Last year, around 100 pro-animal voters came to the UK Parliament for a mass lobby day, run by UK Voters for Animals, to call for an end to cages and crates for farmed animals. This was the first time many of these people had engaged with political advocacy, and together we had over 30 meetings with MPs and their teams about ending cages and crates for farmed animals. (Since then, the UK Government has run a consultation on phasing out cages for layer hens, thanks to the efforts of many dedicated groups and volunteers over time).

With a bit more experience under our belts, we're organising another Mass Lobby Day in Parliament on Tuesday, the 10th of November, and we need YOU to join us.

This time, we take on Frankenchickens: fast-growing chickens that are bred to grow 400% faster than is natural, reaching slaughter weight in as little as 35 days. Their bodies cannot keep up with their own growth. They suffer chronic lameness, heart and lung failure, and hock burns from lying in their own waste, often too heavy to stand. Many suffer from the day they hatch to the day they are [...]

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I think you should almost never use AI to write -- that is, to do the thing you're doing when you type words on a page -- whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo, a thoughtful email, a novel, or any other text aimed at conveying an idea, an argument, an analysis, or other substantive thoughts. I think this is the case even when you give the AI very detailed bullet points, dictated thoughts, or other context, and even when you edit the AI-written text.

I think so because (1) the writing process is an essential part of the thinking process, (2) AI writing is vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways, and (3) writing with AI (and not labeling it as such) is rude and misleading. I'll explain these points in more detail below, but first, a few throat clearings.

As you may know, I'm not anti-AI. I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many other parts of the research and writing processes, such as transcribing audio, analyzing data, searching for information, brainstorming, and giving feedback on drafts. I also think using AI for line and copy editing, or [...]

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Outline:

(02:10) The Writing Process Is the Thinking Process

(04:57) AI Writing Is Vague and Wrong in Hard-to-Notice Ways

(12:43) Writing with AI (and Not Labeling It as Such) Is Rude and Misleading

(15:12) Aren't There Exceptions?

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Subtitle: Sometimes the easily defended view is the one you really want

The most striking thing about effective altruism, dialectically, is that it's a neglected truism:

Moral truisms may still be widely ignored. The moral truism underlying Effective Altruism is that we have strong reasons to do more good, and it's worth adopting the efficient promotion of the impartial good as one among one's many life projects.

Most people do not, in fact, adopt the efficient promotion of the impartial good as even one among their many life projects. That's a shame! I think more people should try this, and I take encouraging this change to be a constitutive aim of the EA movement (along with helping those attempting this project to pursue it more effectively).

Those who don’t like this idea generally don’t reject it explicitly. Nobody says, “As one of the wealthiest people in history, I would really much prefer to keep over 90% of my income for personal consumption, get moral kudos for purely symbolic acts, and not have to think at all about the interests of emotionally unappealing moral patients like shrimp or distant future generations.” But nor will they endorse the moderate EA ask. [...]

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Hi everyone. I lead marketing and communications at CEA. Given the amount of attention we expect The Altruists series to generate, I'm posting a high-level update and introducing myself as a point of contact for questions or coordination.

Later this year, Netflix is expected to release The Altruists, an eight-episode crime drama series telling the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and the collapse of FTX. It's produced by Higher Ground Productions (the Obamas' production company) and stars Anthony Boyle as Bankman-Fried and Julia Garner as Ellison.

We don't have advance information about how EA will be portrayed, or how much the series will engage with EA beyond the FTX connection. We’re following developments as they emerge.

We think it's likely the series will draw a large audience (for comparison, Higher Ground's Inventing Anna amassed 1.2 billion viewing minutes in its first three days) and generate significant media coverage. If that proves correct, we'd expect more people to hear about effective altruism for the first time (for context, Rethink Priorities estimates genuine EA awareness among US adults to be roughly 1-3%). We see our job as making sure accurate and up-to-date information is easy to find when people search [...]

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1. Applications are now open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare. Learn more about what's different this round here and apply here.
2. AIM itself is hungry for talent (nom nom!). We’re seeking applications from ambitious people for a wide range of roles to scale our impact. Are you generally talented? Express your interest here. Are you specifically talented? Express your interest here.

AIM has a reputation for extreme frugality on pay. It was earned but it's now out of date. Over the past few months we have:

• Refreshed our salary policy. Pay has gone from nominally to genuinely needs-based: the full-time London range is now £40,000–90,000 gross (adjusted for location), and the process is built around staff asking for what they genuinely need, with no negotiation and no interrogation of lifestyle choices. Since launch, the average salary has risen by roughly £10k. We'll revisit the range over time as we learn how broad a talent pool and range of life circumstances it covers.
• Overhauled program stipends. A flat default of £1,900 per month has become self-selected amounts based on individual circumstances. We expect most participants to land [...]

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Outline:

(00:17) Public service announcement

(00:55) TL;DR

(02:32) Context

(02:35) From frugal roots

(03:18) Upsides

(04:18) Downsides

(07:04) Our new salary policy

(07:08) The design process

(08:25) The policy

(10:48) Reflections and rollout

(12:07) Program stipends

(14:19) Founder salary advice

(16:16) Was pay your blocker before?

(16:57) Before you go: wanna found an animal charity?

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Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.

The third wave of American philanthropy is finally coming. It could usher in a Golden Age of Animal Welfare. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I recommend reading the linked pieces by Nan Ransohoff and Itsi Weinstock. If you do, read on.

Newly-minted AI millionaires have already donated tens of millions this year to help factory-farmed animals. Many plan to give much more. We don’t yet know how much, but this could be a step-change for our movement.

It's about time. Our movement has long punched above its weight, winning change for billions of animals on a global budget smaller than what Americans spend on Halloween costumes for their pets. If we spend the new funds well, we could help many billions more.

How? Here are some initial thoughts on what the new money could enable our movement to do.

1. Raise our ambitions

We’ve long played triage: with limited resources, we could only pick the biggest fights we could win. Now we [...]

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As a community builder, it doesn’t get much better than receiving a message like this:

Others who work on movement growth have reported similar success stories: someone learns about EA, doesn’t immediately work in an EA-shaped role, but then transitions to impactful work years later. I can’t help but wonder: might there be people who lost touch with EA, but would be excited to put themselves back out there if nudged?

When I learned about EA as a college student in 2017, there were relatively few “EA jobs” I was a fit for. After getting rejected from a few roles, I ruled myself out for most of the next five years. If someone had messaged me “there are a ton of opportunities now; you should consider applying again!” I certainly would have done so.

I think now is a better time than ever before to apply for jobs at organizations doing good effectively. Hundreds of impactful organizations across the EA ecosystem are hiring for a greater number and variety of roles, and I anticipate continued growth in opportunities to keep pace with expansion in effective philanthropy. Plus, with greater resourcing, staff at impactful organizations may have the potential [...]

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GiveWell's Operations department is growing! We have roles open across multiple Ops functions: Grants Administration, People Operations, Talent Acquisition, Technology, and the offices of the CEO and COO. We hope to make multiple hires for many of these roles.

We’re hosting an Ask Me Anything session with our COO, Sai Jahann, to answer questions from the Forum community about what it's like to work at GiveWell, our Operations functions, this hiring round, and impactful Operations careers at GiveWell.

We plan to keep this AMA open through the next week. You can start sharing your questions on this post now, and Sai will plan to respond beginning Friday. We’ll prioritize the most upvoted questions if we can’t get to everything.

A few things we won't be able to cover: commentary on any active or past applications, individualized feedback on application materials, or insight into specific grantmaking decisions made by our Research team. If we’re unable to answer a question, we'll say so rather than skipping it.

This hiring round is a big event for us. If you’ve ever considered working at GiveWell in an Operations role, we are excited to take your questions and hope you’ll consider applying!

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Summary

• The animal welfare movement has already seen an influx in funding and should prepare for the possibility of more.
• The EA Animal Welfare Fund is encouraging you to actively set aside time and resources now to concretely plan for scaling sustainably, and we’ll support you in doing that.
• We’re requesting you set concrete ambitious goals and submit your plans to be able to achieve them.
• This is a call for more ambitious concrete plans, not for lowering the bar for the sake of spending more.
• Our strategic priorities are here. We’ll be launching a series of calls for proposals stemming from these, but if you have related ideas, don’t wait. You’re encouraged to apply here and reach out to us to discuss here [email protected]. 

A call to prepare for scaling impact

The animal welfare space is looking to absorb an influx of funding this year, and expects more funding in future, as do other cause areas. We've seen a lot of online discussion and excitement about this, but relatively few concrete action plans proportional to the significance of the opportunity. We’re not talking about plans to absorb trillions of dollars to buy Tyson Foods and build cultivated meat on the Moon. [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) Summary

(01:06) A call to prepare for scaling impact

(03:01) We're offering support

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BLUF:

• To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a good y-axis: an interval scale of AI capability which means +1 unit always represents the same degree of ‘how much better’, in the same way +1 degree Celsius is always the same amount of ‘how much hotter’.
• Yet there is no good y-axis for AI capability. All our measures are of something related-to but clearly not identical-with it, thus ‘true’ AI capability can be a funhouse-mirror reflection of whatever was measured. Specifically:
  • Benchmark score: One small step in benchmark score can be a giant leap in capability, or the opposite, or whatever else. (My 6/10 vs. your 4/10 ≠ I’m 50% better at maths than you).
  • Elo et al: Can give a real y-axis in terms of winning chances, but doesn’t translate outside of beating others. (Going from 50% to 73% to 88% chance to get a higher score than you on a maths test ≠ gaining 0 → 1 → 2 units of maths ability over you)
  • Epoch Capabilities Index: Analogous to IQ, so [...]

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Outline:

(03:05) Introduction

(04:26) Both a poor reflection and a dark glass

(07:51) Human benchmarking also has a y-axis problem

(12:27) A metrological elegy

(12:49) The base case: benchmarks (cf. exams)

(13:30) Elo et al.

(16:25) (And maybe not quite 'game ability ≡ winning games', after all?)

(18:28) ECI (cf. IQ)

(20:56) Intervals Rarely True

(25:01) Measure endogeneity

(31:12) Forking IRT

(34:45) (Dimensions of being, and beating, a bat)

(39:40) Prediction (cf. chronometry)

(41:58) Time horizons

(44:34) Human "capability" is also exponential in time horizon

(47:38) Intuitive/interpretative prelude

(52:56) Time horizons and ECI share an axis kink

(57:13) Perhaps money, as a measure, stinks the least

(01:01:07) Finale: AI as normal epistemics

(01:06:48) Acknowledgements

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