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!

Marcus Daniell appreciation note

@Marcus Daniell, cofounder of High Impact Athletes, came back from knee surgery and is donating half of his prize money this year. He projects raising $100,000. Through a partnership with Momentum, people can pledge to donate for each point he gets; he has raised $28,000 through this so far. It's cool to see this, and I'm wishing him luck for his final year of professional play!

First in-ovo sexing in the US

Egg Innovations announced that they are "on track to adopt the technology in early 2025." Approximately 300 million male chicks are ground up alive in the US each year (since only female chicks are valuable) and in-ovo sexing would prevent this. 

UEP originally promised to eliminate male chick culling by 2020; needless to say, they didn't keep that commitment. But better late than never! 

Congrats to everyone working on this, including @Robert - Innovate Animal Ag, who founded an organization devoted to pushing this technology.^[1]

1. ^{^}

   Egg Innovations says they can't disclose details about who they are working with for NDA reasons; if anyone has more information about who deserves credit for this, please comment!

Startups aren't good for learning

I fairly frequently have conversations with people who are excited about starting their own project and, within a few minutes, convince them that they would learn less starting project than they would working for someone else. I think this is basically the only opinion I have where I can regularly convince EAs to change their mind in a few minutes of discussion and, since there is now renewed interest in starting EA projects, it seems worth trying to write down.

It's generally accepted that optimal learning environments have a few properties:

• You are doing something that is just slightly too hard for you.
  • In startups, you do whatever needs to get done. This will often be things that are way too easy (answering a huge number of support requests) or way too hard (pitching a large company CEO on your product when you've never even sold bubblegum before).
  • Established companies, by contrast, put substantial effort into slotting people into roles that are approximately at their skill level (though you still usually need to put in proactive effort to learn things at an established company). 
• Repeatedly practicing a skill in "chunks"
  • Similar to the last point, established companies have a "rhythm" where e.g. one month per year where everyone has a priority of writing up reflections on how the sales cycle is going, commenting on each other's writeups, and updating your own. Startups do things by the seat of their pants, which means employees are usually rapidly switching between tasks.
• Feedback from experts/mentorship
  • Startup accelerators like YCombinator partially address this, but still a defining characteristic of starting your own project is that you are doing the work without guidance/oversight.

Moreover, even supposing you learn more at a startup, it's worth thinking about what it actually is you learn. I know way more about the laws regarding healthcare insurance than I did before starting a company, but that knowledge isn't super useful to me outside the startup context.

This isn't a 100% universal knockdown argument – some established companies suck for professional development, and some startups are really great. But by default, I would expect startups to be worse for learning.

Sam Bankman-Fried's trial is scheduled to start October 3, 2023, and Michael Lewis’s book about FTX comes out the same day. My hope and expectation is that neither will be focused on EA,^[1] but several people have recently asked me about if they should prepare anything, so I wanted to quickly record my thoughts.

The Forum feels like it’s in a better place to me than when FTX declared bankruptcy: the moderation team at the time was Lizka, Lorenzo, and myself, but it is now six people, and they’ve put in a number of processes to make it easier to deal with a sudden growth in the number of heated discussions. We have also made a number of design changes, notably to the community section. 

CEA has also improved our communications and legal processes so we can be more responsive to news, if we need to (though some of the constraints mentioned here are still applicable).

Nonetheless, I think there’s a decent chance that viewing the Forum, Twitter, or news media could become stressful for some people, and you may want to preemptively create a plan for engaging with that in a healthy way. 

1. ^{^}

   This market is thinly traded but is currently predicting that Lewis’s book will not explicitly assert that Sam misused customer funds because of “ends justify the means” reasoning

The Forum moderation team has been made aware that Kerry Vaughn published a tweet thread that, among other things, accuses a Forum user of doing things that violate our norms. Most importantly:

Where he crossed the line was his decision to dox people who worked at Leverage or affiliated organizations by researching the people who worked there and posting their names to the EA forum

The user in question said this information came from searching LinkedIn for people who had listed themselves as having worked at Leverage and related organizations. 

This is not "doxing" and it’s unclear to us why Kerry would use this term: for example, there was no attempt to connect anonymous and real names, which seems to be a key part of the definition of “doxing”. In any case, we do not consider this to be a violation of our norms.

At one point Forum moderators got a report that some of the information about these people was inaccurate. We tried to get in touch with the then-anonymous user, and when we were unable to, we redacted the names from the comment. Later, the user noticed the change and replaced the names. One of CEA’s staff asked the user to encode the names to allow those people more privacy, and the user did so. 

Kerry says that a former Leverage staff member “requests that people not include her last name or the names of other people at Leverage” and indicates the user broke this request. However, the post in question requests that the author’s last name not be used in reference to that post, rather than in general. The comment in question doesn’t refer to the former staff member’s post at all, and was originally written more than a year before the post. So we do not view this comment as disregarding someone’s request for privacy.

Kerry makes several other accusations, and we similarly do not believe them to be violations of this Forum's norms. We have shared our analysis of these accusations with Leverage; they are, of course, entitled to disagree with us (and publicly state their disagreement), but the moderation team wants to make clear that we take enforcement of our norms seriously.

We would also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that CEA’s Community Health team serves as a point of contact for the EA community, and if you believe harassment or other issues are occurring we encourage you to reach out to them.

Possible Vote Brigading

We have received an influx of people creating accounts to cast votes and comments over the past week, and we are aware that people who feel strongly about human biodiversity sometimes vote brigade on sites where the topic is being discussed. Please be aware that voting and discussion about some topics may not be representative of the normal EA Forum user base.

Thoughts on the OpenAI Board Decisions

A couple months ago I remarked that Sam Bankman-Fried's trial was scheduled to start in October, and people should prepare for EA to be in the headlines. It turned out that his trial did not actually generate much press for EA, but a month later EA is again making news as a result of recent Open AI board decisions.

A couple quick points:

1. It is often the case that people's behavior is much more reasonable than what is presented in the media. It is also sometimes the case that the reality is even stupider than what is presented. We currently don't know what actually happened, and should hold multiple hypotheses simultaneously.^[1]
2. It's very hard to predict the outcome of media stories. Here are a few takes I've heard; we should consider that any of these could become the dominant narrative.
   1. Vinod Khosla (The Information): “OpenAI’s board members’ religion of ‘effective altruism’ and its misapplication could have set back the world’s path to the tremendous benefits of artificial intelligence”
   2. John Thornhill (Financial Times): One entrepreneur who is close to OpenAI says the board was “incredibly principled and brave” to confront Altman, even if it failed to explain its actions in public. “The board is rightly being attacked for incompetence,” the entrepreneur told me. “But if the new board is composed of normal tech people, then I doubt they’ll take safety issues seriously.”
   3. The Economist: “The chief lesson is the folly of policing technologies using corporate structures … Fortunately for humanity, there are bodies that have a much more convincing claim to represent its interests: elected governments”
3. The previous point notwithstanding, people's attention spans are extremely short, and the median outcome of a news story is ~nothing. I've commented before that FTX's collapse had little effect on the average person’s perception of EA, and we might expect a similar thing to happen here.^[2]
4. Animal welfare has historically been unique amongst EA causes in having a dedicated lobby who is fighting against it. While we don't yet have a HumaneWatch for AI Safety, we should be aware that people have strong interests in how AI develops, and this means that stories about AI will be treated differently from those about, say, malaria.
5. It can be frustrating to feel that a group you are part of is being judged by the actions of a couple people you’ve never met nor have any strong feelings about. The flipside of this though is that we get to celebrate the victories of people we’ve never met. Here are a few things posted in the last week that I thought were cool:
   1. The Against Malaria Foundation is in the middle of a nine-month bed net distribution which is expected to prevent 20 million cases of malaria, and about 40,000 deaths. (Rob Mather)
   2. The Shrimp Welfare Project signed an agreement to prevent 125 million shrimps per year from having their eyes cut off and other painful farming practices. (Ula Zarosa)
   3. The Belgian Senate voted to add animal welfare to their Constitution. (Bob Jacobs)
   4. Scott Alexander’s recent post also has a nice summary of victories.

1. ^{^}

    A collection of prediction markets about this event can be found here.

2. ^{^}

    Note that the data collected here does not exclude the possibility that perception of EA was affected in some subcommunities, and it might be the case that some subcommunities (e.g. OpenAI staff) do have a changed opinion, even if the average person’s opinion is unchanged

Habryka @ 2023-11-29T22:54 (+32)

I've commented before that FTX's collapse had little effect on the average person’s perception of EA

Just for the record, I think the evidence you cited there was shoddy, and I think we are seeing continued references to FTX in basically all coverage of the OpenAI situation, showing that it did clearly have a lasting effect on the perception of EA. 

Reputation is lazily-evaluated. Yes, if you ask a random person on the street what they think of you, they won't know, but when your decisions start influencing them, they will start getting informed, and we are seeing really very clear evidence that when people start getting informed, FTX is heavily influencing their opinion.

Ben_West @ 2023-11-29T23:58 (+6)

we are seeing really very clear evidence that when people start getting informed, FTX is heavily influencing their opinion.

Thanks! Could you share said evidence? The data sources I cited certainly have limitations, having access to more surveys etc. would be valuable.

Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2023-11-30T01:09 (+19)

The Wikipedia page on effective altruism mentions Bankman-Fried 11 times, and after/during the OpenAI story, it was edited to include a lot of criticism, ~half of which was written after FTX (e.g. it quotes this tweet https://twitter.com/sama/status/1593046526284410880 )

It's the first place I would go to if I wanted an independent take on "what's effective altruism?" I expect many others to do the same.

Jason @ 2023-11-30T02:41 (+18)

There are a lot of recent edits on that article by a single editor, apparently a former NY Times reporter (the edit log is public). From the edit summaries, those edits look rather unfriendly, and the article as a whole feels negatively slanted to me. So I'm not sure how much weight I'd give that article specifically.

Habryka @ 2023-11-30T00:42 (+13)

Sure, here are the top hits for "Effective Altruism OpenAI" (I did no cherry-picking, this was the first search term that I came up with, and I am just going top to bottom). Each one mentions FTX in a way that pretty clearly matters for the overall article: 

• Bloomberg: "What is Effective Altruism? What does it mean for AI?" 
  • "AI safety was embraced as an important cause by big-name Silicon Valley figures who believe in effective altruism, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of crypto exchange FTX, who was convicted in early November of a massive fraud."
• Reddit "I think this was an Effective Altruism (EA) takeover by the OpenAI board"
  • Top comment: " I only learned about EA during the FTX debacle. And was unaware until recently of its focus on AI. Since been reading and catching up …"
• WSJ: "How a Fervent Belief Split Silicon Valley—and Fueled the Blowup at OpenAI"
  • "Coming just weeks after effective altruism’s most prominent backer, Sam Bankman-Fried, was convicted of fraud, the OpenAI meltdown delivered another blow to the movement, which believes that carefully crafted artificial-intelligence systems, imbued with the correct human values, will yield a Golden Age—and failure to do so could have apocalyptic consequences."
• Wired: "Effective Altruism Is Pushing a Dangerous Brand of ‘AI Safety’"
  • "EA is currently being scrutinized due to its association with Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto scandal, but less has been written about how the ideology is now driving the research agenda in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), creating a race to proliferate harmful systems, ironically in the name of “AI safety.”
• Semafor: "The AI industry turns against its favorite philosophy"
  • "The first was caused by the downfall of convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who was once among the leading figures of EA, an ideology that emerged in the elite corridors of Silicon Valley and Oxford University in the 2010s offering an alternative, utilitarian-infused approach to charitable giving."

Ben_West @ 2023-11-30T01:19 (+4)

Ah yeah sorry, the claim of the post you criticized was not that FTX isn't mentioned in the press, but rather that those mentions don't seem to actually have impacted sentiment very much.

I thought when you said "FTX is heavily influencing their opinion" you were referring to changes in sentiment, but possibly I misunderstood you – if you just mean "journalists mention it a lot" then I agree.

Habryka @ 2023-11-30T02:11 (+2)

You are also welcome to check Twitter mentions or do other analysis of people talking publicly about EA. I don't think this is a "journalist only" thing. I will take bets you will see a similar pattern.

Ben_West @ 2023-11-30T02:40 (+10)

I actually did that earlier, then realized I should clarify what you were trying to claim. I will copy the results in below, but even though they support the view that FTX was not a huge deal I want to disclaim that this methodology doesn't seem like it actually gets at the important thing.

But anyway, my original comment text:

As a convenience sample I searched twitter for "effective altruism". The first reference to FTX doesn't come until tweet 36, which is a link to this. Honestly it seems mostly like a standard anti-utilitarianism complaint; it feels like FTX isn't actually the crux. 

In contrast, I see 3 e/acc-type criticisms before that, two "I like EA but this AI stuff is too weird" things (including one retweeted by Yann LeCun??), two "EA is tech-bro/not diverse" complaints and one thing about Whytham Abbey.

And this (survey discussed/criticized here):

Habryka @ 2023-11-30T03:50 (+4)

I just tried to reproduce the Twitter datapoint. Here is the first tweet when I sort by most recent: 

Most tweets are negative, mostly referring to the OpenAI thing. Among the top 10 I see three references to FTX. This continues to be quite remarkable, especially given that it's been more than a year, and these tweets are quite short.

I don't know what search you did to find a different pattern. Maybe it was just random chance that I got many more than you did. 

Ben_West @ 2023-11-30T05:08 (+2)

I used the default sort ("Top").

(No opinion on which is more useful; I don't use Twitter much.)

Habryka @ 2023-11-30T05:35 (+4)

Top was mostly showing me tweets from people that I follow, so my sense is it was filtered in a personalized way. I am not fully sure how it works, but it didn't seem the right type of filter.

Ben_West @ 2023-12-05T00:38 (+4)

Yeah, makes sense. Although I just tried doing the "latest" sort and went through the top 40 tweets without seeing a reference to FTX/SBF.

My guess is that this filter just (unsurprisingly) shows you whatever random thing people are talking about on twitter at the moment, and it seems like the random EA-related thing of today is this, which doesn't mention FTX.

Probably you need some longitudinal data to have this be useful.

Nathan Young @ 2023-12-01T14:19 (+2)

I would guess too that these two events have made it much easier to reference EA in passing. eg I think this article wouldn't have been written 18 months ago. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-policy-00121362

So I think there is a real jump of notoriety once the journalistic class knows who you are. And they now know who we are. "EA, the social movement involved in the FTX and OpenAI crises" is not a good epithet.

trevor1 @ 2023-11-29T19:19 (+3)

Upvoted, I'm grateful for the sober analysis.

The previous point notwithstanding, people's attention spans are extremely short, and the median outcome of a news story is ~nothing. I've commented before that FTX's collapse had little effect on the average person’s perception of EA, and we might expect a similar thing to happen here.

I think this is an oversimplification. This effect is largely caused by competing messages; the modern internet optimizes information for memetic fitness e.g. by maximizing emotional intensity or persuasive effect, and people have so much routine exposure to stuff that leads their minds around in various directions that they get wary (or see having strong reactions to anything at all as immature, since a large portion of outcries on the internet are disproportionately from teenagers). This is the main reason why people take things with a grain of salt.

However, overton windows can still undergo big and lasting shifts (this process could also be engineered deliberately long before generative AI emerged, e.g. via clown attacks which exploit social status instincts to consistently hijack any person's impressions of any targeted concept). The 80,000 hours podcast with Cass Sunstein covered how Overton windows are dominated by vague impressions of what ideas are acceptable or unacceptable to talk about (note: this podcast was from 2019). This dynamic could plausibly strangle EA's access to fresh talent, and AI safety's access to mission-critical policy influence, for several years (which would be far too long).

It can be frustrating to feel that a group you are part of is being judged by the actions of a couple people you’ve never met nor have any strong feelings about.

On the flip side, johnswentworth actually had a pretty good take on this; that the human brain is instinctively predisposed to over-focus on the risk of their in-group becoming unpopular among everyone else:

First, [AI safety being condemned by the public] sure does sound like the sort of thing which the human brain presents to us as a far larger, more important fact than it actually is. Ingroup losing status? Few things are more prone to distorted perception than that.

Ben_West @ 2023-11-29T20:02 (+4)

Thanks for the helpful comment – I had not seen John's dialogue and I think he is making a valid point.

Fair point that the lack of impact might not be due to attention span but instead things like having competing messages. 

In case you missed it: Angelina Li compiled some growth metrics about EA here; they seem to indicate that FTX's collapse did not "strangle" EA (though it probably wasn't good).

EA in a World Where People Actually Listen to Us

I had considered calling the third wave of EA "EA in a World Where People Actually Listen to Us". 

Leopold's situational awareness memo has become a salient example of this for me. I used to sometimes think that arguments about whether we should avoid discussing the power of AI in order to avoid triggering an arms race were a bit silly and self important because obviously defense leaders aren't going to be listening to some random internet charity nerds and changing policy as a result.

Well, they are and they are. Let's hope it's for the better.

Plant-based burgers now taste better than beef

The food sector has witnessed a surge in the production of plant-based meat alternatives that aim to mimic various attributes of traditional animal products; however, overall sensory appreciation remains low. This study employed open-ended questions, preference ranking, and an identification question to analyze sensory drivers and barriers to liking four burger patties, i.e., two plant-based (one referred to as pea protein burger and one referred to as animal-like protein burger), one hybrid meat-mushroom (75% meat and 25% mushrooms), and one 100% beef burger. Untrained participants (n=175) were randomly assigned to blind or informed conditions in a between-subject study. The main objective was to evaluate the impact of providing information about the animal/plant-based protein source/type, and to obtain product descriptors and liking/disliking levels from consumers. Results from the ranking tests for blind and informed treatments showed that the animal-like protein [Impossible] was the most preferred product, followed by the 100% beef burger. Moreover, in the blind condition, there was no significant difference in preferences between the beef burger and the hybrid and pea protein burgers. In the blind tasting, people preferred the pea protein burger over the hybrid one, contrary to the results of the informed tasting, which implies the existence of affecting factors other than pure hedonistic enjoyment. In the identification question, although consumers correctly identified the beef burger under the blind condition, they still preferred the animal-like burger.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0963996923003587 

Reversing start up advice
In the spirit of reversing advice you read, some places where I would give the opposite advice of this thread:

Be less ambitious
I don't have a huge sample size here, but the founders I've spoken to since the "EA has a lot of money so you should be ambitious" era started often seem to be ambitious in unhelpful ways. Specifically: I think they often interpret this advice to mean something like "think about how you could hire as many people as possible" and then they waste a bunch of resources on some grandiose vision without having validated that a small-scale version of their solution works.

Founders who instead work by themselves or with one or two people to try to really deeply understand some need and make a product that solves that need seem way more successful to me.^[1]

Think about failure
The "infinite beta" mentality seems quite important for founders to have. "I have a hypothesis, I will test it, if that fails I will pivot in this way" seems like a good frame, and I think it's endorsed by standard start up advice (e.g. lean startup).

1. ^{^}

   Of course, it's perfectly coherent to be ambitious about finding a really good value proposition. It's just that I worry that "be ambitious" primes people to be ambitious in unhelpful ways.

Longform's missing mood

If your content is viewed by 100,000 people, making it more concise by one second saves an aggregate of one day across your audience. Respecting your audience means working hard to make your content shorter.

When the 80k podcast describes itself as "unusually in depth," I feel like there's a missing mood: maybe there's no way to communicate the ideas more concisely, but this is something we should be sad about, not a point of pride.^[1]

Charles He @ 2022-06-18T16:57 (+7)

This is a thoughtful post and a really good sentiment IMO!

When the 80k podcast describes itself as "unusually in depth," I feel like there's a missing mood: maybe there's no way to communicate the ideas more concisely, but this is something we should be sad about, not a point of pride.

As you touched on, I’m not sure 80k is a good negative example, to me it seems like a positive example of how to handle this? 

In addition to a tight intro, 80k has a great highlight section, that to me, looks like someone smart tried to solve this exact problem, balancing many considerations. 

This highlight section has good takeaways and is well organized with headers. I guess this is useful for 90% of people who only browse at the content for 1 minute.

Ben_West @ 2022-06-21T00:40 (+4)

Thanks for the push back! I agree that 80k cares more about the use of their listener's time than most podcasters, although this is a low bar.

80k is operating under a lot of constraints, and I'm honestly not sure if they are actually doing anything incorrectly here. Notably, the fancy people who they get on the podcast probably aren't willing to devote many hours to rephrasing things in the most concise way possible, which really constrains their options.

I do still feel like there is a missing mood though.

80000_Hours @ 2024-03-27T17:20 (+2)

We also offer audio version of those highlights for all episodes on the '80k After Hours' feed: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/

Yarrow Bouchard @ 2024-04-10T09:46 (+1)

To me, economy of words is what’s important, rather than overall length. Long can be wonderful, as long as the writer uses all those words well. Short can be wonderful, if the writer uses enough words to convey their complete thoughts.

Democratizing risk post update
Earlier this week, a post was published criticizing democratizing risk. This post was deleted by the (anonymous) author. The forum moderation team did not ask them to delete it, nor are we aware of their reasons for doing so.
We are investigating some likely Forum policy violations, however, and will clarify the situation as soon as possible.

New Netflix show ~doubles search traffic for plant-based eating

h/t Lewis Bollard.

Closing comments on posts
If you are the author of a post tagged "personal blog" (which notably includes all new Bostrom-related posts) and you would like to prevent new comments on your post, please email forum@centerforeffectivealtruism.org and we can disable them.

We know that some posters find the prospect of dealing with commenters so aversive that they choose not to post at all; this seems worse to us than posting with comments turned off.

An EA Limerick

(Lacey told me this was not good enough to actually submit to the writing contest, so publishing it as a short form.)

An AI sat boxed in a room 

Said Eliezer: "This surely spells doom! 

With self-improvement recursive, 

And methods subversive 

It will just simply go 'foom'."

We are banning stone and their alternate account for one month for messaging users and accusing others of being sock puppets, even after the moderation team asked them to stop. If you believe that someone has violated Forum norms such as creating sockpuppet accounts, please contact the moderators.

@lukeprog's investigation into Cryonics and Molecular nanotechnology seems like it may have relevant lessons for the nascent attempts to build a mass movement around AI safety: 

First, early advocates of cryonics and MNT focused on writings and media aimed at a broad popular audience, before they did much technical, scientific work. These advocates successfully garnered substantial media attention, and this seems to have irritated the most relevant established scientific communities (cryobiology and chemistry, respectively), both because many of the established scientists felt that something with no compelling scientific backing was getting more attention than their own “real” work, and because some of them (inaccurately) suspected that media attention for cryonics and MNT had translated into substantial (but unwarranted) funding for both fields.

Second, early advocates of cryonics and MNT spoke and wrote in a way that was critical and dismissive toward the most relevant mainstream scientific fields, and this contributed further to tensions between advocates of cryonics and MNT and the established scientific communities from which they could have most naturally recruited scientific talent and research funding.

Third, and perhaps largely as a result of these first two issues, these “neighboring” established scientific communities (of cryobiologists and chemists) engaged in substantial “boundary work” to keep advocates of cryonics and MNT excluded. For example, in the case of cryonics: according to an historical account by a cryonicist26 (who may of course be biased), established cryobiologists organized to repeatedly label cryonicists as frauds until cryonicists threatened a lawsuit; they passed over cryonics-associated cryobiologists for promotions within the professional societies, or asked them to resign from those societies, and they also blocked cryonicists from obtaining new society memberships via amendments to the bylaws; they threatened to boycott the only supplier of storage vessels suitable for cryonics, forcing cryonicists to build their own storage vessels; they wrote a letter to the California Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers urging them to investigate cryonicists and shut them down; and so on.

 

I have recently been wondering what my expected earnings would be if I started another company. I looked back at the old 80 K blog post arguing that there is some skill component to entrepreneurship, and noticed that, while serial entrepreneurs do have a significantly higher chance of a successful exit on their second venture, they raise their first rounds at substantially lower valuations. (Table 4 here.)

It feels so obvious to me that someone who's started a successful company in the past will be more likely to start one in the future, and I continue to be baffled why the data don't show this.^[1]

I have heard some VCs say that they don't fund serial entrepreneurs because humans only have enough energy to start one company; I always thought this was kind of dumb, but maybe there is some truth to it.

1. ^{^}

   Although the data don't not show this either. Companies founded by second time entrepreneurs might be less ambitious, raise money earlier, or have some other difference which is consistent with second time entrepreneurs being more successful

Person-affecting longtermism

This post points out that brain preservation (cryonics) is potentially quite cheap on a $/QALY basis because people who are reanimated will potentially live for a very long time with very high quality of life.

It seems reasonable to assume that reanimated people would funge against future persons, so I'm not sure if this is persuasive for those who don't adopt person affecting views, but for those who do, it's plausibly very cost-effective.

This is interesting because I don't hear much about person affecting longtermist causes.

EA Three Comma Club

I'm interested in EA organizations that can plausibly be said to have improved the lives of over a billion individuals. Ones I'm currently aware of:

1. Shrimp Welfare Project – they provide this Guesstimate, which has a mean estimate of 1.2B shrimps per year affected by welfare improvements that they have pushed
2. Aquatic Life Institute – they provide this spreadsheet, though I agree with Bella that it's not clear where some of the numbers are coming from.

Are there any others?