If anyone is still reading this today and is curious where I ended up, I just took a job with Sentience Institute as a Strategy Lead & Researcher.
MichaelDello
Longtermism and Animal Farming Trajectories
Sentience Institute 2022 End of Year Summary
Feedback requested for an animal advocacy and longtermist career (direct and research)
Why making asteroid deflection tech might be bad
Sentience Institute 2023 End of Year Summary
Applying speciesism to wild-animal suffering
Job listing (closed): Sentience Institute is accepting applications for a researcher
Is not giving to X-risk or far future orgs for reasons of risk aversion selfish?
I strongly agree that current LLM’s don’t seem to pose a risk of a global catastrophe, but I’m worried about what might happen when LLM’s are combined with things like digital virtual assistants who have outputs other than generating text. Even if it can only make bookings, send emails, etc., I feel like things could get concerning very fast.
Is there an argument for having AI fail spectacularly in a small way which raises enough global concern to slow progress/increase safety work? I’m envisioning something like a LLM virtual assistant which leads to a lot of lost productivity and some security breaches but nothing too catastrophic, which makes people take AI safety seriously, slowing progress on more advanced AI, perhaps.
A complete spitball.
Causality in altruism
The great calculator
Movement building—An online course
Opportunity to increase your giving impact through AMF
Thanks for sharing, I’m looking forward to this! I’m particularly excited about the sections on measuring suffering and artificial suffering.
“This being said, the format of legislative elections in France makes it very unlikely that a deputy from the animalist party will ever be elected, and perhaps limits our ability to negotiate with the other parties.”
This makes some sense, as unfortunate as it is. Part of the motivation for other parties being willing to negotiate with you or adopt their own incrementally pro-animal policies is based on how worried they are that they might lose a seat to your party. If they’re not at all worried, this limits your influence.
But I wouldn’t say it entirely voids your influence. The more votes you receive, the more it shows other parties that people care about animals enough to vote accordingly. If they want to try and gain some of those votes to beat out other opponents from major parties, they may still adopt some pro-animal policies if they think it might mean getting elected. I think it’s still possible to have some influence in systems where minor parties are unlikely to get elected.
This annoys me about the stance some vegans take, and I’m glad you’ve quantified it. I’d always figured the impact of being vegan was relatively low compared to donating to effective animal organisations, but am a little shocked it’s THAT low.
I’ve argued that vegans could do a lot more good by eating modestly and donating the difference to say the Humane League than being vegan and eating at fancy restaurants all the time. Of course, the ideal case is to do both (be vegan and donate). The same applies for people who think they are doing a lot of good by rescuing say a cat and looking after them. This may be true, but cats need to be fed meat, and the running costs of having a cat could save many animals through effective donations.
This is a very hard sell for deontologists, and in my experience most vegans who aren’t also effective altruists are deontologists, but morality doesn’t begin and end with not eating meat.
As for whether being vegan is worth it, I can’t say I spend any more now than I did when I was an omnivore. In fact I think I spend significantly less, considering how much good quality meat costs, both at shops and at restaurants.
I think this concept leaves open the possibility of people ‘offsetting their meat consumption’ with donations in a similar way people offset their carbon credits when flying in a plane. I don’t have the figures but in many cases it is more effective to fly somewhere and offset your carbon credits than to catch a train, which takes far longer and costs far more. Most people I’ve pitched ‘offsetting meat consumption’ to are horrified by the implications to society. Perhaps not something we want prevalent long term, but it might take off faster than mass veganism would otherwise? Thoughts?
Overall I’d be cautious. This is the sort of thing that, if it went mainstream, would be taken by the non-vegan part of society as an excuse to not eat meat, but I don’t think that would correlate with an increase in donations to effective animal charities.
Doing Good Better—Book review and comments
People more involved with X-risk modelling (and better at math) than I could better say whether this is better than existing tools for X-risk modelling, but I like it! I hadn’t heard of the absorbing state terminology, that was interesting. When reading that, my mind goes to option value, or lack thereof, but that might not be a perfect analogy.
Regarding x-risks requiring a memory component, can you design Markov chains to have the memory incorporated?
Some possible cases where memory might be useful (without thinking about it too much) might be:
How well past social justice movements went may have implications for the success of future movements that relate to X-risk
The way in which problems end may have implications for future problems
Maybe this information can just be captured without memory anyway?
I just want to add that I personally became actively involved with the AJP because I felt that political advocacy from within political parties had been overly neglected by the movement. My intuition was that this is because some of the earlier writings about political advocacy/running for election work by 80,000 Hours and others focused mostly on the US/UK political systems, which I understand are harder for small parties to have any influence (especially the US).
One advantage of being in a small party is that it’s relatively easy to become quite senior quite quickly if you are dedicated, and then have a modest influence on party policy and strategy.
By way of disclosure, I reviewed a draft of this post and am a member of the AJP (e.g. have run as a candidate several times and am the deputy convener of the NSW state branch).