Cofounded EA Israel, background in math & CS, worked in prioritization research, and moderated on the forum.
Iām currently earning to give at a tech company, currently giving everything I donāt need to live. Iām currently prioritizing animal welfare, and Iām giving through Animal Welfare Fund. Iām also a board member at EA Israel and at ALTER.
I have struggled a lot with burnout and depression, and Iām still working to shape my life positively.
Seriously, I love this EA forum holiday ā¤ļø I genuinely feel like this helps the community do more good, get more silly-but-perhaps-with-a-grain-of-usefulness ideas across, and waste time in a way which feels a bit productive
It hurts my prefontal cortex
If the FTX Future Fund was still running, you could get from them easy money, no strings attached!
Cab(W)el(l)?
How do you see the long-term goals and outcomes? Iām particularly interested in how this kind of work interact with abolishment /ā animal-rights. In particular, the following seem important to me:
The kind of work that makes the right option cheaper (by technological improvement of productivity on less cruel methods of production) could, for instance, decrease the cost and thus increase the demand.
Improved welfare could legitimize meat eating and overall decrease public opinion toward preventing animal cruelty.
(It is hard for me to come up with a version of this argument that I believe. If anything, I believe the oppositeāthat increased regulation and action for improved welfare will continuously raise the minimal level of acceptable welfare)
Downvoted. I felt that the post was making a bunch of assertions in a way that was aimed at persuading rather than explaining. That said, I would really be interested in reading more from you about this topic.
I think there is a lot to learn about the nature of consciousness and suffering from buddhist philosophy and practice, and I think that it is worthwhile to investigate how to apply it for AI risk.
In particular, there are some possibly interesting points here that Iād love to see expanded and explained in a way which Iād also feel comfortable engaging with the ideas.
Happy to help, feel free to DM me if still relevant :)
This is really important and interesting to read, thank you!
Would the general point apply for insect farming? Seems like the recommendations are particularly relevant there
Iām really looking forward to the debate on this topic!
Some thoughts:
I like that debate topics arenāt overly operationalized. Allowing people to take slightly different interpretations means that people can focus on the variation which seem most important to them. This can come at the expense of understanding each other crisply and when interpreting the (quantified) agreement scale.
Iām not sure what were the main takeaways from previous debates, but I felt that I cared more about hearing interesting new takes and peopleās reactions to them than I cared about assessing the overall community opinion.
āBy defaultāāOne possible ambiguity here is whether this means with >50% probability or with >99.9% probability.
āThe world whereā ā āThe worlds whereā. Also, perhaps this notion of conceiving of possible futures as possible worlds is a bit too heavy on EA/ārationalist-lingo.
āAI goes well for humansāāI broadly like this. I would be interested in peopleās opinion for both neartermist and lontermist worldviews, and under maxipok or flourishing futures.
āSentient beingsāāHere I think the discussion should be contained to nonhuman animals because the other case seemed to be handled in the previous AI welfare debate.
I donāt think that the statement of the debate should be about āwhat we should doā but rather about the worldview directly. Itās a bit hard for me to pinpoint exactly why I think so and I may regret this.
I think that an operationalization which is too close to peopleās actual decisions may cause more people to defend their existing views or to take a stance based on whatās more salient. Iām not sure why exactly, but framings like āWithout extra animal-focused work, even aligned superintelligence would be bad for non-human animalsā feel like they would generate more ideologically-oriented responses.
This makes the question more complex with more moving parts.
I think that the framing of āAGI which doesnāt cause human extinction or disempowerment will value animal welfareā is quite good. Perhaps this should include CAIS or multipolar scenarios.
quickly, because I want to get back to readingāthe first link to Annaās post is broken. Should probably be https://āāwww.lesswrong.com/āāposts/āāxtuk9wkuSP6H7CcE2/āāayn-rand-s-model-of-living-money-and-an-upside-of-burnout
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This is beautiful, thank you! This has definitely planted some seeds in my mind. Perhaps the most interesting points to me have been the prevalence of cockfighting and the dominance of ethics centered around virtues
I love this! It is rare to see new intervention ideas and I really appreciate such write ups even if you end up with āthis cause area doesnāt need much attentionāāit shines a light on an interesting problem and can spark possibly useful follow on work.
Downvoted in large part because of what looks like the unfiltered use of LLMs. I really appreciate satiric content, and honestly think that is a good way to criticize or talk about unconventional ideas. The basic idea in this post is simple and punchy and would have been much better presented in a much more concise essay
Re the first point, I agree that the context should be related to a person with an EA philosophy.
Re the second point, I think that discussions about the EA portfolio are often interpreted as 0-sum or tribal, and may cause more division in the movement.
I agree that most of the effects of such a debate are likely about shifting around our portfolio of efforts. However, there are other possible effects (recruiting/āonboarding/āpromoting/āaiding existing efforts, or increasing the amount of total resources by getting more readers involved). Also, a shift in the portfolio can happen as a result of object-level discussion, and it is not clear to me which way is better.
I guess my main point is that Iād like people in the community to think less about the community should think. Err.. oops..
I think that this question will be better if it is framed not in terms of the EA community. This is because
The reasoning about the object level question involving timelines and different intervention strategies is very interesting in itself, and thereās no need to add the layer of understanding what the community is doing and how practically it could and should adjust.
Signal boosting a norm of focusing less on intra-movement prioritization and more on personal or marginal additional prioritization and object-level questions.
For example, I like Dylanās reformulation attempt due to it being about object-level differences. Another could be to ask about the next $100K invested in AI safety.
Some thoughts:
Abolishment vs welfarism. The goals of the movement may diverge in both the long term vision (complete abolishment vs happy farms) and in respect to the medium term (less animals grown for food vs animals grown for food have better living standards).
Difference between species and tradeoffs between them (e.g. increased cost of pig meat can increase consumption of chicken meat).
As others have noted, there are important secondary effects on the movement itself for most interventions. I think it is a very important meta- question about how prioritization should account for it.
@Aaron Gertler šø weird bug where the fields donāt show: