Hi! I’m a twenty three year old ex-software engineer. I like to write about EA and do independent research related to it. I’m particularly interested in longtermism, and how we navigate the transition to a post-AGI society.
My blog is James Brobin’s Substack, and it includes stuff that I haven’t posted on this forum.
Gotcha, thanks! I appreciate the fast response.
Thanks for sharing this!
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!
Ah, thanks! This was very helpful!
Ah, thanks! That first link is perfect! I probably should have searched through the forum a bit more before making this post.
Ah, thanks for the recommendations. I always perpetually feel I need to learn more about economics, but I never get around to reading about it.
I would probably add Thinking In Systems by Donella H. Meadows as another peripheral book since it tackles systems thinking, which can be applied to virtually any EA-related subject.
I see. Yeah, that point makes a lot of sense. According to this Gallup study, the typical desired number of children for a US family has stabilized at 2.6 for the past thirty years. Assuming this number isn’t too affected by immigration and is likely to stay the same with a similar economic situation (and that economic situation persists), your conclusion seems pretty strong to me.
In response to your first question, I’m pretty concerned that artificial wombs would not be very high impact from a population perspective.
If artificial wombs were very expensive, I suspect only very wealthy people would make use of them, and it would not solve the fertility crisis.
If artificial wombs were very cheap, I suspect the average person would have barely any more children. This is because the primary drivers for the current fertility crisis seem to also motivate people to want to have less children in general.
According to Our World in Data, the primary drivers of the fertility crisis are:
the empowerment of women — increased access to education and increased labor market participation
declining rates of child mortality
rising costs of bringing up children, with the decline of child labor
It seems like the first and second trend will continue for the foreseeable future, and the third trend will continue in the near-time but reverse in the long-term. Notably, the first trend has to do with women’s ability to make their own decisions. It seems that, in general, if women can choose how many children to have, they usually only have two or three.
Additionally, according a recent 80,000 Hours interview (which was with a non-expert), one of the major drivers of the fertility crisis is simply that people have more interesting things to do with their time than having children. This trend also seems like it will only continue.
I also suspect that if artificial wombs were very cheap, some fanatical religious groups would have extraordinarily large amounts of offspring, which could be generally harmful to the long-term future.
On the other hand though, I suspect that if there were great widespread economic prosperity and people were no longer required to work (such as could be the case if AGI comes about), the average person may have far more children, which, from a total view of population ethics, would be very beneficial.
Ah, thanks for sharing that!!