Welcome Aditi. I organise the Melbourne The Life You Can Save meetup group. We meet once a month (usually at the Fluffy Torpedo ice cream shop in Fitzroy) and we organise talks at schools/workplaces about effective giving. Let me know if you want to be added to our email list, would be great to have you along.

There's also an EA Melbourne group and the Melbourne Giving What We Can community if you're not already involved with them.

There are so many countries that GiveDirectly doesn't cover, so there seems to be a lot of room for other charities to pop up in these areas.

And many patients don't listen or they make mistakes. In an opt-in system that is considered their responsibility, but in an opt-out system like you're proposing, bad outcome will be blamed on the potassium fortification program. Not politically viable

I think that U-curve is narrower with potassium than with iodine, calcium, or fluoride. The consequence of severe hyperkalemia is cardiac arrest so it's quite serious. Most people would have to consume a lot of potassium to get to that point but certain subgroups - people with kidney failure for example - would be susceptible.

Supplements with a U-shaped benefit/harm curve like that and different effects in different subgroups aren't appropriate for universal supplementation. This is not that different to trying to add antihypertensives to the water supply.

Like most antihypertensive treatment, potassium supplementation needs to be implemented case-by-case and on a voluntary basis so that the subpopulation that needs less potassium aren't involuntarily harmed.

Thanks for all your work Luke. Enjoy some time off.

No we should not limit development of poor countries because we're worried about them building up their factory farm industries.

There's a lot of moral uncertainty when comparing animal and human welfare, so that utility calculus will almost always be a dead end. Meanwhile what we can be quite certain of is that limiting global development will be really harmful to the people in those developing countries. It would also look very hypocritical for rich countries to turn around and tell poor countries they shouldn't develop because of animal rights and therefore damaging to the relationship between developing countries and development economists.

It's a no from me.

Keen to listen to/watch this if it's released. Thanks for posting it

“Slow” and “painful” very different. “Slow” yes, you could study how long it takes for freezing to kill them or stop their neurons firing, though this doesn’t seem like very useful information. “Painful” is the key and the problem: I don’t see any way toward quantifying how subjectively “painful” something is for an insect and how much we should spend to avoid that pain, hence there will always be a stalemate when it comes to implementation.