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harfe
1d
5
Consider donating all or most of your Mana on Manifold to charity before May 1. Manifold is making multiple changes to the way Manifold works. You can read their announcement here. The main reason for donating now is that Mana will be devalued from the current 1 USD:100 Mana to 1 USD:1000 Mana on May 1. Thankfully, the 10k USD/month charity cap will not be in place until then. Also this part might be relevant for people with large positions they want to sell now: > One week may not be enough time for users with larger portfolios to liquidate and donate. We want to work individually with anyone who feels like they are stuck in this situation and honor their expected returns and agree on an amount they can donate at the original 100:1 rate past the one week deadline once the relevant markets have resolved.
Animal Justice Appreciation Note Animal Justice et al. v A.G of Ontario 2024 was recently decided and struck down large portions of Ontario's ag-gag law. A blog post is here. The suit was partially funded by ACE, which presumably means that many of the people reading this deserve partial credit for donating to support it. Thanks to Animal Justice (Andrea Gonsalves, Fredrick Schumann, Kaitlyn Mitchell, Scott Tinney), co-applicants Jessica Scott-Reid and Louise Jorgensen, and everyone who supported this work!
GiveWell and Open Philanthropy just made a $1.5M grant to Malengo! Congratulations to @Johannes Haushofer and the whole team, this seems such a promising intervention from a wide variety of views
Maybe EA philanthropists should be invest more conservatively, actually The pros and cons of unusually high risk tolerance in EA philanthropy have been discussed a lot, e.g. here. One factor that may weigh in favor of higher risk aversion is that nonprofits benefit from a stable stream of donations, rather than one that goes up and down a lot with the general economy. This is for a few reasons: * Funding stability in a cause area makes it easier for employees to advance their careers because they can count on stable employment. It also makes it easier for nonprofits to hire, retain, and develop talent. This allows both nonprofits and their employees to have greater impact in the long run. Whereas a higher but more volatile stream of funding might not lead to as much impact. * It becomes more politically difficult to make progress in some causes during a recession. For example, politicians may have lower appetite for farm animal welfare regulations and might even be more willing to repeal existing regulations if they believe the regulations stifle economic growth. This makes it especially important for animal welfare orgs to retain funding.
This is an extremely "EA" request from me but I feel like we need a word for people (i.e. me) who are Vegans but will eat animal products if they're about to be thrown out. OpportuVegan? UtilaVegan?

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In a recent announcement, Manifold Markets say they will change the exchange rate for your play-money (called "Mana") from 1:100 to 1:1000. Importantly, one of the ways to use this Mana is to do charity donations.

TLDR: The CTA here is to log in to your Manifold account ...

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Also, there's a statement in a publicly-accessible stand up meeting summary (speaker unknown) that "I also tentatively think Manifund wants to end the charity program after this"

https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Standup-de82dcce7411478fa52048c229a2eda2

(screenshot on file in my email)

2
OllieBase
35m
Maybe let the forum team know here (Toby's comment above) :)
2
OllieBase
35m
Maybe let the forum know here (Toby's comment above) :)
tobytrem commented on harfe's quick take 1h ago
harfe
1d49
7
0
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Consider donating all or most of your Mana on Manifold to charity before May 1.

Manifold is making multiple changes to the way Manifold works. You can read their announcement here. The main reason for donating now is that Mana will be devalued from the current 1 USD:100 ...

Continue reading

Thanks for sharing this on the Forum! 
If you (the reader) have donated your mana because of this quick take, I'd love it if you put a react on this comment. 

Thank you for bringing this up here! I doubt I would have seen it in time otherwise. 

Crosspost of my blog.  

You shouldn’t eat animals in normal circumstances. That much is, in my view, quite thoroughly obvious. Animals undergo cruel, hellish conditions that we’d confidently describe as torture if they were inflicted on a human (or even a dog). No hamburger...

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Thanks, Vasco! You are welcome to list me in the acknowledgements. I’m glad to have the reference to Tomasik’s post, which Timothy Chan also cited below, and appreciate the detailed response. That said, I doubt we should be agnostic on whether the overall effects of global heating on wild animals will be good or bad.

The main upside of global heating for animal welfare, on Tomasik’s analysis, is that it could decrease wild animal populations, and thus wild animal suffering. On balance, in his view, the destruction of forests and coral reefs is a good t... (read more)

2
Ulrik Horn
4h
Thanks for writing this, it drives home to me the point of taking a broad perspective when making ethical choices. I am wondering if you take animal product consumption a step further and look at only eating animal products where you know both of the below are true? 1. The animals have a very high degree of welfare (think small, local farms you can visit, you know the farmer, etc.) 2. The way they are slaughtered is the most humane possible, ideally on-farm etc. so they more or less have no idea what is coming for them until they are gone - in my mind this more or less has no suffering from a utilitarian perspective (unless the animals somehow are able to anticipate the slaughter and have increased anxiety throughout their lives because of it). I have been pretty vegan so far, but people around me are arguing for the type of animal products above and I have a hard time pushing back on it.
4
Bella
3h
Not opining on the overall question, but FWIW I'm not sure on-farm slaughter is better. Reason being — I think that large slaughterhouses have "smoother" processes and (per animal killed) are less likely to end up with e.g. no stunning, stunning but resuscitation before being killed, etc. But this does have to be weighed against the stress of transport, and I bet in a lot of cases it'd have been better to have on-farm slaughter given the length & conditions of transport.
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OscarD commented on Priors and Prejudice 2h ago
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5

This post is easily the weirdest thing I've ever written. I also consider it the best I've ever written - I hope you give it a chance. If you're not sold by the first section, you can safely skip the rest.

I

Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement,...

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Great post, and an interesting counterfactual history!

Hooray for moral trade.

Evolutionary debunking arguments feel relevant re the causal history of our beliefes.

9
Nathan_Barnard
14h
I essentially agree with the basic point of this post - and think it was a great post! I have some what feel like nitpicks about the specific story that you told that and I'm sort of confused about how much they matter. My guess is that this actually is a counterargument to the point being made in the post and imply that trapped priors are less of a problem than the example used in the post would imply.  I think that the broadly libertarian view and Scandinavian-style social democracy views are much more similar than this post gives them credit for. In particular, they agree on the crucial importance of liberal democracy that prevents elites (in the 19th-century traditional agricultural elites) from using the state to engage in rent-seeking. I remember reading a list of demands of the German Social Democratic party in the 1870s (before it had moderated) that read a list of liberal democratic demands - secret ballot, free speech, expansion of the power of democratically elected Reichstag etc.  These two strands of modern liberal thought also agreed on a liberal epistemology that should be used to try to systematically improve society from a broadly utilitarian perspective - the London School of Economics was founded by 4 Fabian Society members to further this aim!  I think this cashes out in the Effective Samaritans and the Libertarian side of EA (although the Libertains side of EA is pretty unusually libertarian) pursuing pretty similar projects when trying to use non-randomista means for development. For instance, my guess is that both would support increasing state capacity in low-income countries to improve the basic nightwatchman functions of the state, reducing corruption, protecting liberties and the integrity of elections, and removing regulation that that represent elite rent-seeking. Of course they'll be some differences in emphasis - the Effective Samarations might have a particular theory of change around using unions to coordinate labour to push for p

Summary

For pandemics that aren’t ‘stealth’ pandemics (particularly globally catastrophic pandemics):

  1. Reason 1: Not All 'Detections' Are Made Equal: there can be significant variation in the level of information and certainty provided by different detection modalities (e.
...
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Thank you for writing this article! As a complete newcomer to pandemic preparedness at large, I found this extremely useful and a great example of work that surfaces and questions often unstated assumptions.

Although I don't have enough expertise to provide much meaningful feedback, I did want to bring up some thoughts I had regarding your arguments in Reason 2. Your 44 hospitalization threshold in the numerical examples strikes me as reasonable, but it does also seem to me that the metagenomic sequencing of COVID-19 was related, if not a critical precondit... (read more)

yanni kyriacos posted a Quick Take 13h ago

This is an extremely "EA" request from me but I feel like we need a word for people (i.e. me) who are Vegans but will eat animal products if they're about to be thrown out. OpportuVegan? UtilaVegan?

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Heramb Podar posted a Quick Take 3h ago

I don't think we have a good answer to what happens after we do auditing of an AI model and find something wrong.

 

Given that our current understanding of AI's internal workings is at least a generation behind, it's not exactly like we can isolate what mechanism is causing certain behaviours. (Would really appreciate any input here- I see very little to no discussion on this in governance papers; it's almost as if policy folks are oblivious to the technical hurdles which await working groups)

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GiveWell and Open Philanthropy just made a $1.5M grant to Malengo!

Congratulations to @Johannes Haushofer and the whole team, this seems such a promising intervention from a wide variety of views

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Cool! For context, Malengo is helping students from Uganda attend university in Germany, and it also has a program to support students from French-speaking African countries [link in French]. I'm excited about this program not only for its economic benefits, but also for its potential to enable more people to live in liberal democratic countries, and in the long term, increase support for liberal democracy around the globe.

As a quick reply, I'm wondering what evidence you have that education in democratic liberal countries increases support for liberal democracy accross the globe? There's arguments for and against this thesis, but I don't think there's good evidence that it helps. 

 Many dictators in Africa for example were educated in top universities, which gave them better connections and influence which might have helped them oppress their people. Also during the 20ths centure a growing intelligent and motivated middle class seems correlated with higher chance of democracy. - its unclear whether highly skilled migration helps grow this middle class through increasing remittances and a growing economy, or removes the most capable people who could be starting businesses and making their home country a better place. Its worth noting that programs like this don't just take high school graduates, they usually take the cream of the crop who were likely to do very well in their home conutry as well.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that its complicated and far from a slamdunk that this will increase support for liberal democracies.

Regulators should review the 2014 DeepMind acquisition. When Google bought DeepMind in 2014, no regulator, not the FTC, not the EC's DG COMP, nor the CMA, scrutinized the impact. Why? AI startups have high value but low revenues. And so they avoid regulation (...

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At least from an AI risk perspective, it's not at all clear to me that this would improve things as it would lead to a further dispersion of this knowledge outward.