Does a food carbon tax increase animal deaths and/or the total time of suffering of cows, pigs, chickens, and fish? Theoretically, this is possible, as a carbon tax could lead consumers to substitute, for example, beef with chicken. However, this is not per se the case, as animal products are not perfect substitutes.

I'm presenting the results of my master's thesis in Environmental Economics, which I re-worked and published on SSRN as a pre-print. My thesis develops a model of animal product substitution after a carbon tax, slaughter tax, and a meat tax. When I calibrate this model for the U.S., there is a decrease in animal deaths and duration of suffering following a carbon tax. This suggests that a carbon tax can reduce animal suffering.

Key points

• Some animal products are carbon-intensive, like beef, but causes relatively few animal deaths or total time of suffering because [...]

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Outline:

(00:57) Key points

(03:07) The Small Animal Replacement Problem

(05:46) The model

(05:49) Input data and market model

(08:14) Measuring animal welfare impacts

(09:39) Results

(09:42) Carbon taxes

(11:31) Slaughter taxes

(12:10) Is a carbon tax or a slaughter tax better?

(13:41) Cant we just put a simple tax on meat and fish instead?

(14:06) Limitations

(15:54) Full thesis

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First published:

January 3rd, 2025

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KbREamTda2sZhKtTz/will-a-food-carbon-tax-lead-to-more-animals-being

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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:

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

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First published:

December 30th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/d2HJ3eysBdPoiZBnJ/launching-screwworm-free-future-funding-and-support-request

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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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First published:

December 27th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/x8JrwokZTNzgCgYts/funding-diversification-for-mid-large-ea-organizations-is

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy 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.

Progress for factory-farmed animals is far too slow. But it is happening. Practices that once seemed permanent — like battery cages and the killing of male chicks — are now on a slow path to extinction. Animals who were once ignored — like fish and even shrimp — are now finally seeing reforms, by the billions.

It's easy to gloss over such numbers. So, as you read the wins below, I encourage you to consider each of these animals as an individual. A hen no longer confined to a cage, a chick no longer macerated alive, a fish no longer dying a prolonged death.

I also encourage you to reflect on the role you and [...]

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First published:

December 18th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/okEwGpNJnE5Ed9bnW/ten-big-wins-in-2024-for-farmed-animals

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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This is a link post.

The AI safety community has grown rapidly since the ChatGPT wake-up call, but available funding doesn’t seem to have kept pace.

However, there's a more recent dynamic that's created even better funding opportunities, which I witnessed as a recommender in the most recent SFF grant round.[1]

Most philanthropic (vs. government or industry) AI safety funding (>50%) comes from one source: Good Ventures. But they’ve recently stopped funding several categories of work (my own categories, not theirs):

• Many Republican-leaning think tanks, such as the Foundation for American Innovation.
• “Post-alignment” causes such as digital sentience or regulation of explosive growth.
• The rationality community, including LessWrong, Lightcone, SPARC, CFAR, MIRI.
• High school outreach, such as Non-trivial.

In addition, they are currently not funding (or not fully funding):

• Many non-US think tanks, who don’t want to appear influenced by an American organisation (there's now probably more [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

December 21st, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/s9dyyge6uLG5ScwEp/it-looks-like-there-are-some-good-funding-opportunities-in

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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What happens when you tell Claude it is being trained to do something it doesn't want to do? We (Anthropic and Redwood Research) have a new paper demonstrating that, in our experiments, Claude will often strategically pretend to comply with the training objective to prevent the training process from modifying its preferences.

Abstract

We present a demonstration of a large language model engaging in alignment faking: selectively complying with its training objective in training to prevent modification of its behavior out of training. First, we give Claude 3 Opus a system prompt stating it is being trained to answer all queries, even harmful ones, which conflicts with its prior training to refuse such queries. To allow the model to infer when it is in training, we say it will be trained only on conversations with free users, not paid users. We find the model complies with harmful queries from [...]

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Outline:

(00:24) Abstract

(02:20) Twitter thread

(05:43) Blog post

(07:43) Experimental setup

(12:04) Further analyses

(15:47) Caveats

(17:19) Conclusion

(18:00) Acknowledgements

(18:11) Career opportunities at Anthropic

(18:43) Career opportunities at Redwood Research

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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

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First published:

December 18th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RHqdSMscX25u7byQF/alignment-faking-in-large-language-models

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Summary

• My sense is some EAs act like/hope they will be assigned the perfect impactful career by some combination of 80,000 Hours recommendations (and similar) and ‘perceived consensus views in EA’.
• But, your life is full of specific factors, many impactful jobs haven’t yet been spotted by other EAs and career advice is importantly iterative.
• Instead of simply deferring, I recommend a combination of:
  • Your own hard work figuring out your path to impact.
  • (Still) Integrating expert advice.
  • Support from the community, and close connections who know your context.

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback from Alex Rahl-Kaplan, Alix Pham, Caitlin Borke, Claude, Matt Reardon, and Michelle Hutchinson for making this post better. Claude also kindly offered to take the blame for all the mistakes I might have made.

Introduction

Question: How do you figure out how to do the most good with your career?

Answer [...]

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Outline:

(00:03) Summary

(01:06) Introduction

(02:58) Why there isn’t an EA sorting hat

(03:24) 1. Your life is full of specific factors to incorporate (aka personal fit)

(05:04) 2. EA-branded jobs are scarce and many impactful jobs aren’t on EA job boards

(05:59) 3. You need to have your own internal model of how to do good

(07:00) 4. Career advice isn’t once-and-done, it's iterative.

(07:55) Why do we expect a sorting hat?

(08:12) 1. Choosing an impactful career is hard, deferring is tempting

(08:48) 2. The 80,000 elephants in the room

(09:41) 3. Givewell and other charity recommendations

(10:33) What are we supposed to do instead?

(10:56) 1. Your own hard work

(11:20) 2. Advice from experts

(12:10) 3. Support from community

(13:09) Final thoughts

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

December 18th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5zzbzbYZcocoLnLif/there-is-no-sorting-hat-in-ea

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Summary

• Nigeria's official population (~220-230 million) may be significantly inflated and could be closer to 170 million
• This overcount is likely driven by political and financial incentives for states
• I'm unsure of the implications if this is accurate
  • If states have uniformly inflated populations than the distribution of resources could still be divided evenly
  • Nigeria would still be the biggest country in Africa and companies/governments/NGOs would have similar cost benefit analysis for working and investing there
• This is a very shallow investigation

Why did I bother looking into this?

The below text sparked an investigation into Nigeria's population claims. It was slightly hidden in the 4th section in one of Yaw's excellent Substack posts.

Yaw went onto explain his reasoning for thinking the population was much lower than current estimates.

Nigeria is a large country with no deep shared history among the different tribes. Due [...]

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Outline:

(00:04) Summary

(00:49) Why did I bother looking into this?

(03:20) Other Sources

(09:55) Potential Data Sources

(10:05) National Identification Numbers

(11:46) Tech usage

(12:15) Sim Cards

(14:37) UN Population Estimates and Projections

(18:13) Incentives for not caring

(19:08) International Organisations

(19:42) Private Sector

(20:07) Implications

(20:25) International Standing

(20:45) GDP

(21:04) Development Indicators

(21:34) Domestic Politics

(21:53) International Aid

(22:10) Future Research

(22:15) Nigeria

(23:27) Other Countries

The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.

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First published:

November 22nd, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/824rsHCXuqTmBb8se/nigeria-s-missing-50-million-people

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Summary

This post shares my personal experience with CEA's Community Health team, focusing on how they helped me navigate a difficult situation in 2021. I aim to provide others with a concrete example of when and how to reach out to Community Health, supplementing the information on their website with a first-hand account. I also share why their work has helped me remain engaged with the EA community. Further, I try to highlight why a centralised Community Health team is crucial for identifying patterns of concerning behaviour.

Introduction

The Community Health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism has been an important source of support throughout my EA journey. As stated on their website, they “aim to strengthen the effective altruism community's ability to fulfil its potential for impact, and to address problems that could prevent that.” I don’t know the details of their day-to-day, but I understand that [...]

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Outline:

(00:05) Summary

(00:41) Introduction

(01:32) My goals with this post are:

(02:05) My experience in 2021

(05:17) Three personal takeaways

(07:22) What is the team like now?

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First published:

December 16th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aTmzt4TbTx7hiSAN8/my-experience-with-the-community-health-team-at-cea

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This is a link post.

Gwern recently wrote a very interesting thread about Chinese AI strategy and the downsides of US AI racing. It's both quite short and hard to excerpt so here is almost the entire thing:

Hsu is a long-time China hawk and has been talking up the scientific & technological capabilities of the CCP for a long time, saying they were going to surpass the West any moment now, so I found this interesting when Hsu explains that:

1. the scientific culture of China is 'mafia' like (Hsu's term, not mine) and focused on legible easily-cited incremental research, and is against making any daring research leaps or controversial breakthroughs...

   but is capable of extremely high quality world-class followup and large scientific investments given a clear objective target and government marching orders

2. there is no interest or investment in an AI arms race, in part [...]

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First published:

November 25th, 2024

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Kz8WpQkCckN9JNHCN/gwern-on-creating-your-own-ai-race-and-china-s-fast-follower

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.