I think the arguments about moral realism/utility and ethics being demanding are very interesting.

I am new to EA, and I am an environmental vegetarian for over 10 years. I believe it was in one of the video introductions to EA that they talk about how many chickens equal a human life, and the answer varies for different individuals and for some may be quite large. Does EA allow for people having differing valuations of level of suffering?

For people whose animal-to-human suffering equivalence ratio is very high, could the choice to eat meat be presented as a cause of human suffering (of future generations, due to carbon emissions/equivalence) instead of animals? Then again, nearly every choice we make could be. (Do I take the bus vs. drive my car, do I feed myself this fancy meal or feed 100 starving children.)

At least in the bay area, most folks don't tend to have the availability to come to casual meetups frequently, and most of the existing meetups aren't about the basics of EA or focused on how you can individually contribute.

I heard about the Arete fellowship at the CEA local groups retreat in January, and that got me thinking about better on-ramps to EA that I could implement in the bay area.

I do intend to follow up with post-workshop surveys as well as strongly encouraging folks to join existing meetup groups or start their own.

I knowledgable EA has suggested using DAFs for the limited purpose of donating appreciated stock to organizations that do not routinely handle such requests. He said at Vanguard, you can open a DAF, donate your appreciated stock to the DAF, instruct the DAF to donate the appreciated stock to the organization(s), and then close the DAF.

You can find some more reliable information here, though not from an EA perspective.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Donor_advised_fund

I actively enjoy managing people, although it has taken about a decade of experience to get to this point. I'm also good at it, which I think is very important as well.

FWIW I'm currently reducetarian (formally vegetarian), and currently give around 2% of my income. I don't give more because I don't think it's the strategically correct choice for me at the moment. In the past I've given 10%.

But, I consider it *way* easier to give 10% of my income than to change my diet. My income has fluctuated from 50k to 90k and back and not really changed my lifestyle all that much. Changing my donations requires basically a one time change to a monthly auto-payment thingy. Changing my diet requires continuous willpower.

I'm not sure I've ever seen someone in EA who both:

a) Wanted everyone to be vegan and was actively pushy/bothersome toward people who didn't do this

b) Took a fairly permissive stance on luxury/ineffective charity spending

Mostly, this is because I haven't seen a lot of people who fit (a) at all. I have friends who are vegan, donate to animal causes, and are pretty certain that veganism is the "right" thing to do, but they don't judge me too harshly for eating cheese.

The most common position I'm aware of among the most involved people in EA is "try to avoid judging people harshly if they're doing some good things and moving in the right direction, even if they could do better", which they apply to both donations and veganism (if they care about animal causes).

Short answer: No. Why would we do that?

On a personal level, I see Facebook as a useful tool that makes my life appreciably better for many different unrelated reasons, but this question asks about the EA community, so I'll stick to that side of things.

As long as Facebook exists, there will be a lot of people who use it as a primary platform for making plans and hanging out with people, and those people will be less likely to stick with EA if the community mostly disappears from Facebook. (Also, if the "mainstream" groups went down, groups like Dank EA Memes might still up; I don't have any beef with that groups, but it's not the first thing I want a search for "effective altruism" to return on Facebook.)

I've seen squabbles break out on Facebook groups, but those were rarely any worse than the most awkward in-person interactions I've seen in the community; they're also public, and involve people using their real names, which helps to keep things somewhat civil. I'm more uncertain about the EV of small, private EA message groups within Facebook, but I haven't seen evidence that they are actively harmful.

I agree with Zvi that the newsfeed is poorly designed and that some of the company's business practices aren't especially ethical, but I haven't seen it cause any kind of collective harm to the movement, or even to many individuals in the movement.

No worries :)

I think everything is mind-hacky. Facebook doesn't seem better at it than my primary school curriculum or social group. I know it's for corporate interests, but everyone tries to influence you for their own interests. I don't really see how this is special - I think as long as I'm benefiting and Facebook is benefiting, it's no one else's business.

Some links if you haven't seen them yet:

https://reducing-suffering.org/advanced-tips-on-personal-finance/

https://80000hours.org/2013/06/how-to-create-a-donor-advised-fund/

I don't use a DAF but I've considered it in the past. In my view, the chief advantage is that they allow you to claim the tax deduction when you deposit money into the DAF, before you actually make the donation. They're also exempt from capital gains taxes, although you can also avoid capital gains taxes by donating appreciated assets directly to the charity, but that depends on whether the organization will accept them (not sure how universal this is). They also charge fees, which can be fairly expensive but are cheaper than capital gains taxes on expectation.