I agree that I make two separate points. I think evaluating digital sentience seems pretty important from a “try to be a moral person” perspective, and separately, I think it’s just a very reasonable and straightforward question to ask that I expect smart people to be interested in and where smart people will understand why someone might want to do research on this question. Like, sure, you can frame everything in some horribly distorting way, and find some insult that’s vaguely associated with that framing, but I don’t think that’s very predictive of actual reputational risk.
and also dismissive of global health and animal welfare people, who I hope you would consider at least part of the heart of the wonderful EA intellectual ecosystem.
Most of the sub-cause areas that I know about that have been defunded are animal welfare priorities. Things like insect suffering and wild animal welfare are two of the sub-cause areas that are getting defunded, which I both considered to be among the more important animal welfare priorities (due to their extreme neglectedness). I am not being dismissive of either global health or animal welfare people, they are being affected by this just as much (I know less about global health, and my sense is the impact of these changes are less bad there, but I still expect a huge negative chilling effect on people trying to think carefully about the issues around global health).
Specifically with digital minds I still disagree that it’s a super unlikely area to be as PR risk. To me it seems easier than other areas to take aim at, the few people I’ve talked to about it find it more objectionable than other EA stuff I’ve talked about. and there seems to me some prior as it could be associated with other long termist EA work that has already taken PR hits.
Thanks for the clarification about the defunded areas I just assumed it was only long termist areas defunded my bad I got that wrong. Have corrected my reply.
Would be good to see an actual list of the defunded areas...
I agree that I make two separate points. I think evaluating digital sentience seems pretty important from a “try to be a moral person” perspective, and separately, I think it’s just a very reasonable and straightforward question to ask that I expect smart people to be interested in and where smart people will understand why someone might want to do research on this question. Like, sure, you can frame everything in some horribly distorting way, and find some insult that’s vaguely associated with that framing, but I don’t think that’s very predictive of actual reputational risk.
Most of the sub-cause areas that I know about that have been defunded are animal welfare priorities. Things like insect suffering and wild animal welfare are two of the sub-cause areas that are getting defunded, which I both considered to be among the more important animal welfare priorities (due to their extreme neglectedness). I am not being dismissive of either global health or animal welfare people, they are being affected by this just as much (I know less about global health, and my sense is the impact of these changes are less bad there, but I still expect a huge negative chilling effect on people trying to think carefully about the issues around global health).
Specifically with digital minds I still disagree that it’s a super unlikely area to be as PR risk. To me it seems easier than other areas to take aim at, the few people I’ve talked to about it find it more objectionable than other EA stuff I’ve talked about. and there seems to me some prior as it could be associated with other long termist EA work that has already taken PR hits.
Thanks for the clarification about the defunded areas I just assumed it was only long termist areas defunded my bad I got that wrong. Have corrected my reply.
Would be good to see an actual list of the defunded areas...