Is it possible that you’re overestimating the strength between costs of plant based meats decreasing and consumption of plant based meats increasing? I’m sure this is true to an extent, but people like gourmet meats and organic/grassfed meats now and will pay extra for more natural products. Eg meat consumption is expensive already and many people are not choosing which meats to buy based on cost primarily.
Darkness8i8
Karma: 21
AI data gaps could lead to ongoing Animal Suffering
I wonder if LTFF has tried running a Kaggle competition for grant success vs grant rejection? I think this would be quite interesting for people looking to apply for grants as we could gain some idea of the likelihood of success or failure of applications before submitting and it would allow applicants to modify the grant until it looks promising
I’ve always found it easy to substitute foods not replace. I tried originally going vegan by giving up all cheese but that was a huge dietary change that was not sustainable for me. I would definitely say it is now possible to keep one’s current diet while replacing the animal products. Vegan meat, milk and cheese have come huge ways. I make this cheese all the time now, I like simple, unpretentious vegan food.
https://shaneandsimple.com/vegan-cheese-sauce/
For supplements, I take Vitamin B12, Iron, and Omega 3. Many people are deficient in these, vegan or not. Things get a lot easier, and after I modified my existing meals it was a really easy change for me. Also I am probably healthier now without all the fat from cheese :P
How to boost creative thoughts and prevent groupthink in your organization
Sorry typo I meant donate to animals directly.
Thanks you for this post! I am really interested in this intersection!
Let’s say my cause area is helping the most animals. Is it better to donate to animals directly or AI alignment research? If the answer is AI alignment research where is the best fund to donate to?
Can we not perpetuate the idea that some vegans are ‘asshole-like’ just by avoiding eating animals/animal-products? I understand some vegans are less open to discussing their beliefs but I hate the idea that vegans are by default assholes as opposed to omnivores. A substantial amount of EAs are vegans and this phrasing really concerns me
Thanks for your response. You’re right that imminent AGI from AI similar to LLMs is controversial and I should’ve spelled that out more explicitly. And I agree they wouldn’t be pure LLMs but my understanding is that all the advances people talk about like using o1 wouldn’t alter the impacts of pre-training data significantly.
My intuition is that LLMs (especially base models) work as simulators, outputting whatever seems like the most likely completion. But what seems most likely can only come from the training data. So if we include a lot of pro-animal data (and especially data from animal perspectives) then the LLM is more likely to ‘believe’ that the most likely completion is one which supports animals. E.g. base models are already much more likely to complete text mentioning murder from the perspective that murder is bad, because almost all of their pretraining data treats murder as bad. While it might seem that this is inherently dumb behavior and incompatible with AGI (much less ASI), I think humans work mostly the same way. We like the food and music we grew up with, we mostly internalize the values and factual beliefs we see most often in our society and the more niche some values or factual beliefs are the less willing we are to take it seriously. So going from e.g. 0.0001% data from animal perspectives to 0.1% would be a 1000x increase, and hopefully greatly decrease the chance that astronomical animal suffering is ignored even if the cost to stop it would be small (but non-zero).