Kenneth_Diao

Karma: 339

Kenneth_Diao 24 Mar 2025 5:09 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Discussion Thread: Existential Choices Debate Week
I’m going to press on point 2; I think this is self-defeating as it suggests the future will just be bad, so by this line of reasoning we shouldn’t even try to reduce extinction risks.

Kenneth_Diao 23 Mar 2025 22:59 UTC
4 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Discussion Thread: Existential Choices Debate Week
A couple of things:
Even for non-negative utilitarians, I think the marginal value of working on reducing extinction risks on its own is much less than is generally currently believed.
One crux is whether we assume that the future is likely to be high-value as it is. A core claim of those who think working on extinction risks is the most important is that we are very likely to have a high-value future. For many reasons, I am skeptical of this claim. While one may argue that we are making progress in including more beings in our moral circles, we’ve arguably still not reached a state where we’ve even reached parity in terms of welfare, particularly if we include non-human animals. To claim the future is very likely to be high-value, particularly to the extent that some anti-X-risk individuals claim, is fairly ungrounded.
As someone who is sympathetic to a form of negative utilitarianism and anti-frustrationism, I think that the lack of creation of value is generally secondary to the reduction or prevention of suffering.
Many very rich and highly influential people are very concerned about extinction risks. Aside from the problematicity of such individuals being an overwhelming source of funding for movements like EA, it would suggest that extinction risks are less neglected than suffering risks. For reference, Animal Advocacy Careers has reported that the global annual level of funding for farmed animal advocacy is <200 million USD.
I only leave 1 unit away from being the most towards valuing futures where we survive because of uncertainty that I might be highly wrong about something, whether it’s my ethical framework or about marginal value of working on extinction risks.
Some caveats:
I find some of the more extreme claims or theories from individuals and groups concerned with S-risks to be implausible, and I personally think pursuing some of these directions is not an effective use of time and resources. Ditto for X-risk claims.
I think there are deeper systemic issues (e.g. current instantiations of capitalism/neoliberalism) which are driving us towards both higher extinction risk and higher levels and expected levels of suffering. This is what I am personally driven towards focusing on, and not coincidentally, I think we need more focus of this sort.
May add more later.

Kenneth_Diao 23 Feb 2025 2:39 UTC
−1 points
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on: My Personal Story of Rejection from EA Global
Hi Constance,
I’m glad that you did end up being able to attend EAG Boston 2024, because it was lovely to have a chance to meet you!
I just want to say that I think the rejection decisions really didn’t make sense to me. After meeting you, I really felt that you were someone I looked up to as a person who follows EA principles, and I really felt like you were an important part of the EA/Animal Advocacy communities. The decision to reject you 3 times, especially after you put so much effort into the applications, took feedback, and mentioned the projects and connections you had, is just downright puzzling to me. Especially since it wasn’t actually due to capacity!
I’m upset both on your behalf that you had to go through this and on the behalf of others who may have faced similar circumstances. This sort of mismanagement and obfuscation is what I would expect from a corporate HR department, not an EA organization. Do better, EA Global.

Kenneth_Diao 19 Dec 2024 18:27 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 0
on: Transitioning from school to work is hard! Some advice on managing the self
Strong +1 agreement to all points

Kenneth_Diao 20 Nov 2024 17:43 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Dan Wahl’s comment on: Donation Election Discussion Thread
I’m not an expert, but this may be a good idea. Apparently ranked-choice voting is always vulnerable to certain types of failures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem), but these can be avoided with rated voting systems.

Kenneth_Diao 20 Nov 2024 17:39 UTC
5 points
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on: Donation Election Discussion Thread
The donation election post (meet the candidates) and the actual voting platform need to be cross-checked. I saw that Animetrics was included in the vote but not in the post, while Giving Green was included in the post and not in the vote. There may be other errors which I missed.

Kenneth_Diao 20 Nov 2024 17:37 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Donation Election Discussion Thread
I voted for mainly animal welfare/rights charities first, particularly ones which focused on highly neglected, large-scale populations like insects, shrimps, and fishes. I also voted highly for PauseAI because I believe in creating greater public pressure to slow AI progress and shifting the Overton Window, even if I am agnostic about pausing AI progress itself. After these, I voted for some of the meta/mixed organizations which I thought were especially promising, including Rethink Priorities and the Unjournal. Then I voted for mental health/resilience interventions. Then I voted for GCR initiatives. I did not vote for any human welfare interventions which I expected to cause net harm to animals. I did not vote for any other AI organizations because I did not trust that they were sufficiently decelerationist.

Kenneth_Diao 12 Oct 2024 1:25 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Joseph_Chu’s comment on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I I think this is an interesting dilemma, and I am sympathetic to some extent (even as an animal rights activist). At the heart of your concern are 3 things:
1. Being too radical risks losing popular support
2. Being too radical risks being wrong and causing more harm than good
3. How do we decide what ethical system is right or preferable without resorting to power or arbitrariness?
I think in this case, 2) is of lesser concern. It does seem like adults tend to give far more weight to humans than animals (a majority of a sample would save 1 human over 100 dogs), though interestingly children seem to be much less speciesist (Wilks et al., 2020). But I think we have good reasons to give substantial moral weight to animals. Given that animals have central nervous systems and nociceptors like we do, and given that we evolved from a long lineage of animals, we should assume that we inherited our ability to suffer from our evolutionary ancestors rather than uniquely developing it ourselves. Then there’s evidence, such as (if I remember correctly) that animals will trade off material benefits for analgesics. And I believe the scientific consensus has consistently and overwhelmingly been that animals feel pain. Animals are also in the present and the harms are concrete, so animal rights is not beset by some of the concerns that, say, long-termist causes are. So I think the probability that we will be wrong about animal rights is negligible.
I sympathize with the idea that being too radical risks losing support. I’ve definitely had that feeling myself in the past when I saw animal rights activists who preferred harder tactics, and I still have my disagreements with some of their tactics and ideas. But I’ve come to see the value in taking a bolder stance as well. From my experience (yes, on a college campus, but still), many people are surprisingly willing to engage with discussions about animal rights and about personally going vegan. Some are even thankful or later go on to join us in our efforts to advocate for animals. I think for many, it’s a matter of educating them about factory farming, confronting them with the urgency of the problem, and giving them space to reflect on their values. And even if you don’t believe in the most extreme tactics, I think it’s hard to defend not advocating for animal rights at all. Just a few centuries ago, slavery was still widely accepted and practiced, and abolitionism was a minority opinion which often received derision and even threats of harm. The work of abolitionists was nevertheless instrumental in getting society to change its attitudes and its ways such that the average person today (at least in the West) would find slavery abhorrent. Indeed, people would roundly agree that slavery is wrong even if they were told to imagine that the enslaved person’s welfare increased due to their slavery (based on a philosophy class I took years ago). To make progress toward the good, society needs people who will go against the current majority.
And this may lead to the final question of how we decide what is right and what is wrong. This I have no rigorous answer to. We are trapped between the Scylla of dogmatism and the Charybdis of relativism. Here I can only echo the point I made above. I agree that we must give some weight to the majority morality, and that to immediately jump ten steps ahead of where we are is impractical and perhaps dangerous. But to veer too far into ossification and blind traditionalism is perhaps equally dangerous. I believe we must continue the movement and the process towards greater morality as best we can, because we see how atrocious the morality of the past has been and the evidence that the morality of the present is still far from acceptable.

Kenneth_Diao 12 Oct 2024 0:41 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I know this is a debate, but one thing I want to touch on is that animal welfare and human welfare are not necessarily in conflict. I think initiatives like preventing the rise of factory farming in the developing world could be really great for both animals and humans. Animals wouldn’t have to exist in horrible conditions, and humans could (as far as I know; don’t have sources with me right now) have greater food, water, and resource security, reduced ecological/climate devastation, and reduced risk of disease, to name a few things. I think it’s important to think about ways in which we can jointly improve animal welfare and global health, because we all ultimately want to create a better world.

Kenneth_Diao 12 Oct 2024 0:31 UTC
6 points
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on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
A few reasons immediately come to mind for me:
1. There are many more animals in factory farms than humans (scale)
2. The average suffering of these animals is likely worse than the average suffering of humans (because animals are almost uniformly kept in horrendous conditions, while humans are not) (scale)
  1. My intuition is that the “moral multiplier” of human ability to suffer is not much higher than 1, if at all, for many animals. Animals have central nervous systems and nociceptors just like we do. Mammal suffering in particular might be close to par with humans, but I see no obvious reason that birds or fish are somehow less able to suffer. I also think that there’s probably some bias due to our culture’s philosophical heritage of “rational capability = moral consideration”
  2. Not an expert at this, though, so it’s just me freewheeling
3. I don’t have exact numbers with me, but I would bet that animal welfare/rights receives much less funding and attention than global health and development (neglectedness)
  1. I’ve also heard that a dollar could prevent more years of, say, chicken suffering than years of human suffering (tractability)
For me, I think the biggest crux is whether you believe animal suffering is comparable to human suffering. Animal is a broad category, but I think at least for some animals, there is all the reason to think that their suffering is comparable and little reason to think it is not. The only reason I put one notch below the maximum is to signal that I am willing to concede some slight uncertainty about this, but nowhere near enough to persuade me that animal welfare/rights is not a pressing cause.

Kenneth_Diao 30 Sep 2024 0:04 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Gabe K’s comment on: Not Just For Therapy Chatbots: The Case For Compassion In AI Moral Alignment Research
Thanks Gabe! Yes, I agree that aligning to the right values in the right way which will be widely accepted as legitimate is a pretty deep and broad problem.

Kenneth_Diao 23 Apr 2024 20:16 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Leopold Brown’s comment on: Things EA Group Organisers Need To Hear
Hi Leopold,

Thank you for the thoughtful comment! I appreciate that my experience has informed your decision-making, but in the end it’s just my experience, so take it with a grain of salt. I also appreciate your caution; I would say that I’m also a pretty cautious person (especially for an EA; I personally think we sometimes need a little more of that).

I will say that big and risky projects aren’t necessarily a bad thing; they’re just big and risky. So if you’ve carefully considered the risks and acknowledged that you’re committing to a big project that might not pay off and you have some contingency plans, then I think it’s fine to do. I just think that sometimes we get caught up in the vision and end up goodharting for bigger and more visionary projects rather than more actually effective ones (my failure mode in Spring 2023).

Best, Kenneth

Kenneth_Diao 20 Apr 2024 15:31 UTC
12 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: What should the EA community learn from the FTX / SBF disaster? An in-depth discussion with Will MacAskill on the Clearer Thinking podcast
This kind of reminds me of a psychological construct called the Militant Extremist Mindset. Roughly, the mindset is composed of three loosely related factors: proviolence, vile world, and Utopianism. The idea is that elevated levels in each of the three factors is most predictive of fanaticism I think (total) utilitarianism/strong moral realism/lack of uncertainty/visions of hedonium-filled futures fall into the utopian category. I think EA is pretty pervaded but vile world thinking, including reminders about how bad the world is/could be and cynicism about human nature. Perhaps what holds most EAs back at this point is a lack of proviolence—a lack of willingness to use violent means/cause great harm to others; I think this can be roughly summed up as “not being highly callous/malevolent”.

I think it’s important to reduce extremes of Utopianism and vile world in EA, which I feel are concerningly abundant here. Perhaps it is impossble/undesirable to completely eliminate them. But what might be most important is something that seems fairly obvious: try to screen out people who are capable of willfully causing massive harm (i.e., callous/malevolent individuals).

Based on some research I’ve done, the distribution of malevolence is relatively highly right-skewed, so screening for malevolence probably affects the fewest individuals while still being highly effective. It also seems that callousness and a willingness to harm others for instrumental gain are associated with abnormalities in more primal regions of the brain (like the Amygdala) and are highly resistant to interventions. Therefore, changing the culture is very unlikely to robustly “align” them. And intuitively, a willingness to cause harm seems to be the most crucial component, while the other components seem to be more channeling malevolence towards a more fanatical bent.

Sorry I’m kind of just rambling and hoping something useful comes out of this.

Kenneth_Diao 11 Apr 2024 13:57 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Hauke Hillebrandt’s comment on: Reimagining Malevolence: A Primer on Malevolence and Implications for EA
Great summary; thanks Hauke!

Kenneth_Diao 10 Apr 2024 13:44 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Who wants to be hired? (Feb-May 2024)
TLDR: Recent graduate with a B. S. in Psychology and certificate in Computer Science. Looking for opportunities which involve (academic) research, writing, and/or administrative/ops.

Skills & background: ~6 months doing academic research with a grant from Polaris Ventures regarding malevolence (dark personality traits). Before this I was a leader of the UW–Madison chapter of EA and President of its chapter of Effective Animal Advocacy. I also have a substack where I write mostly about EA stuff and philosophy. I have experience writing articles for both academic and lay audiences, writing newsletters, and coordinating events.
Here’s my substack: https://kennethdiao.substack.com/
I should also have a forum post out soon which will showcase more of my research aptitude
Location/remote: Would prefer remote but willing to relocate. I’m currently based in the Twin Cities, MN.

Availability & type of work: Currently, I am quite available and can start immediately. I am interested primarily in paid part-time (or full-time) opportunities, though I’m also open to volunteering.

Resume/CV/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenneth-diao-292b02168/

Email/contact: kenneth.diao@outlook.com

Other notes: My principal cause areas are animal advocacy and suffering reduction, though I’m also interested in learning more about AI governance. My fuzzy vision for my ultimate role is that it involves doing writing and research which is close enough to the public and policy world to be grounded and have a concrete impact. I’m hoping the next couple of roles are able to help me test my fit and develop aptitudes/capital for reaching that eventual stage.

Questions:
- Is it generally effective to go into academia?
  - Am I a good fit for an academic environment?
- How should timelines (not) impact my decisions?
- How effective is writing for public audiences?
- How can I become a researcher who impacts policy (e.g., working at a think tank)? Do I need a policy or law degree?
Thanks everyone!

Kenneth_Diao 9 Apr 2024 21:43 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 2
on: Why hasn’t EA done an SBF investigation and postmortem?
Hi Rob,
Thank you for writing this post. I am also highly disappointed that no institutional post-mortem has been conducted, so I’m glad that you’re speaking out about it. Now that the verdict has been officially handed down to SBF, there’s no excuse for there not to be an investigation anymore.
Maybe somehow there are good excuses (and yes, they are excuses) for why a formal investigation has not taken place. But no matter how florid or sophisticated they are, they won’t change my mind that a public investigation should take place. Pretty much no matter what, the reputation of the core EA leadership is going to take a hit if no public and formal investigation is carried out, at least in my eyes.
Regarding comments about psychopathy/sociopathy: I recently did a bunch of research on malevolence, so I feel confident in speaking on the subject. The term “sociopathy” seems to be the less well-defined term, so I would somewhat advise against using it, at least until greater clarity arises. However, psychopathy is a fairly established construct in the literature with a few widely-used instruments from the academy, so if you’re choosing between using psychopathy or sociopathy, I would say use psychopathy. But even psychopathy is a pretty confused term because it captures so many different characteristics (including callousness, grandiosity, impulsivity, and criminality) which don’t necessarily coincide. My opinion is that the cleanest way of talking about all this is to list out more specific and well-defined traits, such as callousness.
But, and I stress this, just because he wasn’t a violent criminal doesn’t prove he was a good, compassionate person. Neuroscientific evidence suggests that deficiencies in empathy/caring for others have distinct origins from violent or socially unacceptable behavioral expressions. Indeed, the main distinguishing point between psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is that psychopathy has a component that does not theoretically relate to violent or socially unacceptable behavioral expressions (according to an authority on Psychopathy). It would be most adaptive for a person to be able to abide by the most explicit and universal social norms (e.g., don’t kill people) but still do harm in covert, neutral, or even socially desirable ways (e.g., being the CEO of a giant meat company). This is the type of malevolent person I expect SBF is, if he indeed is malevolent.
I also intend to publish a post on this topic, but I thought I’d clarify here since I saw a discussion regarding sociopathy in the comments.

Kenneth_Diao 29 Nov 2023 16:58 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Brian_Tomasik’s comment on: My Thoughts On Suffering
Hi Brian,
I’m honored that you read my article and thought it was valuable!
For the record, I also think that it’s good to know the truth. Maybe I wish it wasn’t necessary for us to know about these things, but I think it is necessary, and I very much prefer knowing about something and thus being able to act in accordance to that knowledge than not knowing about it. So yeah, don’t let my adverse reaction fool you; I love your work and admire you as a person.
Regarding love and hatred, the points you brought up do make me think. I try to always keep an evolutionary perspective in mind; that is, I tend to assume something is adaptive, especially if it’s survived across big time. So I think that, at least in certain environments, things like the dark tetrad traits (narcissism, machiavellianism, psychopathy, sadism) are adaptive even on a group level; maybe they reach some kind of local maximum of adaptiveness. My hope is that there is a better way to retain the adaptive behavioral manifestations of these traits while avoiding the volatile and maladaptive aspects of these traits, and my belief is that we can approach this by having more correct motivations. Like I really idealise the approaches of people like Gandhi and MLK who recognised the wrongness of the status quo while also trying to create positive change with love and peace; I believe we need more of that. That being said, I take your point that darkness and hate can lead to love/reduction in hatred, and that this may always be true, especially in our non-ideal world.

Kenneth_Diao 29 Nov 2023 16:34 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Alfredo Parra 🔸’s comment on: My Thoughts On Suffering
Hi Alfredo, thanks for reading and suggesting those articles! I’ve skimmed the logarithmic scales article and for sure find that terrifying and depressing. All the more reason to lighten that heavy tail!

Kenneth_Diao 22 Nov 2023 15:11 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: SummaryBot’s comment on: My Thoughts On Suffering
Great TL;DR

Kenneth_Diao 25 Aug 2023 21:46 UTC
7 points
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on: A selection of some writings and considerations on the cause of artificial sentience
Thank you for writing about this. I am definitely a person whose concerns about AI are primarily about the massive suffering they might cause, especially when it comes to already-marginal entities or potential entities like non-human animals or digital minds.
I’ll note beforehand that I’m suffering-focused, but I’ll also note that I think even a regular utilitarian using EV reasoning could come to the same conclusions as I do.
I’m curious as to why this isn’t a greater focus in the AI Safety community. At least from my vantage point and recollection, over 90% of the people who talk about AI Safety focus exclusively on the threat AI poses to the continued existence of humanity. If they elaborate at all on what’s at stake in the far future, they emphasize the potential good that could come from having massive populations that are in immense states of bliss, which could be destroyed if we are destroyed (again this is my experience).
I think this rests on the assumption that there is a high likelihood (let’s say >90% confidence) that humanity will become a force of net good in the long term future should it survive to see that. I think that, at the very least, this crux should be tested more than it currently is. I would argue that humanity of the current day is almost certainly (>99% confidence) net harmful (even factory farming alone is an immense harm that it’s hard to argue any good humans do outweighs). I would also argue with similar confidence that humanity’s net impact was consistently negative at least from the agricultural revolution onward (mistreatment/exploitation of non-human animals, slavery, war to name a few major things). Suffice it to say that I would be very worried if an AGI was locked-in with the values of a randomly selected person today (I know some AGI timelines are quite short), or even a randomly selected person 100 years from now (assuming we survive that long), especially if they decide to keep us alive. I can’t give an estimate for how confident I am that humanity’s continued existence with AGI would be a good/bad thing. However, I agree that the suffering risk from AGI is not emphasized proportional to its potential expected consequence, and I’m curious to hear EA/AI Safety perspectives regarding this topic.
I’ll also quickly throw in the idea of humans deliberately creating malicious AGI with the intention of serving their own ends, which is an idea I’ve heard around a few times but know practically nothing about. Though I will say that I think the potential for such a scenario to arise and then become an S-risk is non-negligible (though I can’t really give a good estimate or back it with anything more than intuition).