Currently looking for my next step in animal welfare. Reasonably clueless about what interventions are impartially good.
āWe have enormous opportunity to reduce suffering on behalf of sentient creatures [...], but even if we try our hardest, the future will still look very bleak.āāBrian Tomasik
Thanks for engaging!
I would say I feel good when I hear that a given place has banned bullfighting, and find the practice horrifying. My claim is in the context of the animal welfare movement and how it should spend its resources.
Bullfighting causes intense suffering to a few thousand bulls, for a few hours each. This makes it a very small issue in a consequentialist, most likely less than 0.000001% of the suffering caused by the egg industry on a yearly basis. Then, the counterfactual impact of a single spectator at a bullfight on the outcome is probably low. It doesnāt seem like something altruistic resources are well-spent on.
Meanwhile, I donāt see attitude change as a clear a step toward a better world for animals. āA better world for animalsā is a hideously complicated thing, and currently has little to no correlation with peopleās attitudes. French people burnt cats alive for fun in the 16th century, but factory farming didnāt exist and human-caused suffering to animals was surely <1% of what it was today. A more pro-animal nation may contain more animal suffering (more pesticides, eating smaller and more numerous animals...). And I currently have no reason to believe that there is less total suffering in countries that have banned bullfighting entirely.
I keep admiring AIMās dedication to continuous iteration in the service of impact!
āEAG London this Saturday, 12ā1pm: Office hours with Aaron and the AIM team. Drop in to ask questions, kick ideas around, or just say hi. Find it on Swapcard.ā
Still not seeing this on Swapcard. Am I alone in this?
Low confidence flag, but from what Iāve heard, even GiveDirectly would be saturated quite early by that amount of money, and not be able to distribute it. If anyone has a figure on where that threshold is (or thinks Iām wrong), Iād be interested!
Nothing super constructive to say, but two years later, I still think about this post a lot and keep coming back to it to read some specific bullets. Itās somewhat moving, but also very content-dense, one of my favorite pieces of writing/āinformation on here.
I generally find pieces about how peopleās views and drives evolve helpful on many levels, and Iād welcome more of them, even from much less senior people. I try to keep track of this for myself: itās useful for gaining insights into, for example, what actually influences my priorities over time and how contingent those drives are.
I appreciate you raising this and Iām interested to see how people will answer. However, some weak counter-considerations come to mind:
Many grants go to individual independent researchers for relatively short periods of time, requiring a much higher amount of grantmaking time per FTE than other areas (say, global health) - I realize that this is perhaps not that strong of a consideration, given that many grantmakers mainly fund organizations
Grantmakers want the field to keep growing quickly, and I assume ācreating new granteesā is time-consuming. That means that the current ratio of grantmakers to AI safety FTEs is maybe not the best metric
Abraham has mentioned the new charity briefly on the Hive Slack.
āWhat exactly do you mean by moving goalposts?ā
Quick answer: itās a reference to this paragraph.
Reading a (free) book by Magnus Vinding two years ago is what got me into effective altruism, and I now work full-time on (hopefully) improving the lives of others. Iām very excited by this book, and have loved the chapter drafts that have been released early.
Fun fact: the draft chapter āhealthy habitsā from this new book convinced me to go from a night owl to a regular bedtime person, which is the single most transformative lifestyle change Iāve ever made. Iām awake for 2 hours more per day on average, and am less sleepy.
Really appreciate this sort of cluster thinking exercise, thanks for sharing! ~20% dying from parasites intuitively shocked me upon reading, even though it checks out, given the abundance of parasites in the wild.
āI donāt think there is very much in the way of āthis forecasting happened, and now we have made demonstrably better decisions regarding this terminal goal that we care aboutā.ā
I assume some people disagree with this strong claim. One example Iāve heard was AGI timelines and their influence on AI safety field prioritiesāthough I guess one could answer that certain reports or expert opinions where disproportionately more useful than prediction markets.
On a different point, I appreciated Eli Liflandās past comment on many intellectual activities (such as grantmaking) being forms of forecasting.
Agree with the post and the bottom line, though I donāt think it justifies focusing on AI safety, because of a disanalogy.
In your analogy, we assume that when we give the money to the mugger, they either make the coin more likely to land heads, or do nothing.
Meanwhile, in AI safety, small chances of averting doom come with small chances of causing doomāand it seems most of those who work in the field consider that some respected interventions are actually increasing P(Doom). They just disagree on what those doom-increasing interventions are.
āEA isnāt drawing the same talent as it used itā
Iām surprised by this claim: do you mean itās getting fewer talented newcomers on a yearly basis than before, or that the newcoming talent is different? (different profiles /ā skillsets)
I understood it at the former claim, but that would be surprising to me. Iāve heard a few orgs saying that theyāve been able to raise the bar for who to hire in the past years, because the EA-aligned talent pool has been getting bigger, with more senior professionals and exceptionally competent people. Also, generally, that EAs are less young on average than ten years ago, and that this has benefits for hiring.
I can actually think of one example in animal welfare: the EA Animal Welfare Fund forecasts grant outcomes.
I appreciate the initiative! AI Safety is rich with disagreements, and itās nice to have an opportunity to easily map out the range of existing views. Thanks for sharing!
Fatebook has at once made me better at calibration, and provided an easy way to track what my initial beliefs were on topics before gaining more information. Iād recommend using it for sure!
This probably had my favorite āhumor styleā of this dayās posts. Particularly liked the family planning mention.
A marginal $500,000 should go to:
The backfire effects of general alignment work early on in AI safety may have outweighed the benefits; I worry that the same could be true for animal-specific alignment.
If I really believe that, I should probably want to avoid money going into animal-specific alignment at this stage, while extra 500,000$ to general alignment, while not necessarily positive, is less likely to cause major backfire events?
Solving WAS intuitively seems too niche for people to deliberately change their mind on that, but I could be wrong. After all, the Bible says that the Lion will lie down with the lamb and eat straw like the ox, so it could be that human preferences tend to come back to the idea that animal suffering can be bad even when it doesnāt depend on human actions.
I hesitated on how to frame the deep ecology thing, because I think itās entirely possible that it ends up locked in. I think my thought was something like the following. If AGI gets the values of its builders and then never modifies it, in the current race, itās unlikely that AGI would lock in deep ecology values: these donāt seem massive in Chinese labs (could be wrong), and people in AI labs in the West are not hardcore ecologists, for the most part, because of political divisions.[1]
I do agree that AI systems could populate other worlds with animals for other reasons. Logically, we canāt cover all of the reasons why systems that we donāt know anything about would do something. The same applies to future humans.
(More broadly, I deliberately under-hedged all of the above. I donāt think we have any action-guidance on AGIxAnimals)
Maybe itās good that environmentalists hate AI so much, because it ensures that people in labs are less likely to be friendly to pro-ecology views?
A few years ago, spending on animal welfare reforms in EA was so limited that running rigorous, informative studies to reduce the movementās uncertainty might have cost more than the movementās spending on the campaigns themselves. But as you mention, now that the funding bottleneck might be easing, such studies would inform much larger amounts of spending, and the expected value of information looks much higher. It thus seems like a very good time to raise an issue that would have been much harder to make progress on in the past (though as Lewis Bollardās comment notes, the challenge is still daunting).
I found the post well-written and balanced, and the discussion in the comments mostly helpful. Strongly upvoted.