Executive summary: Brain preservation via chemical fixation and fluid storage is a speculative but potentially cost-effective intervention for saving lives in the long-term, depending on key assumptions about the probability of successful future revival.

Key points:

1. Brain preservation aims to protect the physical structure of the brain after legal death to allow future "revival" if technology advances sufficiently.
2. Chemical fixation followed by fluid preservation is the most affordable long-term storage option, with key assumptions about preservation quality and revival methods.
3. Cost-effectiveness estimates for "lives saved" via brain preservation vary widely based on the subjective probability of successful revival, and could be competitive with other interventions under certain scenarios.
4. Perspectives on the altruistic value of brain preservation differ based on views about research priorities, success probability, and potential societal impacts.
5. Philanthropic funding and advocacy for policy changes could help advance brain preservation given limited conventional research support.
6. Key open questions include the neural correlates of identity, preservation quality, revival pathways, and ethical considerations.

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Executive summary: Advanced AI digital agents will fundamentally change how people consume news in the next 5-10 years, leading to a fragmented, polarized, and decentralized media landscape.

Key points:

1. Foundation AI models will advance to become multimodal digital agents integrated into daily life for most people.
2. People will primarily consume personalized news content via their digital agents rather than directly from media companies or social media.
3. The global media industry will be radically reshaped, with only a few major outlets surviving and local news resurging via individual influencers.
4. Social media platforms will decline as they fail to moderate AI-generated content effectively, causing an exodus of users and advertisers.
5. Information ecosystems will become highly fragmented and polarized as people communicate in private "walled gardens" and inhabit distinct realities shaped by their digital agents.
6. Key assumptions: continued AI progress, rapid adoption, ineffective regulation, reduced AI hallucinations, social media decline, and the rise of private digital spaces. Some of these assumptions are uncertain.

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Executive summary: Partisanship has been detrimental to the environmental movement, leading to decreased public support, difficulty passing legislation, and inconsistent executive actions.

Key points:

1. Polling data shows that as partisanship increased starting in the 1990s, overall public support for environmental issues declined.
2. The frequency of major environmental legislation being passed decreased significantly once the issue became partisan.
3. International environmental treaties stopped being ratified unanimously and some were not ratified at all as partisanship grew.
4. Executive actions on environmental issues fluctuate with the political party in power, leading to inconsistent policies.
5. The environmental movement was most successful in the 1960s-80s when it had bipartisan support.

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Executive summary: The number of farmed animals, especially small animals like fish, shrimp, and insect larvae, is extremely large and raises questions about the scale of animal welfare considerations in agriculture.

Key points:

1. Estimates suggest there are over 2 trillion farmed vertebrate animals alive at any given time, with over 500 trillion killed per year.
2. Farmed shrimp, fish, and insect larvae vastly outnumber farmed mammals and birds.
3. Brine shrimp nauplii, with 1.5 trillion alive at a time and 540 trillion killed per year, challenge expected value reasoning and moral aggregation due to their small size and uncertain sentience.
4. Further research on the mental capacities of small farmed animals like shrimp and insect larvae could be valuable for assessing their moral weight.
5. The scale of animal farming, especially of small animals, raises important questions about the magnitude of animal welfare considerations in agriculture.

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Executive summary: The number of farmed animals, especially small animals like fish, shrimp, and insect larvae, is extremely large and raises questions about the scale of animal welfare considerations in agriculture.

Key points:

1. Estimates suggest there are over 2 trillion farmed vertebrate animals alive at any given time, with over 500 trillion killed per year.
2. Farmed shrimp, fish, and insect larvae vastly outnumber farmed mammals and birds.
3. Brine shrimp nauplii, with 1.5 trillion alive at a time and 540 trillion killed per year, challenge expected value reasoning and moral aggregation due to their small size and uncertain sentience.
4. Further research on the mental capacities of small farmed animals like shrimp and insect larvae could be valuable for assessing their moral weight.
5. The scale of animal farming, especially of small animals, raises important questions about the magnitude of animal welfare considerations in agriculture.

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Executive summary: The EA Survey reveals that Global poverty, AI risk, and Biosecurity are the highest prioritized causes, with longtermist causes being favored especially among highly-engaged EAs, and that key philosophical ideas are associated with cause prioritization.

Key points:

1. Global poverty, AI risk, and Biosecurity are the top prioritized causes overall, with Climate change polarizing and Mental health lower priority.
2. Longtermist causes are prioritized by 63.6% of respondents vs. 46.8% for neartermist causes, a gap that widens among highly engaged EAs.
3. Prioritization of longtermist and existential risk causes has increased over time, while Global poverty has decreased but remains high.
4. Higher engagement predicts greater support for longtermist over neartermist causes, while higher age predicts the reverse. Other demographic factors have smaller effects.
5. Philosophical ideas around longtermism, risk neutrality, and digital sentience correlate with longtermist cause prioritization. Belief in ant sentience is substantial.
6. In an allocation task, respondents assign the most resources to Global health/poverty, then AI risk, then animal welfare, with actual allocations lower on Global poverty and animal welfare than the survey or an earlier survey of EA leaders.

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Executive summary: The Giving What We Can Pledge involves several misconceptions, and clarifying these can better inform potential pledgers about the flexibility and impact of their commitment.

Key points:

1. The pledge is a commitment to donate 10% of lifetime income, not necessarily annually.
2. Pledgers can donate to any highly effective charity, not just those on the Giving What We Can platform.
3. The pledge is not a legally binding contract and can be resigned if necessary.
4. Signing the pledge, even if already donating 10%+, helps influence social norms and inspire others to give.
5. There are several pledge options, including a trial pledge and a pledge to live on a set allowance and donate the rest.

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Executive summary: Caspar Oesterheld shares insights into his conceptual research process, highlighting the importance of immersion, goal-orientation balanced with curiosity, and iterative high-level thinking alongside narrow projects.

Key points:

1. Caspar developed key concepts like surrogate goals, evidential cooperation in large worlds (ECL), and decision auctions through a combination of deep immersion in research areas, high-level thinking, and building on existing ideas.
2. Spending significant time (e.g. 6 months FTE) in a research area helps build useful heuristics and intuitions.
3. Balancing narrow technical projects with regular high-level thinking about the overall problem space is important. Getting stuck in familiar reasoning loops can sometimes lead to breakthroughs.
4. Having the right combination of ideas salient in mind can spark insights, as with realizing the importance of AI after learning about automated theorem proving.
5. Research involves diverse activities like reading, writing, discussion, solo thinking, and background rumination. Occasional obsessive immersion alternating with background immersion can be helpful.
6. Goal-orientation is important, especially with shorter timelines, but curiosity and exploration also play a key role. Academia introduces additional publishing incentives.

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Executive summary: Despite the increasing risks of nuclear war, philanthropic funding for nuclear security has significantly decreased, presenting a critical funding gap that smaller donors could potentially fill.

Key points:

1. Annual philanthropic funding for nuclear security has dropped from $50m to $30m due to the MacArthur Foundation's withdrawal from the field in 2020.
2. Nuclear security receives less funding compared to other neglected EA causes like factory farming, catastrophic biorisks, and AI safety.
3. Nuclear risk seems to be increasing with reports of Russia considering nuclear weapons against Ukraine, China's expanding arsenal, and North Korea's possession of at least 30 nuclear weapons.
4. The collapse of FTX prevented the Future Fund from filling the funding gap, and Open Philanthropy has decided to focus on AI safety and biosecurity instead.
5. Providing $3 million or more per year to experienced grantmakers like Carl Robichaud and Matthew Gentzel at Longview Philanthropy could help address the funding gap and support important nuclear policy efforts.
6. This funding opportunity may be particularly attractive to donors who are skeptical about AI safety but agree that the world underrates catastrophic risks.

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Executive summary: The partisanship of environmentalism in the United States emerged in the 1990s due to specific alliances formed between environmentalists, climate scientists, Democratic politicians, fossil fuel companies, climate skeptics, and conservative think tanks.

Key points:

1. In the 1980s, environmentalism had bipartisan support, including from Reagan and Thatcher, despite their small-government ideologies.
2. Alliances formed between environmentalists, climate scientists, and Democratic politicians (especially Al Gore) in the late 1980s.
3. Fossil fuel companies allied with climate skeptics and conservative think tanks to oppose climate policies starting around 1990.
4. Flawed policy proposals in the 1990s, like the BTU tax and Kyoto Protocol, made it easier for Republicans to rally against environmentalism.
5. Continued partisan decisions and actions in the 2000s reinforced the trend of increasing partisanship on environmental issues.
6. The resulting partisanship was detrimental to the environmental movement's support and legislative accomplishments.

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