Recent graduate of Montana State University
Lenny Triem 🔸
Karma: 46
That makes sense, thanks for responding. I can see where you’re coming from.
I think early spacefaring will probably be a quite competitive space, since there seems to be a lot of diverse commercial and government interest right now. Because of that, it seems like it may be difficult to create any sort of durable norms around something like food sourcing unless there’s a clear winner on efficiency, which I presume would be arrived at independently of whether it involves animals. This might be weak argument if you expect early spacefaring to be dominated by an individual entity like NASA and if you expect government contracts for things like food in space to not be very competitive.
Maybe something that would make this more concrete is looking at whether there are examples of the lock-in of practices like this in the past, and whether we have reason to believe that additional dynamics would make early spacefaring harder to draw historical comparison to. What do you think?
Thanks for sharing that post, I thought it provided good insight into how you’re thinking about reputational risk. I did come away from the post wondering why the proposed reputational risk management method doesn’t appear more widespread across competitive firms if it has an edge on the traditional approach.
I don’t know if I understand/agree with your comparison of CEA to Yudkowsky. CEA, as the steward of much of the EA community’s infrastructure, has a lot of authority and responsibility for this community and its people. In order to maintain peoples’ trust and confidence to do that well, I suspect it’s necessary for it to observe a quite conservative form of message discipline that’s more consistent with traditional PR than the other strategy that the post you shared mentions. I can think of a couple examples where I don’t agree with a communications decision I’ve heard of them making, but I don’t think Yudkowsky’s approach that you gesture to would be the right direction to move. Maybe looking to the ways organizations like universities and churches succeed and fail with communications would provide more useful comparisons.
For individuals or organizations that don’t have responsibility for community stewardship, I agree with the praise you give of Yudkowsky’s approach.
There are some good write-ups on her profile on EA in the Lakes, like this one.
Could you talk more about how you think the norm might persist?
Maybe there are other signals that aren’t vulnerable to the same kind of faking, like evidence of integrity and discretion paired with a track record of impact of the type you’re looking for. Seems harder to easily evaluate, but also seems like a more common way to evaluate alignment with a cause’s mission.
Separately, while I’m vegan myself, I think using veganism as a signal is less reliable than it may appear because it appears not to meet the same effectiveness bar as other popular interventions, and there’s honest disagreement within EA on whether EAs should generally follow a vegan diet. I think I’d have the same concerns with using other marginally good but costly lifestyle choices, like donating a kidney, as a signal as well, though I haven’t thought about a lot of individual cases.
Good luck! What outcomes are you planning to measure?
The best thing I’ve read on it so far is this article by Kelsey Piper.
Thank you for posting this! I appreciated both learning how others feel about this and your thoughtful commentary.
Your last paragraph especially reminded me of The Plague by Albert Camus. Beyond its political allegory (and topical subject matter), I read it as an absurdist case for persistent altruism and an approach to everyday life that centers present experiences over hope and despair that map onto the narrative of a broader cause. Both ideas resonated with me later when I read posts in the EA handbook on altruism and scope sensitivity like Nate Soares’ On Caring.
I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this, but I suspect a couple reasons to continue pursuing this contract beyond the present revenue include (1) retaining relationships and a reputation that provides option value for (especially defense-related) future contracts and (2) increasing the likelihood that safer models are used in high-stakes settings, especially ones that could carry some non-negligible AI-related risks. While those are plausible (and plausibly right) lines of reasoning, I’m writing them without taking a stance on specific details that have central importance to their truth (e.g. are Anthropic’s models “safer” than competitors’? Seems quite likely based on reputation, but I’m not well-informed enough to make that claim confidently). If you’re right and the alternative is the use of another lab’s models for the same jobs, and if the article is right that Anthropic’s models are the only ones being used on classified networks, then I don’t think there are good reasons for Anthropic to intentionally cede that space to competitors.
I thought this could be relevant to a few people interested or working in bioethics:
The Bioethics Interest Group is one of several dozen Special Interest Groups that operate out of the Office of Intramural Research at the NIH. Its monthly virtual seminars “provide a discussion forum, consider different views, and present research on complex ethical issues in medical research.” If you are interested in or working in bioethics, I thought you might find it interesting to sign up for its newsletter so that you have the opportunity to read about and consider attending its seminars.
Center on Long-Term Risk, Rethink Priorities, Fish Welfare Initiative, EA Infrastructure Fund
Thank you for the correction! I think what threw me off was the previous video’s impressive 6M views by comparison. I just spent some time looking at examples of how highly successful videos from smaller channels often perform, and I think my perception of the relationship between initial performance and total views was miscalibrated because of how I’ve observed popular videos from well-established channels performing.
I really enjoyed this video! I have one quick note.
Based on the early performance of your first video, I’m a little surprised that this one isn’t on a more similar trajectory in terms of views. While I don’t want to over-speculate,[1] it seems plausible that YouTube’s moderation system may have mischaracterized the title as borderline content, which could have limited its visibility in searches and recommendations.- ^
Turns out I was incorrect about this detail!
- ^
Thank you for writing this! This is a framing I haven’t heard before, and I’m glad to have had the chance to read it.
The thesis of this post appears to be that there are overlooked opportunities in general policy advocacy that could have high leverage in GHD compared to more direct interventions, and that we should pursue them. I like this thesis directionally, but I have a few concerns.
My first is about Nunn’s argument that “since the initiation of antidumping duties requires significant legal capacity, these are typically initiated by wealthier countries and are often against less-developed countries.” Could another explanation be that there are higher rates of dumping in developing countries, potentially due to differences in domestic enforcement capacity or incentives? Some literature suggests that developing countries are generally under less scrutiny for compliance with international trade policy (https://www.chadpbown.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Bown-Hoekman-JWT-2008.pdf), which leads me to doubt that antidumping duties are applied in a way that systematically disadvantages developing countries.
I also have a concern about the claims you make about the importance of consumer power as a lever for improving international labor standards. In the sweatshop example, if higher wages did not come at the expense of less production or fewer jobs, then the change seems clearly good. However, the 400% increase in minimum wages appears to be nominal, since it looks like real minimum wage in Indonesia rose only about 50% from 2000 to 2010 (or 200% from 1990 to 2012) (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Minimum-Wage-Growth-from-1990-2012-Note-Monthly-nominal-and-real-minimum-wages_fig1_282966999).
In the coffee example, you state that “recent evidence by Dragusanu and Nunn (2018) finds that consumer purchases of fair trade-certified coffee result in increased incomes of FT-certified coffee farmers in Costa Rica.” But the more important question is about incomes across the whole coffee farmer sector (and the laborers those farmers employ), and I don’t know if changes to those groups necessarily followed from changes to the incomes of FT-certified farmers.
Based on the quotes you include, I also share the worry that Nunn’s arguments sometimes risk overemphasizing harms from Western policy. When talking about things like “biased” trade policy, I think it’s pretty important to make clear fact-value distinctions, and I worry that Nunn blurs that line.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that “global aid advocacy is not a substitute for advocacy into good policy by the West,” and I think a more constructive way for it to be framed is as an additional set of (potentially overlooked) items in the arsenal of GHD policy advocates. That said, I have a central concern about whether these generally good policy efforts in developed nations are actually neglected enough to be good candidates for high-value advocacy. As David T noted in another comment, if existing actors already lobby heavily for them, additional EA efforts could have a relatively small marginal impact.
Thank you again for writing this post. While my comment was mostly a criticism, I appreciate what you brought into public discussion on the EA Forum with this post, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to read and comment on it.
This is an amazing speech, and as someone who has to write speeches from time to time, I appreciate the opportunity to hear part of your process laid out in this post.
And another today, this one an exclusive article about the first travel-associated human case in the U.S. connected to the outbreak. My impression is that it isn’t realistically possible for these screwworms to cause a human outbreak in this context, but I think the human cases that will arise from this outbreak could be a compelling part of a broader narrative about its welfare costs and the urgency to control it.
Thanks for writing this! I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the sequence.
I’m curious what approach you’ll take in deciding when to include concrete examples and numbers. On the one hand, examples and statistics from organizations you’ve studied could make your claims more compelling and increase the chance others will apply them in their own decision-making. On the other hand, I recognize there may be privacy concerns with some of the organizations you’ve spoken with, and I know that this isn’t meant to be representative research.
I understand these posts are meant as initial reflections, and I’m glad you’ve chosen to share them. Still, my first reaction was that including more data will likely be important if the outcomes are to be widely taken as practical suggestions for improving governance within EA orgs.
What have you identified as the relevant constraints on the scaling of phage therapies to more clinical settings? I’m not an expert, but I’ve worked on phage biology as a student researcher, and my impression is that the bottleneck on progress for phage therapies isn’t available GMP manufacturing facilities but rather the technical ability to do the necessary tailoring of phage therapies to specific infections at scale and the availability of strong RCT evidence that—with available scalable technologies—we can actually do that.
Since you’re more involved in this field, I realize you may have more current or deep knowledge of the topic, and if you have the capacity, I’d appreciate to hear your perspective on the most relevant bottlenecks on progress in phage therapeutics.
That makes sense, thanks for sharing. In your post on your HPMOR campaign, you describe asking questions like how much recipients liked the book and how much it influenced them, and I’m guessing you’re asking similar questions here. Since you asked, I think it could be valuable to also ask the recipient to briefly describe if reading the book caused them to take some action they would otherwise have not taken, whether that’s taking a particular job or something smaller. If you do end up publishing a write-up of this IABIED campaign once it’s concluded, I’d be interested to read it!