EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Many farmed animal advocates engage in diet change work — the attempt to convince individuals to adopt vegan diets as a way of preventing harm to animals used in our food systems. However, little is understood about the ways in which veganism is spread through a social network. This new study from Faunalytics attempts to shed light on social contagion, paving the way for more effective individual advocacy and further research into the social spread of veganism.

https://faunalytics.org/what-vegan-advocates-can-learn-from-the-social-spread-of-quitting-smoking/

Key Findings

1. Romantic partners are often the strongest social ties we have, which makes them strong candidates for influencing behavior—people are anywhere between 1.3 and 11.8 times more likely to quit smoking if their partner also quits. Applied to veg*nism, this may suggest that individuals in a romantic relationship may be more likely to go veg*n together versus individually. Nonetheless, limited research on this topic has revealed that individuals [...]

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Outline:

(00:34) Key Findings

(05:33) Background

(08:29) Why Smoking Cessation?

(11:16) Research Team

(11:39) Conclusions

(11:43) Strong Ties Predict Strong Influence

(15:11) Harness The Power Of Weaker Ties

(16:26) Keep Up The Fight To Change Social Norms

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TL;DR

• Screwworm Free Future is a new group seeking support to advance work on eradicating the New World Screwworm in South America.
• The New World Screwworm (C. hominivorax - literally "man-eater") causes extreme suffering to hundreds of millions of wild and domestic animals every year.
• To date we’ve held private meetings with government officials, experts from the private sector, academics, and animal advocates. We believe that work on the NWS is valuable and we want to continue our research and begin lobbying.
• Our analysis suggests we could prevent about 100 animals from experiencing an excruciating death per dollar donated, though this estimate has extreme uncertainty.
• The screwworm “wall” in Panama has recently been breached, creating both an urgent need and an opportunity to address this problem.
• We are seeking $15,000 to fund a part-time lead and could absorb up to $100,000 to build a full-time team, which would include a [...]

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Outline:

(00:07) TL;DR

(02:13) What's the deal with the New World Screwworm?

(06:01) What we've learnt so far

(08:46) Future plans

(12:14) Relevant EA discussions on Screwworms:

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OpenAI just announced that it will split the for-profit and non-profit parts.

Our current structure does not allow the Board to directly consider the interests of those who would finance the mission and does not enable the non-profit to easily do more than control the for-profit.

The [for-profit] will run and control OpenAI's operations and business, while the non-profit will hire a leadership team and staff to pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science.

Our plan is to transform our existing for-profit into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation⁠(opens in a new window) (PBC) with ordinary shares of stock and the OpenAI mission as its public benefit interest. The PBC is a structure⁠(opens in a new window) used⁠ by⁠(opens in a new window) many⁠(opens in a new window) others⁠(opens in a new window) that requires the company to balance [...]

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As 2024 draws to a close, I’m reflecting on the work and stories that inspired me this year: those from the effective altruism community, those I found out about through EA-related channels, and those otherwise related to EA.

I’ve appreciated the celebration of wins and successes over the past few years from @Shakeel Hashim's posts in 2022 and 2023. As @Lizka and @MaxDalton put very well in a post in 2022:

We often have high standards in effective altruism. This seems absolutely right: our work matters, so we must constantly strive to do better.

But we think that it's really important that the effective altruism community celebrate successes:

• If we focus too much on failures, we incentivize others/ourselves to minimize the risk of failure, and we will probably be too risk averse.
• We're humans: we're more motivated if we celebrate things that have gone well.

Rather than attempting [...]

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Outline:

(01:54) What progress in the world did you find exciting?

(03:14) What individual stories inspired you?

(04:29) What popular media or articles did you appreciate?

(05:40) What writing from this year did you appreciate or find compelling?

(06:19) What made you grateful or excited to be involved in or related to effective altruism?

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There's an element of preaching to the choir in posting this here, and of course dietary choice seems much less important than choices around where to donate. But I still think this FAQ, which is really more of a Q, could be of interest to EAF users.

Preamble

Why did you write this FAQ?

I wrote this FAQ to explain why I think it is the case that animals raised for food suffer a lot, and why, as a result, people oughtn't to eat meat. Others have written similar things, but I wanted to explain my own reasons for not eating meat. Some people think eating meat is bad because it causes greenhouse gas emissions. Others avoid meat for health reasons. Personally, I would not eat meat even if it turned out that eating meat helped fight climate change.[1]

(That said [...]

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Outline:

(00:22) Preamble

(04:25) Why Think Eating Meat Is Wrong?

(18:58) God and Nature

(23:29) The Moral Status of Animals

(29:55) Animal Sentience and Consciousness

(37:11) Benefits to Humans from Eating Meat

(46:08) Benefits to Animals from Eating Meat

(49:00) Why Think Meat Consumption Is Wrong?

(53:29) Disadvantages of Vegetarianism

(58:00) Implications

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I thought I'd share an edition of the Sentinel minutes with the EA forum. On the one hand, if one cares about existential or global catastrophic risk, one might want to pay attention to possible precursors thereof. On the other hand, some items this week are particularly topical to global health as well: the Nigerian kidnapping estimates or the FEWS.net declaration of famine in Gaza.—Nuño

Top items:

• The CDC found mutations that may enable upper-airway infection and greater transmission in an analysis of H5N1 specimens from the US's first severe case in Louisiana, but the changes would have been more concerning if they were found in animal hosts or in the early stages of infection.
• Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its latest model, which is reportedly competitive with GPT-4o on some metrics and which apparently cost only $5 million to train.
• A power cable [...]

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Outline:

(01:13) Geopolitics

(01:16) Eurasia

(03:27) Middle East

(05:47) Africa

(06:44) Asia-Pacific

(07:03) Americas

(07:58) Biorisk

(09:26) Tech

(09:28) Semiconductors

(09:50) Social media

(10:11) AI

(12:33) Natural disasters

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The views expressed here are my own.

Summary

• I estimate the improvement in cognitive function caused by creatine supplementation is worth it for a net income above 10.6 k$/year.
• I think creatine supplementation is beneficial, although I do not know if cost-effective, ignoring improvements in overall cognitive function. According to the systematic review of Kreider and Stout (2021), “it can be concluded that creatine supplementation has several health and therapeutic benefits throughout the lifespan”.

Break-even analysis

I estimate the improvement in cognitive function caused by creatine supplementation is worth it for a net income above 10.6 k$/year. I calculate this from the ratio between:

• A cost of creatine supplementation of 95.2 $/year, respecting:
  • A financial cost of 0.219 $/d for 0.0730 $/g and 3 g/d.
  • A time cost of 0.0417 $/d for 7.5 s/d and 20 $/h.
  • Capsules, which are 23.5 $/year cheaper than powder under my [...]

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Outline:

(00:09) Summary

(00:42) Break-even analysis

(03:10) Discussion

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I've heard many people say something like "money won't matter post-AGI". This has always struck me as odd, and as most likely completely incorrect.

First: labour means human mental and physical effort that produces something of value. Capital goods are things like factories, data centres, and software—things humans have built that are used in the production of goods and services. I'll use "capital" to refer to both the stock of capital goods and to the money that can pay for them. I'll say "money" when I want to exclude capital goods.

The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There's less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour).

I will walk through consequences [...]

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Outline:

(03:12) The default solution

(04:20) Money currently struggles to buy talent

(09:17) Most peoples power/leverage derives from their labour

(09:43) Why are states ever nice?

(14:34) No more outlier outcomes?

(20:29) Enforced equality is unlikely

(22:36) The default outcome?

(26:06) Whats the takeaway?

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Summary

There's a near consensus that EA needs funding diversification but with Open Phil accounting for ~90% of EA funding, that's just not possible due to some pretty basic math. Organizations and the community would need to make large tradeoffs and this simply isn’t possible/worth it at this time.

Lots of people want funding diversification

It has been two years since the FTX collapse and one thing everyone seems to agree on is that we need more funding diversification. These takes range from off-hand wishes “it sure would be great if funding in EA were more diversified”, to organizations trying to get a certain percentage of their budgets from non-OP sources/saying they want to diversify their funding base(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8) to Open Philanthropy/Good Ventures themselves wanting to see more funding diversification(9). Everyone seems to agree; other people should be giving more money to the EA projects.

The Math 

Of course, I [...]

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Outline:

(00:07) Summary

(00:29) Lots of people want funding diversification

(01:10) The Math

(03:46) Weighted Average

(05:02) Making a lot of money to donate is difficult

(09:17) Solutions

(09:21) 1. Get more funders

(10:34) 2. Spend Less

(12:48) 3. Splitting up Open Philanthropy into Several Organizations

(13:51) 4. More For-Profit EA Work/EA Organizations Charging for Their Work

(16:22) 5. Acceptance

(16:58) My Personal Solution

(17:25) Conclusion

(18:01) 1 I was approached at several EAGs, including a few weeks ago in Boston to donate to certain organizations specifically because they want to get a certain %X (30, 50, etc.) from non-OP sources but I’m sure I can find organizations who are very public about this

(18:20) 2

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Yesterday I donated my 100,000th lifetime dollar.[1] A few weeks ago was the fifth anniversary of my GWWC pledge. And this is Donation Celebration Week. So high time to step back and reflect on giving.

First a poem[2] (audio here). Then some facts, figures and reflections.

Poem

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Outline:

(00:26) Poem

(00:31) Prose

(00:57) Timeline

(04:45) Reflections

(06:58) Appendix: What about AGI??

The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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