whether they be individuals or large charitable organizations, support a variety of charities and cause areas. How should you construct a giving portfolio in light of your beliefs and decision-theoretic commitments? There are two key factors that matter when moving from an assessment of individual options to a portfolio.[1] The first is familiar: namely, the cost curves of the investments that comprise it. If a charity has diminishing marginal returns, then, at some point, it becomes possible that giving an additional dollar to the top-ranking charity would do less good than giving it to a different charity. Therefore, even someone who is risk-neutral and seeks to maximize expected value might have reasons to diversify. Second, someone who is risk-averse may have additional reasons for diversifying. A risk-averse agent cares about the distribution of possible outcomes, preferring a surer-thing investment over one with the same expected value but higher variance in outcomes. Combinations of bets can have dis...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An Introduction to the CRAFT Sequence, published by Bob Fischer on July 8, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post introduces Rethink Priorities' Charitable Resource Allocation Frameworks and Tools Sequence (the CRAFT Sequence). After a brief statement of the problems that CRAFT aims to address, we provide an overview of what it includes. Building Giving Portfolios Some people think that you should go all-in on particular giving opportunities. Some people think that you should diversify your giving portfolio. What assumptions and circumstances favor going all-in? What assumptions and circumstances favor diversification? And either way, what should your resources support? Rethink Priorities' recent Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model (CCM) can help us rank interventions within certain cause areas. It can also help us rank options based on a handful of key decision theories. However, the CCM isn't designed to produce giving portfolios per se. The CCM can help us compare interventions with respect to their expected value or risk-adjusted value. But it was never intended to answer the question: "How should I split a certain amount of money given what matters to me?" We need other tools for that purpose. The CRAFT Sequence introduces beta versions of two such tools: a risk-based portfolio builder, where the key uncertainties concern cost curves and decision theories, and a moral-parliament-based portfolio builder, which allows for the modeling of both normative and metanormative uncertainty. The Sequence's primary goal is to take some first steps toward more principled and transparent ways of constructing giving portfolios. Our tools make debates about worldviews more tractable by illustrating how assumptions about cost curves, attitudes toward risk, and credences in moral theories can influence allocation decisions. These tools are limited in ways you would expect. Their specific recommendations are only as good as their highly uncertain inputs; they assume that you're acting in isolation even though others' allocations can be relevant to what's optimal for you; they sometimes sacrifice granularity for computational efficiency; and so on. Still, the process of operationalizing and implementing proposals is instructive: it makes the choice points clear, it automates relevant calculations, it makes optimization possible, and it paves the way for future research. These tools therefore offer significant improvements over commonly used BOTECs. What's to Come In the coming sequence, we will introduce and comment on two tools for constructing portfolios: one focused on cost-effectiveness under various attitudes toward risk and a second that uses a moral parliament to allocate resources under metanormative uncertainty. The second post introduces the Portfolio Builder Tool that allows you to build a giving portfolio based on (a) the amount of money you want to give, (b) your attitudes toward risk, and (c) some assumptions about the features of the interventions you're considering. The third and fourth posts explore two risk attitudes that this tool incorporates. The third considers challenges to caring about making a difference; the fourth considers the common practice of "rounding down" low probabilities, which is one way of implementing an aversion to poorly justified probabilities. Of course, people don't simply have different attitudes toward risk; they also give some credence to a range of different moral views. So, the fifth post introduces our Moral Parliament Tool, which allows users to consider the impact of moral uncertainty in addition to various risk attitudes. This tool implements a moral parliament and several voting procedures for adjudicating disagreements among the delegates. And, like the first tool, the associated documentation explores the philosophic...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethink Priorities' Digital Consciousness Project Announcement, published by Bob Fischer on July 5, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. One of the core questions regarding the moral status of AI concerns their consciousness. Is there anything it's like to be them? Contemporary AI systems are widely regarded as clearly not conscious, but there seems to be growing concern among experts that we may see conscious AI systems in the not-too-distant future. Understanding our duties to the AI systems we create will involve assessing the nature of their minds, and thus their moral status. There are many important questions about AI minds that bear on their moral status, but whether they are consciousness has a clear and widely recognized role. In addition, it may be important in securing or denying AIs the public's moral consideration. Existing consciousness research revolves first and foremost around human beings. The physical bases (or neural correlates) of consciousness in humans remain uncertain. Leading proposals are both vague and highly controversial. Extending theories of consciousness to AIs will require careful thought about how to generalize beyond the human case. Alternatively, we might look to identify behavioral indicators of consciousness. Behavior has a much more salient role in swaying our attitudes than abstract considerations of architecture. But modern AIs are carefully trained to behave like us, and so it is not easy to tell whether their behaviors indicate anything beyond mimicry. Therefore, we see a variety of kinds of uncertainty at play: there is methodological uncertainty, uncertainty regarding the underpinnings of human consciousness, uncertainty regarding the significance of behavioral evidence, uncertainty about how AIs work, etc. Coming up with any concrete estimate of the probability of consciousness in AI systems will require mapping, measuring, and aggregating these uncertainties. Rethink Priorities has overcome similar challenges before. Our Moral Weight Project wrangled patchy evidence about behavioral traits and cognitive capacities across the animal kingdom through a Monte Carlo framework that output probabilistic estimates of welfare ranges for different species. We learned a lot from this work and we are eager to apply those lessons to a new challenge. We are now turning to the question of how best to assess the probability of AI consciousness. Over the coming months, we plan to carry out a project encompassing the following tasks: 1. Evaluating different modeling approaches to AI consciousness estimation. What different paradigms are worth exploring? What are the pros and cons of each? 2. Identifying some plausible proxies for consciousness to feed into these models. What are the challenges in pinning down values for these proxies? Where might future technical work be most fruitful? 3. Producing a prototype model that translates uncertainty about different sources of evidence into probability ranges for contemporary and hypothetical future AI models. Given our uncertainties, what should we conclude about the overall probability of consciousness? Having such a model is valuable in a few different ways. First, we can produce an overall estimate of the probability that a given system is conscious - an estimate that's informed by, rather than undermined by, our uncertainty about the correct theory of consciousness. Second, because the inputs to the process can be updated with new information as, say, new capabilities come online, we can readily update our overall estimate of the probability of consciousness. Third, because we can repeat this process based on the capabilities that were present at earlier dates, we can also model the historical rate of change in the probability of digital consciousness. In principle, we can use that to make...

(You can read this post as a Google Doc. You might find this easier to share with animal-sympathetic non-EAs. Also: I work at Rethink Priorities, but I'm writing in a personal capacity.) A few weeks ago, I shared some suggested responses for a Defra consultation on welfare labelling. I was really pleased to hear that many EAs and animal rights advocates wrote in to support the proposal. I'm now sharing a similar opportunity: ~ten minutes of your time to speak up for ~4.5 million caged chickens. If you want to help, you have less than 48 hours to get this done! What's the public consultation? The Scottish government is running a public consultation on their proposal to ban cages for layer hens. Agriculture is a devolved power so Holyrood have responsibility for Scottish animal welfare.Let's be clear: cage-free chickens have dramatically better lives than caged chickens. Liberating caged [...] ---Outline:(00:46) What's the public consultation?(03:42) How you can help(04:39) Will your response influence decision-makers?The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 24th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mooBq4A3Hd8ttTyAY/ten-minutes-to-speak-up-for-4-5-million-caged-chickens --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Ten minutes to speak up for ~4.5 million caged chickens, published by Ben Stevenson on June 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. (You can read this post as a Google Doc. You might find this easier to share with animal-sympathetic non-EAs. Also: I work at Rethink Priorities, but I'm writing in a personal capacity.) A few weeks ago, I shared some suggested responses for a Defra consultation on welfare labelling. I was really pleased to hear that many EAs and animal rights advocates wrote in to support the proposal. I'm now sharing a similar opportunity: ~ten minutes of your time to speak up for ~4.5 million caged chickens. If you want to help, you have less than 48 hours to get this done! What's the public consultation? The Scottish government is running a public consultation on their proposal to ban cages for layer hens. Agriculture is a devolved power so Holyrood have responsibility for Scottish animal welfare. Let's be clear: cage-free chickens have dramatically better lives than caged chickens. Liberating caged chickens alleviates a great deal of suffering.[1] Over 80% of Scottish layer hens are already cage-free. A greater proportion than across the whole UK, this is a testament to hard work from animal welfare campaigners. Nevertheless, a ban still seems really important: Corporate commitments might not last forever. A ban can lock in campaigners' hard-won victories and pre-empt businesses backsliding Corporate commitments and welfare schemes might not always be met or enforced. A recent investigation from Animal Rising revealed that at least one English farm kept chickens in cages despite being RSPCA Assured. We could have greater trust that chickens are truly free from cages if they were banned The pro-animal movement will have another win, which builds political momentum for our cause. The Scottish government notes that Luxembourg and Austria have already banned cages; that Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are phasing them out; and that Australia aims to ban cages by 2036. If Scotland is attentive to other governments' bans, then other governments might pay attention to a Scottish ban 18% of Scottish layer hens are still so many - over a million - birds. None of them deserve to live their whole life condemned to a cage. The government are considering three options: 1. 2030 ban on enriched cage production 2. 2030 ban on installing new cages, and 2034 ban on enriched cage production 3. "Information campaign aimed at consumers to encourage all retailers who have not signed up to the retailer pledge and caterers to commit to stop stocking/selling eggs or egg products from enriched cages by 2034"[2] Option (2) is the default because the government thinks this best balances improving bird welfare and supporting the egg industry. This proposal is what the public consultation is about. I think pursuing (2) rather than (1) is really disappointing. Four more years of cages means up to 4.5 million layer hens will live their lives behind bars.[3] And there are only fifteen farms currently keeping caged layer hens in Scotland; do they really need four more years of warning? An instant ban on installing new cages and a 2030 ban on all enriched cage production seem eminently reasonable to me. How you can help You can access the public consultation here and submit your response by 25 June 2024. You don't have to be Scottish to respond. The consultation is divided into several pages. Only the 'About you' page is necessary. Page This is about Number of questions Animal welfare Will a ban on cages help chickens express natural behaviours and improve other welfare outcomes? 2 questions Policy proposal Do you agree with the proposal? 5 questions Capital costs Estimating cost to convert cage farms to cage-free 1 question Production costs Estimating cost per egg under c...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Farmed animals are neglected, published by Vasco Grilo on June 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary Farmed cows and pigs account for a tiny fraction of the disability of the farmed animals I analysed. The annual disability of farmed animals is much larger than that of humans, even under the arguably very optimistic assumption of all farmed animals having neutral lives. The annual funding helping farmed animals is much smaller than that helping humans. Introduction I think one should decide on which areas and interventions to fund overwhelmingly based on (marginal) cost-effectiveness, as GiveWell does. Relatedly, I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare, like the ones supported by The Humane League (THL), have a cost-effectiveness of 14.3 DALY/$, 1.44 k times that of GiveWell's top charities. However, for communication purposes, I believe it is fine to look into the benefits of fully solving a problem as well as philanthropic spending. Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) has a great graph highlighting the neglectedness of farmed animals in the United States relative to their scale. In this post, I estimate the annual disability of and philanthropic spending on humans and farmed animals, both globally and in China[1]. The data and calculations are in this Sheet. Methods I got the annual disability of each group of farmed animals multiplying its population by its disability per living time in (human) years lived with disability (YLD) per animal-year[2], which I calculated from (1 - "welfare per time as a fraction of that of a fully healthy human as a fraction of the welfare range (normalised welfare per time)")*"welfare range". For a normalised welfare per time equal to: 0, corresponding to a neutral life, the disabilty per living time is equal to the welfare range, which makes sense. By definition, a dying human has a disability per living time of 1 YLD/year (which is equal to the welfare range of humans of 1), and a welfare per time of 0. 1, respecting a fully healthy farmed animal, the disability per living time is 0, which checks out. By definition, a fully healthy human has a disability per living time of 0, and it is natural to extend this to farmed animals. In agreement with the above, disability throughout this post refers to the potential for increasing ( affective) welfare up to the level of a fully healthy being. In contrast, the global burden of disease study ( GBD) focuses on actual disability. For simplicity, I did not consider years of life lost ( YLL). I would have to figure out the life expectancy as a function of age for farmed animals living in ideal conditions, as GBD uses a reference life expectancy for ideal human conditions. A "reference life table, or theoretical minimum risk life table (TMRLT), is used in GBD to calculate years of life lost (YLLs) due to premature mortality. It was constructed based on the lowest observed age-specific mortality rates by location and sex across all estimation years from all locations with populations over 5 million in 2016". I used Rethink Priorities' median welfare ranges. I relied on the value for pigs for cows, the mean between the values for carp and salmon for fish, and the value for black soldier flies for insects. To find the normalised welfare per time of farmed broilers, hens and decapod shrimp, I assumed: The time that farmed broilers, hens and decapod shrimp on ongrowing farms experience each of the 4 pain categories defined by the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP). I also supposed all broilers are in a conventional scenario, and that hens are in conventional cages or cage-free aviaries, using data from WFP to find the respective fractions. Excruciating pain is 1 k times as bad as disabling pain[3]. Disabling pain is 100 times as bad as hurtful pain. Hurtful pain is 10 times as bad as...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Help Fund Insect Welfare Science, published by Bob Fischer on June 14, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The Arthropoda Foundation Tens of trillions of insects are used or killed by humans across dozens of industries. Despite being the most numerous animal species reared by animal industries, we know next to nothing about what's good or bad for these animals. And right now, funding for this work is scarce. Traditional science funders won't pay for it; and within EA, the focus is on advocacy, not research. So, welfare science needs your help. We're launching the Arthropoda Foundation, a fund to ensure that insect welfare science gets the essential resources it needs to provide decision-relevant answers to pressing questions. Every dollar we raise will be granted to research projects that can't be funded any other way. We're in a critical moment for this work. Over the last year, field-building efforts have accelerated, setting up academic labs that can tackle key studies. However, funding for these studies is now uncertain. We need resources to sustain the research required to improve the welfare of insects. Why do we need a fund? We need a fund because we need a runway for high-priority research. Scientists need to make plans over several years, not a few months. They have to commit now to a grad student who starts next year and finishes a project two years after that. The fund helps guarantee that resources will be there to support academics in the long-term, ensuring that entire labs can remain devoted to this work. We need a fund because we need to let researchers be researchers, not fundraisers. A fund doesn't just buy critical research; it buys the ability of the world's few insect welfare scientists to focus on what matters. We need a fund because funding scientific research on insect welfare isn't easy for individual donors. First, it's hard to know what to fund. As some of the few researchers who have worked on these issues in EA, we're lending our expertise to vet opportunities. Second, universities take overhead that reduces the impact of your donations; an independent fund can use the board's volunteer labor to make the many small reimbursements that are required to cover costs directly. Third, if you're a donor who's giving below the amounts required to support entire projects, your opportunities are extremely limited. This fund smooths over such hurdles, ensuring that everyone can support the highest value research. This fund gives a brand new field some time to get established, it gives that field the resources required to produce essential science, and it keeps that research as cost-effective as possible. Please support welfare science. Team Bob Fischer is a Professor at Texas State University and the lead project manager and author of the Moral Weight Project, a research project to build comparative models of moral weight across animal species. Daniela Waldhorn is the Director of Animal Welfare research at Rethink Priorities, a board member of the Centre for Animal Ethics at Pompeu Fabra University, and lead author on the largest initial EA project focused on studying invertebrate welfare. Abraham Rowe is the Principal of Good Structures, a nonprofit operations service provider, and was previously the COO of Rethink Priorities, and the co-founder and Executive Director of Wild Animal Initiative, an academic field-building and grantmaking organization supporting research on wild animal welfare. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Quantifying and prioritizing shrimp welfare threats, published by Hannah McKay on June 13, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Citation: McKay, H. and McAuliffe, W. (2024). Quantifying and prioritizing shrimp welfare threats. Rethink Priorities. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4QR8K The report is also available on the Rethink Priorities website and as a pdf here . Executive summary This is the fourth report in the Rethink Priorities Shrimp Welfare Sequence. In this report, we quantify the suffering caused to shrimp by 18 welfare threats to assess which welfare issues cause the most harm. See a complete description of the methodology here. We focused on penaeid shrimp in ongrowing farms and broodstock facilities. Incorporating uncertainty at each step of the model, we estimated the prevalence, intensity, and duration of pain caused by each welfare issue. The intensity was based on the Welfare Footprint Project's Pain-Track categories, and 'pain' refers to their definition of pain, encapsulating both physical and mental negative experiences ( Alonso & Schuck-Paim, 2024a). We collapse different pain type estimates into a single metric: 'Disabling-equivalent pain'. See the results in Figure 1. The average farmed shrimp spends 154 hours in disabling-equivalent pain (95% Subjective Credible Interval (SCI): [13, 378]). If we assume that 608 billion penaeid shrimp die on ongrowing farms annually (i.e., including those that die pre-slaughter; Waldhorn & Autric, 2023) then mean values imply that they experience 94 trillion hours of disabling-equivalent pain a year (95% SCI: [8 trillion, 230 trillion]). The highest-ranking threats are chronic issues that affect most farmed shrimp. The top three are high stocking density, high un-ionized ammonia, and low dissolved oxygen. Threats ranked lower are broadly acute, one-off events affecting only a subpopulation (e.g., eyestalk ablation, which affects only broodstock). However, the credible intervals are too wide to determine the rank order of most welfare issues confidently. Box 1: Shrimp aquaculture terminology The terms 'shrimp' and 'prawn' are often used interchangeably. The two terms do not reliably track any phylogenetic differences between species. Here, we use only the term "shrimp", covering both shrimp and prawns. Note that members of the family Artemiidae are commonly referred to as "brine shrimp" but are not decapods and so are beyond the present scope. We opt for the use of Penaues vannamei over Litopenaeus vannamei (to which this species is often referred), due to recognition of the former but not the latter nomenclature by ITIS, WorMS, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) ASFIS List of Species for Fishery Statistics Purposes. The shrimp farming industry uses many terms usually associated with agriculture - for example, 'crops' for a group of shrimp reared together, 'seed' for the first shrimp stocked into a pond, and 'harvest' for collecting and slaughtering shrimp. For clarity, we broadly conform to this terminology. Although we acknowledge animal welfare advocates may prefer terminology that does not euphemize or sanitize the experience of farmed shrimp, here we favor ensuring readability for a wide audience. Introduction We began the Shrimp Welfare Sequence by asking whether the Animal Sentience Precautionary Principle ( Birch, 2017, p. 3) justifies implementing reforms in shrimp aquaculture. The first three posts collectively provide an affirmative answer: More shrimp are alive on farms than any other farmed taxa Half of them die before slaughter, suggesting that some of the welfare threats they endure must be serious. The welfare threats shrimp experience are varied, ranging from poor water quality to environmental deprivation to inhumane slaughter. Unfortunately, it is probably n...

Texas State University's Bob Fischer, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, joins the Big Ideas TXST podcast to discuss the ethics of insect sentience.  The debate over animal sentience has persisted for centuries. Broadly speaking, it's generally accepted that mammals, reptiles, birds and fish have degrees of sentience—that is, they are conscious and can feel both pleasure and pain. But what about insects? Fischer explains that mounting evidence indicates that at least some insects exhibit behavior attributable to pleasure and pain responses. If so, then what are the ethical implications for the billions of interactions between humans and insects every day?   Fischer earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2011. He is a senior research manager for Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals.  

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund: March 2024 recommendations, published by Linch on May 27, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This payout report covers the EA Infrastructure Fund's grantmaking from June 16th 2023 to March 31st 2024 (9.5 months). It follows our previous June 2023 payout report. Total funding recommended: $1,697,882 Total funding paid out[1]: $1,386,854 Number of grants paid out: 41 Acceptance rate (excluding desk rejections): 49/173 = 28.3% Acceptance rate (including desk rejections): 18.4% (49/266) Report authors: Linchuan Zhang (primary author), Caleb Parikh (interim fund chair), Harri Bescelli, Tom Barnes Funding breakdown[2] EA Groups: $456,780 granted across 18 grants EA-related Groups: $312,304 granted across 6 grants EA Content: $78,216 granted across 3 grants EA Services and Infrastructure: $179,957 granted across 6 grants Effective Giving: $53,000 granted across 2 grants Research: $216,535 granted across 6 grants [Total]: $1,386,854 8 of our grantees, who received a total of $521, 206, requested that our public reports for their grants are anonymized (they're written below). 1 grantee, who received $2,500, requested that we do not have a public report at all (You can read our policy on public reporting here). Our median response time over this period was 27 days, and our average response time was 42 days. For paid out grants, our median and average turnaround times are 57 and 61 days, respectively. Highlighted Grants Below we've highlighted some grants from this round that we thought were particularly interesting and that represent a relatively wide range of EAIF's activities. We hope that these reports will help donors make more informed decisions about whether to donate to EAIF, as well as help the wider community understand our work. Rethink Priorities Worldview Investigations Team ($168,000): Stipend to improve their Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model, including a portfolio builder to help individuals and foundations prioritize their philanthropic spending. [Grant type: Research] Note: This grant, while approved, has not yet been paid out, pending due diligence. This project fits in well with the EA Infrastructure Fund's tentative reorientation towards Principles-Focused Effective Altruism. The fund managers were highly impressed by the ambitious scope of this endeavor. Despite the EA movement existing for over a decade, there were no other publicly available cross-cause models with comparable breadth and an EA-informed perspective. The gap suggests that creating such a comprehensive model is much more challenging than it might initially seem. The fund managers admired the team's intention to produce a practical tool that funders could realistically use, rather than (e.g.) purely theoretical work on cause prioritization. However, some fund managers were concerned about the default values used in the Cross-Cause Model, which sometimes appeared insufficiently principled or overly conservative. Caleb Parikh, the primary investigator for this grant, provided more detailed thoughts in a comment. Overall, while excited to grant this project presently, the fund managers believe continued excitement for renewing the grant or offering similar grants hinges on a few key conditions: 1. The methodology employed in Rethink Priorities' Cost-Effectiveness Model should be broadly reasonable, and easy for EAIF's fund managers to endorse 2. The project should demonstrate potential to genuinely influence decision-making among major funders. 3. We should broadly believe the team's proposed improvements to the model are likely to be useful. Despite the high expected value, the fund managers acknowledge that real-world grantmaking decisions often involve holistic, contextual factors that may limit the direct impact of even thoughtfully-designed the...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The suffering of a farmed animal is equal in size to the happiness of a human, according to a survey, published by Stijn on May 21, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Author: Stijn Bruers, researcher economics KU Leuven Short summary According to a survey among a representative sample of the Belgian population, most people believe that farmed animals like chickens have the same capacity for suffering as humans, and that most farmed land animals (broiler chickens) have negative welfare levels (i.e. experience more suffering than happiness). The average suffering of a farmed land animal, estimated by people, is equal in size to the positive welfare of an average human (in Belgium) whereas the welfare level of a wild bird is zero on average. Given the fact that there are more farmed animals than humans in the world, and that the populations of small farmed animals (chickens, fish, shrimp and insects) are increasing, most people would have to come to the conclusion that net global welfare (of humans, farmed animals and wild animals combined) is negative and declining. People who care about global welfare should therefore strongly prioritize decreasing animal farming and improving farmed animal welfare conditions. Introduction How much do farmed animals such as broiler chickens suffer? How can we compare the welfare of animals and humans? These are crucially important questions, because knowing the welfare capacities and welfare levels of humans and non-human animals is necessary to prioritize strategies to improve welfare on Earth. They can also be used to estimate the global welfare state of the world, as was first done by Fish (2023). His results were very pessimistic: net global welfare may be negative and declining, due to the increased farming of small animals (chicken, fish, shrimp and possibly insects). The top-priority to improve global welfare and decrease suffering on Earth becomes very clear: decrease animal farming (or decrease the suffering of farmed animals). Fish arrived at these pessimistic results using welfare range and welfare level estimates by animal welfare experts at Rethink Priorities (the Moral Weight Project) and Charity Entrepreneurship (the Weighted Animal Welfare Index). However, the calculations by Fish may be criticized on the point that his choice of welfare ranges and welfare levels was too arbitrary, because it first involved the arbitrary choice of source or group of experts, and those experts themselves also made arbitrary choices to arrive at their welfare range and level estimates. Perhaps people believe that the welfare capacities and levels of animal suffering used by Fish were overestimated? Perhaps people won't believe his results because they don't believe that animals have such high capacities for suffering? In order to convince the general public, we can instead consider the estimates of welfare ranges and welfare levels of animals given by the wider public. To do so, a survey among a representative sample of the Flemish population in Belgium was conducted to study how much sentience people ascribe to non-human animals. The estimates of animal welfare ranges by the general public were more animal-positive than those of Rethink Priorities. Most respondents gave higher values of animal welfare ranges than those given by the animal welfare experts at Rethink Priorities. According to the general public, Rethink Priorities may have underestimated the animal welfare ranges. Furthermore, most people estimate that the welfare level of most farmed land animals (chickens) is negative, and in absolute value as large as the positive welfare level of humans (in line with the Animal Welfare Index estimates by Charity Entrepreneurship). Hence, according to the general public, the results of Fish were too optimistic. The global welfare sta...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The scale of animal agriculture, published by MichaelStJules on May 16, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In a table, I combine various estimates of the number of animals farmed with Rethink Priorities' welfare range or moral weight estimates (Fischer, 2023) or my own guesses for others based on them. The table is also accessible here with calculations and some notes for some of the figures. Farmed animals Individual welfare range (Rethink Priorities' Fischer, 2023, and my own guesses for others in italics) Total welfare range-years/tonne produced Total welfare range of those alive at any time (billions) Welfare range * number killed per year (billions) Number alive at any time (billions) Number killed per year (billions) Total weight of animals harvested per year (millions of tonnes) Sources for animal numbers and tonnage Pigs 0.515 4.1 0.5 0.77 0.98 1.49 123 Šimčikas, 2020 and Our World in Data (a, b) Cattle (and buffaloes) 0.5 11.1 0.9 0.17 1.7 0.34 76 Šimčikas, 2020 and Our World in Data (a, b) Sheep and goats 0.5 66.1 1.1 0.57 2.2 1.14 17 Šimčikas, 2020 and Our World in Data (a, b) Chickens 0.332 56.6 7.9 24.9 23.7 75 139 Šimčikas, 2020 and Our World in Data (a, b) Fish (excluding wild fishery stocking) 0.089 152.8 9.2 9.9 103 111 60 Šimčikas, 2020, FAO, 2022 (Figure 13) Fish for wild fishery stocking 0.089 1.3 7.1 15 80 Šimčikas, 2020, Šimčikas, 2019 Decapod shrimp 0.031 1080.3 7.1 13.6 230 440 6.6 Waldhorn & Autric, 2023 Insect larvae (2030 projection) 0.002 438.4 0.78 23.8 391 11905 1.8 2030 production projection by de Jong & Nikolik, 2021 (pdf)) Brine shrimp nauplii 0.0002 98630.1 0.30 108.0 1479 540000 0.003 Boddy/Shrimp Welfare Project, unpublished, tonnage from The Fish Site, 2019 Total of above 123.6 27.7 187.9 2245 552612 224 Humans (for comparison) 1 8.1 0.061 8.1 0.061 Ritchie & Mathieu, 2023 Some notes: 1. When central estimates were not available, I've replaced ranges with my own best guess central estimates. 2. The numbers for insect larvae are based on the projection of production by 2030 by de Jong & Nikolik, 2021 (pdf), for production only in North America and Europe and only for farmed animal feed and pet food, although they expected feed to account for most insect farming, and most investment had been for farms in North America and Europe. I use weights and lifespans reflecting black soldier fly larvae. I use Rethink Priorities' welfare range estimate for silkworms for them. 3. Some of the above estimates may not account for pre-slaughter/pre-harvest mortality, so may understate the number alive at a time or that are killed other than by harvest/slaughter. 4. The figures for "Total weight of animals harvested per year" may be somewhat inconsistent, with some potentially reflecting only meat after removing parts, and others the whole bodies. 5. There are other farmed animals not included above, but the above seems to account for almost all of them (Šimčikas, 2020, Waldhorn & Autric, 2023). Brine shrimp nauplii For some background on brine shrimp (Artemia) nauplii (early larvae), see Van Stappen, 1996, The Fish Site, 2019, Brine shrimp - Wikipedia and Aquaculture of brine shrimp - Wikipedia. They are largely used as feed for fish larvae and decapod shrimp larvae. The number estimates are based on unpublished estimates by Aaron Boddy from Shrimp Welfare Project. I assume, as a guess conditional on being sentient at all, brine shrimp nauplii are sentient for one day before they die, roughly between hatching from the cyst (egg) after being added to tanks as a cyst to feed fish or shrimp larvae, and actually being eaten. I doubt their (potential) mental capacities have been studied much at all. Their average weights as feed are probably around 5*10^-6 grams,[1] similar to nematodes.[2] Rethink Priorities has been fairly skeptical of nematode sen...

Around the end of Feb 2024 I attended the Summit on Existential Risk and EAG: Bay Area (GCRs), during which I did 25+ one-on-ones about the needs and gaps in the EA-adjacent catastrophic risk landscape, and how they've changed. The meetings were mostly with senior managers or researchers in the field who I think are worth listening to (unfortunately I can't share names). Below is how I'd summarise the main themes in what was said. If you have different impressions of the landscape, I'd be keen to hear them. There's been a big increase in the number of people working on AI safety, partly driven by a reallocation of effort (e.g. Rethink Priorities starting an AI policy think tank); and partly driven by new people entering the field after its newfound prominence. Allocation in the landscape seems more efficient than in the past – it's harder to identify [...] --- First published: May 6th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YDjH6ACPZq889tqeJ/updates-on-the-ea-catastrophic-risk-landscape --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Updates on the EA catastrophic risk landscape, published by Benjamin Todd on May 6, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Around the end of Feb 2024 I attended the Summit on Existential Risk and EAG: Bay Area (GCRs), during which I did 25+ one-on-ones about the needs and gaps in the EA-adjacent catastrophic risk landscape, and how they've changed. The meetings were mostly with senior managers or researchers in the field who I think are worth listening to (unfortunately I can't share names). Below is how I'd summarise the main themes in what was said. If you have different impressions of the landscape, I'd be keen to hear them. There's been a big increase in the number of people working on AI safety, partly driven by a reallocation of effort (e.g. Rethink Priorities starting an AI policy think tank); and partly driven by new people entering the field after its newfound prominence. Allocation in the landscape seems more efficient than in the past - it's harder to identify especially neglected interventions, causes, money, or skill-sets. That means it's become more important to choose based on your motivations. That said, here's a few ideas for neglected gaps: Within AI risk, it seems plausible the community is somewhat too focused on risks from misalignment rather than mis-use or concentration of power. There's currently very little work going into issues that arise even if AI is aligned, including the deployment problem, Will MacAskill's " grand challenges" and Lukas Finnveden's list of project ideas. If you put significant probability on alignment being solved, some of these could have high importance too; though most are at the stage where they can't absorb a large number of people. Within these, digital sentience was the hottest topic, but to me it doesn't obviously seem like the most pressing of these other issues. (Though doing field building for digital sentience is among the more shovel ready of these ideas.) The concrete entrepreneurial idea that came up the most, and seemed most interesting to me, was founding orgs that use AI to improve epistemics / forecasting / decision-making (I have a draft post on this - comments welcome). Post-FTX, funding has become even more dramatically concentrated under Open Philanthropy, so finding new donors seems like a much bigger priority than in the past. (It seems plausible to me that $1bn in a foundation independent from OP could be worth several times that amount added to OP.) In addition, donors have less money than in the past, while the number of opportunities to fund things in AI safety has increased dramatically, which means marginal funding opportunities seem higher value than in the past (as a concrete example, nuclear security is getting almost no funding). Both points mean efforts to start new foundations, fundraise and earn to give all seem more valuable compared to a couple of years ago. Many people mentioned comms as the biggest issue facing both AI safety and EA. EA has been losing its battle for messaging, and AI safety is in danger of losing its too (with both a new powerful anti-regulation tech lobby and the more left-wing AI ethics scene branding it as sci-fi, doomer, cultish and in bed with labs). People might be neglecting measures that would help in very short timelines (e.g. transformative AI in under 3 years), though that might be because most people are unable to do much in these scenarios. Right now, directly talking about AI safety seems to get more people in the door than talking about EA, so some community building efforts have switched to that. There's been a recent influx in junior people interested in AI safety, so it seems plausible the biggest bottleneck again lies with mentoring & management, rather than recruiting more junior people. Randomly: there seems to have been a trend of former le...

Sofia Balderson is the co-founder of Hive, formerly known as Impactful Animal Advocacy, an organisation that aims to improve coordination and collaboration in the farmed animal movement through cultivating impactful, intentional, and serendipitous communitiesMany listeners may be on the Impactful Advocacy Slack – a Slack workspace with over 2,000 animal advocates and a great place to connect, learn and share ideas. Today, we spoke with Sofia Balderson, one of the originators of that Slack Channel about lessons in starting new projects, the importance of facing rejection, how much you should listen to philanthropic funders to understand the value of your project and tangible ways to measure whether your work is providing value! This was a very fun and candid conversation which I really enjoyed, so I'm sure you all will too.Relevant links to things mentioned throughout the show:Our website: joinhive.org Chi from Global Vegan inspiration Hive Slack joining link Hive Newsletter (free biweekly) Hive volunteer moderator role Hive channel lead role (volunteer)Hive events Our Theory of Change (general + for each program)Our metrics: what we measure (including our OKRs and KPIs)Our impact estimates for 2023 and 2024Our cost-effectiveness estimates: spreadsheetOur Year in Review 2023: insights in our programs and resultsWeighted factor model explanationMy EA Forum post: Writing about my job: co-founder of an early stage charitySofia's productivity course (Clariteam)Hive Fundraising wiki Rethink Priorities cross cause cost-effectiveness comparison toolLeader Lab book  Obstacle is the way by Ryan Holiday The Daily Stoic by Ryan HolidayChapters----------------00:00 // Start04:25 // History of Hive/Impactful Animal Advocacy06:43 // Who is the Hive Slack for?10:24 // Hive's biggest challenges so far14:19 // Example of projects that didn't work out18:08 // How important is funder feedback?26:30 If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How good it is to donate and how hard it is to get a job, published by Elijah Persson-Gordon on April 17, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary In this post, I hope to inspire other Effective Altruists to focus more on donation and commiserate with those who have been disappointed in their ability to get an altruistic job. First, I argue that the impact of having a job that helps others is complicated. In this section, I discuss annual donation statistics of people in the Effective Altruism community donate, which I find quite low. In the rest of the post, I describe my recent job search, my experience substituting at public schools, and my expenses. Having a job that helps others might be overemphasized Doing a job that helps others seems like a good thing to do. Weirdly, it's not as simple as that. While some job vacancies last for years, other fields are very competitive and have many qualified applicants for most position listings. In the latter case, if you take the job offer, you may think you are doing good in the world. But if you hadn't taken the job, there could be someone in your position doing nearly as good as you (or better, depending on if you were overstating your qualifications.) In animal welfare in particular, jobs get many applicants. Lauren Mee, from Animal Advocacy Careers, on the podcast How I Learned to Love Shrimp: "...there's an interesting irony in the movement where there is actually a lot of people who are interested in working in the movement and not enough roles for all of those people." There is some social pressure within and outside of the Effective Altruism community to have a meaningful job where you help others. Although there is a lot of focus on impactful careers, Rethink Priorities' 2020 Effective Altruism survey found that around only 10% of non-student respondents worked at an Effective Altruism organization. Donations are an amazing opportunity, and I think they are underemphasized I was confused to find that most people I talked to in Effective Altruism settings did not seem to be frugal or donate very much. It seems that this is correct. In the 2020 Effective Altruism survey , among respondents who opted to share their donation amounts, donating $10,000 annually would place you within the top 10% of donors. The median for these respondents was close to $500 per year. (Mostly, they donate to global poverty.) A lot of people in rich countries have flexibility in where their money goes. This money could be put toward their best bets of doing good in the world. Which is more likely to do good: going out to eat, or helping to fund an effective charity? It seems to me that you would have to think that the most effective charities are not that effective or that your contributions would be too small to make an impact to choose the former. To understand more about the effectiveness of charities, I would highly recommend talking to someone from the charity and asking your specific doubts. As for small contributions, I am not exactly sure how to think about them, and hope to write about this topic in the future. However, it seems to me that many charities make purchases in the thousands of dollars, which could be an achievable amount to donate over a year. For instance, Fish Welfare Initiative's 2024 budget includes numbers in the thousands. I used to really want an animal welfare-related job. Then I wanted to donate more. Now I am a substitute at a public school I graduated in May of 2023 and have since been interested in an animal welfare job. I have applied to a handful of these positions, realizing over time that the applicant pools were larger than I thought; the researcher position at Animal Charity Evaluators had 375 applicants. After moving back to a more rural area to be around friends and family, I looked into busin...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Research summary: The evolution of nociception in arthropods, published by abrahamrowe on April 17, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post is a short summary of A long-read draft assembly of the Chinese mantis (Mantodea: Mantidae: Tenodera sinensis) genome reveals patterns of ion channel gain and loss across Arthropoda, a peer-reviewed, open-access publication in G3: Genes | Genomes | Genetics under a CC BY license. The paper and supplemental information can be accessed here. The original paper was written by Jay Goldberg, R. Keating Godfrey, and Meghan Barrett; the research conducted in the paper was funded by Rethink Priorities as part of our research agenda on understanding the welfare of insects on farms. This post was written by Abraham Rowe and reviewed for accuracy by Jay Goldberg and Meghan Barrett. All information is derived from the Goldberg et al. (2024) publication unless otherwise cited, and some text from the original publication is directly adapted for this summary. Introduction Mantids that engage in sexually cannibalistic behaviors (e.g., where the female eats the male during copulation) are often cited as a pinnacle example of insects' lack of pain sensation and, therefore, sentience. In their seminal paper on insect sentience, Eisemann et al.'s ( 1984) Do insects feel pain? - A biological view, the authors cite the fact that male mantids continue to mate while being cannibalized as a behavioral indicator of a lack of pain sensation in insects more broadly ( Eisemann et al. 1984). This behavior suggests that male mantids might not even be able to sense, and thus respond reflexively to, the noxious mechanical damage that occurs during the copulatory experience. One mechanism by which animals can sense mechanical damage is through nociceptive ion channels, proteins found in their peripheral sensory neurons. At the time of Eisemann et al.'s publication, insects were not known to have nociceptive ion channels (a fact they also discuss). It has now been determined that many arthropods (including insects) have nociceptors that perceive chemical, mechanical, and thermal injuries. Indeed, many of their nociceptive ion channels are homologous to mammalian channels (homologous, meaning that the genes for these channels were inherited from a common ancestor to both mammals and insects). However, whether mantids have these ion channels - thus presenting a challenge to the 'peripheral sensory perception' part of the Eisemann argument against insect pain as demonstrated by male mantid behavior - is not known. Genes can be gained and lost across species. Finding evidence of the presence or absence of these channels in the genome of a sexually cannibalistic mantid species would be an important first step to understanding the weaknesses or strengths of Eisemann et al.'s claims about how we might interpret their behavior. Further, by looking at the genes of arthropods across families, we can assess how nociception may have evolved in insects and possibly begin to understand why there is a variance in nociceptive ion channel expression across the arthropods. This understanding might help us identify what kinds of noxious stimuli are perceived negatively by different insect species in the future as, for instance, some other animals are known to lack certain categories of nociceptors (e.g., cold nociception is lacking in some fish species; Sneddon 2019). Additionally, gene copy number (how many copies of that gene the species has in its genome) can also play a role in the strength of their response to a noxious stimulus ( Jang et al., 2023; in Drosophila melanogaster). Determining gene copy number could eventually lead us to understand the high degree of variance in response to noxious stimuli among insects. Of course, in all cases, surveying genetic data is on...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: CEA is hiring a Community Building Grants Associate (apply by 28 April), published by Naomi N on April 11, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We're looking for an ambitious, engaging, and strategic professional to join our Groups team at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) as a Community Building Grants (CBG) Associate. As a CBG Associate, you'll be a key player in increasing the impact of our CBG program and shaping how the city & national groups community ecosystem evolves. The program currently provides over $2.5 million / year in support to local EA directors and is funding >20 FTE in 14 different locations. Examples of these locations include NYC, DC, London, the Netherlands, Australia, and India. These groups have led to several exciting outcomes including: Introducing AI safety to somebody and this leading them to take a role as a technical safety staff at Anthropic. Counterfactually leading to several group members becoming researchers at Rethink Priorities. Preparing members to start effective charities through the Charity Entrepreneurship program, for example Lafiya Nigeria that focuses on contraception access for women in Nigeria. Helping people enter key policy roles, both in the fields of AI and Biosecurity. They report that without their group these positions would not have been on their radar and they would probably not have been able to start working in these fields. Working as a grantee was crucial for taking up longtermist roles, such as Chief of Staff at Forethought, or to found organisations like the Impact Academy. We have the ambition to significantly improve the program and believe that some of our biggest wins in the past have come from seeding and incubating new groups. We're eager to experiment more with this approach. Your responsibilities will include: Conducting practical research into what makes top-performing city and national EA groups excel, translating your findings into concrete program improvements. Developing and leading an incubation program to seed new EA groups in promising locations by recruiting talent, vetting candidates, and providing support. We have some uncertainty about the incubation program, so this responsibility might change. Offering additional support to our current CBG grantees and non-funded city & national groups, including assisting them with hiring. Supporting our team's overall program strategy, evaluation processes, and grant assessments. About the team: As part of CEA's Groups team, you will work closely with, and report directly to, Naomi Nederlof, the CBG Manager. The Groups team cares deeply about both improving the world and maintaining a positive working environment. Is this you? You might be a good fit if: You have deep familiarity with core EA ideas You're skilled at tackling complex, open-ended projects You're passionate about doing impactful work in EA community building You have strong interpersonal skills to build relationships with grantees and stakeholders You're adaptable to shifting priorities as our program evolves You're self-driven and able to own projects end-to-end Preferably, you have experience in community organizing and have knowledge of existing EA groups What we're offering: Full-time role, option for remote work in GMT-6 to GMT+7 timezones Potential visa sponsorship to join our team in the Oxford office Estimated total compensation range of $66,000 - $122,540 (including 10% 401k contribution) Benefits like health insurance, professional development funds, parental leave, and more Anticipated start between June - October 2024 Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Bob Fischer is the Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University.Can insects feel pain? Should people who care about chickens, cows and pigs also care about reducing the suffering of crickets or black soldier flies? In this episode with Bob Fischer from Rethink Priorities, we try to answer some of those questions, as well as talking about the rapidly growing insect industry, and possible ways for advocates to help farmed insects.We talk about lots of interesting content and research, for some of which there are excellent visualisations, which we'll link to at the top of the show notes. I highly recommend checking out the Welfare Range Table and Rethink Priorities' Welfare Range estimates to help better understand some of the points here, both of which are linked.  Bob also had a great conversation on the 80,000 Hours Podcast about the moral weights project more broadly and how they want to try to compare welfare across different species of animals. We think they covered it very well, so we didn't speak much about it today, so we'll link it for interested folks. Relevant links to things mentioned throughout the show:Cognitive and hedonic proxies of different animals from Rethink Priorities Moral Weights Project Rethink Priorities' Welfare Range estimatesFor more on this, listen to Bob's great episode on the 80,000 Hours podcast Research paper, “Can Insects Feel Pain?”, which found that two orders of insects (which include cockroaches, termites, flies and mosquitos) met more criteria to feel pain than decapod crustaceans (e.g. crabs, lobsters, shrimp), which are recognised as sentient by the UK government. How I Learned To Love Shrimp YouTube Channel Meghan Barrett's handbook chapterBarn 8 by Deb Olin UnferthDominion by Matthew ScullyDonate to Insect Welfare Research SocietyDonate to Rethink PrioritiesNewsletter for Insect Welfare Research SocietyNewsletter for Rethink Priorities If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Applications Open: Elevate Your Mental Resilience with Rethink Wellbeing's CBT Program, published by Inga on April 7, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Do you want to: become more fullfilled, resilient, and productive? practice evidence-based tools for self-management, to deal with blockers and stressors such as low concentration, motivation, mood, and self-esteem? embark on that journey together with other ambitiously altruistic people? People who are well do good better. In a rapidly evolving world where adaptability and innovation are paramount, compromised cognitive function due to mental health issues can severely limit one's own and one's team's performance and potential [e.g., 1, 2, 3]. We [at Rethink Wellbeing] are now accepting participants for this year's Mental Resilience Program! Reminder: last year, we served 50+ ambitious altruists, among those employees of 80,000 Hours, Effective Ventures, Rethink Priorities, and the Center for AI Safety, had nearly no dropout (3 people), a 90%+ recommendation rate, and significant pre-post effects on mental health, wellbeing, and productivity. Individuals: Apply now in

Comme chaque année depuis que j'ai lancé le podcast, je consacre un épisode entier aux animaux aquatiques, à l'occasion de la Journée mondiale pour la fin de la pêche et des élevages aquacoles, qui a lieu le dernier samedi du mois de mars. Une fois par an, ce n'est déjà pas assez par rapport au nombre de victimes, mais c'est le strict minimum que je me suis fixé.  Saviez-vous que l'émoji crevettes qui représente une jolie crevette toute rose et courbée ne représente en fait pas du tout les crevettes telles qu'elles sont de leur vivant, mais les crevettes une fois cuites et prêtes à manger ? En fait, scoop mais : les crevettes ne sont le plus souvent pas roses du tout !  Et autre information que vous ne saviez probablement pas : ce sont très certainement les animaux les plus nombreux à être exploités pour la consommation humaine...  Avec mon deux invitées Léa Guttmann de Shrimp Welfare Project et Elisa Autric de Rethink Priorities, on décortique (ok jeu de mots de très mauvais goût, j'avoue) le sort des crevettes exploitées, à la fois celles qui sont pêchées et celles qui sont élevées.  On ne lâche rien pour tous les animaux aquatiques sentients ! Pour plus d'informations sur les meilleurs moyens d'aider les crevettes ou de construire des campagnes sur cette question, n'hésitez pas à contacter Elisa Autric : elisa.autric@gmail.com ________________________________ Références et sources citées dans l'entretien :  - Journée Mondiale pour la Fin de la Pêche et des élevages aquacoles (la JMFP) - Shrimp Welfare Project - Rethink Priorities - Charity Entrepreneurship Program - Rapport "Shrimp: The animals most commonly used and killed for food production" co-écrit par Daniela R. Waldhorn et Elisa Autric - Fishcount - Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), agence des Nations Unies : - Épisode de Comme un poisson dans l'eau avec Tom Bry-Chevalier sur l'altruisme efficace - Article "Pre-slaughter mortality of farmed shrimp" écrit par Hannah McKay et William McAuliffe - Super webinaire avec Hannah McKay - Rapport "Welfare considerations for farmed shrimp" écrit par Hannah McKay, William McAuliffe et Daniela R. Waldhorn pour Rethink Priorities - Shrimp Welfare Report - Article de vulgarisation écrit par Léa Guttmann dans la revue de la Fondation Droit Animal - Épisode de Comme un poisson dans l'eau "Laissons les poisson dans l'eau" - Le principe de précaution vis-à-vis de la sentience, formulé par Jonathan Birch Recommandations d'Elisa Autric et de Léa Guttmann : - le post du EA Forum "Strange Love - Developing Empathy With Intention" - Le podcast How I Learned To Love Shrimp par Amy Odene et James Ozden ________________________________ SOUTENIR : https://linktr.ee/poissonpodcast Comme un poisson dans l'eau est un podcast indépendant et sans publicité : votre soutien est indispensable pour qu'il puisse continuer à exister. Merci d'avance ! Les comptes Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky et Mastodon du podcast sont également à retrouver dans le link tree ! ________________________________ CRÉDITS Comme un poisson dans l'eau est un podcast indépendant créé et animé par Victor Duran-Le Peuch. Charte graphique : Ivan Ocaña Générique : Synthwave Vibe par Meydän Musique : Flying High par Fredji

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Updates on Community Health Survey Results, published by David Moss on March 20, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary Satisfaction with the EA community Reported satisfaction, from 1 (Very dissatisfied) to 10 (Very satisfied), in December 2023/January 2024 was lower than when we last measured it shortly after the FTX crisis at the end of 2022 (6.77 vs. 6.99, respectively). However, December 2023/January 2024 satisfaction ratings were higher than what people recalled their satisfaction being "shortly after the FTX collapse" (and their recalled level of satisfaction was lower than what we measured their satisfaction as being at the end of 2022). We think it's plausible that satisfaction reached a nadir at some point later than December 2022, but may have improved since that point, while still being lower than pre-FTX. Reasons for dissatisfaction with EA: A number of factors were cited a similar number of times by respondents as Very important reasons for dissatisfaction, among those who provided a reason: Cause prioritization (22%), Leadership (20%), Justice, Equity, Inclusion and Diversity (JEID, 19%), Scandals (18%) and excessive Focus on AI / x-risk / longtermism (16%). Including mentions of Important (12%) and Slightly important (7%) factors, JEID was the most commonly mentioned factor overall. Changes in engagement over the last year 39% of respondents reported getting at least slightly less engaged, while 31% reported no change in engagement, and 29% reported increasing engagement. Concrete changes in behavior 31% of respondents reported that they had stopped referring to "EA" while still promoting EA projects or ideas, and 15% that they had temporarily stopped promoting EA. Smaller percentages reported other changes such as ceasing to engage with online EA spaces (6.8%), permanently stopping promoting EA ideas or projects (6.3%), stopping attending EA events (5.5%), stopping working on any EA projects (4.3%) and stopping donating (2.5%). Desire for more community change as a result of the FTX collapse 46% of respondents at least somewhat agreed that they would like to see the EA community change more than it already has, as a result of the FTX collapse, while 26% somewhat or strongly disagreed. Trust in EA organizations Reported trust in key EA organizations (Center for Effective Altruism, Open Philanthropy, and 80,000 Hours) were slightly lower than in our December 2022 post-FTX survey, though the change for 80,000 Hours did not reliably exclude no difference. Perceived leadership vacuum 41% of respondents at least somewhat agreed that 'EA currently has a vacuum of leadership', while 22% somewhat or strongly disagreed. As part of the EA Survey, Rethink Priorities has been tracking community health related metrics, such as satisfaction with the EA community. Since the FTX crisis in 2022, there has been considerable discussion regarding how that crisis, and other events, have impacted the EA community. In the recent aftermath of the FTX crisis, Rethink Priorities fielded a supplemental survey to assess whether and to what extent those events had affected community satisfaction and health. Analyses of the supplemental survey showed relative reductions in satisfaction following FTX, while absolute satisfaction was still generally positive. In this post, we report findings from a subsequent EA community survey, with data collected between December 11th 2023 and January 3rd 2024.[1] Community satisfaction over time There are multiple ways to assess community satisfaction over time, so as to establish possible changes following the FTX crisis and other subsequent negative events. We have 2022 data pre-FTX and shortly after FTX, as well as the recently-acquired data from 2023-2024, which also includes respondents' recalled satisfaction following FTX.[2] Satisf...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: #182 - Comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more (Bob Fischer on the 80,000 Hours Podcast), published by 80000 Hours on March 13, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We just published an interview: Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more. Listen on Spotify or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts. Episode summary [One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to a nest box before she lays an egg, the amount of labour she's willing to go through to do that, to think about how important that is to her. And to realise that we can quantify that, and see how much they care, or to see that they get stressed out when fellow chickens are threatened and that they seem to have some sympathy for conspecifics. Those kinds of things make me say there is something in there that is recognisable to me as another individual, with desires and preferences and a vantage point on the world, who wants things to go a certain way and is frustrated and upset when they don't. And recognising the individuality, the perspective of nonhuman animals, for me, really challenges my tendency to not take them as seriously as I think I ought to, all things considered. Bob Fischer In today's episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Bob Fischer - senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals - about Rethink Priorities's Moral Weight Project. They cover: The methods used to assess the welfare ranges and capacities for pleasure and pain of chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and other animals - and the limitations of that approach. Concrete examples of how someone might use the estimated moral weights to compare the benefits of animal vs human interventions. The results that most surprised Bob. Why the team used a hedonic theory of welfare to inform the project, and what non-hedonic theories of welfare might bring to the table. Thought experiments like Tortured Tim that test different philosophical assumptions about welfare. Confronting our own biases when estimating animal mental capacities and moral worth. The limitations of using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weights. How different types of risk aversion, like avoiding worst-case scenarios, could impact cause prioritisation. And plenty more. Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez Transcriptions: Katy Moore Highlights Using neuron counts as a proxy for sentience Luisa Rodriguez: A colleague of yours at Rethink Priorities has written this report on why neuron counts aren't actually a good proxy for what we care about here. Can you give a quick summary of why they think that? Bob Fischer: Sure. There are two things to say. One is that it isn't totally crazy to use neuron counts. And one way of seeing why you might think it's not totally crazy is to think about the kinds of proxies that economists have used when trying to estimate human welfare. Economists have for a long time used income as a proxy for human welfare. You might say that we know that there are all these ways in which that fails as a proxy - and the right response from the economist is something like, do you have anything better? Where there's actually data, and where we can answer at least some of these high-level questions that we care about? Or at least make progress on the high-level questions that we care about relative to baseline? And I think that way of thinking about what neuron-count-based proxies ar...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Pre-slaughter mortality of farmed shrimp, published by Hannah McKay on March 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Citation: McKay, H. and McAuliffe, W. (2024). Pre-slaughter mortality of farmed shrimp. Rethink Priorities. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/W7MUZ The report is also available as a pdf here . Executive summary Mortality rates are high in shrimp aquaculture, implying welfare threats are common. It is typical for ~50% of shrimp to die before reaching slaughter age. This equates to around 1.2 billion premature deaths a day on average. Mortality varies among species; prioritizing interventions should take this into account. Because of high pre-slaughter mortality (~81%), Macrobrachium shrimp represent a larger share of farmed shrimp than slaughtered shrimp. Most individual deaths are P. vannamei, despite having the lowest mortality rate. More larvae die than any other life stage, but this does not necessarily mean efforts should focus on them. Uncertainty remains about whether larval shrimp are sentient - they are planktonic, so do not make autonomous decisions. Minimizing larval deaths could cause compensatory deaths in later life stages (e.g., ensuring weaker larvae survive, who then die from later harsh conditions). Interventions should likely concentrate on the ongrowing stage (postlarval and juvenile-subadult shrimp), where there are still tens of billions of deaths. There are several causes of mortality and differences between farm types. Most causes are likely a combination of intrinsic shrimp traits (e.g., young shrimp are sensitive to environmental fluctuations), farming practices, and diseases. Disease is a main cause throughout life, but it is often a downstream effect of issues that farmers have some control over (e.g., poor water quality). Variation among reported figures, especially that more intensive farms have fewer deaths, suggests many factors are at play and that some are controllable. The effects of reducing early mortality on industry trajectory are uncertain. The number of shrimp born may decrease if farmers must produce fixed output. But shrimp would live longer, increasing the chances for negative experiences. However, consumer demand has historically outstripped supply, so the industry may grow if it had better control of conditions causing mortality. If reduced deaths come from intensification of practices, more shrimp may be reared in conditions that can harm welfare (e.g., high stocking densities). Pre-slaughter mortality cannot depict total welfare because it misses nonfatal effects. Mortality is only a lower-bound proxy of how many shrimp suffer negative welfare. Premature mortality is more appropriate as one indicator among many that a welfare reform was successful, rather than an end in itself. Pre-slaughter mortality data is limited and non-uniform. Reports should clarify whether mass die-off events were excluded from mortality estimates and if rates are based on intuition from experience or empirical studies. Box 1: Shrimp aquaculture terminology The terms 'shrimp' and 'prawn' are often used interchangeably. The two terms do not reliably track any phylogenetic differences between species. Here, we use only the term "shrimp", covering both shrimp and prawns. Note that members of the family Artemiidae are commonly referred to as "brine shrimp" but are not decapods and so are beyond the present scope. We opt for the use of Penaues vannamei over Litopenaeus vannamei (to which this species is often referred), due to recognition of the former but not the latter nomenclature by ITIS, WorMS, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) ASFIS List of Species for Fishery Statistics Purposes. The shrimp farming industry uses many terms usually associated with agriculture - for example, 'crops' for a group o...

"[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to a nest box before she lays an egg, the amount of labour she's willing to go through to do that, to think about how important that is to her. And to realise that we can quantify that, and see how much they care, or to see that they get stressed out when fellow chickens are threatened and that they seem to have some sympathy for conspecifics."Those kinds of things make me say there is something in there that is recognisable to me as another individual, with desires and preferences and a vantage point on the world, who wants things to go a certain way and is frustrated and upset when they don't. And recognising the individuality, the perspective of nonhuman animals, for me, really challenges my tendency to not take them as seriously as I think I ought to, all things considered." — Bob FischerIn today's episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Bob Fischer — senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals — about Rethink Priorities's Moral Weight Project.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.They cover:The methods used to assess the welfare ranges and capacities for pleasure and pain of chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and other animals — and the limitations of that approach.Concrete examples of how someone might use the estimated moral weights to compare the benefits of animal vs human interventions.The results that most surprised Bob.Why the team used a hedonic theory of welfare to inform the project, and what non-hedonic theories of welfare might bring to the table.Thought experiments like Tortured Tim that test different philosophical assumptions about welfare.Confronting our own biases when estimating animal mental capacities and moral worth.The limitations of using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weights.How different types of risk aversion, like avoiding worst-case scenarios, could impact cause prioritisation.And plenty more.Chapters:Welfare ranges (00:10:19)Historical assessments (00:16:47)Method (00:24:02)The present / absent approach (00:27:39)Results (00:31:42)Chickens (00:32:42)Bees (00:50:00)Salmon and limits of methodology (00:56:18)Octopuses (01:00:31)Pigs (01:27:50)Surprises about the project (01:30:19)Objections to the project (01:34:25)Alternative decision theories and risk aversion (01:39:14)Hedonism assumption (02:00:54)Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuireAdditional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa RodriguezTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Research summary: farmed cricket welfare, published by abrahamrowe on March 7, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post is a short summary of Farmed Cricket (Acheta domesticus, Gryllus assimilis, and Gryllodes sigillatus; Orthoptera) Welfare Considerations: Recommendations for Improving Global Practice, a peer-reviewed, open access publication on cricket welfare in the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed under a CC BY 4.0 license. The paper and supplemental information can be accessed here. The original paper was written by Elizabeth Rowe, Karen Robles López, Kristin Robinson, Kaitlin Baudier, and Meghan Barrett; the research conducted in the paper was funded by Rethink Priorities as part of our research agenda on understanding the welfare of insects on farms. This post was written by Abraham Rowe (no relation to Elizabeth Rowe) and reviewed for accuracy by Meghan Barrett. All information is derived from the Elizabeth Rowe et al. (2024) publication, and some text from the original publication is directly adapted for this summary. Summary As of 2020, around 370 to 420 billion crickets and grasshoppers were farmed annually for food and feed, though today the number may be much higher. Rowe et al. (2024) is the first publication to consider species-specific welfare concerns for several species of crickets on industrialized insect farms. The authors identify 15 current and 5 future welfare concerns, and make recommendations for reducing the harms from these concerns. These concerns include: Stocking density High stocking densities can increase the rates of aggression, cannibalism, and behavioral repression among individuals on cricket farms. Disease Diseases are relatively common on cricket farms. Common diseases, such as Acheta domesticus densovirus, can cause up to 100% cricket mortality. Slaughter Common slaughter methods for crickets on farms include freezing in air, blanching/boiling, and convection baking. Little is known about the relative welfare costs of these methods, and the best ways for a producer to implement a given method. Future concerns that haven't yet been realized on farms include: Novel feed substrates Farmers have explored potentially giving crickets novel feeds, including food waste. This might be nutritionally inadequate or introduce diseases or other issues onto farms. Selective breeding and genetic modification In vertebrate animals, selective breeding has caused a large number of welfare issues. The same might be expected to become true for crickets. Background information Cricket farming Insect farming, including of crickets, has been presented as a more sustainable approach to meet the protein demand of a growing human population. While wild-caught orthopterans (crickets and grasshoppers) are a traditional protein source around the world, modern cricket farming aims to industrialize the rearing and slaughter of crickets as a food source. As of 2020, 370-420 billion orthopterans were slaughtered or sold live, with crickets being the most common. Welfare framework The Five Domains model of welfare, which has been promoted for invertebrates, evaluates animal welfare by looking at the nutrition, environment, physical health, behavior, and mental states of the animals being evaluated. The authors use this model for evaluating cricket farming and potential improvements that could be made on farms for animal welfare. Cricket biology Three of the most common species of crickets farmed belong to the Gryllinae subfamily: Acheta domesticus, Gryllus assimilis, and Gryllodes sigillatus. All three species live between 80 and 120 days from hatching to natural death, with a 10-21 day incubation period. Crickets are hemimetabolous insects: they hatch from an egg, molting through a series of nymph stages called instars, before going through a terminal ...

Summary $8003.98 Charity Entrepreneurship $5000 Insect Institute $5000 Shrimp Welfare Project $5000 Rethink Priorities $5000 Animal Ethics $1000 Wild Animal Initiative Background I think it's good to keep track of and explain donations. It creates a record to get better over time and gives others insights into how you donate. I officially made $45000 in 2023. I earned some investment income from some other sources though this is hard to quantify. I also had some savings from previous years so don't come away from this thinking that I gave such a substantial portion of my income. That said, I am still giving away a significant portion of my income this year. I think this is a good thing and hopefully, I can serve as an example to others to give away a significant portion of their income, even if it isn't that high. In total, I am giving [...] --- First published: February 11th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EkKYqeAy3ArupKuYn/my-donations-2023-marcus-abramovitch --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Summary $8003.98 Charity Entrepreneurship $5000 Insect Institute $5000 Shrimp Welfare Project $5000 Rethink Priorities $5000 Animal Ethics $1000 Wild Animal Initiative Background I think it's good to keep track of and explain donations. It creates a record to get better over time and gives others insights into how you donate. I officially made $45000 in 2023. I earned some investment income from some other sources though this is hard to quantify. I also had some savings from previous years so don't come away from this thinking that I gave such a substantial portion of my income. That said, I am still giving away a significant portion of my income this year. I think this is a good thing and hopefully, I can serve as an example to others to give away a significant portion of their income, even if it isn't that high. In total, I am [...] --- First published: February 11th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EkKYqeAy3ArupKuYn/my-donations-2023-marcus-abramovitch --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Introducing the Effektiv Spenden "Defending Democracy" fund, published by Sebastian Schienle on February 7, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. On January 10, the media platform CORRECTIV published a report on a secret far-right meeting in Germany in November 2023. The report could mark a turning point. Since then, more than 2 million people have taken part in demonstrations against the extreme right and in defense of our democracy, making them some of the largest demonstrations in Germany in recent decades. At Effektiv Spenden, we have long considered the defense and promotion of democracy to be an important cause area. And it has also received some (limited) attention in other parts of the EA community - see related materials e.g., from 80,000 hours (related topics here and here), Rethink Priorities; Founders Pledge; Open Philanthropy; EIP (via its focus on institutional decision-making); and forum posts here and here. However, a systematic mapping and - more importantly - evaluation of interventions is currently lacking, making it difficult to develop recommendations for effective giving. With the generous support of some of our donors, we have therefore helped to launch a new charity evaluator, Power for Democracies, to fill this gap. To respond to the current surge of interest and momentum among both the general public in Germany and our donors, we feel a responsibility to share our initial findings - with all their limitations - in order to guide donors interested in supporting promising interventions that can make a difference in the short term in the specific German context. Therefore, we have launched a new fund called "Defending Democracy" on effektiv-spenden.org. Despite the speculative nature of our recommendations and fund allocations, we believe we can: Guide donors who are already committed to supporting this cause area to achieve significantly greater impact. Encourage those (potential) donors who are interested in the cause area but have been reluctant to give due to the apparent lack of research and evidence-based recommendations. Use the current momentum to introduce more donors to the concept of effective giving, and thereby create more effective giving overall. However, we also see potential downside risks that could reduce our overall impact: A dilution of the concept of effective giving overall by introducing a new cause area that is less well researched and currently more speculative. Low risk: While our understanding of the comparative impact of individual interventions is still limited, the literature is fairly clear on the critical importance of well-functioning democracies for maximizing key societal outcomes such as health and development, peace and security, scientific progress, or economic development. In addition, we launched the new fund as a "beta" version to help our donors understand the increased uncertainty. A shift in donations from better-researched cause areas and interventions to our more speculative Democracy Fund. Medium risk: We expect the "beta" label to mitigate this risk as well. In addition, we explicitly communicate to our existing donors (e.g. through our newsletter) that we recommend the new fund only for additional donations and discourage the reallocation of existing or planned commitments. Overall, we expect the benefits of the new fund to outweigh the potential risks. However, we will closely monitor if/how our new offering may divert funds from other cause areas and will continually reevaluate the need to make potential adjustments. (Including closing the fund if necessary). If you have any questions or comments about the new fund, please feel free to contact us directly at info@effektiv-spenden.org. Similarly, if you are interested in exploring major giving to strengthen democracy internationally (and partic...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Infrastructure Fund Ask Us Anything (January 2024), published by Tom Barnes on January 17, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) is running an Ask Us Anything! This is a time where EAIF grantmakers have set aside some time to answer questions on the Forum. I (Tom) will aim to answer most questions next weekend (~January 20th), so please submit questions by the 19th. Please note: We believe the next three weeks are an especially good time to donate to EAIF, because: We continue to face signficant funding constraints, leading to many great projects going either unfunded or underfunded Your donation will be matched at a 2:1 ratio until Feb 2. EAIF has ~$2m remaining in available matching funds, meaning that (unlike LTFF) this match is unlikely to be utilised without your support If you agree, you can donate to us here. About the Fund The EA Infrastructure Fund aims to increase the impact of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge. Over 2022 and H1 2023, we made 347 grants totalling $13.4m in dispersement. You can see our public grants database here. Related posts EA Infrastructure Fund's Plan to Focus on Principles-First EA LTFF and EAIF are unusually funding-constrained right now EA Funds organizational update: Open Philanthropy matching and distancing EA Infrastructure Fund: June 2023 grant recommendations What do Marginal Grants at EAIF Look Like? Funding Priorities and Grantmaking Thresholds at the EA Infrastructure Fund About the Team Tom Barnes: Tom is currently a Guest Fund Manager at EA Infrastructure Fund (previously an Assistant Fund Manager since ~Oct 2022). He also works as an Applied Researcher at Founders Pledge, currently on secondment to the UK Government to work on AI policy. Previously, he was a visiting fellow at Rethink Priorities, and was involved in EA uni group organizing. Caleb Parikh: Caleb is the project lead of EA Funds. Caleb has previously worked on global priorities research as a research assistant at GPI, EA community building (as a contractor to the community health team at CEA), and global health policy. Caleb currently leads EAIF as interim chair. Linchuan Zhang: Linchuan (Linch) Zhang currnetly works full-time at EA Funds. He was previously a Senior Researcher at Rethink Priorities working on existential security research. Before joining RP, he worked on time-sensitive forecasting projects around COVID-19. Previously, he programmed for Impossible Foods and Google and has led several EA local groups. Ask Us Anything We're happy to answer any questions - marginal uses of money, how we approach grants, questions/critiques/concerns you have in general, what reservations you have as a potential donor or applicant, etc. There's no hard deadline for questions, but I would recommend submitting by the 19th January as I aim to respond from the 20th As a reminder, we remain funding-constrained, and your donation will be matched (for every $1 you donate, EAIF will receive $3). Please consider donating! If you have projects relevant to builiding up the EA community's infrastructure, you can also apply for funding here. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Priority review vouchers for tropical diseases: Impact, distribution, effectiveness, and potential improvements, published by Rethink Priorities on January 5, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Suggested citation: Gosnell, G., Hu, J., Braid, E., & Hird, T. 2023. Priority review vouchers for tropical diseases: Impact, distribution, effectiveness, and potential improvements. Rethink Priorities. https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/priority-review-vouchers. Funding statement: We thank Open Philanthropy for commissioning and funding this research report. The views expressed herein are not necessarily endorsed by Open Philanthropy. Editorial note The report evaluates the value and effectiveness of the United States' Tropical Disease Priority Review Voucher Program, which was initiated in 2007 to incentivize research and development for medical products targeting neglected tropical diseases. (While PRVs have since been legislated for purposes, we focus our attention on this application.) Specifically, we describe some of the program's history to date (e.g., past issuances, voucher sales/use dynamics, and evidence of gaming), the usage extent of PRV-awarded medical products, academic and anecdotal evidence of the program's incentive effect, and ways in which we think the program could be improved. We have tried to flag major sources of uncertainty in the report and are open to revising our views as more information becomes available. While preparing this report for publication, we learned that Valneva was awarded a PRV for developing the first Chikungunya vaccine in November 2023 (Dunleavy, 2023), but we did not incorporate this information in the report or associated spreadsheets. We are grateful for the invaluable input of our interviewees. Please note that our interviewees spoke with us in a personal capacity and not on behalf of their respective organizations. Executive summary We catalog information about the 13 issuances of Priority Review Vouchers (PRV) under the United States' Tropical Disease PRV Program and, for the seven cases with sufficient data, attempt to estimate the number of treatment courses per 1,000 relevant disease cases, or "use rate." Among the seven products with use rate estimates, we find three with high use rates (>100 courses per 1,000 cases), two have medium use rates (10-100), and two have low use rates (10 years, not all products marketed for that long achieve high use rates, and find diverse outcomes in use-rate trajectories, including sharp discontinuities and both upward and downward trends. Given that PRV recipients can either use or sell their voucher, we also explore the dynamics of how the PRVs' value is distributed among different types of players in the industry. We find that PRV sales proceeds go toward repayment for shareholders of small pharmaceutical companies or toward (promises of) further drug development for neglected tropical diseases. Large pharmaceutical companies that receive PRV awards tend to retain or use the voucher for faster FDA review of a profitable drug in their pipelines. Additionally, we review four academic studies that attempt to quantify the effectiveness of PRVs at inducing medical innovations for neglected tropical diseases. Based on their findings and our assessment of study quality, we think it is unlikely that the TD PRV Program had a large, consistent effect on R&D for tropical diseases, but that the results are potentially consistent with a small marginal effect. Additionally, there is historic anecdotal evidence of "gaming the system" - seeking a voucher for a drug that has already been developed and marketed outside of the US - though we think it is unlikely to continue to be an issue going forward given t...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Research summary: farmed yellow mealworm welfare, published by abrahamrowe on January 3, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post is a short summary of a peer-reviewed, open access publication on yellow mealworm welfare in the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed. The paper and supplemental information can be accessed here. The original paper was written by Meghan Barrett, Rebekah Keating Godfrey, Alexandra Schnell, and Bob Fischer; the research conducted in the paper was funded by Rethink Priorities. This post was written by Abraham Rowe and reviewed by Meghan Barrett. Unless cited otherwise, all information is derived from the Barrett et al. 2023 publication. Summary As of 2020, around 300 billion yellow mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) are farmed annually (though recent estimates now put this figure at over 3 trillion individuals ( Pells, 2023 )). Barrett et al. 2023 is the first publication to consider species-specific welfare concerns for farmed mealworms. The authors identify 15 current and future welfare concerns, including more pressing current concerns such as: Disease - Bacterial, fungal, protist, and viral pathogens can cause sluggishness, tissue damage, slowed growth, increased susceptibility to other diseases, and even mass-mortality events. High larval rearing densities - Density can cause a range of negative effects, including increased cannibalism and disease, higher chances of heat-related death, competition over food leading to malnutrition, and behavioral restriction near pupation. Inadequate larval nutrition - This may result from not providing enough protein in the animals' largely grains-based diet. Light use during handling - Photophobic adults and larvae may experience significant stress due to light use during handling. Slaughter methods - While we have high empirical uncertainty about the relative harms of slaughter methods, it is clear that some approaches to slaughter and depopulation on farms are more harmful than others. Future concerns that haven't yet been realized on farms include: Novel, potentially toxic, or inadequate feed substrates - Polymers (like plastics) and mycotoxin-contaminated grains may be more likely to be used in the future. Selective breeding and genetic modification - In vertebrate animals, selective breeding has caused a large number of welfare issues. The same might be expected to become true for mealworms. Current rearing and slaughter practices Yellow mealworms are the larval instars of a species of darkling beetle, Tenebrio molitor. Larvae go through a number of molts prior to pupation, which can take between a few months to two years depending on nutrition and abiotic conditions. Mealworms take up to 20 days to pupate. After pupating, the emerged adult beetles will mate within 3-5 days. Mealworms are a popular insect to farm for food due to their rapid growth, high nutrient content, and ease of handling. Adults are typically only used for breeding, while large larvae are sold as food and feed. Mealworms typically consume decaying grains, but have been reported to eat a wide variety of other foods in certain circumstances (including dead insects, other mealworms, and decaying wood). In farmed conditions, larval mealworms are fed a diet of 70%-85% cereals and other carbohydrates, and may be provided with supplementary protein, fruit, or vegetables. Mealworms are reared in stackable crates, usually with screened bottoms to allow frass (insect excrement) to fall through and not accumulate. Mealworms may be reared in up to 24-hour darkness, as they are photophobic. Insects bound for slaughter are collected at around 100 mg. Prior to slaughter, insects are sieved out of the substrate, washed (to remove frass and other waste from the exterior surface of their bodies), and prevented from eating for up to two days (ca...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Winners in the Forum's Donation Election (2023), published by Lizka on December 24, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR: We ran a Donation Election in which 341 Forum users[1] voted on how we should allocate the Donation Election Fund ($34,856[2]). The winners are: Rethink Priorities - $12,847.75 Charity Entrepreneurship: Incubated Charities Fund - $11,351.11 Animal Welfare Fund (EA Funds) - $10,657.07 This post shares more information about the results: Comments from voters about their votes: patterns include referencing organizations' marginal funding posts, updating towards the neglectedness of animal welfare, appreciating strong track records, etc. Voting patterns: most people voted for 2-4 candidates (at least one of which was one of the three winners), usually in multiple cause areas Cause area stats: similar numbers of points went to cross-cause, animal welfare, risk/future-oriented, and global health candidates (ranked in that order) All candidate results, including raw point[3] totals: the Long-Term Future Fund initially placed second by raw point totals Concluding thoughts & other charities You can find some extra information in this spreadsheet. Highlights from the comments: why people voted the way they did We asked voters if they wanted to share a note about why they voted the way they did. 74 people (~20%) wrote a comment. I'm sharing a few excerpts[4] below, and more in a comment on this post (separated for the sake of space) - consider reading the longer version if you have a moment. There were some recurring patterns in different people's notes, some of which appear in these two comments explaining their authors' votes: "[AWF], because I was convinced by the post about how animal welfare dominates in non-longtermist causes, [CE], so that there can be even more excellent ways of making the world a better place by donating, [GWWC], because I wish we had unlimited money to give to all the others" "Realized I'm too partial to [global health] and biased against animal welfare, [so I decided to vote for the] most effective animal organization. Rethink's post was very convincing. CE has the most innovative ideas in GHD and it isn't close. GiveWell is GiveWell." Rethink Priorities's funding request post was mentioned a lot. People also noted specific aspects of RP's work that they appreciate, like the EA Survey, public benefits/publishing research on cause prioritization, moral weights work, and research into particularly neglected animals. There were also shoutouts to the staff: "ALLFED and Rethink Priorities both consist of highly talented and motivated individuals that are working on high-potential, high-impact projects. Both organizations have left a strong impression on me in terms of their approach to reasoning and problem solving. [...] Both organizations have recently posted extremely well-detailed [updates on their financial situation and how additional funding would help]. [...]" CE's Incubated Charities Fund (and Charity Entrepreneurship more broadly) got a lot of appreciation for their good and/or unusual ideas and track record. There were also comments like: "...direct-action global health charities need more funding now, especially in light of reductions in future funding from Open Phil. [And] there's enough potential upside to charity incubation to put a good bit of money there." A number of people wrote that they'd updated towards donating to animal welfare as a result of recent discussions ( often explicitly because of this post). Many gave a lot of their points to the Animal Welfare Fund, sometimes referencing GWWC's evaluations of the evaluators. Some also said they wanted to vote for animal welfare to correct for what they saw as its relative neglectedness in EA or to emphasize that it has a central place in EA. One example: "I vo...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Incubating AI x-risk projects: some personal reflections, published by Ben Snodin on December 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In this post, I'll share some personal reflections on the work of the Rethink Priorities Existential Security Team (XST) this year on incubating projects to tackle x-risk from AI. To quickly describe the work we did: with support from the Rethink Priorities Special Projects team (SP), XST solicited and prioritised among project ideas, developed the top ideas into concrete proposals, and sought founders for the most promising of those. As a result of this work, we ran one project internally and, if all goes well, we'll launch an external project in early January. Note that this post is written from my (Ben Snodin's) personal perspective. Other XST team members or wider Rethink Priorities staff wouldn't necessarily endorse the claims made in this post. Also, the various takes I'm giving in this post are generally fairly low confidence and low resilience. These are just some quick thoughts based on my experience leading a team incubating AI x-risk projects for a little over half a year. I was keen to share something on this topic even though I didn't have time to come to thoroughly considered views. Key points Between April 1st and December 1st, Rethink Priorities dedicated approximately 2.5 full-time equivalent (FTE) years of labour, mostly from XST, towards XST's strategy for incubating AI x-risk projects. We decided to run one project ourselves, a project in the AI advocacy space that we've been running since June. We're in the late stages of launching one new project that works to equip talented university students interested in mitigating extreme AI risks with the skills and background to enter a US policy career. A very rough estimate, based on our inputs and outputs to date, suggests that 5 FTE from a team with a similar skills mix to XST+SP would launch roughly 2 new projects per year. XST will now look into other ways to support high-priority projects such as in-housing them, rather than pursuing incubation and looking for external founders by default, while the team considers its next steps. Reasons for the shift include: an unfavourable funding environment, a focus on the AI x-risk space narrowing the founder pool and making it harder to find suitable project ideas, and challenges finding very talented founders in general. I think the ideal team working in this space has: lots of prior incubation experience, significant x-risk expertise and connections, excellent access to funding and ability to identify top founder talent, and very strong conviction. I'd often suggest getting more experience founding stuff yourself rather than starting an incubator - and I think funding conditions for AI x-risk incubation will be more favourable in 1-2 years. There are many approaches to AI x-risk incubation that seem promising to me that we didn't try, including cohort-based Charity Entrepreneurship-style programs, a high-touch approach to finding founders, and a founder in residence program. Summary of inputs and outcomes Inputs Between April 1st and December 1st 2023, Rethink Priorities dedicated approximately 2.5 full-time equivalent (FTE) years of labour towards incubating projects aiming to reduce existential risk from AI. XST had 4 full-time team members working on incubating AI x-risk projects during this period,[2] and from August 1st to December 1st 2023, roughly one FTE from SP collaborated with XST to identify and support potential founders for a particular project. In this period, XST also devoted roughly 0.4 FTE-years working directly on an impactful project in the AI advocacy space that stemmed from our incubation work. The people working on this were generalist and relatively junior, with 1-5 years' experience in x-risk-relat...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing Surveys on Community Health, Causes, and Harassment, published by David Moss on December 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We are announcing a supplementary survey to gather timely information from the EA community before the next EA Survey in 2024. This survey will contain questions related to: Community health and satisfaction with the EA community Cause prioritization and how EA resources should be allocated Demographics (which can optionally be skipped if you provided your email address last time and opt for us to link your responses) We are also sending out a separate survey, requested by CEA's Community Health and Special Projects team, focusing primarily on sexual harassment and gender-related experiences: 4. EA Climate and Harassment Survey You can take the first survey here. This will give you the option to take the Climate and Harassment Survey immediately afterwards, without having to answer the demographic questions twice. Alternatively, you can just take the Climate and Harassment survey here. If you wish to share links to either of these surveys with others, please use the following links: Both surveys: https://rethinkpriorities.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1G37guBPVAl9TtI?source=sharing Climate and Harassment Survey alone: https://rethinkpriorities.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bxD0wtmuuXw4KUe?source=sharing The first survey should be significantly shorter than the main EA Survey, depending on how much detail you choose to provide in the open comment questions and whether you skip the demographic section by providing your email address. The EA Climate and Harassment Survey is estimated to take between 5 and 30 minutes depending on how much detail you choose to provide. Both surveys are planned to close on 1st January 2024. Acknowledgements The post is a project of Rethink Priorities, a global priority think-and-do tank, aiming to do good at scale. We research and implement pressing opportunities to make the world better. We act upon these opportunities by developing and implementing strategies, projects, and solutions to key issues. We do this work in close partnership with foundations and impact-focused non-profits or other entities. If you're interested in Rethink Priorities' work, please consider subscribing to our newsletter. You can explore our completed public work here. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org