David T

Karma: 1,482

David T 11 May 2026 20:56 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Arno’s comment on: Exporters Without Borders: Why You Should Start a Company Instead of Working in Aid
On paper the absolute perfect people to do this are the diaspora: people who are both sufficiently familiar with local languages and cultural norms and challenges and sufficiently Westernized to be good at dealing with Western consumers and importers and funders.

Obviously some are doing this, just wondering if there’s much [Western] support infrastructure to help people trying to get into it?

David T 8 May 2026 8:45 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Berke’s comment on: Effective Altruism focused on bednets while a malaria vaccine was stuck for 35 years. The case for Abundance.
The vaccine acceleration has some nuance as well. It’s definitely not as simple as “people could have produced enough vaccines to end malaria if the silly people slowing things down didn’t get in the way”. RTS’S, whilst moderately effective at reducing deaths in infants until the effects wear off never had the potential to get remotely close to ending malaria, and has been estimated to be less cost-effective at saving lives than plain old bednets.^[1] Ideally, of course, kids in the most affected areas would have both and probably seasonal chemoprevention too, but we haven’t even funded comprehensive enough bednet distribution yet.

Also these particular decisions don’t get taken by people who are sceptical of the potential of science or who lack skill in number crunching—quite the opposite. The Phase III trials had a further followup very large trial rather than instant mass distribution as soon as it was declared efficacious and probably safe because spending large fractions of developing countries’ healthcare budget on a promising intervention that appeared to work well in some groups but not others is a difficult thing to do.^[2] It’s not like adopting the opposite approach doesn’t have its drawbacks: the COVID vaccines were about as effective and safe as could be possibly have been hoped for in the accelerated timescale they were released on, but still ended up with the indirect result of US medicine being coopted by radical antivaxxers^[3] which seems bad, as does more parents withdrawing their kids from once routine vaccination schedules. Could have been a lot worse if those rare myocarditis side effects people spotted late on weren’t rarer than myocarditis side effects from the COVID everyone was getting anyway. It’s easier to say more, bigger, faster without considering second order effects.
1. ^
  see for example https://www.1daysooner.org/how-cost-effective-is-the-new-r21-vaccine-compared-to-existing-malaria-interventions/ and note that these have wide error bars due to the differences in costs of vaccination programs between countries and uncertainty about how consistently bednets are used, and that R21 which got faster regulatory approval is more cost effective because it appears more potent and is cheaper to manufacture and distribute.
2. ^
  it wasn’t just the overlapping but probably completely coincidental meningitis, there were quirks in the Phase III trial data probably related to the relatively small sample size like the rare but most-likely-to-be-fatal cerebral malaria actually showing up more in vaccinated older kids which brought recommendations for a very large trial rather than universal incorporation into everyone’s vaccine schedule.
3. ^
  Trump moves in mysterious ways, but his decision to appoint RFK Jr to attack vaccine science surely isn’t unlinked to how the fact the one Trump achievement he can get booed by his own supporters for mentioning is vaccine rollout, after the narrative everyone was being injected before the scientists even knew what the side effects were took hold.

David T 7 May 2026 22:13 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
It’s an interesting idea but as expressed feels a little tendentious, particularly if one looks at what is actually formally considered a war crime these days (much of which would not have been recognised as war crimes in the past, including by actors who believed themselves to be unusually chivalrous). Hard to believe it will be impossible to avoid total war if a few civilians are murdered or chemical weapons are used, never mind if a pilot gets shot after ejecting or if a spy is not afforded a fair trial, and hostage taking was once considered a good way to avoid total war. We see peace agreements between prolific war criminals quite often too. Avoiding total war might be a motivation, but it can’t be the only one.
On the other hand game theory favours opposing sides agreeing to not shoot ejecting pilots or torture each others’ prisoners even if they don’t agree on anything else, whereas it is impossible to win a war if you are not permitted to fire at the other side’s soldiers, and at least in 1949 artillery and aerial bombardments were also too critical to winning for the Geneva Convention to agree to ban them. It is possible for opposing sides to agree not to shoot at people that don’t wear uniform, but only if both sides treat sneaking up on the other side and shooting them whilst not wearing uniform as also a crime.
Also, many people genuinely believe in the idea that people shooting other people in a uniform which indicates they intend to fire back represents some sort of fair play (even if the targets happen to be sleeping conscripts who haven’t had a chance to surrender yet) and the sort of people that believe in that sort of thing are disproportionately likely to be military officers. They tend to believe in just wars too...
I do agree that opposing sides are considerably more likely to respect conventions on war crimes (and even reach other bargains like prisoner swaps) whilst the infrastructure that may allow the sides to mutually end the war still exists. But there’s plenty of evidence of war crimes committed with impunity in conflicts that never came close to total war, and for that matter of individual military units choosing to abide by conventions despite there being no realistic prospect of a near-term peace agreement and plenty of war crimes being committed by others on their side

David T 7 May 2026 19:34 UTC
5 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: New EA Forum LLM-use policy
I would add that whilst I understand non-native speakers wanting to use LLMs to write more idiomatic English, I would rather read their own thoughts with a few grammar errors and unusual word choices than their own thoughts mixed up with vaguely similar ideas that aren’t theirs and pithy summaries that are actually expressing something different...

David T 6 May 2026 21:29 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Goodmaxxing
I like the idea of goodmaxxing but feel like I am wayyy to old to know how seriously the sort of youngster that watches videos with maxxing in the title would take this blog :)

David T 27 Apr 2026 21:42 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: huw’s comment on: Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It
Interesting point, and I suspect that there are lower hanging fruit in gambling too: some of the most addictive forms (e.g. fixed odds betting terminals in the UK) are not some intrinsic part of the culture but relatively new innovations promoted by a mere handful of companies and so regulators are much happier grappling with them (in the case of fixed odds betting terminals, I suspect restrictions on how much could be bet per spin were even more popular with the people who actually use them on a regular basis than the wider public!).
In that respect it’s perhaps a lot like animal rights activism requires campaigns focused on winnable battles to be effective (and it might appeal to some people that already have that lobbying skillset)

David T 26 Apr 2026 11:37 UTC
15 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It
I tend to agree with the OP, but think there are a couple of other points about subsidising prediction markets which could have had more emphasis
- Forecasts are a market in which people trade money, which makes it easy for them to function on a for profit model if there is significant interest in participation. Even if prediction markets are objectively highly valuable, it is not clear there is sufficient altruism-relevant benefit in forecasting quality coming from subsidised rather than non-subsidised platforms to justify the subsidy ^[1]
- Forecasting for profit is zero sum,^[2] which means every superforecaster is balanced out by an equal and opposite amount of money collectively lost by others who are less “well calibrated”. Many people are perhaps happy to net lose money gambled for entertainment or signalling purposes (though perhaps they could part with their cash in other ways which deliver more positive outcomes...), but others may be developing gambling habits which can be extremely self destructive^[3]. I guess this links to Marcus’ “feels like doing something useful where it isn’t” point, but it can be much worse than simply a distraction. Negative externalities can be significant, and it is unclear if the positive externalities outweigh them.
1. ^
  I guess without a platform cut/spread you get marginally more precision, but how many forecasts actually need that precision and are sufficiently liquid to get it?
2. ^
  actually worse than zero sum on a for-profit exchange, obviously...
3. ^
  many forms of traditional gambling relies heavily on “whales” with a mixture of non trivial amounts of money to lose and impulse control problems for much of their volume and profit; some of them ruin their lives doing so, even more so the people with the same impulse control problems and less starting money. This may not apply to niche prediction markets, but I’m sure people can become addicted to the idea of winning their money back even if they know casino “betting systems” are -EV and don’t like sports or machines with flashing lights

David T 25 Apr 2026 16:53 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Guy Raveh’s Quick takes
Presumably CEA did some sort of estimate of utilization and operational costs to justify the funding bar; the decision to shutter it fairly early based on cost benefit analysis suggests that those estimates proved optimistic. It would be interesting to see how much they missed by, and whether they factored alternatives like hosting at the local university into either of the assessments.
The venue selection process between 3 publicly listed and immediately available properties in the range £6-£15m sounds rather trivial as described considering the expense, particularly in a culture which encourages rigorous analysis of the relative effectiveness of much smaller donations.

David T 24 Apr 2026 14:59 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: Guy Raveh’s Quick takes
It’s a niche property with very few potential buyers and they probably overpaid. The UK property market has cooled a little and isn’t necessarily as attractive to the sort of oligarch or hospitality company most likely to buy it. It will also have a very high annual maintenance bill due to its age; it’s possible they found more work which needed doing which hit the value and hanging onto it would have had a non-trivial cost regardless. It’s also possible they clawed some money back from selling off some parts separately (there was an apartment in a Wytham Abbey outbuilding for sale last year, though I’m not sure EA ever owned that building).

It’s not particularly unusual for buyers of niche high value property to make large losses when under a little pressure to sell, especially if they bought into the property’s sentimental appeal rather than its costs. The people that very confidently dismissed the idea that Wytham would be a losing venture because don’t you guys know what a capital investment is understood the market dynamics and operational costs less well than many of the critics.
I mean, if you want to buy up a pretty hotel with a bus service to Oxford, you can get more bedrooms for less money than Wytham was sold for, never mind what it was bought for https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/739022765321024#/?channel=COM_BUY

David T 22 Apr 2026 20:58 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: List of my Favorite Named Adages, Aphorisms, Dictums, Laws, Maxims, and Rules to Live By
What’s labelled Asimov’s Corollary here is actually Parkinson’s Law
Asimov’s Corollary, which is pretty neat but completely different and not nearly as pithy, is explained here. As a fan of Clarke’s laws, I’m sure Peter likes that one too.

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I also haven’t seen or heard anyone refer to Mandelson’s law before? Although the quote is certainly ironic in the context of UK politics (Peter Mandelson is a political figure in the headlines for his third resignation in disgrace having been brought back into the fold 25 years after his last one; the struggling Prime Minister is probably sick of trying to explain his appointment to an unreceptive public by now....)

David T 22 Apr 2026 19:16 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mihkel Viires 🔹’s comment on: Mihkel Viires ’s Quick takes
It also feels like smugglers helping regular smokers get discounts on their habit are the wrong model, since the target for the ban is young people who generally don’t [yet]have a smoking addiction. Basically everyone else buys cigarettes legally in convenience stores and teenagers already barely smoke them with the trend being steeply downwards since the turn of the century. Kids who don’t have a smoking habit and increasingly aren’t interested in trying are barely a demand factor for underground cigarettes, especially since they can also obtain them by asking an older person to purchase it in a regular convenience store, same as 15 year olds wanting to experiment with cigarettes and alcohol have done for years. .
It’s just it places more of a barrier to them getting it regularly in quantities likely to become habit-forming, and ultimately apart from being highly addictive when people do that tobacco doesn’t have much appeal as a drug, offering minimal high and being something grandma smokes and teen idols don’t, so it really doesn’t seem like something that a few years down the line is going to result in speakeasies full of chainsmoking twentysomethings or a new sideline for dealers in cocaine.

David T 22 Apr 2026 17:46 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MathiasKB🔸’s comment on: Cullen_OKeefe’s Shortform
I can understand that prediction markets trending towards sports gambling was overlooked by the sort of people who (i) were arguing about the creation of new markets for stuff that didn’t already have an abundance of well-marketed gambling options and (ii) generally weren’t personally interested in betting on sports.
But lack of debate at the time about preying on people with weak impulse control surprises me, given that prediction markets are by design zero-sum games (like binary options trades, which have long been dominated by boiler room outfits preying on people with weak impulse control, and are regulated equivalently to sports gambling in many jurisdictions) rather than trades between entities with different liquidity needs or risk tolerance. Even if (or especially if) some of the market participants are superforecasters whose data-driven approach makes their assessments worth paying attention to, they still need punters to win money off and most bets offered simply aren’t a good hedge for anything.

David T 21 Apr 2026 21:48 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Why is it so hard to convince people of EA?
Think this is a good post. But the specific example below feels like so much of a mischaracterization of typical debate it might actually illustrate part of the problem.
The problem with many of the naive objections to EA is that they are not matters of opinion. A favorite objection of the uninitiated is “but how can you KNOW that doing X is better than doing Y? I don’t think it’s possible to know, so you can choose arbitrarily between X and Y.” It is not a matter of opinion, for example, that giving $50,000 to train a single seeing eye dog is less effective at combating blindness than curing literally 1,000 people of cataracts.
Whilst you may have experienced specific counterexamples, I think relatively few objectors to EA are questioning the principle that restoring the sight of 1000 people might plausibly be agreed to be a preferable outcome to moderately aiding one blind person^[1] as opposed to generalising from this to what EA actually is, which is a much bolder set of claims and priorities than “sometimes you can help more people achieve the same ends with the same amount of money”
tbh even if they are explicitly asking an EA to state something as fundamental as how they can treat helping 1000 blind people > 1 blind person as established fact, if they’re someone who’s ever had a conversation with an EA before there’s a decent chance they’re doing so to ward off the EA promptly substituting 2000 chickens or ~~priors~~ convenient imputed probability claims into the equation! And, in general, I think people asking why EA is so convinced it’s so much better at prioritising and insisting philanthropic choices are arbitrary aren’t doing so because they don’t think cost benefit analysis can be done in any circumstances^[2] they’re asking because of how many other assumptions are necessarily smuggled in to even attempt cause neutrality (or because they think the assumptions smuggled in are wrong,^[3] or just not actually that neutral).
Obviously this isn’t because EAs refuse to debate their assumptions at all. Indeed they love nothing more than respectful debate with people who like to state their own priors and utility ranges, and even someone questioning the validity of the whole EA utilitarian consequentialist framework might get entertained so long as they establish themselves as being suitably intellectual if they contextualise it by explaining their own ethical framework first. But there’s a strong tendency to assume that if people don’t come armed with the right jargon and specific alternatives or at least have the decency to state that their question is axiological they must just not understand anything, or actually reject the whole edifice of science.^[4] I think even when delivered without a hint of condescension that sort of talking past people is more annoying than the bluntness^[5]
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Similarly I don’t think advising people midway through medical school to retrain as AI researchers is a form of fanaticism which is just unrealistic enough to be annoying (though it’s an excellent example of unrealistic enough to be annoying fanaticism). It’s also a fundamental error based on evaluating outsider professions differently from the recommended ones: completely forgetting that if we’re dismissing the impact of choosing to become a doctor by comparing them with the counterfactual of the next best applicant like 80k hours says, we should we should treat the impact of the alternative career the same way. Which means the impact of a couple of medical students career changing to the even more competitive profession of AI safety should be measured by how much more likely they are to solve AI alignment than the multiple CompSci graduates who’ve been obsessing over it for five years applying for the same positions. Even if they somehow find a job in that field they’re unlikely to tangibly change it^[6]. It’s not just the fanaticism producing recommendations that are annoying or too late, it’s also that cargo culting the arguments produces recommendations that are plain bad.^[7]
1. ^
  There are obviously also explicit arguments for preferring to help one person over 1000s far away based on axiological assumptions about duty to particular communities or individuals, but yeah, those arguments don’t tend to be made implicitly in the form of a question....
2. ^
  again, people (including EAs) sometimes have arguments against the applying it to particular fields and evidence bases which are really good but they tend to explicitly make them
3. ^
  there are lots of epistemological questions about recommendations that have a better answer than “don’t you know the difference between opinion and fact?” too: the better EA analyses are explicit about their evidence base and the extent to which it represents a knowledge claim and their level of confidence X actually does deliver Z more cost effectively than Y
4. ^
  I’m not saying bad questions don’t exist, I’m saying that reasonable ones often get framed as unreasonable ones because lecturing people about how cost benefit analysis is just maths and they surely aren’t arguing with maths is easier than justifying the use of “moral weights”
5. ^
  tbh online at least I think EA’s style of debate is more likely to be accused—fairly and otherwise—of annoyingly polite persistence
6. ^
  nor will the modal AI researcher...
7. ^
  tbf the other default EA recommendation of doing medical research instead probably isn’t a bad suggestion in this instance. Or maybe they should study how to use AI to do medical research to make everyone happy ;)

David T 21 Apr 2026 19:55 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Junior people should apply to things that they won’t get.
I think the main benefit of applying to jobs you don’t think you’ll get remains the possibility you might actually get them.
If you’re applying for feedback you’ll usually be disappointed though. Most organizations offer little feedback due to a mix of caution, other things to do and the tendency of “honestly you were pretty OK, the other candidates just stood out as better in a mix of different ways” to be the actual answer, which isn’t really actionable.

David T 21 Apr 2026 19:36 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: alexfogelson’s comment on: Against Credulous AI Hype
Credulous really is the right word. There is a strand of dialogue in EA circles that feels like “we called much of this many years ago” therefor “everything that transpires will mimic our thought experiments perfectly.” The marketing from frontier labs is the offspring of early EA/LW ideas. The potential for confirmation bias here is astronomical.
I also think that when it comes to assessing whether they’re overly trusting of the claims of frontier labs because it fits their broader views, it’s probably more relevant that EAs generally believed Altman and Musk when they said they were founding OpenAI to do philanthropic research when basically everybody else understood what they were really trying to do than that EAs correctly called transformers being a big deal when the average computer scientist was a bit more cautious.
GPT2 was “too dangerous to release” as a marketing strategy too.

David T 9 Apr 2026 17:17 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Infinite Dust Specks Are Worse Than One Torture
I think human responses to pain are more complex than just thresholds too. In addition to your gentle scratching, or the near-zero amount of pain sensations registered when applauding, humans voluntarily inflict non-trivial amounts of pain upon themselves for entertainment and self-worth, and accept inevitability of pain as part of their hobbies. Is it meaningful to argue that a certain number of tattoo artists is more objectionable than a smaller number of puppy kickers, or that selecting someone to play football for 90 minutes which will aggravate their modest limb pain is morally more dubious than intentionally kicking them on that limb? I don’t think so.
And that’s not to mention the benefits of pain which such discussions ignore. For many millenia, one of the most feared diseases was leprosy, which manifests itself in numbness.
When it gets to complex organisms and torture much of it is measured as psychological responses rather than intensity of nervous sensation too, which also doesn’t align well with a neat cardinal pain scale; techniques like waterboarding actually trigger objectively useful reflexes rather than inflicting neurological pain. Is there a certain amount of cumulative experience of unexpected droplets in the nasal system aggregated across many people that approximates a single instance of waterboarding one individual? I would say no. I’d probably also say that there isn’t a certain amount of aggregated BSDM kink that’s worse than one actual torture chamber...

David T 9 Apr 2026 16:04 UTC
5 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Matt_Sharp’s comment on: [Opinion] EA should do more to shape its public narrative
I’d go further and say that the FTX-ish reputation “EA is where extremely wealthy Silicon Valley nerds brag about their generosity whilst mostly funnelling money to people like them and using it as an avenue for self-promotion” also attracts the wrong sort of people—before there were people complaining about FTX being a scam, there were people complaining about the perceived ease of getting funding by FTX attracting the insincere.

(Other negative EA stereotypes contribute to putting well-intentioned people off, but I’m not sure they actually attract the wrong people)

David T 4 Apr 2026 23:22 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Daniel_Friedrich’s comment on: Only What Is Alive Can Be Conscious
I’m not sure what you’re imagining here. If you give people a trolley problem (only via text) and say on one track, there’s a dog and on the other one, there’s a computer program Eliza and they can chat to either, most would choose to save the dog, even if its only text output were “whoof whoof”.
What I’m imagining, which I evidently didn’t make clear enough, is not a trolley problem but simply trying to discern whether something else is conscious without knowing whether it has “faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body”, such as reading its output [if any] over a remote computer terminal.^[1] In these circumstances, not only will humans be unable to find any grounds for empathy with almost all sentient beings, but they will find plenty of grounds to empathise with or at least attribute motivation and intent to software programs.^[2] So in the absence of context there’s definitely a bias in mind attribution towards symbol manipulators; even trivially simple ones that merely mimic or perform arithmetic.
On the other hand it seems like the “faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body” are actually a relatively useful heuristic, especially since adults are seldom deceived by taxidermy or cuddly toys in comparison to how easily they’re impressed by “cheap parlour trick” level AI
Are people more likely to empathise with entities with “faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body” than disembodied entities with apparent facility with symbol manipulation? Possibly, though I think this varies,^[3] but the relevant question is: are people more likely misplace their empathy in imputing basic consciousness to other mammals or imputing heightened consciousness to anything that can beat them at chess
The level of misattribution matters too. Our sense of empathy anthropomorphises dogs by overestimating their grasp of language and underestimating the extent to which they are motivated by smell, and anthropomorphises irritating repetitive hardcoded chatbots by assigning meaning and motivation which simply doesn’t exist.
Most non-dualists would say consciousness is a feature of information processing (functionalists, illusionists, non-reductive materialists) or something as fundamental as physics (Russelian monism, pan(proto)psychism)...The phrase “rooted in [biochemical processes]” is the least controversial but it still connotes something most might not endorse—i.e. that biology and chemistry is the correct category or level of description
The rooted in biochemical processes is the bit I’m aiming for here; I am not aware of a non-dualist theory which roots human cognition in something other than the biochemical processes of the body (I don’t think the biochemical processes of the body themselves particularly care whether philosophers of mind label them as the consequence of evolutionary imperatives, physics, function, or illusion.)^[4] Perhaps I can only be fully confident of my own consciousness, but its relationship with my biochemistry and physiology does at least comes with a bunch of hypotheses originally tested on similar organisms (albeit many of those hypotheses I’d rather not test …).
1. ^
  Like Turing’s eponymous test, only not explicitly a test. Eliza might convince a human not primed to look for evidence it’s just a shoddy computer program that its outputs represent a stream of conscious thought; nobody’s going to try to follow the strains of thought in a dog’s typing...
2. ^
  including those [near]-universally agreed to be too simple to have any sort of motivation, intent or consciousness
3. ^
  No shortage of people who have developed feelings for ChatGPT, and I bet most of them eat cute farm animals
4. ^
  or indeed if between 93% and 99.9% of them live lifestyles too chaste or avant garde to acknowledge the possibility that changes in their hormone balance and neurological state associated with [the prospect of] sex might be linked to evolutionary imperatives to reproduce ;-)
5. ^
  I can experimentally verify claims made about how certain changes to my biochemistry or physiology would affect my consciousness, though in most cases I’d rather not :)

David T 4 Apr 2026 12:45 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Daniel_Friedrich’s comment on: Only What Is Alive Can Be Conscious
We are evolved to feel empathy—that is, modelling “what it is like to be them”—towards entities that have faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body. We feel a lot of empathy for pets and babies—entities that don’t control language
People empathise with ChatGPT transcripts too; the key distinction is between empathising with a wide range of physiological and behavioural cues as opposed to a narrow one. For all its flaws, observing whether they are like us seems like a more plausible way of establishing likely consciousness than aptitude for symbolic manipulation. Disintermediated by a computer to replace biases introduced by cuteness and non-verbal expressiveness with biases introduced by symbolic manipulation, humans would without exception rate a pocket calculator or Eliza- style toy script as more likely to be conscious than a dog or a two year old child. I don’t think anyone sincerely believes this to actually be the case. A corollary of this is that facility with human language and mathematics—something most entities considered to be conscious do not possess—is not a particularly good standalone proxy for consciousness, even if the entity under examination is much much better at it than Eliza.
Unless we’re positing dualism, what we perceive at consciousness is an emergent property of complex chemical processes rooted in our biology (and the imperatives of our biology to survive and self replicate.. That’s the case whether we empathise with other entities that share this biology, dispassionately analyse the likelihood we evolved from a common ancestor or torture them into demonstrating similar stress hormone responses to humans. That doesn’t necessarily mean warm blooded DNA-replicating machines with limbs and fur and cute eyes are the only possible form of consciousness, but it is something we have and current “AI” doesn’t even have a loose analogue of. And yes, obsession with symbolic manipulation is doing an awful lot of work to explain why people are concerned about the consciousness of assemblies of silicon chips running specific software whilst disregarding the possibility of the sentience of more complex and interesting long running processes like forests, rivers or planetary systems, or indeed larger assemblies of silicon chips running software that doesn’t transform human text into cute replies.

David T 2 Mar 2026 23:03 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Stevenson’s comment on: Should sustainable pet diets be a leading EA cause area?
Feels like tractability is the key point here. It doesn’t matter a huge amount if 7 billion is or isn’t the total amount of animals that would counterfactually be saved if all pets were fed vegan diets^[1]
What matters is what change can feasibly be achieved by a marginal campaign or food innovation, given that vegan pet food is already a thing which I suspect most vegans are aware of, and most pet owners are not vegans. Also, many vegans are comfortable feeding their pets (or in the case of one person I know, an entire zoo) with omnivorous or carnivorous diets.
I suspect the returns to campaigning would look like marginal returns to vegan advocacy and meat alternatives research for humans, but it feels like this is where the evidence would be most interesting.
1. ^
  the order of magnitude seems plausible when considering how many more animals free ranging domestic cats alone are estimated to kill...