Currently: ?
Previously: Biosecurity at Telis and Alvea, Cellular Agriculture at Tufts and Mission Barns, Global Health at Medical Teams International
kyle_fish
Karma: 1,567
Hm, I’m not sure how I would have read this if it had been your original wording, but in context it still feels like an effort to slightly spin my claims to make them more convenient for your critique. So for now I’m just gonna reference back to my original post—the language therein (including the title) is what I currently endorse.
I’m concerned about that dynamic too and think it’s important to keep in mind, especially in the general case of researchers’ intuitions tending to bias their work, even when attempting objectivity. However, I’m also concerned about the dismissal of results like RP’s welfare ranges on the basis of speculation about the researchers’ priors and/or the counterintuitive conclusions, rather than on the merits of the analyses themselves.
Thanks, Jeff! This helps a lot, though ideally a summary of my conclusions would acknowledge the tentativeness/uncertainty thereof, as I aim to do in the post (perhaps, “concludes that things may be bad and getting worse”).
I strongly object to the (Edit: previous) statement that my post “concludes that human extinction would be a very good thing”. I do not endorse this claim and think it’s a grave misconstrual of my analysis. My findings are highly uncertain, and, as Peter mentions, there are many potential reasons for believing human extinction would be bad even if my conclusions in the post were much more robust (e.g. lock-in effects, to name a particularly salient one).
I’m skeptical of anchoring on people’s initial intuitions about cross-species tradeoffs as a default for moral weights, as there are strong reasons to expect that those intuitions are inappropriately biased. The weights I use are far from perfect and are not robust enough to allow confident conclusions to be drawn, but I do think they’re the best ones available for this kind of analysis by a decent margin.
Agreed! While I do think there’s value in looking just at humans and farmed animals given the current state of available data and welfare analysis, a major hope of mine for this work is that it might inspire more comprehensive and more rigorous models that include wild animals.
The sign of the conclusion would be the same (though significantly weaker) even if you ignore shrimp entirely, provided all other assumptions are held constant. That said, the final numbers are indeed quite sensitive to the moral weights, particularly those of chickens, shrimp, and fish as the most abundant nonhumans.
I agree re: the value of both a function-based version that would allow folks to put in their own weights/assumptions, and a version that explicitly considers uncertainty. I don’t have plans to build these out myself, but might reconsider if there’s sufficient interest, and in any case would be happy to support someone else in doing so.
Thanks for the kind words! I’m also skeptical of putting too much weight on the conclusions given the huge uncertainties, which I hope comes across in the post.
Re: underlying code—I’m working on a sharable version. Just sent you a DM!
Thank you for flagging this, Laura! I’ve edited the definition to correct the misstatement.
Wow, I’m thrilled about this! I’ve been wondering recently why EA “Campus Centres” aren’t more of a thing, and am delighted to see a big push in that direction. Thank you for an excellent plan and write-up!
What is your process for identifying and prioritizing new research questions? And what percentage of your work is going toward internal top priorities vs. commissioned projects?
A few things that jump to mind:
Data on the development of EA-related fields (e.g. growth of AI safety/alignment as an academic discipline, including things like funding, number of publications, number of faculty/graduate students, etc.)
Data on the history of philanthropy (e.g. how much have private philanthropists spent over the years, and on what?)
This is great to see! Do you have a sense of what fraction of the EA community is engaging with the forum? I’m curious how much of this growth is driven by the increased size of the EA community, versus an increased percentage of community members using the forum.
Really helpful, thank you!
This is huge, congrats on the launch! I’m so excited for this fund to exist. How did you decide on the growth targets for the different phases? And will the balance be visible publicly (á la EA Funds) or disclosed some other way?
Could you elaborate on your definition of “high impact professionals” as your target audience? I’m not sure I understand who exactly you’re hoping to reach. Some examples (real or fictitious) of the types of people you have in mind would be helpful!
The core of our disagreement seems to be here:
This estimate assumes that all biological functions in an organism can be replicated with technologies, and that these technologies can reach the same efficiency as the biological functions that reached high efficiency due to evolution and natural selection.
I don’t think this is realistic. Perhaps in isolation you could build systems that efficiently accomplish some of these functions, but in the case of cultured meat they all have to be compatible with/support the growth of animal cells and tissues. This is an enormous handicap. All of the technologies you cite as analogous (solar panels vs plants, cars vs horses, planes vs birds, recombinant vs porcine insulin) represent new approaches that are completely free from the limitations of the biological systems they’ve replaced. I don’t think any of them should be counted as precedents for the type of innovation cultured meat would require.
We might not have to replicate the animal systems precisely, but we’d definitely need cheap solutions to the problems of contamination (3rd sentence), sensitivity/robustness (5th sentence), waste management (6th sentence), and scalability (7th and 8th sentences). All of these are currently huge issues for any biomanufacturing.
I don’t think cars, solar panels, and recombinant insulin are analogous technologies here. Cars and solar panels won out because they are completely new approaches to transportation and solar energy capture that are not constrained by the biology of the systems they’re replacing. Cultured meat seems severely handicapped by its reliance on the growth of animal cells and tissues.
Recombinant insulin is still manufactured in biological systems (bacteria and yeast), but they are much simpler than mammalian cells and can efficiently express a protein that is only present in tiny amounts in the pig pancreases it used to be purified from.
I’m still confused by the perceived need to state this in a way that’s stronger than my chosen wording. I used “may” when presenting the top line conclusions because the analysis is rough/preliminary, incomplete, and predicated on a long list of assumptions. I felt it was appropriate to express this degree of uncertainty when making my claims in the the post, and I think that that becomes all the more important when summarizing the conclusions in other contexts without mention of the underlying assumptions and other caveats.