Hi Tobias — thanks for the ideas!
Invertebrate welfare is wrapped into ‘Wild animal welfare’, and reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors is partially captured under ‘S-risks’. We’ll discuss the other two.
Robert_Wiblin
Karma: 5,859
Consider a wider range of jobs, paths and problems if you want to improve the long-term future
For future reference, next time you need to look up the page number for a citation, Library Genesis can quickly let you access a digital copy of almost any book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
I didn’t mean to imply that the protests would fix the whole problem, obviously they won’t.
As you say you’d need to multiply through by a distribution for ‘likelihood of success’ and ‘how much of the problems solved’.
I think a crux for some protesters will be how much total damage they think bad policing is doing in the USA.
While police killings or murders draw the most attention, much more damage is probably done in other ways, such as through over-incarceration, petty harassment, framing innocent people, bankrupting folks through unnecessary fines, enforcing bad laws such a drug prohibition, assaults, and so on. And that total damage accumulates year after year.
On top of this we could add the burden of crime itself that results from poor policing practices, including a lack of community trust in police due to their oppressive behaviour and lack of accountability.
Regardless of where a consequentialist analysis would come down, it is a tragedy that people feel they need to choose between missing an opportunity to fix a horrible system of state violence, and not spreading a dangerous pandemic.
If I weren’t interested in creating more new beings with positive lives I’d place greater priority on:
Ending the suffering and injustice suffered by animals in factory farming
Ending the suffering of animals in the wilderness
Slowing ageing, or cryonics (so the present generation can enjoy many times more positive value over the course of their lives)
Radical new ways to dramatically raise the welfare of the present generation (e.g. direct brain stimulation as described here)
I haven’t thought much about what would look good from a conservative Christian worldview.
Hi PBS, I understand where you’re coming from and expect many policy folks may well be having a bigger impact than front-line doctors, because in this case prevention is probably better than treatment.
At the same time I can see why we don’t clap for them in that way, because they’re not taking on a particularly high risk of death and injury in the same way the hospital staff are right now. I appreciate both, but on a personal level I’m more impressed by people who continue to accept a high risk of contracting COVID-19 in order to treat patients.
Eleven recent 80,000 Hours articles on how to stop COVID-19 & other pandemics
Podcast with Ben Todd covering the key ideas of 80,000 Hours (2h 57m)
I’ve compiled 16 fun or important points from the book for the write-up of my interview with Toby, which might well be of interest people here. :)
Hi Khorton — yes as I responded to Denise, it appears the one year thing must have been specific to the (for-profit) bank I spoke with. They pay so many up-front costs for each new donor I think they want to ensure they get a lot of samples out of each one to be able to cover them.
And perhaps they were highballing the 30+ number, so they couldn’t say they didn’t tell you should the most extreme thing happen, even if it’s improbable.
Hmmmm, this is all what I was told at one place. Maybe some of these rules — 30 kids max, donating for a year at a minimum, or the 99% figure — are specific to that company, rather than being UK-wide norms/regulations.
Or perhaps they were rounding up to 99% to just mean ‘the vast majority’.
I’d forgotten about the ten family limit, thanks for the reminder.
Like you I have the impression that they’re much less selective on eggs.
In some ways the UK sperm donation process is an even more serious commitment than egg donation.
From what I was told, the rejection rate is extremely high — close to 99% of applicants are filtered out for one reason or another. If you get through that process they’ll want you to go in and donate once a week or more, for at least a year. Each time you want to donate, you can’t ejaculate for 48 hours beforehand.
And the place I spoke to said they’d aim to sell enough sperm to create 30 kids in the UK, and even more overseas.
The ones born in the UK can find out who you are and contact you once they turn 18. With so many children potentially resulting, there’s a good chance that a number will do so. It would be worth thinking ahead of time how you’d respond, and whether that’s something you’ll want in your life in ~20 years’ time.
I know 2 working in normal pandemic preparedness and 2-3 in EA GCBR stuff.
I can offer introductions though they are probably worked off their feet just now. DM me somewhere?
Thanks for the detailed feedback Adam. :)
Part of the issue might be the subheading “Space colonization will probably include animals”.
If the heading had been ‘might’, then people would be less likely to object. Many things ‘might’ happen!
80% seems reasonable. It’s hard to be confident about many things that far out, but:
i) We might be able to judge what things seem consistent with others. For example, it might be easier to say whether we’ll bring pigs to Alpha Centauri if we go, than whether we’ll ever go to Alpha Centauri.
ii) That we’ll terraform other planets is itself fairly speculative, so it seems fair to meet speculation with other speculation. There’s not much alternative.
iii) Inasmuch as we’re focussing in on (what’s in my opinion) a narrow part of the whole probability space — like flesh and blood humans going to colonise other stars and bringing animals with them — we can develop approaches that seem most likely to work in that particular scenario, rather than finding something that would hypothetically works across the whole space.
I apologise if I’m missing something as I went over this very quickly.
I think a key objection for me is to the idea that wild animals will be included in space settlement in any significant numbers.
If we do settle space, I expect most of that, outside of this solar system, to be done by autonomous machines rather than human beings. Most easily habitable locations in the universe are not on planets, but rather freestanding in space, using resources from asteroids, and solar energy.
Autonomous intelligent machines will be at a great advantage over animals from Earth, who are horribly adapted to survive a long journey through interstellar space or to thrive on other planets.
In a wave of settlement machines should vastly outpace actual humans and animals as they can travel faster between stars and populate those start systems more rapidly.
If settlement is done by ‘humans’ it seems more likely to be performed by emulated human minds running on computer systems.
In addition to these difficulties, there is no practical reason to bring animals. By that stage of technological development we will surely be eating meat produced without a whole animal, if we eat meat at all. And if we want to enjoy the experience of natural environments on Earth we will be able to do it in virtual reality vastly more cheaply than terraforming the planets we arrive at.
If I did believe animals were going to be brought on space settlement, I would think the best wild-animal-focussed project would be to prevent that from happening, by figuring out what could motivate people to do so, and pointing out the strong arguments against it.
Thanks for doing this research, nice work.
Could you make your figure a little larger, it’s hard to read on a desktop. It might also be easier for the reader if each of the five arguments had a one-word name to keep track of the gist of their actual content.
I don’t think this is quite right. Arguments 5 and 12 are very much within the confidence interval for Argument 9. Eyeballing it I would guess we can only be about 60% confident that argument 9 would do better again if you repeated the experiment.
I would summarise the results as follow:
All five arguments substantially outperformed the control, on average increasing giving by around 45%.
We also had some evidence that Arguments 5, 9 and 12 all outperformed Arguments 3 and 14, perhaps having about 30% more impact.