Because the author’s objective is to promote animal welfare. They are jettisoning that which is unnecessary, but you need the payload.
Larks
Karma: 16,702
There doesn’t seem to be anything gained by being negative about veganism though, and not doing that would seem robustly better.
Being seen as honest about the problems with veganism raises their credibility with their other recommendations. “Oh yes, we’re not like those annoying people you’ve already rejected, we have a different view”.
This feels like a very negative take on a lighthearted campaign that is trying to get across an important point. It’s important to do outreach to people who disagree with you—even people who think vegans are annoying.
If donors thought the other thing was more valuable than GiveWell, they should donate there instead, and that other group could then pay higher salaries and attract the talent.
Thanks for finding! If it was new to Toby and Ryan in that thread this was probably the earliest EAs had come across it.
This was named the Meat-Eater Problem in this article in the Journal Of Controversial Ideas by @MichaelPlant.
The name is much older than this, though it has generally been refered to as ‘The Poor Meat-Eater Problem’ which I think is a better name; I remember discussing it in 2012 and I don’t think it was new then. On the forum with a quick search I found this from over 9 years ago.
David D Friedman wrote a very interesting blog post on this topic which significantly influenced my thinking, arguing that if you reject the validity of human shields, then you should also accept the possible acceptability (in sufficiently dire circumstances) of conscription:
The bad guy grabs a convenient bystander, pulls out a gun, points it at you, and starts shooting with the bystander held in front of him. If you shoot back you might kill the innocent shield. Are you entitled to do it?
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If your response to the human shield problem is that killing an innocent shield violates the victim’s rights so you should never do it, you are at the mercy of any opponent willing to follow the Hamas strategy or any serious nuclear power.
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The alternative is that you have a right to defend yourself. If the only way of defending yourself violates the rights of other people, you are still entitled to do it; your violation of their rights is the fault of the attacker you are defending against. That seems the obvious position, short of pacifism, for a libertarian to take.
But …
Arguably, defending against aggressive neighbors requires taxes. Collecting taxes violates the rights of the taxpayers but if you are entitled to kill innocent Palestinians or Russians when doing so is necessary to defend your rights, surely you are also entitled to violate the rights of Americans to some of their money.
There are good arguments against a military draft under most circumstances but imagine a war so dangerous that no wage would be high enough to recruit enough volunteers to keep the enemy from conquering you. You wouldn’t want to violate the rights of people by drafting them, but if it is the only way of defending your rights …
Similarly, you argue that (according to normal ethics) killing people is forbidden normally, but encouraged during war. But neither seems true to me: killing is permitted to normal people if necessary in self defense or the defense of others, and killing in war is only permitted if the war is just—ie a war of national defense or the defense of others.
Something can be a promising X intervention even if its something that had been thought of before in connection with another purpose.
For example, GLP-1 blockers are promising obesity interventions. When we discovered they were very effective at weight loss, this was an important intellectual contribution to the world. It gave fat people a new reason to take the drugs. This is true even though GPL-1s were already an approved medical intervention for a different purpose (diabetes).
Even beyond this, I think Nick’s Astronomical Waste argument is Longtermist. So in that sense it is a novel Longtermist idea, even if it predates the term ‘Longtermism’.
I distinctly remember telling my parents to wear a mask in the airport, based on rationalist sources, and having to argue that actually anonymous people on the internet were more reliable sources than the government, who did not recommend this.
Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group
Is this actually meaningfully the case? As far as I can see, this is basically a group of left-wing academics (some of whom literally worked for the Democrats!) who assembled a list of things they think the current administration might do and called them Threats to Democracy. They omitted any questions which might paint the current administration in a more favourable light, or the prior democrat administration in a negative light.
The scoring also seems pretty biased. For example, for the question about whether the DoJ would override normal procedures to protect the President’s family, the Biden Administration is given a (positive) scoring of ‘no’, even though the DoJ tried to give the President’s son a sweetheart plea deal that would protect him from charges of being a drug user in possession of a firearm (and potential lengthy prison sentence), and whistleblowers say the prosecution deliberately slow-walked the process and leaked information to the defense.
Even the data presentation seems biased. For example, on this question, the Biden administration is scored as ‘yes’ (i.e. 100%) for 2023-2024. Yet for some reason the bar for 100% is shorter than Trump’s bar for 40%?
I think Patrick’s comments are best interpreted as an attempt at hyperstition.
One potentially negative effect would be if fertility is over-rated as a driver of why older people have fewer children—e.g. if parental energy is also a significant effect. If this is the case, people might delay having children in the expectation how using artificial wombs, but then lack the energy to manage multiple kids later on. Alternatively, if the arrival of artificial wombs causes people to delay having children, the temporary reduction in births could contribute to the de-normalisation of parenthood, which could reduce longer term desired fertility.
I doubt the magnitude of these effects are sufficient to fully reverse the sign though.
Thanks, very strange. I definitely selected linkpost; the GUI appears to have forgotten this, possibly when I tried to edit the thumbnail. Fixed.
Thanks, done.
The OpenAI Foundation has announced its first round of grants
Yes I find it bizarre that many people seem to be simultaneously opposed to the War on Drugs and also support extending it to a new drug.
A final way the tobacco industry is dodging the rules is with e-cigarettes, or “vapes.” Using marketing that illegally targets children, they peddle vapes as a “safer” way to smoke. This tactic has proved alarmingly successful.
SMA condemn the tobacco companies for claiming that vapes are safer, but don’t discuss whether this key claim is actually true. Yet as far as I can see it clearly is true. There is debate about exactly how much safer they are—e.g. how convincing we should find the NHS claim that vapes are 95% safer—but I haven’t seen any credible argument that vapes aren’t safer at all. It’s not ‘dodging’ safety rules to release a considerably safer product.
Further, I think vapes are also pretty good evidence again SMA’s defense of paternalism. If smoking cigarettes wasn’t really a choice, why has the availability of vapes and pouches been associated with a decline in cigarettes? The most natural explanation here is that previously people choose to smoke cigarettes, and then a superior product came along, so people started choosing that instead.
If you think it’s merely ‘arguable’ that OpenAI has had had a significant negative impact through acceleration then I think you are significantly more positive than the median EA.
Thanks for sharing! TruthSocial having more positive engagement is interesting.
No-one in this thread is the target audience for the campaign. And you are clearly attacking another group’s effort right here!