I am the director of Tlön, an organization that translates content related to effective altruism, existential risk, and global priorities research into multiple languages.
After living nomadically for many years, I recently moved back to my native Buenos Aires. Feel free to get in touch if you are visiting BA and would like to grab a coffee or need a place to stay.
Every post, comment, or wiki edit I authored is hereby licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
do you think factory-farming is less intentional and systematic than the Holocaust?
Yes, because consumers of animal products mainly demand the taste and texture associated with meat, eggs and milk; exceptions aside, people do not have an intrinsic preference that these products come from live animals (let alone sentient beings). Furthermore, even if factory farming could be described as intentional and systematic, it would not be the intentional and systematic extermination of an entire ethnic group, which seems central in the intuition shaping commonsense evaluations of the Holocaust.
I agree with the general reasoning of your comment.
However, I also think that this specific comparison is not very illuminating. You comapre these two moral tragedies along the dimension of QALYs lost. However, commonsense moral intuitions about the Holocaust—which shape our own intuitions, even if we reject commonsense morality—aren’t solely driven by an implicit quantification of its QALY burden. The intentional, systematic, and large-scale effort to exterminate an entire ethnic group also plays a significant role in our intuitive assessment. When multiple dimensions of evaluation influence our grasp of the moral value of something, comparing something else to it along only one of these dimensions may not help us much to internalize how good or bad it really is.
(ETA: I made a few edits to make the comment clearer.)
@RobBensinger had a useful chart depicting how EA was influenced by various communities, including the rationalist community.
I think it is undeniable that the rationality community played a significant part in the development of EA in the early days. I’m surprised to see people denying this.
What seems more debatable is whether this influence is best characterized as “rationalism influenced EA” rather than “both rationalism and EA emerged to a significant degree from an earlier and broader community of people that included a sizeable number of both proto-EAs and proto-rationalists”.
Hi Mo. I’m unsure if you’ve seen it, but Gwern’s article was discussed here.
Thanks for sharing this. FYI, the links to the ‘Nuclear Safety Standards’ and ‘Basel III’ case studies are not publicly accessible.
An increasing number of people believe that developing powerful AI systems is very dangerous, so companies might want to show that they are being “safe” in their work on AI.
Being safe with AI is hard and potentially costly, so if you’re a company working on AI capabilities, you might want to overstate the extent to which you focus on “safety.”
I think if you think there’s a major difference between the candidates, you might put a value on the election in the billions—let’s say $10B for the sake of calculation.
You don’t need to think there’s a major difference between the candidates to conclude that the election of one candidate adds billions in value. The size of the US discretionary budget over the next four years is roughly three orders of magnitude your $10B figure, and a president can have an impact of the sort EAs care about in ways that go beyond influencing the budget, such as regulating AI, setting immigration policy, eroding government institutions and waging war.
Couldn’t secretive agreements be mostly circumvented simply by directly asking the person whether they signed such an agreement? If they fail to answer, the answer is very likely ‘Yes’, especially if one expects them to answer ‘Yes’ to a parallel question in scenarios where they had signed a non-secretive agreement.
Alternatively, you could make the downvote button reduce votes by one if the vote count is positive, and vice versa. For example, after casting a +9 on a comment by strongly upvoting it, the user can reduce the vote strength to +7 by pressing the downvote button twice.
Another option is to let people with a voting power of n cast a vote of any strength between 1 and n. This may be somewhat challenging from a UI perspective, though.
I think many people have a voting power of 9. I do, and I know many people with more karma than me.
That seems like a fully general counterargument against relying on medical diagnoses for anything. There are always facts that confirm a diagnosis, and then the diagnosis itself. Presumably, it is often helpful to argue that the facts confirm the diagnosis instead of simply listing the facts alone. I don’t see any principled reason for eschewing diagnoses when they are being used to support the conclusion that someone’s testimony or arguments should be distrusted.
It seems reasonably clear that there are certain psychiatric disorders such that people would be justified in refusing to engage with, or dismiss the claims of, those who suffer from them. I think the epistemically sound norm would be to ask those who argue that someone suffers from such a disorder to provide adequate evidence for the allegation.
See also Anders’s more personal reflections:
I have reached the age when I have seen a few lifecycles of organizations and movements I have followed. One lesson is that they don’t last: even successful movements have their moment and then become something else, sclerotize into something stable but useless, or peter out. This is fine. Not in some fatalistic “death is natural” sense, but in the sense that social organizations are dynamic, ideas evolve, and there is an ecological succession of things. 1990s transhumanism begat rationalism that begat effective altruism, and to a large degree the later movements suck up many people who would otherwise have been recruited by the transhumanists.
FHI did close before its time, but it is nice to know it did not become something pointlessly self-perpetuating. As we noted when summing up, 19 years is not bad for a 3-year project. Indeed, a friend remarked that maybe all organisations should have a 20-year time limit. After that, they need to be closed down and recreated if they are still useful, shedding some of the accumulated dross.
The ecological succession of organizations and movements is not all driven by good forces. A fresh structure driven by interested and motivated people is often gradually invaded by poseurs, parasites and imitators, gradually pushing away the original people (or worse, they mutate into curators, gatekeepers and administrators). Many ideas develop, flourish, become explored and then forgotten once a hype peak is passed – even if they still have merit. People burn out, lose interest, form families and have to change priorities, or the surrounding context make the movement change in nature. Dwindling activist movements may suffer “core collapse” as moderate members drift off while the hard core get more radical and pursue ever more extreme activism in order to impress each other rather than the world outside.
FHI did not do any of that. If we had a memetic failure, it was likely more along the lines of developing a shared model of the world and future that may have been in need for more constant challenge. That is one reason why I hope there will be more organizations like FHI but not thinking alike – places like CSER, Mimir, FLI, SERI, GCRI, and many others. We need the focus of a strongly connected organization to build thoughts and systems of substance but separate organizations to get mutual critique and diversity in approaches. Plus, hopefully, metapopulation resilience against individual organizational failures.
Why do you keep referring to Ives Parr as “Ives Parr”? I don’t know if that is his real name or a nom de plume, but in either case it is the name Ives Parr has chosen to use, and I think you should respect that choice; enclosing his name in scare quotes seems disrespectful.
There is a list by Sandberg here. (The other items in that post may also be of interest.)
There is now a dedicated FHI website with lists of selected publications and resources about the institute. (Thanks to @Stefan_Schubert for bringing this to my attention.)
Thanks for drawing this study to my attention. In this context, the truth of the price, taste, and convenience hypothesis is irrelevant, though; what matters is whether consumers of animal products have an intrinsic preference that this food comes from live animals in extreme agony, which is the feature of factory farming by virtue of which we regard it as seriously morally wrong. I have partly crossed out a sentence in my previous comment to make this clear.
The claim is not that the Holocaust was morally evil because German citizens supported it. The claim is that the Holocaust was morally evil, to a significant degree, because it consisted of a systematic plan to exterminate all members of an ethnic group. Whether this was intended only by the Nazi leadership or by larger sections of German society is primarily relevant for assessing their degree of moral responsibility and blameworthiness, rather than for evaluating the Holocaust itself.
Me too, but as I said, our intuitive appraisal of the badness of the Holocaust is clearly shaped by the commonsense moral views I described.