I live for a high disagree-to-upvote ratio
huw
Karma: 2,365
Are there also just, concerns about misinterpretation? There’s not really a good way of checking baselines on hallucinations or unconfident predictions from the AI, since 99% of humans don’t know what these sounds mean.
Furthermore, since these seem to be based on the behaviours humans observe co-occurring with the communication, they’d necessarily be lower-fidelity than that animal’s thought process (as you note). That seems a bit lame and the website certainly isn’t trying to dispel their own mythmaking around ‘talk to animals’, which isn’t really what’s happening here in any meaningful sense.
Hmm, I think that’s not the right framing for this. UBI is just not settled as a universally good idea in academic or political circles (sorry, no definitive citation for this), let alone that there’s an urgent unemployment crisis (the statistic I think you’re citing is for job openings, not actual employment rates) or that such a crisis, if it did exist, has structural causes which could be expected to increase (i.e. it might not be AI, nor should we necessarily expect AI to become orders of magnitude more advanced in the next 5 years; there was plausibly a very different shock to the global economic system beginning around Liberation Day, 2025).
I’d also be curious about whether Abundance money could fund this, too. Urban sprawl is a big driver of habitat destruction!
That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that some orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.
I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.
Well the blackouts are the only way to ensure a free & fair election Nick :)
Late to this, but something I didn’t catch in the comments—Global Health looks overfunded in your calculations, but my sense is that Global Health is quite efficient at spending money. Much of the money in global health goes directly to programmes and beneficiaries, or working-class talent that often gets excluded as ‘not what we mean’ in these kinds of surveys. I would argue, too, that the other cause areas here are often quite talent-dense. Under these terms, it’s probably still valid to argue that Animal Welfare is under-resourced relative to Existential Risks though :)
I think maybe a little bit of nuance is lost when just saying ‘electoral politics isn’t neglected and might be quite hard’—that’s not the EA response to large global health issues, or existential risks. It’s just that once you get down to brass tacks, most Western political systems are pretty easy to buy your way into, and it’s substantially cheaper to effect meaningful piecemeal change by paying for lobbyists.
You only need electoral politics when trying to undertake massive political/ideological shifts (see: the kochs/mercers shifting the U.S. to a sort of anarcho-capitalism), and fundamentally, most EAs are on the centre-left and don’t see these kinds of changes as desirable.
(You can see this in the LessWrong post you linked, most of the post and replies are proposing exactly what Kamala Harris did in 2024 and lost doing)
((Vastly oversimplifying but I hope it provides some nuance that the other answers are missing))
Just generally, I like the idea of putting something out there in the world even if the first version isn’t perfect :)
I’m a little confused about your problem statement, indeed, most of the extreme politicians in the U.S. seem to win outright, in ranked-choice primaries, or systems with two-candidate runoffs.
In the Democratic party, which I’m more familiar with, their most extreme (this is not an endorsement or disendorsement of their policies, just to note that these politicians are the furthest left in the party) elected officials tend to win outright majorities or in reformed elections:
Mamdani won a ranked-choice primary and then an outright majority in the general
AOC won an outright primary in 2018 against a single candidate (no coalescing issue)
Although Rashida Tlaib won her first successful primary in FTTP, in 2020 she won outright against a single candidate
Ilhan Omar similarly won her first two primaries with a minority of the vote, but won her last three outright, in 2 cases against one ‘reasonable’ candidate (i.e. all other candidates got a small share of the vote)
Bernie Sanders has a very strange electoral history due to running as an independent but usually being on the Democratic primary ticket. Nevertheless, he has pretty much always won his elections outright.
Similarly, I skimmed the Wikipedias for a few far-right politicians, whom I’m less familiar with, and they demonstrated similar trends. MTG, for example, won a contested primary with 40%, but then won a two-candidate runoff and has seen outright wins since.
It seems as though extreme politicians are genuinely popular—enough that people don’t form coalitions to oppose them in future elections, even when there’s only one other candidate on the ballot. I am not very convinced that your proposed form would work.
If you’re directly posting LLM output, please trim it down for clarity. This was too repetitive and very long.
Is indoor tanning worse than outdoor tanning? If not, I can see a ban making sense in cold countries, where people might counterfactually tan, but in countries like Australia and Brazil I can assure you this just has a displacement effect of sending people outside (even in winter).
Really excited about this—congrats to the team!
Conscription in particular seems really bad; if your country is undertaking an offensive war then it’s probably completely indefensible, and if it’s a defensive war then defending your country should be self-evidently valuable to enough people that you wouldn’t need it.
I also don’t think that even defensive wars hold killing to be morally good—otherwise you would see more situations where one side murders combatants who have been disarmed. Instead, most countries have historically imprisoned them or let them go. This seems, at least, consistent with peacetime ethics around imprisonment?
I don’t want to sound too facetious here but I genuinely believe that you can resolve this ‘paradox’ by just holding that all of these things are categorically bad and that war is not a special case.
I can’t speak to sub-Saharan Africa, but in India the government have put together a very comprehensive survey of mental wellbeing, which they ran in 2016 and are running again now. They randomly sampled households across the country, and asked people about their feelings and symptoms, which they then categorised into different mental conditions, rather than asking directly. This found results that largely concurred with previous GBD estimates for India. But I can’t say for sure whether there might be other biases, and there are almost certainly issues with the GBD’s Africa estimates due to a lack of ground truth data in many regions and methodological issues.
Here’s a paper on the kinds of surveys and interviews used to form the GBD prevalence estimates, and here’s one arguing that prevalence is sharply underestimated.
Not particularly interested right now, but maybe in the future :)
I will take a note—we are trying to do more comms in 2026 and this could be a great thing to post about. If we do, I’ll reach out :)
5% of Americans identify as being on the far left
However, I would strongly wager that the majority of this sample does not believe in the three ideological points you outlined around authoritarianism, terrorist attacks, and Stalin & Mao (I think it is also quite unlikely that the people viewing the Tik Tok in question would believe these things either). Those latter beliefs are extremely fringe.
My hobby horse around these parts has been that EA should be less scared about reaching out to the left (where I’m politically rooted), and thinking about what commonalities we have. This is something I have already seen in the animal welfare movement, where EAs are unafraid to work with existing vegan activism, and have done a good job of selling philanthropic funding to them, despite having large differences in opinion on the margins.
As you note, it’s not unreasonable that EA looks very far left from some perspectives. GiveDirectly is about direct empowerment, and I would argue that a lot of global development work, especially economic development, can be anti-imperial and generally concord with Marxist ideas of the internationale. Some better outreach and PR management in these communities would go a long way in the same way that it has for the political centre-left, who seem to get lots more attention from EA.
(Even in the roles where it has produced productivity improvements, such as programming, that doesn’t necessarily imply job loss, as companies could get more ambitious with their existing budgets)