Hi folks, this is our annual thread where we spend the day collecting ideas for Cause X. (Posted early to be kind to our friends in Australia) Remember--serious suggestions only!!!
Original post: April Fool's Day is Very Serious Business
Last year's thread: New Top EA Causes for 2021?
Plant suffering
Many plants have displayed communication strategies when being eaten alive, including ultrasonicly screaming in pain. Fungi display complex electrical signaling and intricate decision-making processes.
One of the extreme cases of such suffering happens in agricultural environments. Corn crops, for example, are raised in extremely dense environments where they suffer chemically induced pain from insecticides and are harvested young.
Therefore, I think we should develop lab-grown plants for consumption.
Meta-Religion
Religious institutions are arguably the most influential institutions worldwide. Like any institutions, they suffer from poor institutional decision-making, a decline of progress, corruption, and overall misalignment. Therefore, we should study these institutions and propose reforms and interventions.
There was a book that came out a few years ago called meta-religion which theorizes religion as a way of exercising power. This may have been an April fools post but I’m intrigued—after all some of the oldest existing organized institutions are religious but have reformed so much they redefined the understanding of the word reformation. Besides the handful of articles that examine EA from a religious perspective, could you point me to any groups that work on religious reform/intervention that are kind of aligned with EA or EA-sequence goals?
I don't know of any! I genuinely think that there might be something here, even though I find this a bit funny from a cynical perspective.
I know a bit about the work of EA for Jews and there are communities of EAs in christianity and buddhism. Some of the work they do is to build the related communities and spread the ideas of EA there. This might be one way of influencing these religious institutions, from the ground up.
I'd also be interested in people trying to climb up the ladder of the religious institutions and influence people high up. The current Dalai Lama and Pope seem pretty cool :)