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
Karma: 496
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.
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.
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?
Cost is one factor, but nuclear also has other advantages such as land use, amount of raw material required (to make the renewables and lithium etc. for battery storage), and benefits for power grid.
It’s nice that renewables is getting cheaper, and I’d definitely like to see more renewables in the mix, but my ideal long term scenario is a mix of nuclear, renewables and battery. I’m weakly open to a small amount of gas being used for power generation in the long term in some cases.
Seeking grants from EA grant makers is something I haven’t at all considered. I wonder if there are any legal restrictions on this as a political party recipient (I haven’t looked into this but could foresee some potential issues with foreign sources of funding). On the one hand, AJP can generate its own funds, but I feel like we are still funding constrained in the sense that an extra $10,000 per state branch per election (at least) could almost always be put to good use. Do you think we should we look into this, particularly with the federal election coming up?
When I say that the idea is entrenched in popular opinion, I’m mostly referring to people in the space science/engineering fields—either as workers, researchers or enthusiasts. This is anecdotal based on my experience as a PhD candidate in space science. In the broader public, I think you’d be right that people would think about it much less, however the researchers and the policy makers are the ones you’d need to convince for something like this, in my view.
Am I reading the 0.1% probability for nuclear war right as the probability that nuclear war breaks out at all, or the probability that it breaks out and leads to human extinction? If it’s the former, this seems much too low. Consider that twice in history nuclear warfare was likely averted by the actions of a single person (e.g. Stanislav Petrov), and we have had several other close calls ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls ).
My impression is that people do over-estimate the cost of ‘not-eating-meat’ or veganism by quite a bit (at least for most people in most situations). I’ve tried to come up with a way to quantify this. I might need to flesh it out a bit more but here it is.
So suppose you are trying to quantify what you think the sacrifice of being vegan is, either relative to vegetarian or to average diet. If I were asked what was the minimum amount money I would have to have received to be vegan vs non-vegan for the last 5 years if there were ZERO ethical impact of any kind, it would probably be $500 (with hindsight—cue the standard list of possible biases). This doesn’t seem very high to me. My experience has been that most people who have become vegan have said that they vastly overestimated the sacrifice they thought was involved.
If one thought that there were diminishing returns for the sacrifice for being vegan over vegetarian, perhaps the calculus is better for being vegetarian over non-vegan, or for being vegan 99% of the time, say only when eating at your grandparents’ house. I see too many people say ‘well I can’t be vegan because I don’t want to upset my grandpa when he makes his traditional X dish’. Well, ok, so be vegan in every other aspect then. And as a personal anecdote, when my nonna found out she couldn’t make her traditional Italian dishes for me anymore, she got over it very quickly and found vegan versions of all of them [off-topic, apologies!].
I also suspect that people are comfortable thinking about longtermism and sacrifice like this for non-humans but not for humans is because they may think that humans are still significantly more important. I think this is the case when you count flow-on effects, but not intrinsically (e.g. 1 unit of suffering for a human vs non-human).
I think the intrinsic worth ratio for most non-human animals is close to 1 to 1. I think the evidence suggests that their capacity for suffering is fairly close to ours, and some animals might arguably have an even higher capacity for suffering than us (I should say I’m strictly wellbeing/suffering based utilitarian in this).
I think the burden of proof should be on someone to show why humans are significantly more worthy of intrinsic moral worth. We all evolved from a common ancestor, and while there might be a sliding scale of moral worth from us to insects, it seems strange for there to be such a sharp drop off after humans, even within mammals. I would strongly err on the side of caution when applying this to my ethics, given our constantly expanding circle of moral consideration throughout history.
Very true David, but then the same could be said of being vegan to a lesser extent.
This article was targeted more towards the vegan community in general, not just EAs (though I cross posted it here because I thought it might be useful). Most non-EAs wouldn’t think about donations that way, and probably wouldn’t donate the $20,000 if they didn’t get a pet.
Thanks for sharing! I love seeing concrete roadmaps/plans for things like this, and think we should do it more.
I’d like to steelman a slightly more nuanced criticism of Effective Altruism. It’s one that, as Effective Altruists, we might tend to dismiss (as do I), but non-EAs see it as a valid criticism, and that matters.
Despite efforts, many still see Effective Altruism as missing the underlying causes of major problems, like poverty. Because EA has tended to focus on what many call ‘working within the system’, a lot of people assume that is what EA explicitly promotes. If I thought there was a movement which said something like, ‘you can solve all the world’s problems by donating enough’, I might have reservations too. They worry that EA does not pay enough credence to the value of building community and social ties.
Of course, articles like this (https://80000hours.org/2015/07/effective-altruists-love-systemic-change/) have been written, but it seems this is still being overlooked. I’m not arguing we should necessarily spend more time trying to convince people that EAs love systemic change, but it’s important to recognise that many people have, what sounds to them, like totally rational criticisms.
Take this criticism (https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2015/07/why-peter-singer-is-wrong-about-effective-altruism/ - which I responded to here: https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2016/09/effective-altruism-changing-think-charity/). Even after addressing the author’s concerns about EA focusing entirely on donating, he still contacted me with concerns that EA is going to miss the unintended consequences of reducing community ties. I disagree with the claim, but this makes sense given his understanding of EA.
Thanks for this Peter, you’ve increased my confidence that supporting SHIC was a good thing to do.
A note regarding other social movements targeting high schools (more a point for Tee, who I will tell I’ve mentioned): I’m unsure how prevalent the United Nations Youth Association is in other countries, but in Australia it has a strong following. It has two types of member, facilitators (post high school) and delegates (high school students). The facilitators run workshops about social justice and UN related issues and model UN debates.
The model is largely self-sustaining, and students always look forward to the next weekend conference, which is full of fun activities.
At this point I don’t have an idea for how such a model might be applied to SHIC, but it could be worth keeping in mind for the future.
An alternative might be to approach UNYA to get a SHIC workshop into their curriculum. I don’t know how open they would be to this, but I’m willing to try through my contacts with UNYA in Adelaide.
Thanks for writing this. One small critique:
“For example, Brian Tomasik has suggested paying farmers to use humane insecticides. Calculations suggest that this could prevent 250,000 painful deaths per dollar.”
I’m cautious about the sign of this. Given that insects are expected to have net negative lives anyway, perhaps speeding up their death is actually the preferable choice. Unless we think that an insect dying of pesticide is more painful than them dying naturally plus the pain throughout the rest of their life.
But overall, I would support the recommendation that OPP supports WAS research.
Thanks for the great question. I’d like to see more attempts to get legislation passed to lock in small victories. The Sioux Falls slaughterhouse ban almost passing gives me optimism for this. Although it seemed to be more for NIMBY reasons than for animal rights reasons, in some ways that doesn’t matter.
I’m also interested in efforts to maintain the lower levels of speciesism we see in children into their adult lives, and to understand what exactly drives that so we can incorporate it into outreach attempts targeted at adults. Our recent interview with Matti Wilks touches on this a little if you’re interested.
Thank you so much for the feedback!
I did think about working for a government department (non-partisan), but I decided against it. From my understanding, you can’t be working for ‘the crown’ and running for office, you’d have to take time off or quit.
The space agency was my thinking along those lines, as I don’t think that counts as working for the crown.
I hadn’t thought about the UK Civil Service. I’ve never looked in to it. I don’t think that would affect me too much, as long as I’m not a dual citizen.
I haven’t completely ruled out earning to give. I worked in the energy industry for 18 months before my PhD earning to give, but felt a pretty low personal fit for it. If I found a job that I was also intrinsically passionate about, I would consider it, but not otherwise.
Ah I hadn’t thought about the for-profit plant-based food tech side of things, thanks, I’ll think about that.
I have one concern about this which might reduce estimates of its impact. Perhaps I’m not really understanding it, and perhaps you can allay my concerns.
First, that this is a good thing to do assumes that you have a good certainty about which candidate/party is going to make the world a better place, which is pretty hard to do.
But if we grant that we did indeed pick the best candidate, there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping the other side from doing the same thing. I wonder if reinforcing the norm of vote swapping just leads us to the zero sum game where supporters of candidate A are vote swapping as much as supporters of candidate B. So on the margin, engaging in vote swapping seems obviously good, but at a system level, promoting vote swapping seems less obviously good.
Does this make any sense?
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).