At my particular place, I think that improving AI safety community epistemics (writing thorough and careful arguments against people both in the community and outside of it who make silly mistakes) is, by most reasonable estimates, probably less impactful than helping to run MAIA, which is what I currently spend most of my time doing.

I don’t think I’m the only person in this situation, which is quite scary to me, as I think there are a lot of things are epistemically iffy in the AI safety community. For example:

• A lot of the most viral pro-AIS people (especially the ones that are relatively new to the field) seem to not be reasoning especially carefully
• The field’s hiring process is quite insular
• Not enough time is spent engaging with a lot of good faith disagreements (imo)
• Fieldbuilding strategy doesn’t optimize for careful reasoning amongst those it recruits
• People receive lots of social/material benefits for continuing to believe that AI risk is the most important thing and work on it
• Even under some of the shortest timelines and most speculative capabilities that superintelligence might have, I really don’t extinction within the next year should be assigned any notable probability mass, due to the need for data centers to be replenished

I also see a lot of disagreements that I think are poorly reasoned. For example: 

• Poor application of/thinking about EV when conceptualizing risks
• Psychoanalysis that doesn’t explain the safety community’s behaviors well
• Comments significantly overstating the case for something
• Arguments without the slightest amount of research into what the other side actually believes

Tbh though, most of these critiques apply to both sides.

I think this primarily arises because the people working in AI safety who are the most careful reasoners also have the highest opportunity costs, because they tend to be good at other things. This means it’s less valuable for them to write out their thoughts online carefully.

My main point, though, is that it’s a little scary to see so much going wrong with the discourse and not being able to do anything about it (or even be worth trying to do anything about it). It feels like there’s not much worth trying except praying for Forethought to do a good job and reach everyone.

I just thought this would be funny

"'The EA name & brand' is kind of a tricky thing to reason about."
 

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that we should be willing to pay a lot to preserve EA's image, and it seems likely that hiring Ellison will cause significant negative backlash. It could be valuable to look at the EA community's historical willingness to pay to improve its image, so here are some proxies:

•  CEA reported that about 4% of its 2025 spending ($21.8M) was on marketing and communications, which comes out to roughly $870k. I'm not sure how much of this work is directly about improving EA's name and brand, but I suspect that's maybe half the theory of change for all of CEA's media outreach?
  • For reference, Fable says this money was spent on improving social media accounts, redesigning effectivealtruism.org, running an "EA Stories" video campaign, and working with journalists to improve how accurately EA is described in the media.
  • Spending on the team is projected to be well above $1M this year, and most of the work (or at least the work related to The Altruists) is reactive media handling and corrections.
• I'm not confident in this, but I suspect that the primary theory of change for giving grants to Andy Masley is that he's a good writer who says reasonable things well and shows off some of the strongest parts of EA. 

I lack the information to determine if this hiring decision is net negative or net positive, but I don't think it's impossible to make a reasonable guess for how much we should be willing to pay to avoid bad PR. I hope Manifund receives a lot of surplus benefits from hiring her. 

Thanks for the lovely comment :) and the feedback/information!

“Further, if this pledge serves as an entry point to EA for a student who ends up donating 10% or having a change of career, the ROI is extremely high.”

My personal guess is that the expected value of doing OFTW tabling is dominated by the chance of finding a highly talented student who can take a career in a highly effective cause area. If this is the case, shouldn’t there be a larger focus on selling EA to them as well?

Thanks for your response! These are thoughtful points.

I'll need to think more about the marginal impact of being a member of a movement like the vegan one. You raise some good points, and upon reflection, I remember that the vegans in my life have certainly inspired my actions at least a little bit. These are benefits that I am wrong to discount too much. 

I think the step in my money pump argument that bothers me the most is choosing to buy a boba over donating to an effective charity, because it doesn't seem in line with how I make my other decisions. I would really like my preferences to be transitive, as it makes me feel less hypocritical.

2. Veganism doesn't ask people to do anything extra (like pay more for luxury goods). Instead, it asks people to refrain from doing something they otherwise would have done. This makes it feel different in kind than asking people to donate money, although I'll admit that this doesn't seem to make the former any easier unfortunately.

Perhaps the way I think about this is very abstracted away from how real people think about their choices, but I would argue that small charitable donations are less costly to many people than the choice to give up meat. On many restaurant menus, you can find a section that says something along the lines of "add chicken/beef/pork to this for $1.99" or something along those lines. Or maybe a menu will have something like "spaghetti and marinara sauce: $7.99; spaghetti and meatballs: $9.99." The existence of these items at these prices implies that the value of giving up meat in these circumstances is worth at least $2 to some people (they would rather have the meat than have those $2). So, based on people's revealed preferences through pricing, I think veganism is probably more costly to people than explicitly spending small amounts of money. Perhaps there is something to be said about the effort of going out of your way to donate, but in my experience, the process is quite painless.

Quick math: In terms of total expected suffering averted, inviting a group of friends to a barbecue where the main meat is beef is probably more impactful than eating a vegan meal by yourself.

According to Faunalytics' Animal Product Impact Scales, a serving of chicken requires approximately 10 times as many days of animal life to produce as a serving of beef (not adjusted for quality of life or moral weights). Additionally, most seafood is much, much worse than this. If this meal prevents your friends from going and eating those other foods, tricking them into eating beef will likely do more good than eating a vegan meal by yourself. 

Still, this may not be as impactful as saving your money and donating it directly to impactful charities. Saving a single dollar on food and donating it to the SWP will probably do more to reduce suffering than hosting a barbecue. 

Also, you might expose yourself to various forms of value drift by hosting a barbecue, but I could see this happening in a net positive (hosting more barbecues in the future) or a net negative (giving up on veganism entirely/permanently failing to convince any of your friends to give up meat) direction.

I see. Thanks for the response!