I read this cross-post with great interest. I wonder if I can buy a franchise from Michael Huemer—I’d like to write a whole series of articles using his brilliant line of reasoning.

The first installment would be provisionally titled: “Be Grateful to Your Lord, You Lowly Serf.”
It would explain why the wealth gap between lords and serfs wasn’t a problem at all. After all, the lords protected their serfs from raiders, settled disputes, and maintained order. They trained for years to become warriors, risking their lives to preserve peace. Their horses and armor were expensive! True, the serfs did labor on the land, but the land was granted to the lords by God himself to own and protect - as any honest priest would be happy to confirm.

Besides, the lords carried superior genes and noble heritage, which they even generously shared with some serfs through the occasional exercise of droit du seigneur—not so much a “right,” really, as a touching act of feudal philanthropy.

Surely it’s only fair they received a larger share of the surplus!

Next in the series: “Ancient Rome—Slaves’ Lost Paradise.”

Excellent post, thanks for sharing your experience! Strongly recommend for all group organisers

Let's take the next decisive step and turn it into a proper guerilla underground movement! We must all scatter and during the day pretend to be effective egoists, but when the night falls we will show our real faces...

It’s nice to see this level of strategic leadership—thank you for sharing your plans. In my view, one of the top priorities for sustainable growth is attracting and retaining participants who have both strong commitment to altruistic causes and also the knowledge and good judgment to advance effective approaches. Perhaps we could start a focused discussion on EA Groups Slack about practical steps on how to improve outreach and bring in people who will genuinely strengthen the movement.

On a related note, I have a proposal (with some valuable inputs from @David_Moss) for a new event format designed to deepen connections in the EA community. In short, it's retreat-style gatherings in informal settings during holidays (like Cyprus) that will feature plenty of open-ended social time, to spark fresh ideas and foster collaboration. Such interactions often build the kind of relationships that sustain long-term commitment. We prepared a detailed concept and I'd be glad to discuss this in more detail with CEA team how it can be piloted to complement existing EA Global events.

Why not add to this highly interesting event an option for online participation?

Vasco, I absolutely agree with you. My idea was just a small thought experiment to let those people who disagree to view this from another angle.

Worrying about shrimp may seem like a mild form of insanity—until one considers: what if there are powerful beings in the universe for whom we are like shrimp? )))

Intuitively, it's all been very clear (to me, at least!) - but thanks for spending time on making those calculations. An extra argument to convince sceptics is always useful.

 

In one of his books, Gerald Durrell described in vivid detail how he extracted a particularly evil parasite living in an animal's tail. The parasite lived inside and gradually ate the tail, and at the smallest alarm, it would hide deep inside the tail. Durrell added - I wish all those protesting to animals living in zoos and claiming animals lead far happier lives in the wild - I wish they all saw this!

I have my own cat shelter so I know too well how many risks cats are facing. In my cat zoo, there are for example a three legged cat and another cat that was hit by a car - if I did not happen to be nearby purely by chance and take her immediately to a clinic, she would have died. 

Of course, people are unable to stop suffering of their own kind, not to mention other species. But it does not mean that we don't need to do anything about it.

It's great idea - I sent you my suggestion by dm