Hi! I’m a twenty three year old writer, researcher, and software engineer. I’m particularly interested in EA community building, public awareness raising, and how we navigate the transition to a post-AGI society.
I also know a bit about farm animal suffering, since I made a website about how to reduce the animal cruelty in one’s diet. (boulderhumanefood.org)
You’re right. I should have mentioned mirror biology. That’s definitely the greatest biorisk I know of. That said, it still seems to be a low risk, considering that a significant number of people are actively working on it and they are being taken seriously.
And, also, I am accounting for ways that extinction could occur that I haven’t thought of when I mentioned unknown risks (which I said could plausibly be as high as 10%). As such, my thesis perhaps should be adjusted to “the known non-AI risks that are commonly discussed seem really unlikely, although the unknown risks could plausibly be somewhat high.” That said, in terms of known existential risks, I don’t think I should weigh a risk particularly high if every scenario I hear for it almost certainly wouldn’t kill everyone on Earth.
I have also changed the title to account for the fact that I’m not referring to AI.
I see. Yeah, I expressed what I was thinking incorrectly here. What I meant was that our preferences are slightly abnormal compared to what you would expect but not extraordinarily alien.
In our ancestral environment, we developed a taste for sugary things because berries, which are sugary, are good for us. Knowing this, you would expect that we would eat berries but not ice cream. The fact that we eat ice cream is somewhat abnormal. That said, it is not extraordinarily alien. If we, for instance, devoted our entire lives to eating as much sugar as is physiologically possible without dying, that would be very alien.
I should have said that their argument implies that AIs might have weird preferences but not extremely bizarre ones.
Thanks for catching that!
Yeah, I guess my definition of long-term is more like twenty to a hundred years.
Thanks for sharing your personal experience! As an outsider, I feel like I haven’t seen many of those sorts of projects, but it’s cool to see that people are actually doing them!
No, I haven’t! Thanks for sharing it!
That’s an interesting approach to trying to improve EA’s presence! I really wish more people knew about EA, so I’m glad to see you’re helping with that!
“EA animal activism’s current interventions neglect creating meaningful change over longer time horizons (10 − 20 years).”
I would like to be able to select multiple tags when searching the forum (such as “animal welfare” and “collections/resources”). I would also like to be able to get the top posts for different tags from different years. (For example, I would like to be able to find the top posts on “existential risks” from 2025.)
I would really like to see AI text banned from the forum. Many posters use AI tools to help organize, edit or generate parts of their writing. As a result of this, it’s difficult to assess which ideas are originally from the author or merely generated by AI. Overall, I think that AI generated text tends to have a much lower quality because its tends be very vague, general, and repetitive. It also tends to use the exact same structures over and over again, which can be very boring to read. Lastly, by requiring posters to write out their own thoughts, it will create a higher barrier of entry to posting on the forum, which will improve the forum’s content overall.
I haven’t found anything about how much YouTube converts people to highly engaged EAs. I also haven’t seen anything about what actually motivates people to be highly engaged in EA either. That said, I did just find this article from 80,000 Hours, which discusses how the organization moved away from ads and sponsorships but started to focus more on making their own videos. As such, it’s probably not too unlikely we’ll have a good answer from them in the near future.
Ah, thank you!!
Hi Jack,
Thanks for pointing out your channel! I just updated the post to account for it.
I apologize for the omission!
Thanks for sharing this!