EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

This memo was originally written for the Effective Giving Summit 2024, and slightly adapted/updated for the Meta Coordination Forum 2024. I’m sharing this here (with very minor edits) in the hope it will be useful for others as well.

TL;DR

• We’d like to find ways to scale the current ~$1 billion to (say) 10s of billions of dollars moved to high-impact funding opportunities (HIFOs) each year
  • Note that this would still only be ~10% of the $500B of donations made in the US every year; this seems like an ambitious but achievable goal.
• I think it's useful to categorise current approaches to fundraising into 4 (2x2) candidate strategies, each of which can be applied to different target groups:
  • Broad direct
  • Broad pledge
  • HNW direct
  • HNW pledge
• These strategies can (and likely should) be combined by organisations, but some may ultimately scale much better than others.
  • I think [...]

---

Outline:

(00:24) TL;DR

(02:00) Defining the categories

(02:22) Broad vs HNW

(03:52) Direct vs pledge

(06:41) Comparing the four strategies

(07:44) Limiting factors

(10:54) Sustained giving

(11:38) Value drift / Incentives

(12:28) Spreading EG principles

(13:42) Diversification of funding/perspectives

(14:06) Example: the broad pledge strategy

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Ambitious Impact (AIM) is excited to open applications for four influential roles in our tight-knit, dedicated team. You can find more information about each of the roles, including job descriptions, on our website.

We also recommend watching this video for a (slightly outdated) sense of what it's like working at AIM. If you're not looking for a role currently, please think about one person you know who might be interested in one of these roles and share this opportunity with them. You can refer candidates you would like to recommend to us for any of these roles through this link.

We'll be hosting a series of webinars to answer questions about each of the roles, each hosted by a team member with direct experience of the role advertised:

• Friday, 11th October, 4pm BST - Operations Manager Q&A with Alex [...]

---

Outline:

(01:39) Why work at AIM?

(02:53) Each role in a nutshell

(04:49) A final note

The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.

---

First published:

Source:

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.

Hi everyone! I’m excited to share another update from Legal Impact for Chickens with y’all.

Yesterday we filed a lawsuit against dairy company Alexandre Family Farm. The suit alleges the company poured table salt into cows’ eyes, dragged disabled cows across concrete, and starved them. The lawsuit comes on the heels of Farm Forward's April exposé that revealed “systemic deception, cruelty, and animal abuse.”

Please find a full press release here and below, and the complaint here. If you’d like more information, or to speak with the legal team, just let me know.

Thank you,
Sage
__
Egregious Cruelty: Humboldt Farm Sued for Putting Salt in Cows’ Eyes, Starving Cattle

For Immediate Release: October 1, 2024
Contact: Sage Max, (352) 327-1282, [email protected]

Humboldt County, CA – A well-known dairy has poured table salt into cows’ eyes, dragged disabled cows across concrete, and starved them: These are the allegations [...]

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Lundgren and Kudlek (2024), in their recent article, discuss several challenges to longtermism as it currently stands. Below is a summary of these challenges.

The Far Future is Irrelevant for Moral Decision-Making

• Longtermists have not convincingly shown that taking the far future into account impacts decision-making in practice. In the examples given, the moral decisions remain the same even if the far future is disregarded.
  • Example: Slavery
    We didn’t need to consider the far future to recognize that abolishing slavery was morally right, as its benefits were evident in the short term.
  • Example: Existential Risk
    The urgency of addressing existential risks does not depend on the far future; the importance of avoiding these risks is clear when focusing on the present and the next few generations.
• As a result, the far future has little relevance to most moral decisions. Policies that are [...]

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This post was inspired by a week of working from Ambitious Impact's office in London, and chatting with several of the startup charities there. While my experience is in the for-profit world, I think it's applicable to entrepreneurs working on impact-driven endeavors in lower-income places, both for-profit and non-profit. (Acknowledging that much of this advice will be obvious to entrepreneurs from lower-income countries; I am mostly writing for readers who like me are from high-income countries.)

On Speed and Focus

---

Outline:

(00:36) On Speed and Focus

(01:28) On Learning Things By Going Places And Talking To People

(02:21) On Regulation

(04:00) On Product

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I recently had a conversation with a teammate that made me reflect on a possible cultural issue within the EA community. This teammate had expressed in a few meetings that they wanted to take on various new projects and expand their scope of responsibility. As their manager, I wanted to have Alliance Mentality to support them where possible. However, from my perspective, a slightly more tightly scoped role was probably a bit better for the team: their core responsibilities are vital for the team (and for what it's worth, when I try to do them, I'm much worse at them!).

During our recent one-on-one, realized that we both preferred the more tightly scoped role. More importantly, we uncovered that they had internalized a cultural norm from EA that people needed to be constantly changing or expanding their roles to be doing a good job.

I wanted to write a [...]

---

Outline:

(00:58) The Pressure to Change Roles

(01:42) The Value of Steady Hands

(02:38) Shifting the Narrative

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Note: this is a new article I've written for 80,000 Hours making the case that understanding the moral status of digital minds is a pressing world problem. It's written for a general audience rather than the typical forum reader, but it may still serve as a useful introduction to the area for many.

We don't currently rank this issue among our top problems, because it's an emerging challenge without a full field devoted to it. We have a lot of remaining uncertainties about it as a problem area. But we think working on it could potentially be competitively impactful to work on our top problems for people with the right personal fit.

We welcome feedback on the article in the comments below or through our site's feedback form.

“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.”

Those words were produced [...]

---

Outline:

(03:04) Summary

(03:50) Our overall view

(05:25) Why might understanding the moral status of digital minds be an especially pressing problem?

(05:32) 1. Humanity may soon grapple with many AI systems that could be conscious

(11:35) Clearing up common misconceptions

(13:27) 2. Creating digital minds could go very badly — or very well

(19:02) 3. We don’t know how to assess the moral status of AI systems

(32:50) The strongest case for the possibility of sentient digital minds: whole brain emulation

(36:37) 4. The scale of this issue might be enormous

(43:53) 5. Work on this problem is neglected but seems tractable

(52:52) Summing up so far

(53:49) Arguments against the moral status of digital minds as a pressing problem

(54:10) Two key cruxes

(55:10) Take concrete next steps

(57:12) Aim for key roles

(01:00:32) Where to work

(01:01:44) Support this field in other ways

(01:02:44) Important considerations if you work on this problem

(01:03:50) Learn more

(01:03:53) Podcasts

(01:04:20) Research

The original text contained 8 images which were described by AI.

---

First published:

Source:

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.

The Democrat decided to reject the measure because it applies only to the biggest and most expensive AI models and doesn’t take into account whether they are deployed in high-risk situations, he said in his veto message.

Smaller models sometimes handle critical decision-making involving sensitive data, such as electrical grids and medical records, while bigger models at times handle low-risk activities such as customer service.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Questioning Beneficence: Four Philosophers on Effective Altruism and Doing Good—by Sam Arnold, Jason Brennan, Ryan Davis, and me—is now available from Routledge. It introduces a new “roundtable” format for debate books: each of us chose three questions relating to beneficence, wrote a “starter essay” on our own questions, wrote responses to each of the others’ starter essays, and then wrote a wrap-up response to the responses. The result is a lot of constructive engagement between our different viewpoints. I hope it's as edifying to the reader as it was for me as an author!

As a nice bonus, the publisher has allowed me to publicly share some of my contributions to the volume (my introduction & starter essays, plus three of my responses to others’ questions). My plan is to share one essay a week on my substack, starting with the introduction today. If you’re [...]

---

Outline:

(01:20) Series contents

(02:04) Introduction: Three Questions Exploring Beneficence

The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.

---

First published:

Source:

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.

TLDR: Sign up here to join a six-month experiment to democratize effective giving. The experiment establishes a community who agree to allocate charitable gifts proportionally to member votes. You’ll help make EA donations more representative of the community's cause prioritization. Sign up and pledge by October 15th to participate in our first round.

Equal Hands is a 6-month trial in democratizing charitable giving among EA cause areas.

Here's how it works:

1. You pledge to give a certain amount each month.
2. Each month that you pledge, vote on the optimal distribution of the donated money across causes (1 vote per person, no matter how much you give).
3. The total amount of money pledged is split out proportionally to the total of the votes, so that no matter how much you gave, your voice equally influences the final allocation.
4. To actually make the gifts, you will be assigned a particular [...]

---

Outline:

(02:42) Effective giving overly weighs the views of a few decision makers.

(06:13) How will Equal Hands work exactly? An example funding round

(08:58) The Details

(09:01) The process

(10:16) Transparency

(10:36) Improvements

(10:51) FAQ

(10:54) Why would individual people participate?

(11:31) What causes can I vote on?

(13:15) Why not just establish some kind of fund people can donate to and then vote on the allocation of its grants?

(13:42) Why cause areas and not individual charities?

(15:33) Why these specific charities to represent these cause areas and not \[my preferred charity\]?

(16:00) Why do I have to donate a minimum amount to participate?

(16:22) Can I give via another entity to one of the listed charities?

(16:52) Why not quadratic funding / some other hip mechanism?

(17:11) Will I have to donate to causes I don’t care about?

(17:44) What happens if this goes well?

(17:54) How is this governed/funded/run?

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.