I'd love to see an 'Animal Welfare vs. AI Safety/Governance Debate Week' happening on the Forum. The risks from AI cause has grown massively in importance in recent years, and has become a priority career choice for many in the community. At the same time, the Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week demonstrated just how important and neglected the cause of animal welfare remains. I know several people (including myself) who are uncertain/torn about whether to pursue careers focused on reducing animal suffering or mitigating existential risks related to AI. It would help to have rich discussions comparing both causes's current priorities and bottlenecks, and a debate week would hopefully expose some useful crucial considerations.

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.

How tractable is improving (moral) philosophy education in high schools?  tldr: Do high school still neglect ethics / moral philosophy in their curriculums? Mine did (year 2012). Are there tractable ways to improve the situation, through national/state education policy or reaching out to schools and teachers? Has this been researched / tried before?   The public high school I went to in Rottweil (rural Southern Germany) was overall pretty good, probably top 2-10% globally, except for one thing: Moral philosophy. 90min/week "Christian Religion" was the default for everyone, in which we spent most of the time interpreting stories from the bible, most of which to me felt pretty irrelevant to the present. This was in 2012 in Germany, a country with more atheists than Christians as of 2023, and even in 2012 my best guess is that <20% of my classmates were practicing a religion.  Only in grade 10, we got the option to switch to secular Ethics classes instead, which only <10% of the students did (Religion was considered less work).  Ethics class quickly became one of my favorite classes. For the first time in my life I had a regular group of people equally interested in discussing Vegetarianism and other such questions (almost everyone in my school ate meat, and vegetarians were sometimes made fun of). Still, the curriculum wasn't great, we spent too much time with ancient Greek philosophers and very little time discussing moral philosophy topics relevant to the present.  How have your experiences been in high school? I'm especially curious about more recent experiences.  Are there tractable ways to improve the situation? Has anyone researched this?  1) Could we get ethics classes in the mandatory/default curriculum in more schools? Which countries or states seem best for that? In Germany, education is state-regulated - which German state might be most open to this? Hamburg? Berlin?  2) Is there a shortage in ethics teachers (compared to religion teachers)? Can we

I've had a couple of organisations ask me to clarify the Donation Election's vote-brigading rules. Understandably, they want to promote the donation election amongst their supporters, but they aren't sure to what extent this is vote-brigading. The answer is- it depends.  We want to avoid the Donation Election being a popularity contest/ favouring the candidates with bigger networks. Neither popularity, nor size of network, is perfectly correlated with impact.  If you'd like to reach out to your audience, feel free, but please don't tell them to vote for you. You can explain the event, and mention that you are a candidate, but we want the votes to inform us of the Forum audience's opinions of marginal impact of money donated to these charities, not to the strength of their networks.  I'm aware this exortation won't do all the work- we will also be looking into voting patterns, and new accounts (made after October 22, when the election was announced) won't be eligible to vote. 

🎧 We've created a Spotify playlist with this years marginal funding posts.  Posts with <30 karma don't get narrated so aren't included in the playlist.