Data scientist working on AI forecasting through Epoch and the Stanford AI Index. GWWC pledge member since 2017. Formerly social chair at Harvard Effective Altruism, facilitator for Arete Fellowship, and founder of the DC Slate Star Codex meetup.
Robi Rahman
Karma: 1,284
I agree. Mods, is there a reason why I can’t downvote the community tag on this post?
You make some great points. If you think humanity is so immoral that a lifeless universe is better than one populated by humans, then yes, it would indeed be bad to colonize Mars, from that perspective.
I would be pretty horrified at humans taking fish aquaculture with us to Mars, in a manner as inhumane as current fish farming. However, I opened the Deep Space Food Challenge link, and it’s more like what I expected: the winning entries are all plants or cellular manufacturing. (The Impact Canada page you linked to is broken.)
If we don’t invent any morally relevant digital beings prior to colonizing space, then I think wild animal suffering is substantially likely to be the crux of whether it is morally good or bad to populate the cosmos.
Interesting argument. However, I don’t think this point about poverty is right.
The problem is that [optimistic longtermism is] based on the assumption that life is an inherently good thing, and looking at the state of our world, I don’t think that’s something we can count on. Right now, it’s estimated that nearly a billion people live in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than $2.15 per day.
Poverty is arguably a relic of preindustrial society in a state of nature, and is being eliminated as technological progress raises standards of living. If we were to colonize Mars, it would probably be done by wealthy societies that have large amounts of capital per person. You might argue that conditions are so harsh on Mars that life will be unpleasant even for the wealthy, or that population growth will eventually turn Mars society into a zero-sum Malthusian hellhole, but I don’t think those are your claims.
As for animal cruelty, it’s pretty straightforward to propose things like a ban on animal cruelty in a Mars charter or constitution. Maybe this is politically difficult and we don’t have leverage on the Mars colonist people, but then it would be even harder to ban Mars colonization altogether. Finally, this issue might be moot: it’ll be really expensive to take pets and farm animals to Mars. Everyone will probably be eating hydroponic lettuce for the first fifty years anyway, not foie gras.
Shrimpify Mentoring? Shrimping What We Can? Future of Shrimp Institute?
Oh, and we can’t forget about 1FTS: One for the Shrimp.
I’m very disappointed that Rethink Priorities has chosen to rebrand as Rethink Shrimp. I really think we should have gone with Reshrimp Priorities. That said, I will accept the outcome, whatever is deemed to be most effective, and in any case redouble my efforts to forecast timelines to the shrimp singularity.
I don’t see Shapley values mentioned anywhere in your post. I think you’ve made a mistake in attributing the values of things multiple people have worked on, and these would help you fix that mistake.
I don’t really see anything in the article to support the headline claim, and the anonymous sources don’t actually work at NIST, do they?
Rather than farmers investing more profits from growing plants into animal farming, I think the main avenue of harm is that animal feed is an input to meat production, so if the supply of feed increases, production of meat would increase.
Under preference utilitarianism, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether AIs are conscious.
I’m guessing preference utilitarians would typically say that only the preferences of conscious entities matter. I doubt any of them would care about satisfying an electron’s “preference” to be near protons rather than ionized.
So you think your influence on future voting behavior is more impactful than your effect on the election you vote in?
Gina and I eventually decided that the data collection process was too time-consuming, and we stopped partway through.
Josh You and I wrote a python script that searches Google for a list of keywords, saves the text of the web pages in the search results, and shows them to GPT and asks it questions about them from a prompt. This would quickly automate the rest of your data collection if you have the pledge signers in a list already. Email me if you want a copy.
The social value of voting in elections is something where I’ve seen a lot of good arguments on both sides of an issue and it’s unresolved with substantial implications for how I should behave. I would really love to see a debate between Holden Karnofsky, Eric Neyman, and Toby Ord against Chris Freiman and Jacob Falkovich.
Context for people who don’t follow the authors:
“Why Swing-State Voting is not Effective Altruism” by Jason Brennan and Chris Freiman: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopp.12273
Eric Neyman on voting:
https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/?s=vot
“Casting the Decisive Vote” by Toby Ord
https://www.tobyord.com/writing/decisive-vote
“Vote Against” by Jacob Falkovich
I don’t think this is empirically true. US speed limits are typically set lower than the safest driving speeds for the roads, so micromurders from speeding are often negative in areas without pedestrians.
Insurance fraud has low social cost? Explain?
I agree, however, isn’t there still the danger that as scientific research is augmented by AI, nanotechnology will become more practical? The steelmanned case for nanotech x-risk would probably argue that various things that are intractable for us to do now, have no theoretical reasons why they couldn’t be done if we were slightly better at other adjacent techniques.
they were trying to do was place two carbon atoms onto a carbon surface, and they failed, as they didn’t have the means to reliably image diamond surfaces
Has this limitation been ameliorated by advancements in imaging? I used to work in materials science and don’t anymore, but my understanding is that scientists have very recently refined needles to one-atom width at the point, which should improve the resolution of scanning tunneling microscopy. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
a prosecutor showing smiling photos of a couple on vacation to argue that he couldn’t have possibly murdered her
I think you meant a defense attorney, not a prosecutor.
Kat is responding to other questions in this thread, but not ones about the “Sharing Information on Ben Pace” section.
It’s not clear that the anecdotes are from someone outside of Nonlinear who had some bad experience with Ben Pace other than Ben publishing the original post about Nonlinear.
It’s not clear whether Kat wants people to think that it’s about some unmotivated third party, or if it’s supposed to be obvious that it’s Kat writing her own experience in third person. She did write in the post that you shouldn’t update on it, but maybe she wants it to be ambiguous, which has the effect of discrediting Ben. She says that if the person it’s referring to said these things publicly, people would disagree 50⁄50 on whether Ben did something bad, which sure does sound a lot like it’s talking about this whole controversy.
Other people in this thread are saying it’s obvious, but I’m really confused.
It’s not clear the anecdotes in that section are real and not made-up. Kat is dodging questions about it, so for all we know, it could be the case that everyone referenced in that section was a Nonlinear employee who feels bad due to Ben’s post. Some people elsewhere in this thread theorized that it’s Kat describing herself, and strangely but conspicuously, she hasn’t denied it.
Beef cattle are not that carbon-intensive. If you’re concerned about the climate, the main problem with cattle is their methane emissions.
If I eat beef, my emissions combined with other people’s emissions does some amount of harm. If I don’t eat beef, other people’s emissions do approximately the same amount of harm as there would have been if I had eaten it. The marginal harm from my food-based carbon emissions are really small compared to the marginal harm from my food-based contribution to animal suffering.