You seem to be assuming that the primary harm of malaria deaths and (conditioned on "fetuses counted as people") of abortion is the suffering that children and fetuses experience when dying of malaria and abortion, respectively. That's an unusual assumption; I think most people would identify the primary harm as the loss of ability to live the rest of the child or fetus' life. 

So I think you're missing a step of either (1) explaining why your implied assumption above is correct, or (2) comparing human loss-of-life to chicken suffering rather than suffering to suffering as your infographic does. (In the world where factory farming ended, these chickens would likely not exist in the first place, so I wouldn't include a loss-of-enjoyable-life factor on the chicken side of the equation).

Reading Evan's comment and Sarah's response -- along with some other comments like @titotal's -- updates me to a mild-to-moderate degree toward the possibility that there may be a felt (and possibly real) need for two or more related spaces that call for mutually inconsistent design criteria. One might be more academic, formal, and rigorous while the other related space would be more flexible, open, and accessible. That feels like a big change from the status quo, and I'm hardly confident my update is directionally correct. But I think it's worth pondering whether different groups of users may be seeking things from the Forum experience that are valid, worthwhile, and yet incompatible.

Over the course of 2024 (and indeed, since early 2023), Forum usage metrics have steadily gone down^[1]. My subjective opinion was that the Forum did not meet my (perhaps too high) expectations in terms of producing valuable discussions that enable collective intellectual progress on the world’s most pressing problems^[2]. 

I would start with the assumption that this had a lot more to do with the larger zeitgeist vs. anything to do with what the Forum team did / didn't do. For instance:

• In the era with fairly accessible and expanding financial & human resources, people might have been more motivated to devote time to proposing novel and exciting stuff because they assessed a higher probability of launch feasibility;
• In the immediate post-FTX era, critical voices might have felt that the kettle was hot and that they had a better chance of getting desired reforms through vs. now;
• And so on.

Some of this is normal, inevitable, and even necessary as a social movement develops. I don't have any clear opinion on whether what you're identifying here fits into the normal/necessary bucket or the something-to-be-addressed bucket. My low-confidence guess is that there is something in both?

All that is to say that I would be cautious about weighing raw quantitative or qualitative data about the quality of Forum discussions too heavily in the Forum team's feedback loops. There is likely to be a lot of noise.

I directionally agree with the second paragraph but there are some relevant differences in my mind. First, to the extent that a large donor chose to have their donation advertised (as opposed to remaining anonymous / confidential), they can be seen as making some implied assertions (which they may or may not be consciously intending to make!):

• I am public-spirited / charitable / deserving of status and praise for what I did; and
• Others who are public-spirited / charitable should consider donating as I did.

This is particularly true if they get the concert hall named after them or something. I think we need to be somewhat gentle, but I think we're entitled to get our viewpoint out on those claims. 

In contrast, I don't think anyone who spends all their money on yachts and mansions can be reasonably seen as making these kinds of assertions. The stronger response to the ineffective donor can be seen as a means of combatting these implied messages; there is little risk of anyone misunderstanding the moral value of Jeff Bezos' non-philanthropic choices.

There's also the practical reality that the tax breaks for charitable donations in the US mean that the taxpayers (including myself) -- as a functional matter -- pay for a meaningful fraction of almost any significant charitable donation to a 501(c)(3).At some point, that gives me somewhat more of an interest in criticizing what the rich donor is claiming the tax writeoff for than in what someone is buying without a subsidy from me.

Policing strong downvotes better may be a relatively low-cost way to mitigate this. The status quo risks disincentivizes making comments to which a few people who are willing to use their strongvote hammers will react negatively.

With the caveat that underlying data are unavailable, I get the sense that some users are too trigger-happy on the strong downvote button for content with which they disagree. I've suggested requiring strong downvoters to check a box or enter text justifying their vote -- which might serve as a "stop and think" moment against reflexive use of the button. The voting norms are relatively restrictive on what rises to the level of justifying a strong downvote, although these are not exclusive:

• It contains many factual errors and bad reasoning
• It’s manipulative or breaks our norms in significant ways (consider reporting it)
• It’s literally spam (consider reporting it)

I wouldn't be opposed to giving mods the power to downgrade strong downvotes to standard ones in certain circumstances. For example, where there is a significant number of upvotes on a post or comment, that discrepancy suggests that the strong reaction of a strong downvote may be outside the range of reasonable responses to the post or comment. Requiring that kind of objective indicator would prevent mods from downgrading strong downvotes willy-nilly.

I suspect many of us would directional agree with the need for structural / systemic / developmental / etc. changes to effect more durable change. But this is a movement whose human nearterm wellbeing arm has a couple hundred million per year to spend and maybe a few hundred to thousand people to utilize (depending on who counts). So the solution space does have to take account of that.

Although I would speculate that it would be harder for a Bryn Mawr graduate to successfully break into EA now than it would have been when EA was very, very young. So founding-era evidence may not be much evidence relating to OP's claim that "EA organizations have become a gentrified refined versions of what they wanted to be." (emphasis mine).

[Disclaimers: This is more shallow and conclusory than I'd like due to non-EA stuff that has been going on in my life. Although I am a lawyer, I lack professional experience with UK law specifically, although it is a common-law jurisdiction like the US . Still, I thought there was value in me saying something before this got too stale.]

1. The opinion of the Court of Appeals, Civil Division ("CACD") seems to be a mixed bag, and THL UK's post seems overall too rosy. On the other hand, I find VettedCauses' analysis in the comments to be too pessimistic.

2. CACD's interpretation of paragraph 29 seems somewhere in the middle of plausible interpretations of the relevant text. It is certainly more favorable to animal advocacy than the position taken by the lower-court judge below. 

3. Paragraph 29 needs to be understood in the context of the broader regulatory scheme, as described in the following excerpt from the judgment (emphasis mine):

I would therefore accept the Secretary of State’s case that Paragraph 29 is a prohibition on the keeping of farmed animals whose genotype and phenotype mean that, regardless of the conditions in which they are kept, they cannot be kept without detriment to their health or welfare. However, this needs some further explanation. There is a difference between detrimental characteristics which are inherent in the nature of the breed and which cannot be mitigated by changing the environmental conditions in which the animal is kept, and those which can be so mitigated. 

For example, an animal which, because of the way in which it has been bred, is susceptible to cold will not suffer any detrimental effect on its health or welfare if it is kept indoors with appropriate heating during periods of cold weather. It can reasonably be expected, therefore, that such an animal can be kept without any detrimental effect on its health or welfare. The keeping of such an animal is not prohibited by Paragraph 29, although it may be that other provisions of the legislation would be engaged if the animal was kept outside in the winter, or if adequate heating was not provided. That might constitute a failure to take reasonable steps in all the circumstances to ensure that the needs of the animal were met, contrary to section 9 of the 2006 Act.   

(This continues with the language quoted by JBentham in another comment.)

In other words, Paragraph 29 covers cases in which no adequate mitigations are available, while advocates need to look to other legislative provisions to cover cases in which adequate mitigations were available but not employed. I assume that these theories could be charged in the alternative in a prosecution (i.e., the advocates would not have to commit to one theory in advance).

4. THL UK did not succeed in compelling the UK authorities to do anything, and seems to have at least de-emphasized this part of its case on appeal. From a US law perspective, it is hard to compel a regulator to regulate when it doesn't want to -- so I am not surprised by the loss or the court's reasoning. The status quo was that Defra wasn't acting, and there wasn't to my knowledge a viable alternative pathway to compel Defra's action. So this is a loss but does not sound like a worsening of the status quo.

5. So what's the theory of impact here? THL UK's post points to planned private prosecutions as the current plan. The English legal system is unusually friendly to private prosecutions -- but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) can take over a privately-conducted prosecution at any time, including with the specific intent of discontinuing the prosecution. This includes cases in which it deems the public-interest test for prosecution is not met. Although I have no knowledge of CPS decisionmaking in these circumstances, I would guess that CPS would weigh the view of the responsible governmental agency quite strongly in making this determination. 

6. If Defra has pointedly declined to endorse anything remotely near THL UK's view of the facts and the law, then I speculate that THL UK needed a somewhat favorable judicial interpretation of Paragraph 29 to avoid CPS taking over any potential prosecution and discontinuing it. Litigation was and is always a risk, but THL UK may have reasonably concluded that Paragraph 29 wasn't of much use without either Defra support or judicial support.

7. Likewise, I think most Magistrates' Courts would be very unlikely to convict without some official/authoritative source putting farmers on notice with sufficient specificity that they could be violating the criminal law. That makes sense, because this is a criminal statute and Paragraph 29 is written at a very high level of generality. A report written by an advocacy organization is not, in my view, an official/authoritative source. So again, I think it was reasonable to think that THL UK -- having failed to get buy-in from Defra -- needed something from a precedential judicial authority before initiating criminal prosecutions.

8. Defendants convicted before the magistrates can get a rehearing from the Crown Court (the upper-level criminal court). After that, they can seek leave to appeal to . . . the Court of Appeal. So in all likelihood, any successful path to prosecution would be going through the Court of Appeal one way or another (although it would be the Criminal Division).

9. THL UK isn't made of money. I assume it would be much more cost-effective to figure out what the law is, and then build your trial around that legal standard . . . rather than running all the expenses of trial against very well-heeled defendants and then risking everything getting thrown out because the Criminal Division didn't agree with the lower courts on the law.

10. All in all, the choice of litigation strategy seems reasonable to me, and I suspect there is still a potentially viable way forward for THL UK -- even if it isn't the way forward THL UK might have hoped for. 

While Moral Ambition incorporates many EA principles, it steers readers toward its own School of Moral Ambition rather than EA organizations. For instance, 80,000 Hours—a natural fit for this topic—gets just a single footnote. This contrasts with EA’s collaborative spirit, where mutual recommendation and shared resources are the norm.

This makes sense to me, though, based on what Bregman is likely trying to accomplish here. [Caveat: I haven't read the book as I only read English.]

In the world of doing good effectively ("DGE"), we can think of EA as something like a planet. It metaphorically has enough mass to create a round shape due to its gravity, and has cleared its orbit of smaller objects. It's big enough, and too dependent on outside forces for its funding or other critical elements. The cynical rough analogy -- which I do not fully endorse -- would be that Open Phil is the planet, and various other orgs are -- in a gravitational sense -- satellites of Open Phil to a considerable extent. By that I mean that they lack practical independence from their predominant funder and are rather suspectable to changes in its thinking.

Assuming Bregman has important philosophical differences from Open Phil and/or the EA ecosystem, he probably doesn't want to create a satellite of the EA / Open Phil planetary system. That could be for philosophical reasons (e.g., a more neartermist approach vs. believing Open Phil is likely to move increasingly longtermist over time) or for practical reasons (e.g., trying to reach people and tap resources not practically available to EA for optics or cultural reasons). When and if SMA gets larger, it may be in a position to interface with EA on a planet-to-planet basis the way GiveWell can now. I doubt it could do so now.

No community can be all things to all people, and besides redundancy limits the risks of single points of failure. SMA may be intended as a somewhat more populist / accessible, somewhat more "vanilla" flavor of DGE than the EA community, and I don't think it could accomplish those ends very well as an EA satellite. Although there are tradeoffs, I think it's probably good on balance to have a few more planetary systems in the DGE star system. 

Thanks for posting this. My comment is on the viability of donor screening; I'm looking for places to reduce the level of burden to make this more viable.

I'm not going to focus on the specific details of the CC policy, but will mention one big issue that I think makes it a weak model in general. It comes across too close to one-size-fits-most, rather than being heavily risk stratified. That stratification should depend on the amount, the presence or absence of yellow/orange/red flags in a more cursory screen, and so on.

For at least some organizations, I like the $10K threshold for performing some sort of donor screening. That's in part based on my gut that third parties may see a five-figure donation as significant. I could be persuaded to go higher depending on the size of the organization and the nature of its work. Maybe I'm showing my own biases, but I think it would be hard for the general public to get or at least stay mad at a bednet-distribution charity that took a problematic $50K donation as long as it promptly disgorged it upon detection, and those orgs' effectiveness is less dependent on public esteem anyway. Tolerances for policy or meta work would probably be less.

But for orgs on the relatively higher screening side of things: in the $10K to perhaps $25K or $50K range, that should probably look more like 15-30 minutes of time from a junior staffer / contractor / intelligent college student intern looking for yellow, orange, or red flags, not a full-fledged review. If no flags are found, clear the donor for three years (unless their donations go up a level or the organization happens to learn of concerns). If there are flags, send the file to the development director ("DD") or other mid-level staff. The DD could clear yellow flags or decline red flags, or do a medium-to-full fat writeup if necessary.

In my view, the primary point of vetting one's midsize donors for most orgs is to stop donations from red-klaxon donors -- e.g., SBF's parents, most people who have been convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude or fraud, people who are readily known to have engaged in pretty shady behavior with crypto initial coin offerings, etc. It is not realistic to scope midsize-donor investigation to catch everyone from whom one wouldn't take a donations after a bespoke custom investigation. At this level, I don't think it is necessary to consider an individual donor's employer unless it presents a conflict of interest, the donor is a senior executive, or the employer is really problematic/controversial.

Moving to the $50K-$250K range, I predict that a lot of donors will still be low risk and should be able to screen OK even at stricter orgs without involvement of senior staff or a lot of paperwork. Anyone whose source of income is being a lawyer at a typical law firm, a physician doing typical physician things, a trader at somewhere like Jane Street, etc. shouldn't be too hard to clear efficiently. One potential crux is that I'm relatively more concerned that the donations are cleanly obtained and relatively less concerned about the donor's non-financial activities (as it were). So I don't necessarily think most orgs would have many donors who need the full-dress vetting treatment.

When does a donor become more than "midsize" for screening purposes? One non-exclusive indicator: when the org cannot afford to disgorge a donor's money going back several years immediately and without grave impacts on the viability of the org's continuing work, then that donor is not midsize. In other words, perhaps post-acceptance screening (cf. post-claims underwriting in insurance) can be a viable part of the overall vetting strategy . . . but only if the org can immediately spit back the money that it wouldn't have taken had it conducted a full investigation upfront.

I'll check feasibility with GiveWell's donor numbers because I know where to find those. There were 138 100K+ donors through GiveWell in 2022, plus an unclear number of anonymous donors (p. 12). A few hundred screened donors seems appropriate for an org moving as much money as GiveWell, especially since most of its donors are repeat donors and I do not think full reinvestigations would be necessary each year. 

What to do with the anonymous money is likely to be a major issue here, though. If an org is going to do that, I guess the only mitigation may be healthy reserves for post-acceptance screening if the donor's identity becomes known and is problematic?