📣We start in 12 hours, this time using the video conferencing platform jitsi. See link in the description 😊
Thank you for this post and kudos on your first year accomplishments. Your M&E approach including the A/B tests and the mystery client approach seems very rigorous.
The situation doesn’t seem very similar to Anthropic. Regardless of whether you think Anthropic is good or bad (I think Anthropic is very good, but I work at Anthropic, so take that as you will), Anthropic was founded with the explicitly altruistic intention of making AI go well. Mechanize, by contrast, seems to mostly not be making any claims about altruistic motivations at all.
About remarkable evenhanded treatment of an issue about which it’s hard to be fair minded. Thanks for that.
A fourth article in this genre is Maxim Lott’s “The Rational Case for Trump”.
I think you are one of the few people who disregards x-risk and has a well-considered probability estimate for which it makes sense to disregard x-risk. (Modulo some debate around how to handle tiny probabilities of enormous outcomes.)
I was more intending to critique the sort of people who say “AI risk isn’t a concern” without having any particular P(doom) in mind, which in my experience is almost all such people.
Yeah I agree with that.
So is it fair to say that the takeaway is that we have pretty strong evidence for the efficacy of very large protests in the US, but very little evidence about smaller protest activities?
I think that’s correct. On priors, if large-scale protests work, I would expect smaller protests to work too, but there’s minimal supporting evidence. In this section I gave an argument for why small-scale protests might not work even if nationwide protests do.
I wonder if protests about animals can expect to have similar results, given that baseline consideration for animals as relevant stakeholders seems to be quite a bit lower.
I don’t know, but there’s some evidence about this. Orazani et al. (2021) included some animal welfare protests. It would be possible to do a subgroup analysis comparing the animal vs. human protests.
I wonder if any studies have looked at patterns of backlash? E.g., BLM protest succeeds in the short term, but then DEI is cancelled by the Trump administration.
There are indeed studies on this, but I didn’t review them because none of them are high-quality. Well, Wasow (2020) has high-quality evidence that violent protests backlash, but I think that’s not what you’re talking about; you’re talking about a short-term success followed by a long-term backlash.
Survey evidence from the BLM study actually found the reverse order: protests appeared to have a negative effect on BLM favorability in the weeks following the protests, but by the time of the 2020 election, BLM appeared to have a net positive effect—although I don’t think the study succeeded at establishing causality, so I’m not confident that this is a real effect.
Here’s an example of what I would consider high-quality evidence on this question:
Study uses rainfall method, finds that BLM protests increased support for Democrats in 2020.
However, the same counties showed decreased support for Democrats in 2022.
There are no studies like that, as far as I know.
Let me amend that. Personally I would have no problem with an AI having its own forum account. But then it would also have to stand on its own merits of conciseness and relevance etc, and earn its own up votes.
Thank you for writing this, I found it very useful.
You mention that all the studies you looked at involved national protests. So is it fair to say that the takeaway is that we have pretty strong evidence for the efficacy of very large protests in the US, but very little evidence about smaller protest activities?Another consistency is that all the protests were on issues affecting humans. I wonder if protests about animals can expect to have similar results, given that baseline consideration for animals as relevant stakeholders seems to be quite a bit lower.
Finally, just musing, but I wonder if any studies have looked at patterns of backlash? E.g., BLM protest succeeds in the short term, but then DEI is cancelled by the Trump administration. I suppose there could be backlash to any policy success regardless of how it was accomplished, but one hypothesis could be that protest is a particularly public form of moving your movement forward, and so perhaps particularly likely to draw opposition—although why you would see that years later instead of immediately is not clear, and so maybe this isn’t a very good hypothesis…
And I guess also more generally, again from a relatively outside perspective, it’s always seemed like AI folks in EA have been concerned with both gaining the benefits of AI and avoiding X risk. That kind of tension was at issue when this article blew up here a few years back and seems to be a key part of why the OpenAI thing backfired so badly. It just seems really hard to combine building the tool and making it safe into the same movement; if you do, I don’t think stuff like Mechanize coming out of it should be that surprising, because your party will have guests who only care about one thing or the other.
Oh whoops, I was looking for a tweet they wrote a while back and confused it with the one I linked. I was thinking of this one, where he states that “slowing down AI development” is a mistake. But I’m realizing that this was also only in January, when the OpenAI funding thing came out, so doesn’t necessarily tell us much about historical values.
I suppose you could interpret some tweets like this or this in a variety of ways but it now reads as consistent with “don’t let AI fear get in the way of progress” type views. I don’t say this to suggest that EA funders should have been able to tell ages ago, btw, just trying to see if there’s any way to get additional past data.
Another fairly relevant thing to me is that their work is on benchmarking and forecasting potential outcomes, something that doesn’t seem directly tied to safety and which is also clearly useful to accelerationists. As a relative outsider to this space, it surprises me much less that Epoch would be mostly made up of folks interested in AI acceleration or at least neutral towards it, than if I found out that some group researching something more explicitly safety-focused had those values. Maybe the takeaway there is that if someone is doing something that is useful both to acceleration-y people and safety people, check the details? But perhaps that’s being overly suspicious.
1. JBS Ear Notching—Non-existent commitment, according to Vetted Causes
SINERGIA’S RESPONSE:
Sinergia already explained this is a valid commitment and Vetted Causes was mistaken to classify it as a non-existing commitment. We acknowledge and regret the deadline error in our spreadsheet shared with ACE.
There are two JBS ear notching commitments Sinergia has claimed existed:
Commitment 1: A commitment from JBS to stop ear notching by 2023.
Commitment 2: A commitment from JBS to stop ear notching by 2027.
It appears Sinergia and Vetted Causes agree that Commitment 1 never existed.
Note: Sinergia is currently being credited for Commitment 1 even though it never existed.
2. JBS Gestation Crates—Pre-existing Policy Presented As a New Commitment, according to Vetted Causes
SINERGIA’S RESPONSE:
[...]
2021 Report:
“New projects adopt the ‘cobre e solta’ system, allowing the sows, after being artificially inseminated, to be housed in group housing.”It appears Sinergia and Vetted Causes agree that this is a pre-existing policy being presented as a new commitment.
Also, it’s important to note that Sinergia took credit for other commitments that do not mention the terms “100%” or “all farms.” (see Row 4) Further, Sinergia’s “Best guess” for how many of these companies will stick to their commitments is only 57.5%, so it is clear many of these policies are not permanent. (see Cell B14)
3. Teeth Clipping—Practice Was Already Illegal Prior to Alleged Commitments, according to Vetted Causes
SINERGIA’S RESPONSE:
[...]
It is also important to clarify that Sinergia Animal did not, at any point, discourage ACE from considering IN 113 as a basis for assessing legal deadlines
It appears Sinergia and Vetted Causes agree teeth clipping was already illegal prior to the alleged commitments. Here is a quote from Sinergia’s Pigs in Focus report: “According to Normative Instruction 113/2020 (IN 113/2020), teeth clipping is prohibited”.
4. Aurora—Pre-Existing Policy Presented as a New Commitment, According to Vetted Causes
SINERGIA’S RESPONSE:
[…]
The claim that Aurora had a formal and exclusive immunocastration policy prior to 2023 does not align with the timeline of documented changes to the company’s website. On October 24, 2022, Aurora’s webpage underwent two rapid edits, according to Web Archive.
The first edit, at 16:44, introduced the phrase cited by Vetted Causes: “The Cooperative only chooses to adopt immunocastration, as it is a less invasive practice.” However, this version was online for just one minute (if Web Archive is right). At 16:45, the page was edited again, and that second version—which does not contain the language cited by Vetted Causes—is the one that remained publicly available and is the one we referenced in Sinergia’s 2022 Pigs in Focus report.
This is factually incorrect, the edits Sinergia describes did not occur. Every archive of the webpage from October 24, 2022 states: “The Cooperative only chooses to adopt immunocastration, as it is a less invasive practice.” (translated from Portuguese to English)
Here is a screen recording proving this to be the case.
5. BRF—Pre-Existing Policy Presented as a New Commitment, According to Vetted Causes
SINERGIA’S RESPONSE:
[…]
the current 5% is likely to increase in future years.
It appears Sinergia and Vetted Causes agree that Sinergia should not have taken credit for helping 100% of BRF’s sows in 2023 through this commitment when only ~5% were impacted.
6. Female Piglets Surgical Castration
SINERGIA’S RESPONSE: […] Sinergia never said the number of piglets was correct. It was an unintentional mistake of Sinergia’s team to leave all piglets
It appears Sinergia and Vetted Causes agree that:
ACE’s impact calculations were not correct
Sinergia and ACE didn’t account for female piglets not being surgically castrated
Sinergia was incorrectly credited for helping millions of female piglets through surgical castration commitments
That post was written today though—I think the lesson to be learned depends on whether those were always the values vs. a change from what was espoused at the time of funding.
Responding here for greater visibility—I’m responding to the idea in your short-form that the lesson from this is to hire for greater value alignment.
Epoch’s founder has openly stated that their company culture is not particularly fussed about most AI risk topics [edit: they only stated this today, making the rest of my comment here less accurate; see thread]. Key quotes from that post:
“on net I support faster development of AI, so we can benefit earlier from it.”
“I am not very concerned about violent AI takeover. I am concerned about concentration of power and gradual disempowerment.”
So I’m not sure this is that much of a surprise? It’s at least not totally obvious that Mechanize’s existence is contrary to those values.
As a result, I’m not sure the lesson is “EA orgs should hire for value alignment.” I think most EAs just didn’t understand what Epoch’s values were. If that’s right, the lesson is that the EA community shouldn’t assume that an organization that happens to work adjacent to AI safety actually cares about it. In part, that’s a lesson for funders to not just look at the content of the proposal in front of you, but also what the org as a whole is doing.
My vibe is that you aren’t genuinely interested in exploring the right messaging strategy for animal advocacy; if I’m wrong feel free to message me.
A separate nitpick of your post: it doesn’t seem fair to say that “Shrimp Welfare Project focuses on” ablation, if by that you meant “primarily works on.” Perhaps that’s not what you meant, but since other people might interpret it the same way I did, I’ll just share a few points in the interest of spreading an accurate impression of what the shrimp welfare movement is up to:
SWP primarily works on changing how shrimp are killed, not ablation. Their Humane Slaughter Initiative is listed first on their list of interventions.
In fact, they don’t list anything related to eyestalk ablation on their interventions list at all; it appears they just write up a profile when a company reports phasing out eyestalk ablation, but it doesn’t seem like they are actively campaigning on it.
In support of that theory, SWP’s guesstimate model on their impact doesn’t include eyestalk ablation reforms; it only counts their shrimp stunning work.
Recent campaign wins in the UK were for eyestalk ablation and stunning (e.g., item 4 on the Tesco welfare policy), not just ablation, and that the Mercy For Animals announcement on it is clear that ablation only happens to breeding females. As far as I am aware, all shrimp welfare campaigning that includes eyestalk ablation also includes other higher-impact reforms in their ask.
Tarbell intentionally omitted?
“For Humans By Humans” is a 💯 appropriate rule-of-thumb for posting I agree.
My comment was FHBH ofc, I wouldn’t be so hypocritical as to post #3 and then violate it in the same moment! 🙏
I see the reputational danger! As soon as someone sees a speaker has mixed generated text into their speech once, the the speaker may be marked as “sus” evermore...
When I learned more about eyestalk ablation reviewing the Rethink Priorities report, I was surprised how little it seemed to bother the shrimp, and I did downgrade my concern about welfare from that particular practice. However, I think what people are reacting to is more the barbarity of it than the level or amount of harm. (After all, they already knew the shrimp get killed at the end.) I think it’s just so bizarre and gross and exploitative-feeling that it shocks them out of complacency in how they view the shrimp. I think they helplessly imagine themselves losing their own eye and they empathize with the shrimp in a powerful, gut-level way, and that this is why it has been impactful to talk about.
Sounds like a recipe for:
Reinforcing the stereotype of vegans/vegetarians as “bleeding hearts” who don’t think about practicalities.
Misguided regulations/legislation in the style of bee bricks that contribute to society’s red tape fatigue without having positive impact.
Reduced trust in the effective animal welfare movement (I’ll now be more skeptical, less trusting that I’m being told all relevant info)
To be clear, my personal values are different from my employees or our company. We have a plurality of views within the organisation (which I think it’s important for our ability to figure out what will actually happen!)
I co-started Epoch to get more evidence on AI and AI risk. As I learned more and the situation unfolded I have become more skeptical of AI Risk. I tried to be transparent about this, thought I’ve changed my mind often and is time consuming to communicate every update, see eg:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fhwh67eJDLeaSfHzx/jonathan-claybrough-s-shortform?commentId=X3bLKX3ASvWbkNJkH
I also strive to make Epoch work relevant and useful to people regardless of their views. Eg both AI2027 and strategical awareness rely heavily on Epoch work, even though I disagree with their perspectives. You don’t need to agree with what I believe to find our work useful!