Banning Factory Farming

Sentience Politics works to ban factory farming in Switzerland via a national vote in 2019. This is a great benchmark since the initiative is said to have a macroscopic chance of success, will have its main effect for however many centuries nation states and national laws will still remain meaningful, and pattern-matches such seminal campaigns such as California’s Proposition 2, The Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, while avoiding some of its problems, centrally problems with imports. An intervention that aims to affect the long term should at least perform better than this very assuredly valuable intervention, which is probably a high bar.

Humane Space Colonization

The idea is that SpaceX and others may start shooting people into space in a few decades and may start to put them on Mars too. When that time comes, they’ll be looking for technologies that’ll allow people to survive in these environments permanently. They’ll probably have a range of options, and will choose the one that is most feasible, cheap, or expedient. There may even be a path dependence effect whereby the proven safety of this one technology and the advanced state of its development make it hard for other technologies to attract any attention or funding.

Preserving Effective Altruism

Movement building so far – probably highly effective but also fairly well funded – has aimed to grow the movement or grow its capacity – one aiming for greater numbers the other aiming for greater influence, better coordination, fewer mistakes, etc. But if effective altruism is destroyed, this would be a bad outcome according to even more value systems than in the case of existential catastrophes, so it would pay to invest heavily into reducing the probability of a permanent collapse of the movement.

Read the full article on effective altruism priorities by Telofy at Effective Altruism Forum