Jens Aslaug 🔸

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 30 Nov 2025 8:12 UTC

  2 points

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  on: New dona­tion op­por­tu­nity: the Cen­ter for Wild An­i­mal Welfare

  Really excited to see an org in the WAW space focusing exclusively on policy. Especially since the org sounds to be pragmatic, very knowledgeable on the topic, have great communication skills and in general have a great team—what more can you ask for! Looking forward to donating.

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 29 Nov 2025 19:55 UTC

  9 points

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  on: Where I Am Donat­ing in 2025

  Thanks a lot for the post! Just wanted to say that your posts (especially the one you made last year) have inspired a large part of my donations.
  
  Of the almost $30k I donated over the last year, 70% went to AI policy orgs (mainly Palisade Research). I’m not sure where I would have donated without your posts, but I can’t say with certainty that they would have ended up the same place.

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 21 Oct 2025 18:16 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Jens As­laug ’s Quick takes

  First off, I must say—I really like that answer.
  
  I guess I’m concerned about how much of a value lock-in there will be with the creation of AGI. And I find it hard to imagine a majority caring about wild animal suffering or mass producing happiness (e.g. creating a large amount of happy artificial sentience). But I do agree—I shouldn’t giv it a 90% likelihood.

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 21 Oct 2025 18:02 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: idea21’s comment on: Jens As­laug ’s Quick takes

  True. But I think that’s more of an argument that the future is uncertain (which ofc is a relevant argument). But even with the technology I don’t necessarily think we’ll have a majority interested in eliminating all forms of suffering (especially in the wild) or mass producing happiness.

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 21 Oct 2025 17:55 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Mikolaj Kniejski’s comment on: Jens As­laug ’s Quick takes

  Net positive/​negative: “All good” minus “all bad”
  In expectation: Weighted average outcome (prob × impact)

Jens As­laug ’s Quick takes

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 19 Oct 2025 5:14 UTC

  10 points

  1 ∶ 2

  on: Jens As­laug ’s Quick takes

  I have a question I would like some thoughts on:
  
  As a utilitarianist I personally believe alignment to be the most important course area—though weirdly enough, even though I believe x-risk reduction to be positive in expectation, I believe the future is most likely to be net negative.
  
  I personally believe, without a high level of certainty, that the current utilities on earth are net negative due to wild animal suffering. If we therefore give the current world a utility value of −1, I would describe my believe for future scenarios like this:

  1. ~5% likelihood: ~10¹⁰⁰⁰ (Very good future e.g. hedonium shockwave)

  2. ~90% likelihood: −1 (the future is likely good for humans, but this is still negligible compared to wild animal suffering, which will remain)

  3. ~5% likelihood: ~-10¹⁰⁰ (s-risk like scenarios)

  My reasoning for thinking “scenario 2” is more likely than “scenario 1” is based on what seems to be the values of the general public currently. Most people seem to care about nature conservation, but no one seems interested in mass producing (artificial) happiness. While the earth is only expected to remain habitable for about two billion years (and humans, assuming we avoid any x-risks, are likely to remain for much longer), I think, when it comes to it, we’ll find a way to keep the earth habitable, and thus wild animal suffering.

  Based on these 3 scenarios, you don’t have to be a great mathematician to realize that the future is most likely to be net negative, yet positive in expectation. While I still, based on this, find alignment to be the most important course area, I find it quite demotivating that I spend so much of my time (donations) to preserve a future that I find unlikely to be positive. But the thing is, most long-termist (and EAs in general) don’t seem to have similar beliefs to me. Even someone like Brian Tomasik has said that if you’re a classical utilitarian, the future is likely to be good.
  
  So now I’m asking, what am I getting wrong? Why is the future likely to be net positive?

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 19 Oct 2025 5:08 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Altru­ism and Happiness

  Thank you for the post! Can’t belive I only saw it now.
  
  I do agree that altruism can and should be seen as something that’s net positive to once own happiness for most. But:
  1. My post was mainly intended for people who are already “hardcore” EAs and are willing to make a significant personal sacrifice for the greater good.
  2. You make some interesting comparisons to religion that I somewhat agree with. Though I don’t think religion is as time consuming as EA is for many EAs. I’m also sure EA would seem less like a personal sacrifice if you were surrounded by EAs.
  3. Trying to make EA more mainstream is not simple. Many ideas seems ratical to the average person. You could ofc try to make the ideas seem more in line with the average viewpoint. But I don’t think that’s worth it if it makes us less efficient.

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 1 Aug 2025 11:34 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Open thread: July—Septem­ber 2025

  I have a question I would like some thoughts on:
  
  As a utilitarianist I personally believe alignment to be the most important course area—though weirdly enough, even though I believe x-risk reduction to be positive in expectation, I believe the future is most likely to be net negative.
  
  I personally believe, without a high level of certainty, that the current utilities on earth are net negative due to wild animal suffering. If we therefore give the current world a utility value of −1, I would describe my believe for future scenarios like this:

  1. ~5% likelihood: ~10¹⁰⁰⁰ (Very good future e.g. hedonium shockwave)

  2. ~90% likelihood: −1 (the future is likely good for humans, but this is still negligible compared to wild animal suffering, which will remain)

  3. ~5% likelihood: ~-10¹⁰⁰ (s-risk like scenarios)

  My reasoning for thinking “scenario 2” is more likely than “scenario 1” is based on what seems to be the values of the general public currently. Most people seem to care about nature conservation, but no one seems interested in mass producing (artificial) happiness. While the earth is only expected to remain habitable for about two billion years (and humans, assuming we avoid any x-risks, are likely to remain for much longer), I think, when it comes to it, we’ll find a way to keep the earth habitable, and thus wild animal suffering.

  Based on these 3 scenarios, you don’t have to be a great mathematician to realize that the future is most likely to be net negative, yet positive in expectation. While I still, based on this, find alignment to be the most important course area, I find it quite demotivating that I spend so much of my time (donations) to preserve a future that I find unlikely to be positive. But the thing is, most long-termist (and EAs in general) don’t seem to have similar beliefs to me. Even someone like Brian Tomasik has said that if you’re a classical utilitarian, the future is likely to be good.
  
  So now I’m asking, what am I getting wrong? Why is the future likely to be net positive?

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 31 Jul 2025 13:47 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Clara Torres Latorre 🔶️’s comment on: How much to donate to max­i­mize im­pact and per­sonal hap­piness

  Well I totally agree with you, and the simple answer is—I don’t. All of the graph/​tables I made (except fig. 5 - which was only a completely made up example) are based on averages (including made up numbers that’s supposed to represent the average). They don’t take into account personal factors—like your income or how expensive rent+utilities are in your area. Therefore the models should only be used as a very rough guide, that can’t work by itself (I guess one could make a more complex model that includes these factors). Therefore one should also make a budget, to see how it would look in real life, as I suggested in this section.

How much to donate to max­i­mize im­pact and per­sonal hap­piness

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 22 Mar 2025 10:35 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Dis­cus­sion Thread: Ex­is­ten­tial Choices De­bate Week

  X-risk reduction (especially alinement) is highly neglected and it’s less clear how our actions can impact the value of the future. However, I think the impact of both is very uncertain and I still think working on s-risk reduction and long-termest animal work is of high impact.

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 29 Dec 2024 18:58 UTC

  4 points

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  on: Dona­tion Cel­e­bra­tion Post

  Center on long term risk

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 9 Oct 2023 12:23 UTC

  7 points

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  in reply to: Max Taylor’s comment on: What AI could mean for animals

  I agree. :) Your idea of lobbying and industry-specific actions might also be more neglected. In terms of WAW, I think it could help reduce the amount of human caused suffering to wild animals, but likely not have an impact on natural caused suffering.

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 6 Oct 2023 18:03 UTC

  16 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: What AI could mean for animals

  Thanks a lot for the post! I’m happy that people are trying to combine the field of longtermism and animal welfare.

  Here’s a few initial thoughts from a non-professional (note I didn’t read the full post so I might have missed something):

  I generally believe that moral circle expansion, especially for wild animals and artificial sentience, is one of the best universal ways to help ensure a net positive future. I think that invertebrates or artificial sentience will make up the majority of moral patients in the future. I also suspect this to be good in a number of different future scenarios, since it could lower the chance of s-risks and better the scenario for animals (or artificial sentience) no matter if there will be a lock-in scenario or not.

  I think progression in short-term direct WAW interventions is also very important since I find it hard to believe that many people will care about WAW unless they can see a clear way of changing the status quo (even if current WAW interventions will only have a minimal impact). I also think short-term WAW interventions could help to change the narrative that interfering in nature is inherently bad.
  (Note: I have personally noticed several people that have similar values as me (in terms of caring greatly about WAW in the far future) only caring little about short-term interventions.)

  It could of course be argued that working directly on reducing the likelihood of certain s-risk and working on AI-alignment might be a more efficient way of ensuring a better future for animals. I certainly think this might be true, however I think these measures are less reliable due to the uncertainty of the future.

  I think Brian Tomasik has written great pieces on why animal-focused hedonistic imperative and gene drive might be less promising and more unlikely than it seems. I do personally also believe that it’s unlikely to ever happen on a large scale for wild animals. However, I think if it happens and it’s done right (without severely disrupting ecosystems), genetic engineering could be the best way of increasing net well-being in the long term. But I haven’t thought that much about this.

  Anyways, I wouldn’t be surprised if you already have considered all of these arguments.

  I’m really looking forward to your follow-up post :)

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 17 Sep 2023 11:51 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: The­ory: “WAW might be of higher im­pact than x-risk pre­ven­tion based on util­i­tar­i­anism”

  I do agree that t in the formula is quite complicated to understand (and does not mean the same as the typical meant by tractability), I tried to explain it, but since no one edited my work, I might be overestimating the understandability of my formulations. “t” is something like “the cost-effectiveness of reducing the likelihood of x-risk by 1 percentage point” divided by “the cost-effectiveness of increasing net happiness of x-risk by 1 percent”.

  When that’s been said, I still think that the analysis lacks an estimation for how good the future will be. Which could make the numbers for “t” and “net negative future” (or u(negative)) “more objective”.

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 16 Sep 2023 12:35 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: The­ory: “WAW might be of higher im­pact than x-risk pre­ven­tion based on util­i­tar­i­anism”

  I do somewhat agree (my beliefs on this has also somewhat changed after discussing the theory with others). I think “conventional” WAW work has some direct (advocacy) and indirect (research) influence on peoples values, which could help avoid or make certain lock-in scenarios less severe. However, I think this impact is less than I previously thought, and I’m now of the belive that more direct work into how we can mitigate such risk is more impactful.

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 16 Sep 2023 12:22 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: The­ory: “WAW might be of higher im­pact than x-risk pre­ven­tion based on util­i­tar­i­anism”

  If I understand you correctly you believe the formula does not take into account how good the future will be. I do somewhat agree that there is a related problem in my analysis, however I don’t think that the problem is related to the formula.

  The problem your talking about is actually being taken into account by “t”. You should note that the formula is about “net well-being”, so “all well-being” minus “all suffering”. So if future “net well-being” is very low, then the tractability of WAW will be high (aka “t” being low). E.g. lets say “net well-being” = 1 (made up unit), than it’s gonna be alot easier to increase by 1 % than if “net well-being” = 1000.

  However I do agree that estimations for expectations on how good the future is going to be, is technically needed for making this analysis correctly. Specifically for estimating “t” and “net negative future” (or u(negative)) in for the “main formula”. I may fix this in the future.

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 14 Sep 2023 15:57 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Isaac Dunn’s comment on: The­ory: “WAW might be of higher im­pact than x-risk pre­ven­tion based on util­i­tar­i­anism”

  (I hope it’s not confusing that I’m answering both your comments at once).

  While I will have to consider this for longer, my preliminary thought is that I agree with most of what you said. Which means that I might not believe in some of my previous statements.

  Thanks for the link to that post. I do agree and I can definitely see how some of these biases have influenced a couple of my thoughts.

  --

  On your last point, but future-focused WAW interventions, I’m thinking of things that you mention in the tractability section of your post:...

  Okay, I see. Well actually, my initial thought was that all of those four options had a similar impact on the longterm future. Which would justify focusing on short-term interventions and advocacy (which would correspond with working on point number three and four). However after further consideration, I think the first two are of higher impact when considering the far future. Which means I (at least for right now) agree with your earlier statement:

  “So rather than talking about “wild animal welfare interventions”, I’d argue that you’re really only talking about “future-focused wild animal welfare interventions”. And I think making that distinction is important, because I don’t think your reasoning supports present-focused WAW work.”

  While I still think the “flow through effect” is very real for WAW, I do think that it’s probably true working on s-risks more directly might be of higher impact.

  --

  I was curious if you have some thoughts on these conclusions (concluded based on a number of things you said and my personal values):

  • Since working on s-risk directly is more impactful than working on it indirectly, direct work should be done when possible.

  • There is no current organization working purely on animal related s-risk (as far as I know). So if that’s your main concern, your options are start-up or convincing an “s-risk mitigation organization” that you should work on this area full time.

    • Animal Ethics works on advocating moral circle expansion. But since this is of less direct impact to the longterm future, this has less of an effect on reducing s-risk than more direct work.

  • If you’re also interested in reducing other s-risks (e.g. artificial sentience), then working for an organization that directly tries to reduce the probability of a number of s-risk is your best option (e.g. Center on Long-Term Risk or Center for Reducing Suffering).

• Jens Aslaug 🔸 14 Sep 2023 12:20 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: ElliotJDavies’s comment on: The­ory: “WAW might be of higher im­pact than x-risk pre­ven­tion based on util­i­tar­i­anism”

  I’d argue there’s a much lower bar for an option value preference. To have a strong preference for option value, you need only assume that you’re not the most informed, most capable person to make that decision.

  I do agree that there are more capable people to make that decision than me and there will be even better in the future. But I don’t believe this to be the right assessment for the desirability of option value. I think the more correct question is “whether the future person/​people in power (which may be the opinion of the average human in case of a “singleton democracy”) would be more capable than me?”.

  I feel unsure whether my morals will be better or worse than that future person or people because of the following:

  • The vast majority of moral patients currently, according to my knowledge, are invertebrates (excluding potential/​unknown sentient beings like aliens, AI made by aliens, AI sentient humans already made unknowingly, microorganisms etc.). My impression is that the mean moral circle is wider than it was 10 years ago and that most people’s moral circle increases with the decrease in poverty, the decrease in personal problems and the increase in free time. However, whether or not the majority will ever care about “ant-suffering” and the belief that interventions should be done is unclear to me. (So this argument can go both ways)

  • A similar argument can be used for future AI sentients. My impression is that a lot of humans care somewhat about AI sentients and that this will most likely increase in the future. However, I’m unsure how much people will care if AI sentients mainly come from non-communicating computers that have next to nothing in common with humans.

  To what extent do you think approaches like AI-alignment will protect against S-risks? Or phrased another way, how often will unaligned super-intelligence result in a S-risk scenario.

  Well, I think working on AI-alignment could significantly decrease the likelihood of s-risks where humans are the main ones suffering. So if that’s your main concern, then working on AI-alignment is the best option (both with your and my beliefs).

  While I don’t think that the probability of “AGI-caused S-risk” is high. I also don’t think the AGI will prevent or care largely for invertebrates or artificial sentience. E.g. I don’t think the AGI will stop a person from doing directed panspermia or prevent the development of artificial sentience. I think the AGI will most likely have similar values to the people who created it or control it (which might again be (partly) the whole human adult population).

  I’m also worried that if WAW concerns are not spread, nature conservation (or less likely but even worse, the spread of nature) will be the enforced value. Which could prevent our attempts to make nature better and ensure that the natural suffering will continue.

  And since you asked for beliefs of the likelihood, here you go (partly copied from my explanation in Appendix 4):

  • I put the “probability” for an “AI misalignment caused s-risk” as being pretty low (1 %), because most scenarios of AI misalignment, will according to my previous statements, be negligible (talking about s-risk, not x-risk). It would in this case only be relevant if AI keeps us and/​or animals alive “permanently” to have net negative lives (which most likely would require traveling outside of the solar system). I also put “how bad the scenario would be” pretty low (0,5) because I think most likely (but not guaranteed) the impact will be minimal to animals (which technically might mean that it would not be considered a s-risk).

  I want to try explore some of the assumptions that are building your world model. Why do you think that the world, in our current moment, contains more suffering than pleasure? What forces do you think resulted in this equilibrium?

  I would argue that whether or not the current world is net positive or net negative depends on the experience of invertebrates since they make up the majority of moral patients. Most people caring about WAW believe one of the following:

  • That invertebrates most likely suffer more than they experience pleasure.

  • It is unclear whether invertebrates suffer or experience pleasure more.

  I’m actually leaning more towards the latter. My guess is there’s a 60 % probability that they suffer more and a 40 % probability that they feel pleasure more.

  So the cause for my belief that the current world is slightly more likely to be net negative is simply: evolution did not take ethics into account. (So the current situation is unrelated to my faith in humanity).

  With all that said, I still think the future is more likely to be net positive than net negative.