I’m a Sophomore at a liberal arts school, and I feel like EA is something I should keep an eye on.
K.F. Martin
Karma: 43
It makes enough sense for you to disagree with it.
Thank you for this, both points are great food for thought! Oscar Horta convinced me that care for farmed animals—closer to us, without the public worry of messing with nature—is well condusive to advancing care for wild animals. Bruce Friedrich, also, brought up a point I think a lot about; that people more easily care about animals when they aren’t eating meat, having to justify it, which I infer also leads into concern for wild animals.
I heard this in their respective Morality is Hard and 80,000 Hours interviews.
“Not enough is being done, somebody has to do it, and it may as well be us.” That’s what you all at Sentient Futures say and do about the future of all conscous beings at the coming of superintelligence, something I wouldn’t have found hope in without the out-of-the-box thinking you’ve done, to spare concious beings by numbers I’d seem crazy to mention.
The results indeed seem bleak, but I’m glad someone’s done the incredibly in-depth forecasting to foster a strategy against such scary things; thanks to you all and others scattered about, we’re not living in a world where nobody has thought about this, let alone worked on it. You gathered the insight and put in the effort to so thoroughly factor in not two, but ten groups of key players who are soon to be shaping the future. The deep knowledge of several differing yet relevant studies is phenomenal to see in the effort for animals.
A particularly scary insight was the idea animal advocates could be branded as terrorists, something important I hadn’t thought of before. As for the thing you were cleverest to factor in with this, I can’t pick an answer. It could be the spread of Chinese tech to Africa, an astute geopolitical observation, with oppurtune eyes to where development is happening fast. Perhaps it’s the inclusion of not-all-bad-intentioned motivations that bring Golden Wing into existence, something I feel will be glossed over by us advocates so used to evil from factory farming expansion. Maybe it’s the consideration that the EU and UK could position itself as “the last bastion of liberal democracy” in a world where the far right becomes more of a norm in the US. The whole project is made of clever.
You’ve gone above and beyond with this extensively-considered trial to provide much information that we’ll need. Thank you, on behalf of everyone you spare, for everything you do. 🐔
Aah, thank you! The in-depth views in this course, of specific problems any individual animal will go through, seem to be what I was looking for. 👍
Thank you for sharing! Being new to this stuff, I was just about to look for an unsugarcoated documentary to help me grasp the severity of suffering in the wild and importance of this issue.
Both very good points: the ick factor seems to be an important advantage to our effort, and for us early birds to be here before it’s a political contest, or a livelihood, is indeed another opportunity. 👍
As somewhat of an amateur, it’s good to hear I’m on the right track taking expected value as a core concept of EA, factoring it in with stuff daily. I’m reassured when I read the experts lend the same level of credence to it: a way of doing things that likely does an astronomical amount of good. Thank you for another contribution of great, well-written wisdom, Bentham! 🦐
This is an excellent post. I went into this with a very cursory understanding of biocomputing, and by the end of it, am convinced as strongly as I’m intended to be of what you seek to make happen. I understand clearly and agree that we’re at a very opportune time to enact a ban on most biocomputing, that a ban is very reasonable, and that it is quite possible.
In a world where animal agriculture was some novel and experimental concept in our modern society, it seems likely that the public, knowing what it would entail, would easily be on board with a ban before it became mainstream.
The consideration you give to concerns of framing risk and the uncertainty of moral value at this current stage shows that you’ve thought this stuff through very deeply and very professionally, and does well to quell the little uncertainty I had going in. The two arguments that convinced me most are those on setting an extensive precedent and the success of early action on other scientific issues.
Very nice work! I wish you great success in this endeavor you are already working hard for, and thank you on behalf of the conscious agents this effort may well save. 🧠
Just some idiomatic language for animal rights efforts in effective altruism. 😁
This solid post of yours gets me thinking, and clears up a lot of the confusion I’ve had about how AI can negatively impact animals, and humans, too. I thought it was a weird topic to bring up the first time I’ve heard about it, but have been giving it credence the more I’ve seen the experts do so, and now I have some comprehensive reasons as to why this intersection may be very important to keep an eye on.
It’s some valuable food for thought for the ever-multiplied situation of animals in longtermism, which has seemed very important to get into as I join the corps to do what we can for them. Thank you much for your contribution to early-stage learners like me here, and for keeping most of the world in mind while working to protect the future.
I’ve wondered about this, so thank you for thinking this up and calculating! Considering how I did about as much work this past week to get a $3 monthly subscription cancelled, this is kind of genius.
This is a very enlightening and clever-to-make post: billions annually for a species I’d never even thought about giving special attention to, or thought about much at all, three years in amateur EA and nine in veganism.
For what it’s worth, I could see them being more “personally relatable” than fish, about on the level of chickens, even. I’ve seen fellow zoomers walk around with frog-themed stuff like beanies, hoodies, and backpacks, which seems important when assessing tractability.
This bug stepping thing was where it all began for my scrupulosity problems, walking home from work days after my bestie had died, which have been the biggest and deadliest challenges of my life since that evening in 2018, and what led me to EA. I didn’t know the science on bugs, still barely do, but knew they seemed alot like animals such as you and I and those cows and chickens we choose not to eat because they are conscious.
Being compassionate in this way—unflinching about when consciousness is consciousness and not abandoning the idea that compassion is respect for the conscious experience—it’s orders of magnitude harder than most of the world somehow accepts it to be. It’d be absolutely mercliess for anyone not to be considered a “good person” anymore when they watch the goalposts for being a “good person” move away so drastically.
I like how you quite compassionately acknowledge this, speaking of crippling intensity and a reasonable line, while all the while being very much open to the idea for a gentler ethic to insects, because you’re unflinching like that. We might as well be if we have a goal of reducing pain in any species, even when perfection is nowhere near possible. It’s the good that comes out of facing such horrifying truth. 🪲
Thank you for taking on this debate, Tobias. Like our target audience in creating not a vegan community, but a vegan world, I share very personal frustration with the guilt and shame approach; not in spite of me wanting the same “total abolition” which the anti-welfarists and anti-incrementalists do, but because I want it. I can see why Bashir is convinced by the anecdotes he’s able to tell, and it reveals to me why science and studies, if done well, is the collection of many helpful anecdotes from a wide and varying population to inform how to work toward everyone’s goal: a world without factory farming that stays without factory farming.
Bruce Friedrich convinced me that vegan activism as it’s been for the past fifty years isn’t working and sent me down the road of meat alternatives as a solution. I’ve been having trouble doing anything to advance it now, so I’ve been looking into dietary incrementalism as another solution to learn about alongside it, which is why I watched the debate. It seems up to each of us to be honest with ourselves about what we’ve tried, how well it’s working, and what other options we have to work toward our goal that hasn’t changed.
On behalf of the voiceless animals, thank you for everything that you do. I’ll remember your book in case I decide to explore reducitarian advocacy further.
I like this sentiment. It’s good to care about the one, I feel, and to take oppurtunities to help many because they’re all just like that one, with suffering and joy that’s worth caring about, even alone.
Thank you for the thoughtful insight! It’s always astounded me how expertly some multilinguals on the internet speak English, sometimes as fluently as myself, despite it being not being their “first language”, like my Israeli friend on Telegram who’s never been to an Anglophone place yet I talk to like we’ve been neighbors for a decade. It’s interesting, and good news, to hear one such wizard endorse Anki and the study of linguistics and grammar as part of their optimal path, and place value on artificial immersion, as I’m still doing the phone language-switchy thing.
For four months last year I did over half of Russian Babbel, joined two Discord servers, played some translated games, and started thinking what I could in Russian. Forming sentences on the spot is still nigh-impossible, but reading and listening is easier. Indeed, the German I learned six years ago comes a whole lot more naturally for input and output still. It must be is those long words in a new script, like представляющий, and their manifold of conjugations.
A very interesting post that came just in time for my resolution in 2024, which will be my first year in college. My main worry has been how much I’ll have to read, going into the “Great Books” cirriculum; but knowing this post, as well as what a pomodoro timer is, gives me reason to be confident I may well remember years from now. Thank you much for writing this, and Dark Lady watch over you! 😁
Either it’ll be recieved well, or you get free criticism on your ideas, or a blend of the two.
A tough pill for super-sensitives like me to swallow, but I can see it as an exceptionally powerful one. I surely sympathize with OP on the fear of being downvoted—it’s what kept me away from this site for months and from Reddit entirely—but valid criticism on many occasions has influenced me for the better, even if I’m scornful of the moments. Maybe my hurt with being wrong will lessen someday or maybe not, but knowing why can serve me well in the end, I can admit that.
I’m glad I found this. It’s incredibly moving, so thoughtfully, artfully composed, and as a new member to the forum I feel I’m in the right place here, reading about the foundations of why empathy and kindness are worth it, not just how it’s applied on a grand scale. It presents alone the fearsome reality of suffering, with an implied silver lining that whatever means we have to mitigate it is of immense value, even if all we can do is think to ourselves “I don’t want that.” It conveys better than any other what Effective Altruism means to me, why I’ve delved deep into it these past eight months, and why I let this school of thought direct my future plans, hopefully for decades to come.
Six months later, this is definitely the most influential and enlightening among the topic-focused/research-centered posts I’ve read here. I’m far too amateur to take anything with total certainty, so don’t worry about that. The post did make me switch from being super confident in cultivated meat as the solution to very skeptical, and got me taking the development of plant-based meat more seriously. I still see cultivated meat being promoted as a solution, so I’m still figuring out what to think about it; I don’t need much of an opinion at the moment, being an undergrad student with nothing to do but learn and give feedback on what I read. 🍔
Most of all, this post got me to face the fact that working in EA involves loads of 4D chess: nothing in this world is certain, the effectiveness of large-scale actions are determined by a world of factors more numerous than can be kept track of, and backfiring is something, sadly, to keep an eye out for. It’s turned EA, to me, from the imperative to seize golden oppurtunities of doing good, to the choice of trying to doing good, not because I’m sure it will work, but because I believe something has to be done. Thank you for your brilliant insight, and for getting me think with more clear realism, expanding my world. 💡