Hmm. I'm imagining a monogamous bisexual person who prefers het relationships, but settles for a gay one because they really love their partner and reasonably believe they wouldn't be able to find a better het relationship if they were back on the market (such that they are not avoiding suffering and also maximising utility by being in this relationship). This person would opt to take the pill that makes them exclusively gay in order to feel more life satisfaction (or even SWB), even though it destroys their preferences.

I assume this person is in your latter bucket of preferring greater life satisfaction per se? If so, I don't think this situation is as uncommon as you imply—lots of people have hard to satisfy or unsatisfiable preferences that they would rather be rid of in favour of greater life satisfaction; in some sense, this is what it means to be human (Buddhism again).

I am a bit unenlightened when it comes to moral philosophy so I would appreciate if you can help me understand this viewpoint better. Does it change if you replace 'subjective well-being' with 'life satisfaction' (in the sense of SWB being experiential and satisfaction being reflective/prospective)? i.e. are there conceptions of 'life satisfaction' that sort of take into account what this person wants for themselves?

For example, I wonder if people who have preferences that are hard to satisfy might actually want to take such a life-satisfaction pill, if it meant their new preferences were easier to satisfy. (Is this, in some sense, what a lot of Buddhist reframing around desire is doing?)

Congrats! These are great results and it looks like you're scaling really well for a very early-stage org :)

I'm curious about that 9-point PHQ-9 reduction goal. How did you decide on it? Do you think it's achievable (especially since you saw a much larger reduction in your pilot)? Why do you think you saw such a large difference in reductions between the pilot and now? And finally, do you think focusing on increasing effect size will take effort away from cost-reduction efforts?

This is clearly an outstanding issue for a non-negligible proportion of the community. It doesn't matter if some people consider the issue closed, or the investigation superfluous; this investigation would bring that closure to the rest of EA. Everyone here should be interested in the unity that would come from this.

What beings are inside and outside of your moral circle these days? If your views (e.g. on insects) have meaningfully changed recently, why?

With that criteria, you would be extremely hard pressed to find any global health charities that avoid the meat-eater problem (or, for that matter, any GCR charities, since those would save the lives of rich people).

However, I would suggest a focus on culturally vegetarian countries such as India could still meet that criteria. Kaya Guides operate there currently.

I looked into this a number of years ago and it doesn't seem like Founders Pledge's methodology has changed since then. You can read their Cause Area Report for more depth, but the primary metric they rate on is tonnes of CO2-equivalent pollutants averted per year per U.S. dollar (CO2-equivalent uses simple weights to compare between different greenhouse gases, such as methane). They have somewhat strong estimates per charity, such that in 2018, the Clean Air Task Force and Coalition for Rainforest Nations came out ahead—but with the proviso that this extrapolated past performance into the future, which isn't a given with lobbying organisations.

I agree that GWWC could use more depth here, and at the same time I tend to agree that they're right to recommend Founders Pledge first.

Microsoft have backed out of their OpenAI board observer seat, and Apple will refuse a rumoured seat, both in response to antitrust threats from US regulators, per Reuters.

I don’t know how to parse this—I think it’s likely that the US regulators don’t care much about safety in this decision, and nor do I think it meaningfully changes Microsoft’s power over the firm. Apple’s rumoured seat was interesting, but unlikely to have any bearing either.

Piggybacking off this:

• How do you evaluate an opportunity once you have it?
• How do you decide whether to invite Jimmy to make something a main channel video vs a Beast Philanthropy video?
• What kinds of charities perform the best in terms of views? What about funds raised? (Do either of these metrics influence what charities you pick?)