It is, I think, the difference between outreach-oriented messaging and within-community messaging.

I would hope that EA continue to keep a fairly tight lid on the grabbiness of within-community messaging.

Experientially, I agree: "doing good better" just isn't as inspiring a message as "the best ways to help others".

With that said:

Wasn't the reason for "doing good better" partially about tamping down maximising messages within the EA community, on account of committed EAs sometimes tending to overmaximise at the cost of their health or their other ethics, then ultimately burn out and quit?

Is it not supposed to provide a more sustainable framework, rather than a more initially personally inspiring one?

So I wouldn't strike it off the whole record just yet.

I think the focus on beef consumption is better explained by flipping the argument: if you are advocating for a reduction in beef consumption, you may be advocating for a substantial increase in animal suffering, and this should give you pause if the reason you are advocating is that you care deeply and desperately about animal suffering.

The general conclusion being that more research is needed in this area for people who care about soil animal welfare to work out whether soil animals live positive or negative lives, and only once this is done work out how this might be tractably actioned to increase or decrease the number of soil animals via land use change.

I'm honestly really hoping that soil animal lives work out net positive at the mite and springtail level, and that nematodes are sufficiently simple as to not possess the kind of conscious experience needed for welfare capacity. But I remain open to the troubling possibility of well-evidenced alternate conclusions, and support Vasco's work to shed light on this area.

Thanks for sharing your misgivings.

I think it may be illuminating to conceptualise that EA has several "attractor failure modes" that it can coalesce into if insufficient attention is paid to methods of making EA community spaces not do that. You've noted some of these attractor failures in your post, and they are often related to other things that overlap with EA. They include (but are not limited to):

• The cultic self-help conspiratorial milieu (probably from rationalism)
• Racism and eugenicist ideas
• Doomspirals (many versions depending on cause area, but "AI will kill us all P(doom) = 95%" is definitely one of them)

The question, then, is how does one balance community moderation to both promote the environment of individual truth seeking necessary to support EA as a philosophical concept, while also striving to avoid these, given a documented history within EA of them leading to things that don't work out so well? I wonder what CEA's community health team have said on the matter.

I'm very glad of Reflective Altruism's work and I'm sorry to see the downvotes on this post. Would you consider a repost as a main post with dialed down emotive language in order to better reach people? I'd be happy to give you feedback on a draft.

That's fair.

Mostly this is about strategies for engaging non-EAs for effective giving. So it wouldn't come up much.

Although this does sound like a version of the standard right-of-centre effectiveness-based objection "why bother, giving just causes dependency loops that entrench the problem" - to which I would probably shift to impact mode and explain that AMF donations specifically don't do that.

I can see people arguing that they shouldn't have to donate to help stop malaria. (I get that all the time.)

I cannot, however, see anyone genuinely advocating for a pro-malaria stance?

(As opposed to for example peace activism where you get people genuinely advocating for pro-war stances)

Is this a thing in EA? Some people are pro-malaria?

I'd hope that even the "meat-eater problem" lot recognise that the set of effective methods to reduce animal suffering don't include pro-malaria advocacy.

To clarify: I think soil animals should be an area of focus. I'm unconvinced on nematodes specifically - but I think there's good arguments for assessment of the life experiences of higher-neuron soil species being a very important thing.

I think that the method of calculation of the set of animals that are most important for any point within an unknown measurement of welfare is a good method to have.

I also think you've done really well in pointing out that the welfare ranges would seem to imply a capacity to experience suffering that drops off far less than the neuron count does, and that does have issues.

I suspect that there exists a belief that below a certain threshold there is no consciousness or capacity for welfare - a discontinuity - and thus animals such as nematodes are out of scope. I, at least, have no trouble saying that 1 neuron would not have capacity for welfare - that welfare capacity arises through the linkages, and not through things internal to the cell. And 302 really is quite small. I feel if you could get welfare capacity off linkages in a system of that size, we'd have found digital consciousness by now.

I also sympathise with the feelings you have to be doing something, even if you can't really afford to be doing anything right now. I recommend you have a chat to any EAs you know personally about that - it's a common feeling, and talking to others about it can help you feel less alone.