I run the Studio team 80,000 Hours, which produces the 80,000 Hours podcast. Previously I worked at the Global Priorities Institute, ran Giving What We Can and was a Fund Manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund.
Comments here are my own views only, not my present or past employers’, unless otherwise specified.
in my personal experience people who care about animals and want to help them but eat animal products often show a lot of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning
This sounds plausible to me, though fwiw I also think that this stereotype is another that makes it hard for omnivores to feel fine in animal welfare spaces. I kind of hate people assuming simply from my diet that probably I’m making epistemic mistakes that I refuse to acknowledge, or that I’m pretending to care about animals when I actually don’t.
Obv I agree there’s a strong desire not to turn to the cruelty of your own diet. I think figuring out how to allow ourselves and help each other to live with the terrible suffering in the world we’re not doing things about is one of the big challenges of effective altruism.
What a great video! Really moving.
Thank you!
How does someone join the Whatsapp community?
This has made me realise I’m not sure what has caused me to be invited to the things I’m invited to, because I don’t get invites to all the things on the events calendar (which works great for me!). I wonder if it’s worth setting up something that’s easy to join that just tells people about the significant things @Joseph Miller ?
Thanks for flagging!
You’re quite right, thank you!
Fwiw, I think wild animal suffering and s-risks were reasonably widely discussed amongst longtermists earlier than 2015.
It would seem reasonably surprising to me if when we collonised the galaxies we spread wild animal suffering as it is on earth, so that doesn’t feel like a strong reason to try to avoid human extinction to me (even aside from the reason you point to).
S-risks do seem like a stronger reason to care less about extinction. On the other hand, the strongest arguments for the plausibility of s-risks seem to do with AI alignment to me, rather than with humans holding power. So increased emphasis on s-risks doesn’t seem to me like it would explain the trend I’m pointing to.
That does seem like a more plausible lock in event than many. But I’d have tentatively expected that we’d send off space probes reasonably early, such that as technology gets better we can overtake the original ones. I guess a significant speed up of technological development would make a difference here though. Interested in how this affects your thinking?
Interesting, I don’t think I noticed that trend between 10 years ago and 2 years ago.
Cool!
I agree that in deciding how much to prioritise averting extinction vs improving worlds in which we persist, it’s important to think about the difference in value between (non-existence)(default survival)(actual utopia). But that argument has been around a long while. I think Ben Garfinkel was advancing the idea that (actual utopia) - (default survival) might be much larger than (default survival) - (non-existence) in the late 2010s. I’m interested in what’s changed that’s affected discourse. It’s possible the answer is ‘more people have read arguments of this form’. But in that case people who had already read those arguments should update less than if the change is eg us getting more info about how difficult alignment is.
Interesting that you don’t come across many people these days who still identify as longtermist, that’s pretty different from my experience. I think it feels more intuitive to me to identify as ‘longtermist’ than ‘effective altruist’. The former is a claim about my values (people in the future matter morally) whereas the latter is behavioural and feels presumptuous (how altruistic really am I? Am I effective at it even when I try?). But I guess I’m in the minority on that!
I was intending to pick out a group of people who have for years identified as EAs and longtermists but have changed what they’ve worked on. I was thinking it was clear in talking about EAs deprioritising a thing that I meant the ones who prioritised that highly initially, but I see how that’s confusing—I’ll edit to clarify.
Good point, thanks!
Thanks for the links!
Thank you—in a world that does often feel scary and full of suffering, it’s inspiring to remember what we can and have so far achieved.
Better luck next time
“And the reason EA will be great again is that the best EAs, of which there are many, all want to be EAs. It’s in their bones. If they weren’t staring down the barrel of an intelligence explosion, or if the prospect of transformative AI somehow disappears with relative certainty, they would open their Animal Welfare for Dummies books the next day. Or they’d roll up their sleeves to defend America. Some of them are doing these things now. The point is that the EAs are ready to do what’s right with no fuss and no ego. Believe it or not, that’s what AI safety work entailed just seven or eight years ago.”
<3
“The reader will note that I am not the best of us.”
The reader notes that one day you’ll have to stop pretending, and grudgingly admit that you are.
”the way we’ll know EA is really winning is when the Oxford crew is wholly eclipsed by a new generation of even more ambitious and clear-thinking altruists”
Amen
You have such a way with words.
What a great idea!