Former Reliability Engineer with expertise in data analysis, facilitation, incident investigation, technical writing, and more. Currently working with the Communications team at MIRI. Former Teaching Fellow and current facilitator at BlueDot Impact. I volunteer with AI Safety Quest, giving Navigation Calls and running the MAGIS mentorship program.
Joe Rogero
Karma: 192
Conditional on insects having conscious experiences, I’d agree with you. I’m not convinced they do, and I don’t find stimulus-response alone to be sufficient for giving a creature nonzero moral weight. Plenty of people may disagree with me on that, though, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone attempt a diet substitute that they think causes more harm.
Even an obligate omnivore can try to eat less meat
I enjoyed this post. Short and to the point.
I’d like to add that the stakes are high enough to justify pushing resources into every angle we might reasonably have on the problem. Even if foundational research has only a sliver of a chance of impacting future alignment, that sliver contains quite a lot of value. And I do think it’s in fact quite a bit more than a sliver.
Great advice, Yonatan! This is actually baked into the original plan—build a minimum viable product, find some users, find the sticking points, iterate and improve. “Build a feedback form” is on the to-do list, and I’m always open to suggestions for better design and sharing.
Also, honestly, even if nobody else benefits from this, I’ll be glad to have it available. Initially the thing that drew me to David’s post was my frustration at not knowing where to look for quick-win opportunities to benefit EA. I figured someone had done something like what I wanted, and I was delighted to find that someone did. Even if it completely flops, I won’t regret the time spent collecting and organizing project ideas, and I’ll probably keep using the list as a reference for years.
Thank you for your suggestions! I’ve added them to the table. I’ll be in touch about editing shortly.
Announcing the EA Project Ideas Database
I don’t suppose there’s a way to tag shortforms with this?
Joe Rogero’s Quick takes
An anecdote I sometimes share: during my undergraduate college search, I experienced what you would call “polarizing techniques” at one university and their antithesis at another. I had previously attended a summer camp at a university in my home state; in my senior year of high school, they invited me back for a short seminar and proceeded to spend an hour talking about how wonderful they are, how privileged I would be to attend, how much of an honor it was to be invited to join [insert pithy university collective name]. They were, in fact, a decent school. They were also my backup option. Big fish, small pond.
I attended a different university’s program not long after. The program director’s welcome speech, by contrast, said in essence “we want you here, we think we’d be good for you, but you should go to the school that will bring out the best in you; if you think that’s not us, go elsewhere with our blessing.”
I attended the second school and never regretted it. While my decision was pretty overdetermined, the stark contrast between the pushy, snobbish diatribe at the first school and the encouraging, welcoming, confident-but-not-arrogant tone at the second was a definite influence.
Respect your audience, and they respect you back.
How hard do you suppose it might be to use an AI to scrub the comments and generate something like this? It may be worth doing manually for some threads, even, but it’s easier to get people to adopt if the debate already exists and only needs tweaking. There may even already exist software that accepts text as input and outputs a Kialo-like debate map (thank you for alerting me that Kialo exists, it’s neat).
Hello! I have, and am willing to offer to EA Forum members, the following generalist skills:
Facilitation. Organize and run a meeting, take notes, email follow-ups and reminders, whatever you need. I don’t need to be an expert in the topic, I don’t need to personally know the participants. I do need a clear picture of the meeting’s purpose and what contributions you’re hoping to elicit from the participants.
Technical writing. More specifically, editing and proofreading, which don’t require I fully understand the subject matter. I am a human Hemingway Editor. I have been known to cut a third of the text out of a corporate document while retaining all relevant information to the owner’s satisfaction. I viciously stamp out typos.
Presentation review and speech coaching. I used to be terrified of public speaking. I still am, but now I’m pretty good at it anyway. I have given prepared and impromptu talks to audiences of dozens-to-hundreds and I have coached speakers giving company TED talks to thousands. A friend who reached out to me for input said my feedback was “exceedingly helpful”. If you plan to give a talk and want feedback on your content, slides, or technique, I would be delighted to advise.
I am willing to take one-off or recurring requests. I reserve the right to start charging if this starts taking up more than a couple hours a week, but for now I’m volunteering my time and the first consult will always be free (so you can gauge my awesomeness for yourself).
I literally had the same thought about four days ago, followed by “I bet someone already tried this.” I’m pleased to learn someone did. Happy to volunteer as a project manager and I’ll probably want to do one or more of these myself, they look like good learning experiences.
The main challenge seems to be spreading the word, convincing lots of groups to use the same tool (and integrating any existing tools).
Thanks, Fai! I’m still on the fence about this, but assuming it were true—
what does the evidence look like for suffering? It seems like it might be better to eat an animal that’s lived a relatively normal life compared to e.g. farmed chickens. I knowsomefish farms can get pretty bad but how common is that?Edit: Pete’s comment had a useful source here.I’m curious what evidence convinced you about fish. So far I haven’t seen much on the subject of consciousness specifically, though I have seen some arguments around pain nerves and aversive stimuli.