Nice to see that we're thinking along similar lines. I really like your thinking on finding a status-based game which still gives people something to strive for and could really help with giving people meaning in a post-work society!

Thanks for the pointer Henry! It motivated me to look into culling more and I just wanted to share some EU-specific facts I found:

A hen produces ~350 eggs, so consuming one egg is ~1/350th of culling a male chicken. 28% of chicken in Europe have in-OVO sexing, with Germany having ~80%. The numbers are lower for organic eggs because for some reasons in-ovo sexing was forbidden for organic eggs until this year (stupid much???).

Overall, I find it difficult to weigh male-chicken-culling morally. Do they have strong conscious experience at that time? How much suffering is there involved in their deaths?

Thanks a lot! These seem like very significant issues that updated me to put only eat 2 eggs/month instead of per week. I was surprised to read that chicken (even organic ones) can be kept inside for 5-6 months per year. Also, reading about the welfare issues of chicken bread for egg laying seems pretty bad (eg weaker bonestructure, immune system and social behavior).

Thanks for writing this Kat! While I don't agree with everything, the core argument (cluelessness about nutritional science means ancestral diets are a strong prior) was convincing to me.

I wanted to note how I updated my diet from this and additional ~3 hours of research:
- 100g/week of sardines: (due to reasons here)
- 150g/week of mussels: I agree with the post that they are unlikely to be sentient
- 2 eggs/week: My guess is that EU welfare level 0 (organic) actually means chickens possibly have a net-positive life. Lmk if you know of welfare concerns with organic eggs in the EU!
- Once per month cow liver: In order to cover the "red-meat" food group, I'm adding some cow meat as it seems to cause the lowest suffering of commonly available animals per kg. Why liver and not normal beef? Firstly, it has higher nutrient density, thus you need less of it. Secondly, organs were regularly eaten by ancestors, thus the ancestral prior is strong. Thirdly, livers are a byproduct of normal meat production and organ meat is often discarded due to low demand. Thus, buying livers likely doesn't increase demand for cows much.

I was already occasionally eating cheese beforehand; otherwise, yoghurt/kefir might also look good.

I'm happy to be convinced of changing this based on new evidence!

Great post Johan! It got me thinking more deeply about the value of working on x-risk reduction and how we ought to act under uncertainty. I think people (including me) doing direct work on x-risk reduction would do well to reflect on the possibility of their work having (large) negative effects.

I read the post as making 2 main arguments:
1) The value of working on x-risk reduction is highly uncertain
2) Given uncertainty about the value of cause areas, we should use worldview diversification as a decision strategy

I agree with 1, but am not convinced by 2). WDS might make sense for a large funder like OpenPhil, but not for individuals seeking to maximize their positive impact on the world. Diversification makes sense to reduce downside risk or because of diminishing returns of investing in one option. I think neither of those apply to individuals interested in maximizing the EV of their positive impact on the world. 1) While protecting against downside risks (e.g. losing all your money) makes sense in investing, it is not important if you're only maximizing Expected Value. 2) Each individual's contributions to a cause area won't change things massively, so it seems implausible that there are strong diminishing returns to their contributions.

However, I am in favor of your suggestion of doing worldview diversification at the community level, not at the level of individuals. To an extent, EA already does that by emphasising Neglectedness. Perhaps practically EAs should put more weight on neglectedness, rather than working on the single most important problem they see.

Hey I'm one of the organisers of the PISE Fellowship and would like to weigh in on some of the points you made:
(a) I agree that it's hard to cover all core ideas of EA well in 4 weeks. For example we were not able to fit in animal welfare.  So for a 4 week model it seems essential to offer things like discussion groups, in depth fellowships, etc. so people can keep learning after the fellowship is over. 
(b) From my experience friendships and social engagement come more from social activities or working together than from a fellowship (might be different for others).  Again here it seems essential when running a 4 week fellowship to offer other ways of socialising and engaging. PISE does this by organising big social events and  by recruiting people into commitees after the fellowship ends.
(c) Anecdotally, multiple people mentioned that they felt like 4 weeks was not a big commitment and joined because of that. I hope we soon have some data that can shed some light on this question.
There will be a longer post about our experience with the 4 week fellowship soon.

In the newly founded EA Delft we are planning to employ a different model. We will first run a 4 week intro fellowship (and advertise it as 4 weeks),  but then throughout offer people to continue the fellowship for another 4 weeks. This way the people only willing to join for 4 weeks will join, but  the ones willing to do the full 8 weeks will get to dive into more topics. We will share our experience and the results we get with this method at some point.