I’m a rising Junior at a liberal arts school, a proud donor of Sentient Futures, and an aspirant for an effectively altruistic life’s work.
I also work for New Sapience, a startup trying to redesign AI in a way that lets us know what’s going on under the hood, with some other benefits, as well.
I couldn’t get the free Claude to make one that works, and don’t really care about this enough to pursue it further, at least for now. Thank you for the suggestion, though! 😁
Has the forum team considered making a settings option to hide vote counts? The option to hide agree/disagree and reaction counts are something I would also appreciate.
I stayed away from this forum for over a year because of it being structured like Reddit, and have also heard concerns about vote counts anywhere influencing bias, as well as issues with like and dislike buttons in general. This post on LessWrong makes a more ambitious case for this, though I’m not campaigning here for any change affecting all users.
I understand the voting system is a necessary evil for maintaining the quality of what’s read on the forum, and do think that users here are more responsible about vote count vs. agree count, as well as voicing why one personally disagrees with something, than is commonplace on Reddit. I just think it would be great for us not interested in rating and numbers in discourse to be able to opt out of seeing and indeed being influenced by them.
I do appreciate the removal of the downvote button on the front and user pages as well as the options already here for hiding usernames. Thank you for reading and considering all this! 👍
You are off to a whirlwind start with this blog! You think carefully about problem that evidently has a jackpot of leverage to solve, run a very revealing study from which you extract plenty of great data from 98 days of meals, and make a steel case for why LLM companies should take this whole situation very seriously. The argument that animal-heavy diet recommendations are a misalignment with Claude’s constitution ties all the other great arguments together wonderfully and with force, and even if some other company were only interested in preventing gender stereotypes, they have plenty of reason now to put your findings to work, as well. This is a lot of excellent effort gathering evidence and rationale that I imagine can, and hopefully will, make fixing these staggeringly influential models plenty easier. I just very much hope they see your great work and proposition! 🐔️
(Also the link just now stopped working, sadly)
Like the stuff you write about in general, Kat Woods, this post speaks to me poignantly—worth coming back to after months, no doubt. It feels like some recognition for the number one issue that pulls me back from working with anyone I don’t know on anything serious: misanthropy.
In a way, I’ve quit EA without realizing it, dreading and staying away from it more often than I perhaps have to, because I think of this community as a monolith that I do pretty much dislike. It’s like those who’ve spoken kindly to and encouraged me, not to mention those good-natured people on my podcasts and blogs, aren’t even part of that movement they devote their careers to.
Pleasant or otherwise, the only EAs I’ve ever interacted with are online avatars. I’ve stayed away from the forum for years because it’s structured and sometimes converses like Reddit. It’s hard to imagine that there are upvotes hidden in those unjustly negative vote counts, that there are people here who take issue with rudeness, as well, and may well be controlling an avatar here out of compromise, not agreeing with all the wickedness I ascribe to the monolith. Seeing some names here that I’m confident are good people is reason not to let bad apples spoil a bunch.
You put forth a good alternative, that this community is indeed made of individuals; and it’s a tough pill to swallow, but possibly one which loads of good impact depends on. Maybe even some of those less likable ones would indeed be likable if I got to know them, I just hope they would be so to those they speak brashly towards. We’re all here to achieve a common goal, first and foremost. 🍎
This may be just one of those 10^20 birth stories happening everywhere, every year, but it’s no less a tremendously important one. I’m touched by these connections you’ve made about suffering in all the world from the vivid experience of your own child, with insights to come away with and bring to us as you have.
It gives me a clearer picture of what r-strategist babies are going through all the time, and sparks some interest and perhaps future reading on the science of consciousness—so little do we yet know about this immensely important mystery.
I wish you, your wife, and your rising pride and joy of one year and counting tonight’s very best. May they be your muses in freeing so much of the world from agony, and may life go well for you all.
Nice to meet you, too, Oli, welcome back! I love this chill and honest attitude you have going on; you seem like someone great to have around, and certainly more thoughtful and well-read in your fields than I. As I understand, such pleasant character and great thought is where the magic happens, in EA and probably anything. I hope you find everything you want to here and more. Wishing you well from Maryland USA to UK! 👋
The color argument, especially, seems excellent, if only for how much it could benefit flies and humans both, and perhaps is something humans would want. It seems like a victory for both humans and animals far outside most humans’ moral circle. I’m not an expert, but I figure this victory would hinge on whether warmly-colored light is healthier for humans, and whether humans prefer warm light over white light.
I can’t imagine when our ancestors would’ve ever encountered white light at times where artificial light is needed, only the warm light of campfires. Aside from that, I prefer to be around warm light over white light always, and have only heard complaints about white light and praise of warm light. I could see opinion research on this being instrumental.
I could see us partnering with public health and other efforts far mightier than EA; even those who care nothing about flies could be doing something great for billions of flies, and we could support the effort. Thank you for proposing this, for both the flies and a more pleasant nighttime for me. 💡🪰🔥
I quite appreciate your compassion for all the morally scrupulous, and this new lens that the money and work I’ve been able to put in may well amount to something, something more meaningful than I ever care to recognize. It’s a bit of a throwback to being called an “essential worker” during COVID, working extra hours and hating it, yet always having such nice things said to me by friends, family, and strangers to keep in mind through it all.
Who would’ve thought that after discovering how to do way more for good causes than we thought possible, many of us would be more worried about not doing enough? I’m indeed not doing enough, because nobody is. If there was someone doing enough, factory farms wouldn’t exist, neither would diseases, nor any other suffering in the world, preventable or otherwise; just one instance of it is plenty horrible on it’s own.
The problems are bigger than we can comprehend, but so is the progress just a little care makes on solving them, let alone what sustained charitable action by treating ourselves nicely brings about. 🌠
For any message worthy enough to incorporate into our lives, we should treat it not as law, but as a nudge. An inspiration. A north star.
Thank you for sharing. I love me some survey oppurtunities, a super easy way for a EA noob like me to be useful. This is a very interesting and important-seeming topic, too; any advance in our knowledge and clarity about it is a welcome sight.
Among other things, the natural-atrocity take on zombies is what got me in love with the TV series; depressed by them but interested in this new aesthetic of dangerous nature globally killing human civilization, think overgrown moss on broken subways. I can indeed see things like it motivating EA people to prevent such things, very much involved with visions of such a world. 🪸
I like this. It makes me think of how these people working in typical EA jobs wouldn’t be doing much at all without the people working in food, water, health, transportation, and other stuff that makes life livable, work workable; and if the number of those support workers suddenly fell to the number of direct workers, EA recruiters would focus on nothing but restoring the number of farmers, bus drivers, and healthy-world doctors. 💌
Yes, humanity in EA is always good. The monthly (perhaps even weekly) question idea sounds brilliant, and a great way to get people easily engaged; especially the nonprofessionals like me, swinging by the forum on my short downtime, not feeling up to reading entire long posts, but happy to pass the time with prompted comments.
Nice post! I get the impression that the ideal is to find something you always consider to be work but is without the unbearably negative aspects, like losing money, and maybe a little bit of what you like in it.
I was really depressed working as a janitor for a grocery store: it was work, often there was lots to do quickly without enough staff, and cleaning full-time was all I did, most of which I dreaded.
Loading packages for FedEx, on the other hand, seemed like the sweet spot for blue-collar jobs: it was work, at times lots to do quickly without enough staff, but my managers treated me with respect, I got to socialize a little on the job, and even do some medium-intensity workout.
I never went to work for free. I’d rather do a short workout and chill out than load for as long as I did, but I’d also rather load than clean, any day.
I appreciate you making this post; it’s plentiful with research and comprehensive sharing. Most importantly, it posits an idea most vegans don’t want to hear while coming from someone who, as much as them, cares about the animals and realizes the horror. In a world where vegan advocacy hasn’t stopped meat consumption from doubling on all continents since 1990, animal welfare people questioning animal welfare ideas, whatever they be, is crucial to the movement going anywhere.
I wish, for your sake, I could say I was fully convinced I should eat meat, but you have won me over in a few ways. This post did get me to double down on my nutrition, now taking a multivitamin that satisfies way more than just my B12 need. The studies you present also got me more open to the idea that a diet with some animal consumption, because the world sucks, is optimal for human health. In a world where moral progress may not grow infinitely upward, where humans may not only continue to trounce on others for their own smaller benefit but expand such endeavors, considering tough-to-face facts like vegan health deficiencies is crucial to making a world without factory farms still possible: directing greater research into the study of nutrition, alternative proteins, and whatever else, rather than telling people the problems they have with going vegan don’t exist.
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. 💡
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. 👍
I’m back, because you deserve big praise for these three posts on biocomputing that are excellent: excellent because of how much work you’ve put into making this neglected, large-scale, and tractable problem comprehensive to all who should know about it; and excellent because how much that work pays off in the quality of your writing, enough to get me on a deep dive into this stuff after being introduced to it a while back by you.
I’m a new hire at a novel AI startup trying to, among other problems, solve that same issue of energy efficiency that the brain companies are trying to justify their work with, only without brain matter. I have a lot of good information about biocomputing to share with my cohorts now, which might make them important allies if New Sapience ever takes off like we dream of. Just to name a few brilliant, important points you’ve given us, there’s this from the first post:
this from the second post (my most used):
and now this here from the third post:
You’ve earned this cause area an unusually enthusiastic watcher in me, an ally in trying to get this stuff shut down before it scales—and as is evident by how much attention these posts got, likely a good amount of others, even if we’re far from the ultimate goal. I’m an undergraduate pursuing a not-too-relevant degree, but don’t let that stop you if you think there’s some opportunity for action worth telling me (or better yet, all of us) about. Thank you again. 🧠