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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Here’s survey data about what most EAs believe, >60% have animals or global health at the top. You may dislike longtermism, which is fine, but EA and longtermism aren’t the same, nor is EA rationalism: forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CKwDgZ...

forum.effectivealtruism.org

EA Survey 2024: Cause prioritization

Summary • In this post, we provide an overview of responses to the cause area prioritization questions in the 2024 EA Survey. We report on the relati…

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I look at this like the Dem party. Across several thousand people without unified control, some people (in power or not) will be really shitty. But the Dems usually (not always) kick out the bad guys. While this is not true of the GOP. EA should do better, but that doesn’t make them the rationalists

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I read that article at the time and agree that is bad. And EA has had issues with sexual harrsssment and abuse. But beside the demographic lack of overlap a big difference between EA and rationalists is EA kicks the abusers out. Literally people get banned from the forum and from coming to events.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This is horrifying but not an EA space? Most EAs are not rationalists (nor longtermists), most rationalists are not EAs, and the owner of Lighthaven, specifically, hates EA. There’s a Venn diagram of overlap between these groups but that overlap doesn’t seem enough to justify treating this as EA?

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

It’s bad that most chickens raised for food live their lives in crowded cages, never seeing the sun, in a space so small they can’t turn around or spread their wings. You can help them, and you don’t need to change your diet to do so.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

But here’s the argument: Do unto others and help those most and need first. The global poor are genuinely much more poor than those in rich countries and we can help them. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good, you personally can help even while working on bigger policy changes.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And it’s not super convincing because little is, it’s hard and when someone does make this argument “we should help the global poor more” some say we shouldn’t because it’s communism, because that’s what government is for, or it would never work, or this is a way for tech people to get out of taxes.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Far from thinking people are stupid/evil, i think most people aren’t convinced this is true. And most people have not heard of EA at all. They have their own problems and lives. Just like most people aren’t engaged in politics seriously.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

And as an empirical matter, I think we can give privately and vote for officials who would do better on international aid. But ironically, I think the public route is the low probability but high upside option. And giving privately is the steady, lower upside, high probability option.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I don’t think there is a way to act on “some charities are more efficient than others and we should give there” in a public way that’s not offputting even if this argument for people in rich countries doing more has been around since the 70s.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I don’t disagree that negative polarization is a big deal, but the vast majority of EAs are left of center. People are polarized in part because they feel judged (reasonably so) but I don’t think there’s an escape from that. This also applies to politics.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament so why not do both? Just because the government can and should do better doesn’t mean personal spending shouldn’t contribute where possible. If I were in the position of need I don’t think I’d consider it a rounding error whether or not I’m helped.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

You have described the typical EA. The link above points out >60% rate global health or animals as their top cause. These are people giving money to GiveWell or Animal Charity Evaluators top charities. Anti-malarial bednets, backed by lots of RCTs, is perhaps the modal donation.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I’d add most EAs don’t even live in the US (34%), or the the UK (14%). EA is just not a Silicon Valley thing, the largest share of EAs in one city live in London but it’s ~7% of all. forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fpn6MZ...

forum.effectivealtruism.org

EA Survey 2024: Geography

Summary • * Countries * The USA (34.4%) and the UK (13.5%) remain the countries with the largest proportions of EA respondents. We observed that…

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Most of EAs are relatively normal people with relatively normal jobs, donating money to stuff, and paying taxes on their salaried income. They are nowhere near rich enough to even try dodging taxes. That or they are college students: forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z4Wxd2...

forum.effectivealtruism.org

EA Survey 2024: Demographics

Summary • In this post we report results about the demographics of the EA community from the latest EA Survey. …

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

EA is mostly people not super engaged but thinking charity should be efficient and occasionally donating to deworming or chickens out of cages. But media coverage, and the biggest donors, are way more into longtermism.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

This is hard to disentangle from who is employed in EA. Coefficient Giving is granting >50% of the money in EA and they grant ~50% of their money to longtermist stuff. If you polled people who identified as Dems “engagement”wouldn’t track employment so much but those employed would be different.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The alternative, that hundreds to thousands of people are donating to GiveWell or animal charities as a cover or a prequel to giving to longtermism, would be a historic-sized conspiracy. Also, GW and animal donors often hate longtermists, in public and private, for the same reasons you seem to.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Being an expert on fraud doesn’t make EA homogeneous on this matter? I don’t don’t think, say, thousands of GiveWell donors are doing an elaborate cover for longtermism by spending money on bednets. I would suspect you don’t think this either. Is it possible some people are? Sure. Is it common? No.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Every idea can lead to silly conclusions but the basic idea “you should care about efficiency in helping people with your dollars” is very much the actual core of EA and you don’t have to reject that idea because you don’t think you should do risk neutral, low confidence utilitarianism.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

This is not what most EAs think, you have a complaint with longtermism specifically. Most EAs rate global health and animals as their top cause. There is survey data about this: forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CKwDgZ...

forum.effectivealtruism.org

EA Survey 2024: Cause prioritization

Summary • In this post, we provide an overview of responses to the cause area prioritization questions in the 2024 EA Survey. We report on the relati…

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

There are Kantians (like Korsgaard), or contractualists (like Scanlon) who would endorse that there’s some level of cruelty to animals (even shrimp) that means we should prefer helping them to helping poor humans. Otherwise you likely need infinite tradeoffs and that too is controversial.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

SWP’s primary intervention is advocating for stunning before slaughter. I don’t think only utilitarians advocate for this. Their second intervention is moderately improving water quality, again not a super controversial moral position.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The donor shift is much more plausible, but if the argument is donors in EA shifted that’s a different argument! Rich people are not representative particularly given one really big foundation Coefficient Giving is responsible for >50% of all spending: brian-foerster.github.io/EAGrantsData...

brian-foerster.github.io

EA Grants Database

Aggregated database of Effective Altruism grants

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

They also note a shift towards longtermism but cite no data. Survey data says the typical EA prioritizes GHD first (narrowly), then AI, then AW. This is mixed in that more support AI now but it’s not a majority. AW and GHD make up 61% for the top cause: forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CKwDgZ...

forum.effectivealtruism.org

EA Survey 2024: Cause prioritization

Summary • In this post, we provide an overview of responses to the cause area prioritization questions in the 2024 EA Survey. We report on the relati…

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This article is embarrassingly incorrect about some basic facts. CEA’s board fired the CEO when they realized they were involved with Leverage. The current CEO has nothing to do with Leverage. This is like arguing the South Korean government is currently a cult because of Park Geun-hye.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

What section is this? Perhaps strange to ask but I am something of a connoisseur of terrible arguments

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

What happened? Racisms from beyond the grave are rare but I wouldn’t put it past him.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Or at least to pay enough to get work funded to do it. And without regulation making it happen, the labs might be much less incentivized to go along. That said a dog and pony show pretending to be neutral can be much worse than nothing.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I agree that ad hominem is, ironically, often given too bad a name. But the desire to even do evals is currently driven in part by a partially empirical/theoretical/ideological belief these models could be dangerous, so I think it could be hard to find replacements that wouldn’t qualify as friendly.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I guess I can imagine AI safety standards were designed based on explicit chance of harms via certain mechanisms and anything below the mark is nor released. In the US the NHTSA seems to function this way (but I don’t know much about it)

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Thank you, this makes sense. I guess if a concern is connections they get for doing such work for free, a legit issue for anyone purporting to be evaluating any industry, the solution is probably a governmental review?

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Can you expand on this? Is it because of COIs via funding sources or personnel connections? Or process wise, like they are pursuing evals in an anthropomorphic way that you are criticizing above? Something else?

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

It does fix gerrymandering making the system less democratic and more prone to fascism? You could argue independent commissions w/out proportional representation are better for that but this is a big problem even if had no impact on which coalitions form.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

His implied position (because he never comes out and says it but it’s my best theory) seems to be Democrats shouldn’t talk about, let alone take action on, divisive cultural issues, no matter the substantive merits and magnitude of the issue, or how far out for an election we are.

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trashawaythrow.bsky.social @trashawaythrow.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

I think this is the most generous possible reading of Yglesias. He argued in early 2025 explicitly against raising the salience of immigration at all, and explicitly at WelcomePAC gave a speech criticizing Dems for taking actions that drew attention to Abrego Garcia’s wrongfully deportation.

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