The only problems that scaling up would automatically eliminate are those of conflicts between different states [...]

Historically, those have caused some major problems...

and these would likely be transformed into conflicts between interest groups in one state.

Warring political parties are generally less dangerous than warring nation states. Revolutions can happen, but they aren't too common - especially in well-designed political systems.

You have to be a Hufflepuff to want to help. You have to be a Ravenclaw to be smart enough to do so. You have to be Slytherin to realize what you can do. And I guess you have to be Gryffindor, to do something nobody else does.

While we're at it, what elements would you need?

Generosity, obviously.

I don't think the Elements of Harmony can help much beyond that.

"Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right." --Isaac Asimov

All too often, an intuition creates mistakes which rationality must remedy, when one is presented with a complex problem in life. No fault of the intuition, of course--it is merely the product of nature.

A question: How many people are so attached to being experts at parenting that they would rather see children jobless, unhappy, or dead than educated by experts in a particular field (whether biology or social studies)?

That's a very odd question because you're phrasing it as a hypothetical, thus forcing the logical answer to be "yes, being taught by an expert is better than having the child dead", but you're giving no real reason to believe the hypothetical is relevant to the real world. If experts could teleport to the moon, should we replace astronauts with them?

So, rather than saying we trust business, government, or one's genetic donors, shouldn't we be trying to make it so that the best teachers are trusted, period?

If you seriously believe what that is implying, that argument wouldn't just apply to education. Why shouldn't we just take away all children at birth (or grow them in the wombs of paid volunteers and prohibit all other childbearing) to have them completely raised by experts, not just educated by them?

I wrote a blog post arguing against focusing on earning to give to the exclusion of pursuing a career with direct altruistic impact.

Something I noticed when a friend told me about this (some terms have been altered):

Suppose there are a hundred ponds, with ten children each drowning, ALL THE TIME. Wearing a clean suit will earn you enough money to save more of them by hiring people using your large paycheck (I shall assume this suit is good enough to get you a decent job) to fish children out of ponds. In the mean time, you'd ALSO be living a comfortable life, which will further allow you to buy job-getting suits for saved children and divers, thereby increasing the number of people that will impact the situation. You would run out of drowning children pretty quick, then, and even supposing you never do, will be able to dive in to save any that DO fall in with no fears about your suit (since you can just buy another one later).

We do not live in a world of one pond and one child. I suspect we live in a world with considerably more ponds and more children than even the one above. Currently, the world we live in is full of divers (if only in potential, since people are willing to do ANYTHING for money these days), but may need some more suit-wearing investors into charity. Therefore, keep walking, get a decent job, THEN come back to the ponds with a team of divers.

PS: Would be interested to know how much money would be needed to solve the WHOLE World Hunger problem, WHOLE Poverty Problem, and so on. I suspect it will help determine just how many people are needed to fish EVERY child out of EVERY pond, and thereby show what the proportion between divers and suit-wearing investors should be. Before then, I'll keep on working on getting that suit (or them blue suede shoes), and dive only when I can afford to.

That's like claiming that bicycling is better than driving cars, as long as "driving cars' includes cases where the cars are missing or broken.

If the parents are missing, dead, abusive, or total idiots (depending on how severe the "total" idiocy is), they can be replaced by adoptive or foster parents. You would need to compare bureaucrats to parents-with-replacement, not to parents-without-replacement, to get a meaningful comparison.

He tried the nice way first...

This would seem to further weaken the quote in as much as it is evidence that the tactic doesn't work.

What you want provides some information about what is right, so you do pay attention. When making decisions, you can further make use of moral principles not based on what you want at a particular moment. In both cases, making use of these signals doesn't mean that you expect them to be accurate, they are just the best you have available in practice.

Estimate of the accuracy of the moral intuitions/principles translates into an estimate of value of information about morality. Overestimation of accuracy would lead to excessive exploitation, while an expectation of inaccuracy argues for valuing research about morality comparatively more than pursuit of moral-in-current-estimation actions.

I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you've provided says:

[Beyond Meat] mimics chicken to such a degree that renowned New York Times food journalist and author Mark Bittman claimed that it "fooled me badly in a blind tasting".

But reading Bittman's piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:

It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both are about texture, chew and the ingredients you put on them or combine with them. When you take Brown’s product, cut it up and combine it with, say, chopped tomato and lettuce and mayonnaise with some seasoning in it, and wrap it in a burrito, you won’t know the difference between that and chicken.

I like soy meat alternatives just fine, but vegans and vegetarians are the market. People who enjoy the taste of meat and don't see the ethical problems with it don't want a relatively expensive alternative with a flavor they have to mask. There's demand for in-vitro meat because there's demand for meat. If you can make a product that tastes the same and costs less, people will buy it.

Maybe it's likely impossible to scale vat meat such that it is actually cheaper to produce, long-term, than meat from conventionally-raised livestock. Has this sort of analysis been done? I'd assume from the numbers New Harvest quotes - 45% reduction in energy use, 95% reduction in water use, etc. - that it is actually possible.

If you put vat meat on a styrofoam plate with a label with a big red barn on it and a cheaper price tag than the stuff next to it, people almost certainly will buy it. If consumers were that discerning about how their meat was produced, they wouldn't buy the stuff that came from an animal that spent its entire life knee-deep in its own excrement.