Philosophy, global priorities and animal welfare research. My current specific interests include: philosophy of mind, moral weights, person-affecting views, preference-based views and subjectivism, moral uncertainty, decision theory, deep uncertainty/cluelessness and backfire risks, s-risks, and indirect effects on wild animals.
I’ve also done economic modelling for some animal welfare issues.
A pause would still give more groups more time catch up on existing research and to build infrastructure for AGI (energy, datacenters), right? Then when the pause is lifted, we could have more players at the research frontier and ready to train frontier models.
I think Thomas did not take a stance on whether it was axiological or deontic in the GPI working paper, and instead just described the structure of a possible view. Pummer described his as specifically deontic and not axiological.
I’m not sure what should be classified as axiological or how important the distinction is. I’m certainly giving up the independence of irrelevant alternatives, but I think I can still rank outcomes in a way that depends on the option set.
I’ll get back to you on this, since I think this will take me longer to answer and can get pretty technical.
That seems true, but I’m not convinced it’s the best way to reduce s-risks on the margin. See, for example, Vinding, 2024.
I’d also want to see a fuller analysis of ways it could backfire. For example, a pause might make multipolar scenarios more likely by giving more groups time to build AGI, which could increase the risks of conflict-based s-risks.
Yes, we probably aren’t benefitting future individuals in a strict and narrow person-affecting sense much or at all.
However, there are some other person-affecting views that are concerned with differences for future moral patients:
On wide person-affecting views, if Alice would have a better life than Bob, then it’s better for Alice to come to exist than for Bob to come to exist, all else equal (the Nonidentity problem). This doesn’t imply it’s better to ensure Alice or Bob exists than neither does, though. (See Thomas, 2019 or Meacham, 2012 for examples).
On asymmetric person-affecting views, it can still be good to prevent bad lives. (This needn’t imply antinatalism, because it could be that good lives can offset bad lives (Thomas, 2019, Pummer, 2024).)
I’m also pretty skeptical of convergence, largely because I’m a moral anti-realist. I don’t see why we would converge to any view in particular, except by coincidence or mechanisms that don’t track stance-independent moral truths (because there are none). It’s just people weighing their own particular moral intuitions. Humans differ in our most basic moral intuitions and leanings.
Barring value lock-in, I suspect there would be convergence towards the recognition that unnecessary suffering is bad and worth preventing (when cheap enough) because this seems pretty widely held and something societies move towards, but I’d guess there will still be disagreement on some of these:
population ethics
hedonism vs preference views vs others
whether non-sentient/non-conscious things matter terminally, e.g. preserving nature
whether groups of moral patients have special status beyond their aggregates, e.g. ethnic groups, species
deontology vs consequentialism vs virtue ethics
what counts as conscious/sentient (I think this is partly normative, not just empirical)
decision theory, attitudes towards risk and ambiguity, fanaticism
Starting my own discussion thread.
My biggest doubt for the value of extinction risk reduction is my (asymmetric) person-affecting intuitions: I don’t think it makes things better to ensure future people (or other moral patients) come to exist for their own sake or the sake of the value within their own lives. But if future people will exist, I want to make sure things go well for them. This is summarized by the slogan “Make people happy, not make happy people”.
If this holds, then extinction risk reduction saves the lives of people who would otherwise die in an extinction event, which is presumably good for them, but this is only billions of humans.[1] If we don’t go extinct, then the number of our descendant moral patients could be astronomical. It therefore seems better to prioritize our descendant moral patients conditional on our survival because there are far far more of them.
Aliens (including alien artificial intelligence) complicate the picture. We (our descendants, whether human, AI or otherwise) could
use the resources aliens would have otherwise for our purposes instead of theirs, i.e. replace them,
help them, or
harm them or be harmed by them, e.g. through conflict.
I’m interested in others’ takes on this.
And it’s not clear we want to save other animals, in case their lives are bad on average. It can also make a difference whether we’re talking about human extinction only or all animal extinction.
Since this comment gets some attention every now and then, I’m leaving another comment here to point to this sequence where I flesh out this kind of view more.
Yes, or we don’t need to have any specific reason to believe they do better than random. I think this could be consistent with phenomenal conservatism.
The second one is more about the grounds for justification (having warranted beliefs). Maybe judgement calls don’t need to tend to be correct or for there to be the right kind of fit towards calibration for the resulting beliefs to be warranted. Maybe just the fact that something seems a certain way, e.g. even direct intuition about highly speculative things like the far future effects of interventions, can justify belief.
EDIT: This could be consistent with phenomenal conservatism.
FWIW, I don’t think P1 and P2 together logically imply the conclusion as stated. I think you’re probably leaving out some unstated premises (that might be uncontroversial, but should be checked).
For example, could anything other than evolutionary pressures (direct or indirect) work “against individuals unable to make the correct judgment calls regarding what actions do more good than harm (in expectation) considering how these impact the far future”?
Now you might say no, because our judgement calls are outputs of systems built up through evolution.
But I think an additional premise should capture that. It is not a tautology, but (possibly) an empirical fact.
Another: does making correct judgement calls enough to have warranted beliefs (in humans) about something require any (past) pressure against incorrect judgement calls (about those things in particular, or in domains from which there is enough generalization to the particular things)?
I think you’d say yes, but this is also an empirical claim, not a tautology.
Hmm, I might be misunderstanding you, so let me know if this doesn’t respond to what you have in mind.
I don’t think I’ve assumed any intervention is definitely positive in the long run. I have assumed they are each net positive in expectation for at least one set of targets (or types of effects) we can identify ahead of time (just humans, just farmed animals or just wild animal).
I guess I didn’t specify how far these sets of targets go into the future, so you could assume I’m ignoring far future moral patients, or we can extend the example to include them, with interventions positive in expectation for some sets of far future targets.
The example is just illustrative, so I didn’t want to complicate it with more than 3 sets of targets.
Coming back to this, on what timeline do you expect this kind of growth in wealth to happen, making animal welfare extremely cheap?
Or, with what probability would it not happen for at least another 15 years (and us not all dying for at least that long)? I’d guess 15 years is long enough for many animal welfare interventions to have significant impact, although on the shorter end. Some take several years to have any welfare impacts at all.
I’m imagining we could just discount welfare impacts by such probabilities. Animal welfare could still look quite cost-effective even after that, but it’ll depend on the probabilities.
My first impression is that these techniques are pretty obscure and technical, and charities would not think to use them or know how to by default. In fact, sharing them here might make it more likely that charities use them (an infohazard).
EDIT: But maybe if motivated and strategic enough, they would find them through online search.
Were they successful in getting evidence removed from web archives?
Didn’t they already address this specific vulnerability with the measures described on that page?
However, we remain concerned that in the case of a dispute, we would be accused of creating fake screen recordings/archives.
If there is a third-party service that is trusted by the community that could verify the accuracy of our screen recordings/archives prior to us showing reviews to charities, we’d be much more open to the idea of showing reviews to charities before releasing them. Please let us know if you’re aware of one.
https://web.archive.org/ seems good enough to me in most cases?
I think it doesn’t do so well for Google Spreadsheets or videos, though:
For example, this archive of ACE’s CEA of ALI only includes the first tab of the sheet. I tried seeing if I could archive the other tabs via their separate links, but it just redirects me here, where only the one tab is archived. Maybe there’s a way around this, or a better acrhiving service.
AFAIK, videos are not archived at all, either.
I’ve also used https://archive.ph/. There’s a browser plugin Archive Page for it, but I often get nginx errors when I try to archive pages with it. You can archive specific tabs by the tab links, e.g. here, but then it doesn’t let you scroll through the sheet, which means you won’t be able to access sheet cells you’d have to scroll to see. It also doesn’t show how cells are calculated.
You could just save the whole sheet and upload it somewhere with a timestamp, and save archives anyway. Maybe there are better options than web.archive.org and archive.ph.
I gave an answer here:
“I think what matters about urgency should be captured by a version of neglectedness that accounts for future resources that will otherwise be spent on the problem. If something is not urgent, we might not expect it to be neglected in the long run, as others will come to work on it. If urgent, there’s a risk few will work on it in time.”
(Excuse the formatting, on mobile.)
Do you think Sinergia and ACE almost certainly have no information you don’t that could lead to different conclusions or interpretations of claims, in ways more favourable to Sinergia and/or ACE? Do you think there’s no room for reasonable disagreement about whether the claims you call false are actually false?
E.g. see Abraham’s comment.
I think I’m ~100% on no non-instrumental benefit from creating moral patients. Also pretty high on no non-instrumental value from creating new desires, preferences, values, etc. within existing moral patients. (I try to develop and explain my views in this sequence.)
I haven’t thought a lot about tradeoffs between suffering and other things, including pleasure, within moral patients that would exist anyway. I could see these tradeoffs going like they would for a classical utilitarian, if we hold an individual’s dispositions fixed.
To be clear, I’m a moral anti-realist (subjectivist), so I don’t think there’s any stance-independent fact about how asymmetric things should be.
Also, I’m curious if we can explain why you react like this:
Some ideas: Complexity of value but not disvalue or the urgency of suffering is explained by the intensity of desire, not unpleasantness? Do you have any ideas.