Thanks everyone for the constructive feedback. I apologize for two things: 1) misdirecting my anger towards the big donors when it was really directed at the Silicon Valley culture as a whole, and 2) not communicating myself as productively and effectively as I should have. I’ve made changes based on that and welcome further feedback and thoughts.
Kenneth_Diao
Karma: 392
Thank you for your feedback. I agree that my anger was aimed at the wrong target and not communicated well. I’ve made changes which hopefully clarify things a little.
One thing I should have done was to distinguish long shots from what I consider to be quixotic quests. Working on wild animal welfare or insect welfare is a long shot that I wholeheartedly support. Paying millions for a superbowl commercial is a quixotic quest. Of course, there’s disagreement on what falls into one or the other, but what my criticism is primarily aimed at is things that are quixotic quests or bordering on quixotic.
This is a fair criticism. I wasn’t clear that my negativity is directed towards the Silicon Valley/limited liability culture in general, and that these IPOs are just a manifestation of that.
This makes sense to me, and I recognize it would be harder than just tossing money onto the streets. The point I was trying to make is that the bar is pretty high, and the vibes I’m getting are that we are far short of that bar at the moment.
Argh sorry again; I thought I’d pressed the publish changes button. Hopefully now it’s updated!
Hi Bruce,
Thanks for reading my post!
My apologies for using you as an example of disillusionment—I was going off a conversation I had with an acquaintance who talked with you once, and that probably led to me hearing something out of context. I will edit the article to reflect that.
I still stand by my position that it’s possible (though I don’t know how likely) for activism and moral suasion to bring about a moral revolution on their own, and the rest of the forum can fight me on that. But I also absolutely think alternative proteins are a great lever for change and that we should use everything we can to bring about the change we want to see. As Frederick Douglass said, men in earnest don’t fight with one hand when they might fight with two.
I look forward to reading your new book as well! And thank you for all the work that you’ve done; it is an inspiration to me and I’m sure to many others :)
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.
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.
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.
Strong +1 agreement to all points
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.
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.
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.
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:
Being too radical risks losing popular support
Being too radical risks being wrong and causing more harm than good
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.
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.
A few reasons immediately come to mind for me:
There are many more animals in factory farms than humans (scale)
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)
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”
Not an expert at this, though, so it’s just me freewheeling
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
To EAs and AI safety people I would especially emphasize the point that we are underestimating the need for communicating with and involving the public. I think getting massive popular buy-in is critical for passing and enforcing the kind of robust AI governance legislation that would significantly buy time and reduce x-risk. The anger at data centers shows the potential energy is there, but whether and how that energy translates into legislative accomplishments probably depends heavily on whether and how AI safety people are in touch with the rest of America and the world.
This applies even/especially to race dynamics; e.g., achievements in nuclear deescalation were driven substantially by popular movements within the respective blocs.
Disclosure: I’m a member of PAISC, but my opinions are my own.