If this post is going to be a recurring piece for the foreseeable future, would it be practical for you to include a changelog or similar each time you post it? On the one hand I'm interested in your updated recommendations, but on the other hand I'm less interested in reading the same post repeatedly, and in practice this time it seems that the latter factor outweighed the former; I ended up failing to motivate myself to read the post past the first few paragraphs at all, despite knowing there'd presumably be interesting new stuff at some point, because the expected new:old ratio seemed too low and because I'm not great at distinguishing old from new on a casual skim without spending time reading both in depth. (In a way which a changelog-or-such would have helped mitigate, doing the distinguishing for me so I could skip around reading only the parts identified by the changelog as new.)
Yay, thanks! In terms of specific formatting, I'm thinking something like... have a "Changelog" section at the bottom of the post under the main content (maybe with a footnote pointing out its existence, maybe with a link at the top of the chagelog section to the previous-post-relative-to-which-the-changelog-is-anchored to help contextualize it), and in that section have a bulleted list of new things in the post since its last instance, one bullet per chunk of significantly-added text, with each bullet reasonably clearly pointing to where the new parts are? So example bullets might be e.g. "added three paragraphs to the end of the U. S. Democracy section", "added recommendations for candidates Name1 and Name2", et cetera. Phrasing making it easy to ctrl-f to the right place (or ctrl-f to the right section-header and then scroll to the right place) and jump straight into reading the new stuff.
(Also perhaps bullets for significant non-addition changes too. "Removed recommendations for candidates Name3 and Name4" or such. I expect I'd find that *less* useful—not directly determining my reading-shape like I expect ones for new parts to do—but still potentially at-least-somewhat useful, in a "help me avoid keeping out-of-date recommendations cached" sort of way.)
A) orange man is bad, but it's not neglected. Lots of normies are donating money to this.
B) shrimp have the same number of neurons as as a fruit fly. I don't have clear estimates on how many insects are killed horribly in agriculture but it's plausible to me per calorie directly eating a shrimp kills fewer animals with 100k neurons than eating plants. I once accidentally microwaved 15 rolly pollies hiding in an artichoke.
C) There are a few articles in the EA forum that are skeptical cage free is is actually higher welfare which I recommend reading. Having volunteered recently at a local non profit "high welfare" farm I agree. Free range is essentially fiction, especially when bird flu means free range chickens can spend 6 months in a barn.
I think normies are often not donating money in an effective way to solve the problem (for example, Democratic donors tend not to favor the moderates who have a chance of actually flipping red districts).
I agree that cage-free hens are still treated awfully, but my read of the evidence is that cage-free is a straightforward improvement on caged hens. The increased mortality seems to be mostly about transitioning to cage-free and returns to normal as farmers get more experience with cage-free systems. While cage-free systems have an increased risk of certain injuries, I don't think it outweighs the fact that cage-free systems allow hens to perform a wider range of normal behaviors that caged hens can't.
I understand that marginal calculations vs. quality of personal life are kinda up to the person, but if you are much less well-off than most major political donors, what amount do you think is worth donating?
Currently apparently for individual American income I'm about 71th percentile, but I live in a major urban area and with another person which drives up expenses and drives down my income to around 53rd-60th percentile. I also have upcoming living expenses I'm saving up for such as home ownership/childcare. I'm sure there are those less well off who make less and donate more - I suppose being in the growth stage of my life it's easier to feel selfish at the moment.
Currently accounting for all that, I think I could probably spare ~$150-200 a month for donations. Or potentially close to the max donation for one political candidate in one year. This seems pretty cool! But feels a bit overwhelming to choose one causes where this amount has actually useful impact given the sheer number of causes I care about. Any recommendations?
The standard recommendation for *how much* to donate is 10% of your income; that's the Giving What We Can pledge. Whether you think you can do that depends on your circumstances, and any amount you can donate is valuable.
Assuming you stick to the amount you listed, your best option is probably to pick the single cause you care the most about and donate to that. You can't afford to donate to everything; that's the reality of life for anyone who isn't incredibly rich, and that's okay. Effective altruism includes cause prioritization, both for organizations and for you as an individual - you aren't donating enough to hit diminishing returns, so your donation will be more efficient if you spend it all on the one cause that matters most to you.
This set of candidates has come through my feeds as "Democratic nominees in races for STATE legislatures that are close and don't have much $ donations (so therefore your donations would go far)." I have not vetted them independently but sharing in case helpful for others https://app.oath.vote/donate?p=tspgs-2026
"On a symbolic level, America is the best-known country in the world and a beacon of capitalist, liberal democracy, the best system of government ever invented. If we fall to illiberal autocracy, it emboldens dictators and human-rights violators all around the world."
This is the part I always wondered about (the rest of your excellent piece I have no quibble with). Doesn't the rest of the world just see American 'freedom' as a fig leaf for our imperial interests while we go bombing and looting poor countries?
That depends on where in the rest of the world you are and how idealistic or cynical you are. (And at least the US in 2015 was better liked than Russia and China.)
That may well have been true in 2015! I wonder how much it matters now...the US's reputation has permanently been sullied. We are never, for example, going to get back the relationship we had with Canada, and the Europeans can't trust us again, because even if a Democrat gets back into power and grovels before every head of state in NATO the next Republican can just undo it all. We might have fallen into a global low-trust equilibrium for at least a generation where everyone assumes the worst and we just go back to great-power politics.
Heck, who in America below the age of 40 still believes in democracy? I agreed with Churchill it was 'the worst form of government except for all the others', but half the kids want feminist antiwhite socialism and the other half want white supremacist fascism depending on where they are on the progressive stack. (We got brown Nazis now. It's really strange.)
I generally am way on the cynical side of the scale, but my lefty grade school, high school and college were always pointing out examples of American imperialism. (And this was the 80s and 90s.) So I tend to assume the worst of anyone in power in particular. The big difference between me and my old teachers is I extend that to left-wing regimes and groups as well. It's actually been a bit of a surprise to me to see Trump be significantly *more* corrupt than anyone before him; I always assumed they were all on the take!
Much of this post is advocacy for donating to politicians in general, but there's not very much about why we should donate to specific candidates. It seems to me that the proportions should be reversed.
I read it, but it didn't really move the needle for me. Maybe because a list of recommendations doesn't feel like an effort post?
Maybe the way to go would be someone to run something like a book review contest where writers advocate for donating to one candidate that they're excited about? Or it could be generalized to include advocacy for donations to other specific organizations, too.
It would be sort of like Wirecutter's format of recommending one specific product in a category at a forcing function.
I'm a big free speech fan and had precisely the opposite conclusion. The only thing protecting free speech right now in the US is rule of law. I currently live in the UK and we do not have a written constitution and there's nothing protecting us from the excesses of internet censorship here. I am fighting a losing battle donating to Open Rights Group and emailing my MP.
Rule of law keeps speech free from government control in US because it's in the Constitution. Trump has no respect for the Constitution. Time after time he's done things so blatantly unconstitutional and disrespected court rulings. Starting with asking Pence to go overturn the election, who refused on constitutional grounds. The EO to get rid of birthright citizenship.
And on free speech specifically recently the EO last year to delete anything "woke" from DVIDS, which is a historical repository of images and videos from the military. They deleted images and videos of Pride events recorded in the Pentagon. Images of female soldiers in Afghanistan. Images of black and Asian soliders because it was tagged with their nationality. Regardless of whether you agree with it, retconning history as if those events never happened and those soldiers didn't exist is straight out of 1984.
It's true Trump is old and will die soon, but I also worry with every precedent he sets, our democracy (I'm a citizen) gets weaker. And the weaker the judiciary, the weaker the protections for free speech. What happens when the next person in power is a Dem and exploits the same weaknesses he has?
To nitpick a bit, I am not sure USAID was as uncontroversial as you have described. Many people I know had not heard of it before it was canceled. I’m not sure it would have been all that popular had it been well-known; I can easily imagine my conservative family saying “We’re paying for what?!” when they learned USAID existed
I was and am extremely angry about the cancellation of incredibly important aid... and yet a tremendous number of things done by USAID seem to have been political or subject to political-laundering.
Additionally, there was a rash of domestic left-wing organizations suddenly having solvency problems around when this was happening.
If this post is going to be a recurring piece for the foreseeable future, would it be practical for you to include a changelog or similar each time you post it? On the one hand I'm interested in your updated recommendations, but on the other hand I'm less interested in reading the same post repeatedly, and in practice this time it seems that the latter factor outweighed the former; I ended up failing to motivate myself to read the post past the first few paragraphs at all, despite knowing there'd presumably be interesting new stuff at some point, because the expected new:old ratio seemed too low and because I'm not great at distinguishing old from new on a casual skim without spending time reading both in depth. (In a way which a changelog-or-such would have helped mitigate, doing the distinguishing for me so I could skip around reading only the parts identified by the changelog as new.)
Sure, I'll do that next time! Do you have thoughts on what format would be helpful?
Yay, thanks! In terms of specific formatting, I'm thinking something like... have a "Changelog" section at the bottom of the post under the main content (maybe with a footnote pointing out its existence, maybe with a link at the top of the chagelog section to the previous-post-relative-to-which-the-changelog-is-anchored to help contextualize it), and in that section have a bulleted list of new things in the post since its last instance, one bullet per chunk of significantly-added text, with each bullet reasonably clearly pointing to where the new parts are? So example bullets might be e.g. "added three paragraphs to the end of the U. S. Democracy section", "added recommendations for candidates Name1 and Name2", et cetera. Phrasing making it easy to ctrl-f to the right place (or ctrl-f to the right section-header and then scroll to the right place) and jump straight into reading the new stuff.
(Also perhaps bullets for significant non-addition changes too. "Removed recommendations for candidates Name3 and Name4" or such. I expect I'd find that *less* useful—not directly determining my reading-shape like I expect ones for new parts to do—but still potentially at-least-somewhat useful, in a "help me avoid keeping out-of-date recommendations cached" sort of way.)
I basically disagree with everything here.
A) orange man is bad, but it's not neglected. Lots of normies are donating money to this.
B) shrimp have the same number of neurons as as a fruit fly. I don't have clear estimates on how many insects are killed horribly in agriculture but it's plausible to me per calorie directly eating a shrimp kills fewer animals with 100k neurons than eating plants. I once accidentally microwaved 15 rolly pollies hiding in an artichoke.
C) There are a few articles in the EA forum that are skeptical cage free is is actually higher welfare which I recommend reading. Having volunteered recently at a local non profit "high welfare" farm I agree. Free range is essentially fiction, especially when bird flu means free range chickens can spend 6 months in a barn.
I think normies are often not donating money in an effective way to solve the problem (for example, Democratic donors tend not to favor the moderates who have a chance of actually flipping red districts).
I agree that cage-free hens are still treated awfully, but my read of the evidence is that cage-free is a straightforward improvement on caged hens. The increased mortality seems to be mostly about transitioning to cage-free and returns to normal as farmers get more experience with cage-free systems. While cage-free systems have an increased risk of certain injuries, I don't think it outweighs the fact that cage-free systems allow hens to perform a wider range of normal behaviors that caged hens can't.
Do we have anything for people outside the U.S. who are worried about AI safety?
I understand that marginal calculations vs. quality of personal life are kinda up to the person, but if you are much less well-off than most major political donors, what amount do you think is worth donating?
Currently apparently for individual American income I'm about 71th percentile, but I live in a major urban area and with another person which drives up expenses and drives down my income to around 53rd-60th percentile. I also have upcoming living expenses I'm saving up for such as home ownership/childcare. I'm sure there are those less well off who make less and donate more - I suppose being in the growth stage of my life it's easier to feel selfish at the moment.
Currently accounting for all that, I think I could probably spare ~$150-200 a month for donations. Or potentially close to the max donation for one political candidate in one year. This seems pretty cool! But feels a bit overwhelming to choose one causes where this amount has actually useful impact given the sheer number of causes I care about. Any recommendations?
The standard recommendation for *how much* to donate is 10% of your income; that's the Giving What We Can pledge. Whether you think you can do that depends on your circumstances, and any amount you can donate is valuable.
Assuming you stick to the amount you listed, your best option is probably to pick the single cause you care the most about and donate to that. You can't afford to donate to everything; that's the reality of life for anyone who isn't incredibly rich, and that's okay. Effective altruism includes cause prioritization, both for organizations and for you as an individual - you aren't donating enough to hit diminishing returns, so your donation will be more efficient if you spend it all on the one cause that matters most to you.
This set of candidates has come through my feeds as "Democratic nominees in races for STATE legislatures that are close and don't have much $ donations (so therefore your donations would go far)." I have not vetted them independently but sharing in case helpful for others https://app.oath.vote/donate?p=tspgs-2026
Any suggestions for organizations to donate to that are working to stop Trump from declaring elections invalid?
Donald Trump: Making George W. Bush look good since 2015.
"On a symbolic level, America is the best-known country in the world and a beacon of capitalist, liberal democracy, the best system of government ever invented. If we fall to illiberal autocracy, it emboldens dictators and human-rights violators all around the world."
This is the part I always wondered about (the rest of your excellent piece I have no quibble with). Doesn't the rest of the world just see American 'freedom' as a fig leaf for our imperial interests while we go bombing and looting poor countries?
That depends on where in the rest of the world you are and how idealistic or cynical you are. (And at least the US in 2015 was better liked than Russia and China.)
That may well have been true in 2015! I wonder how much it matters now...the US's reputation has permanently been sullied. We are never, for example, going to get back the relationship we had with Canada, and the Europeans can't trust us again, because even if a Democrat gets back into power and grovels before every head of state in NATO the next Republican can just undo it all. We might have fallen into a global low-trust equilibrium for at least a generation where everyone assumes the worst and we just go back to great-power politics.
Heck, who in America below the age of 40 still believes in democracy? I agreed with Churchill it was 'the worst form of government except for all the others', but half the kids want feminist antiwhite socialism and the other half want white supremacist fascism depending on where they are on the progressive stack. (We got brown Nazis now. It's really strange.)
I generally am way on the cynical side of the scale, but my lefty grade school, high school and college were always pointing out examples of American imperialism. (And this was the 80s and 90s.) So I tend to assume the worst of anyone in power in particular. The big difference between me and my old teachers is I extend that to left-wing regimes and groups as well. It's actually been a bit of a surprise to me to see Trump be significantly *more* corrupt than anyone before him; I always assumed they were all on the take!
That's fair.
I guess I really only differ with you on whether we can come back from this. But I've always favored Realpolitik, so it may be motivated reasoning. ;)
Much of this post is advocacy for donating to politicians in general, but there's not very much about why we should donate to specific candidates. It seems to me that the proportions should be reversed.
I recommend reading the Slow Boring link if you want more on any individual candidate!
I read it, but it didn't really move the needle for me. Maybe because a list of recommendations doesn't feel like an effort post?
Maybe the way to go would be someone to run something like a book review contest where writers advocate for donating to one candidate that they're excited about? Or it could be generalized to include advocacy for donations to other specific organizations, too.
It would be sort of like Wirecutter's format of recommending one specific product in a category at a forcing function.
The question is who would run it.
I am stuck between the Scylla of election denial and the Charybdis of mask mandates, FBI controlling what's allowed on Facebook, and diversity quotas.
I voted for Trump 3x and would do it again, simply because free speech is the most important right we have (all others are impossible without it).
Trump is a fool and will eventually leave or die. From my perspective, it's Democrats who are the persistent threat.
I am sorry we disagree. It feels like we are aligned that we live in a dangerous era and I can feel the republic slipping away from us.
I'm a big free speech fan and had precisely the opposite conclusion. The only thing protecting free speech right now in the US is rule of law. I currently live in the UK and we do not have a written constitution and there's nothing protecting us from the excesses of internet censorship here. I am fighting a losing battle donating to Open Rights Group and emailing my MP.
Rule of law keeps speech free from government control in US because it's in the Constitution. Trump has no respect for the Constitution. Time after time he's done things so blatantly unconstitutional and disrespected court rulings. Starting with asking Pence to go overturn the election, who refused on constitutional grounds. The EO to get rid of birthright citizenship.
And on free speech specifically recently the EO last year to delete anything "woke" from DVIDS, which is a historical repository of images and videos from the military. They deleted images and videos of Pride events recorded in the Pentagon. Images of female soldiers in Afghanistan. Images of black and Asian soliders because it was tagged with their nationality. Regardless of whether you agree with it, retconning history as if those events never happened and those soldiers didn't exist is straight out of 1984.
It's true Trump is old and will die soon, but I also worry with every precedent he sets, our democracy (I'm a citizen) gets weaker. And the weaker the judiciary, the weaker the protections for free speech. What happens when the next person in power is a Dem and exploits the same weaknesses he has?
https://www.cato.org/commentary/rule-law-serves-american-people-especially-conservatives
Please don't vote for the climate change denial and anti-vaccine party.
To nitpick a bit, I am not sure USAID was as uncontroversial as you have described. Many people I know had not heard of it before it was canceled. I’m not sure it would have been all that popular had it been well-known; I can easily imagine my conservative family saying “We’re paying for what?!” when they learned USAID existed
I was and am extremely angry about the cancellation of incredibly important aid... and yet a tremendous number of things done by USAID seem to have been political or subject to political-laundering.
Additionally, there was a rash of domestic left-wing organizations suddenly having solvency problems around when this was happening.
as someone who does not live in USA and doesn't follow USA news -do you have some source to the left-wing organizations solvency problems claim?