I think philosophically it could be interesting whether if we were at 90% of neartermist EA funding going to animals whether we should move it all the way to 100%, but since this is very far from reality, I think practically we don't need to think/worry much about 'going all-in on animal welfare'.

I think the Rethink people were suitably circumspect about their conclusions and the assumptions they made, but yes probably others have taken some claims out of context.

This would be nice if it is the case, but it makes me think of https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/omoZDu8ScNbot6kXS/beware-surprising-and-suspicious-convergence. I think we can care about animal welfare without regard to the (probably small) flow through effects to human health.

Maybe the idea is some sort of meat-eating Kuznets curve? Though evidence for that is limited.

could we get some way to see people's vote when viewing the discussion thread? Usually you can guess based on the comment roughly where they fall, but it would be nice to have a number/visual to quickly see.

There's not much to add beyond what everyone else has said. I think we would need to be exceedingly confident in particular views about sentience and moral patienthood and capacity for suffering for non-humans to think GHD was better. I very much wish I had written down more of my reasoning from years ago when I was mainly donating to GiveWell, I think I just hadn't thought it over much!

I don't think I follow, which challenges; which surveys?

Nice, you could consider making this an event: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/events

(not sure who many people look at/find out about events from that page though)

Thanks for writing this, heaps of interesting points. Most surprising and saddening to me was that you think there is a 70% chance EA will be net-negative! Could you explain why you think this? Your various concerns about power centralisation and so forth make sense to me, but to my mind this isn't nearly enough to flip the sign, and EA still seems overwhelmingly good to me.

I was also struck by your melancholy tone - somehow I think I implicitly hoped that if I accomplished all the things you have I would feel more resoundingly happy with my impact! But maybe EAish people are unusually cognisant of missed opportunities and impact that could have been but wasn't.

I think I agree with you that many people won't want rapid change.

However, it seems inevitable that some people will (even just part of the EA/rationalist sphere, though I think people wanting explosive growth would be a fair bit broader set). And so if even a small fraction of the population wants to undertake explosive growth, and they are free to do so, then it will happen and they will quickly comprise ~all of the world economy.

This is a huge if: maybe the status quo ante will have powerful enough proponents that they prevent anyone from pursuing explosive growth.

But I think it is also quite plausible a few people will go and colonise space or do some other explosive-growth-conducive thing, and that there will be a bunch of people kind of technologically 'left behind', perhaps by choice.

At the time of this comment the post has 25 karma from 12 votes which seems like not necessarily (or certainly not many) downvotes? Maybe it was different earlier. But I agree downvotes would be strange.