Managing Director at Hive. Effective Altruism and Animal Advocacy Community Builder, experience in national, local and cause-area specific community building. Amateur Philosopher, particularly keen on moral philosophy.
Kevin Xia šø
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Great question, thank you for working on this. An inter-cause-prio-crux that I have been wondering about is something along the lines of:
āHow likely is it that a world where AI goes well for humans also goes well for other sentient beings?ā
It could probably be much more precise and nuanced, but specifically, I would want to assess whether ātrying to make AI go well for all sentient beingsā is marginally better supported through directly related work (e.g., AIxAnimals work) or through conventional AI safety measuresāthe latter of which would be supported if, e.g., making AI go well for humans will inevitably or is necessary to make sure that AI goes well for all. Although if it is necessary, it would depend further on how likely AI will go well for humans and such; but I think a general assessment of AI futures that go well for humans would be a great and useful starting point for me.
I also think various explicit estimates of how neglected exactly a (sub-)cause area is (e.g., in FTE or total funding) would greatly inform some inter-cause-prio questions I have been wondering aboutāassuming that explicit marginal cost-effectiveness estimates arenāt really possible, this seems like the most common proxy I refer to that I am missing solid numbers on.
Super interesting read, thanks for writing this! I have been thinking a bit about the US and China in an AI race and was wondering whether I could get your thoughts on two things I have been unsure about:
1) Can we expect the US to remain a liberal democracy once it develops AGI? (I think I first saw this point brought up in a comment here), especially given recent concerns around democratic backsliding? (And if we canāt, would AGI under the US still be better?)
2) On animal welfare specifically, Iām wondering whether the very pragmatic, techno-optimistic, efficiency stance of China could make a pivot to alternative proteins (assuming they are an ultimately more efficient product) more likely than in the US, where alt-proteins might be more of a politically charged topic?
I donāt have strong opinions on either, but these two points first nudged me to be significantly less confident in my prior preference for the US in this discussion.
Interestingly, Claudeās numbers would actually suggest that BOAS is a higher EV decision (for some reason, it appears to double-count the risk; I.e., it took the EV which takes 60% failure into account and multiplied it again by 0.4).
Not that anyone here should (or would) make these decisions based on unchecked Claude BOTECs anyway; just found it to be an interesting flaw.
Always!
Just wanted to drop by and say that I have been really enjoying this sequence, and I deeply resonate with this idea of divine discontent!
I would like to add to this and applaud Vasco for being such a good sport about this, sharing the draft with me in advance and engaging in an unusually civil and productive back and forth with me to clear up misunderstandings, including nitpicky nuances and issues that arose from my own miscommunication. To anyone who would like to share feedback or ways to improve our community guidelines, but prefers no to do so publicly, you can also reach me/āus per dm here on the Forum/āE-mail/āSlack, and we have an anonymous form! Although we do generally think that a public discussion here could be valuable for other community spaces as well. I would also like toādespite thisāthank you, Vasco, for being a valued community member and for your exceptional moral seriousness/ācommitment to taking ideas seriously and care.
Strong agree! I also often get asked āwhy push careers, if the movement is primarily funding constrainedā - itās almost as though there is a bit of a misconception around the idea that only non profit work is a ācareer that helps animalsā and I think part of this is that there is no good guide on making an impact in adjacent areas (outside of E2G perhaps). Iām very excited to see the research you are producing!
Effektiv Spenden has donation vouchers that seem roughly in line with what you are thinking of!
Great post, thanks for looking into this! I previously noted four different types of interventions one might want to prioritize given AIxAnimals; Iād love to hear your thoughts on the implications on this intersection from a broader, zoomed out perspective!
I found this post deeply and wonderfully relatable, especially the section on why you didnāt pursue Philosophy! :)
I am sure someone has mentioned this before, butā¦
For the longest time, and to a certain extent still, I have found myself deeply blocked from publicly sharing anything that wasnāt significantly original. Whenever I have found an idea existing anywhere, even if it was a footnote on an underrated 5-karma-post, I would be hesitant to write about it, since I thought that I wouldnāt add value to the āmarketplace of ideas.ā In this abstract concept, the āidea is already out thereāāso the job is done, the impact is set in place. I have talked to several people who feel similarly; people with brilliant thoughts and ideas, who proclaim to have ānothing original to write aboutā and therefore refrain from writing.
I have come to realize that some of the most worldview-shaping and actionable content I have read and seen was not the presentation of a uniquely original idea, but often a better-presented, better-connected, or even just better-timed presentation of existing ideas. I now think of idea-sharing as a much more concrete, but messy contributor to impact, one that requires the right people to read the right content in the right way at the right time; maybe even often enough, sometimes even from the right person on the right platform, etc.
All of that to say, the impact of your idea-sharing goes much beyond the originality of your idea. If you have talked to several cool people in your network about something and they found it interesting and valuable to hear, consider publishing it!
Relatedly, there are many more reasons to write other than sharing original ideas and saving the world :)
Great point, Michael! I agree on discounting potential counterfactual impacts of current interventions past X years and think that short-term large payoffs are a very good way of dealing with the overall situation. In addition to that, Iād argue that cheaper higher animal welfare and alternative proteins in X years suggest that interventions will be more cost-effective in X years, which might imply that we should āsave and investā (either literally, in capital, or conceptually, in movement capacity). Do you have any thoughts on that?
To me, this suggests prioritizing (1) short-term, large payoff interventions, (2) interventions actively seeking to navigate and benefit animals through an AI transition (depending on how optimistic you are about the tractability of doing so), (3) interventions that robustly invest in movement capacity (depending on whether you think interventions are likely to be more cost-effective in the future), and perhaps (4) interventions that seem unlikely to change through an AI transition (depending on how optimistic you are in their current cost-effectiveness and how high your credence is in their robustness).
Thank you for writing this up, Max! The more I dive into AI for Animals, the more it seems to be just about the most important (and drastically underdiscussed) topic within the farmed animal movement, both in terms of risks and opportunities.
I donāt think the concept of moral responsibility in the way I use it requires judgment (i.e., I wouldnāt want to hold someone morally responsible for the sake of their responsibility). Rather, I think moral responsibility here should act as a vehicle to determine where change needs to happenāI think this aligns with my understanding of consequentialism tooāin which case, there is no apparent need for free will. Hope this makes sense!
Hey Steven, I think itās great that you are looking into animal charities and it looks like you have done some good initial research here :)
There are a couple of points that I imagine many people would want to challenge, especially around invertebrate and wild animal welfare. If you donāt mind writing it out, I imagine your thoughts on factoring in uncertainty in your decision-making (i.e., on low-probability, enormous impact scenarios such as in invertebrate welfare) and your thoughts on aggregating welfare among individuals (i.e., on scenarios where orders of magnitudes more animals are affected, but each to a smaller degree such as in invertebrate welfare and in wild animal welfare) would provide a good base for these discussions to happen.
I think these are important discussions in this context specifically, because if you take neglected animals such as invertebrates and wild animals into account, you may want to explore the EA Animal Welfare Fund or ACEās Movement Grant instead of or in addition to ACEās Recommended Charities. I also want to flag that Faunalyticsā research shouldnāt really be boiled down to āstatisticsā, but I imagine your stance on New Roots Institute (i.e., helping animals directly > education/āone-step-removed?) applies here too.
All of that being said, based on your expressed views, I think you will find Sinergia Animal to demonstrate the best numbers yet.
Lastly, you may find this perspective from ACE worth engaging with, specifically their perspective on ranking charities within recommended charities:
āUpdate the decision-making process so that it directly compares all recommended charities on marginal cost-effectiveness. Our basis for deciding whether to add a Recommended Charity is whether we think it would lead to more animals being helped on the margin (compared to having a smaller number of Recommended Charities), which is conceptually different from ranking charities. Given the types of uncertainty currently faced by the animal advocacy movement when it comes to calculating cost-effectiveness, we decide whether a charity should be recommended based on a range of decision criteria rather than scoring and ranking charities based on our sense of their relative marginal cost-effectiveness. In the future, if we had sufficiently robust evidence to form reliable cost-effectiveness estimates, including evidence or good proxies for speculative work with complex long-term theories of change, itās possible we would move more toward the kind of ranking approach that GWWC suggests. Additionally, we consider relative cost-effectiveness during each Recommended Charity Fund distribution, where we adjust the size of each grant depending on the most up-to-date plans that charities share with us.ā [emphasis added]
Yes! These are instances in which we use Slackās @channel function, which we try to do as rarely as possible, as it notifies basically everyone.
I think you make a really important point! You/āanyone else interested in this may be interested in talking to @Constance Li and her work with @AI for Animals (Website)
I donate 10% in the form of a salary sacrifice to Hive. In addition, I regularly donate ~10% spread across other Meta Organizations and Expert-managed funds in the animal space (roughly in order): EA AWF, AAC, Rethink Priorities, and the ACE Movement Grant. I have also made some smaller donations throughout the year to opportunities that I find promising and hope to look further into next year, namely AI for Animals, Animetrics and the Profit for Good Initiative.
I think you might refer to SouthWings? Someone shared it on Hive a while ago, saying
āI wanted to let you know about an organization, SouthWings, that offers small airplane flights to activists and organizations in 15 U.S. states (mainly in the Southeast) - they primarily focus on helping orgs document environmental pollution from the air but Iām sure would be happy to work with animal advocates too. I found this service incredibly helpful for my documentary, The Smell of Money, in which we show factory farm pollution captured from a plane.ā
Really enjoyed reading this post!
This example reminded me of something similar I have been meaning to write about, but @AppliedDivinityStudies got there before me (and did so much better than I could have!) - it is not just that influencing Big Normie Foundations could produce the same marginal impact due to a lower counterfactual, but also that there is way more money in them.
I think one can conceptualize impact as a function of how much influence we are affecting, where it is moving from (e.g., the counterfactual badness/ālack-of-goodness), and where it is moving to. It seems to me like we are overly focused on affecting where the influence is moving to. Perhaps justifiably so, for the objections you mention in the post, but it seems far from obvious that we are focus is optimally balanced.