I appreciate the unusual nature of this piece, and glad you posted it here, even though it’s atypical. Yet we as EA participants know the value of weirdness and don’t automatically reject it, and I encourage others reading this piece to avoid the temptation to reject it because it’s atypical.
Coming down from the meta-level to the object-level, I get what you’re saying about the suffering of beings we haven’t yet learned about. I think it’s a quite important issue to think about. While I’m not so concerned about trees per se, I am concerned about the potential suffering of digital minds as we approach constructing an artificial intelligence, or the potential suffering of sentient aliens who we have not yet met.
As I am personally most engaged in the aspects of EA related to movement building through outreach to a broad audience, I do have some concerns about “allkind” from the perspective of its public impact. If I imagine anyone asking me “what do EAs care about” and I answer “improving the flourishing of allkind,” this might put people off. I don’t have any problems with the use of this word as internal EA jargon, just want to signal a potential problem with how it would look to outsiders.
Perhaps a more optimal term might be “sentience.” If I imagine saying that EA members care about “improving the flourishing of sentience,” it wouldn’t really put people off, and it conveys the same idea as “allkind”—i.e., if we discover trees have sentience, then we would care about them. Sentience also applies to both animals and future beings, as well as digital minds and aliens. Sentience is also more measurable and quantifiable than “allkind”—i.e., some beings might have more or less sentience and experience more or less suffering. This would be relevant to prioritizing and quantifying various efforts aimed at reducing suffering.
I appreciate the unusual nature of this piece, and glad you posted it here, even though it’s atypical. Yet we as EA participants know the value of weirdness and don’t automatically reject it, and I encourage others reading this piece to avoid the temptation to reject it because it’s atypical.
Coming down from the meta-level to the object-level, I get what you’re saying about the suffering of beings we haven’t yet learned about. I think it’s a quite important issue to think about. While I’m not so concerned about trees per se, I am concerned about the potential suffering of digital minds as we approach constructing an artificial intelligence, or the potential suffering of sentient aliens who we have not yet met.
As I am personally most engaged in the aspects of EA related to movement building through outreach to a broad audience, I do have some concerns about “allkind” from the perspective of its public impact. If I imagine anyone asking me “what do EAs care about” and I answer “improving the flourishing of allkind,” this might put people off. I don’t have any problems with the use of this word as internal EA jargon, just want to signal a potential problem with how it would look to outsiders.
Perhaps a more optimal term might be “sentience.” If I imagine saying that EA members care about “improving the flourishing of sentience,” it wouldn’t really put people off, and it conveys the same idea as “allkind”—i.e., if we discover trees have sentience, then we would care about them. Sentience also applies to both animals and future beings, as well as digital minds and aliens. Sentience is also more measurable and quantifiable than “allkind”—i.e., some beings might have more or less sentience and experience more or less suffering. This would be relevant to prioritizing and quantifying various efforts aimed at reducing suffering.