Co-Founder of Aalto EA, undergraduate in Mathematics in Aalto University, and a Pro Forecaster at INFER
SanteriK
Karma: 79
Is this/other episodes available on Spotify or other podcast platforms? I couldn’t find it with a quick search
Thanks for the response! It’s great to see that animals are mentioned in many other pages on the website. I understand the difficulty of tradeoffs between succintness and precision.
I’m not sure if I follow. I guess strict veganism would be a more effective signal then, since it would be more costly? But I see even less people in the EA/rationalist circles being vegan rather than vegetarian.
I agree that it makes sense, although using the term “people” and mentioning that it means also non-human animals in a footnote seems a bit dishonest to me. I’m uncertain about the tradeoffs between telling the truth and trying to maximize impact here.
That’s helpful to know, thanks! I still think the word “people” is quite misleading in the sense that people rarely associate it with nonhuman animals. I also think there might be an additional reason for not mentioning animals, which is to avoid alienating people who don’t care about animals but who are interested in longtermist causes.
I was quite suprised to see that 80k doesn’t mention animals in their definition of ‘impartial positive impact’.
Their definition: “We define ‘impartial positive impact’ as what helps the most people live better lives in the long term, treating everyone’s interests as equal.”
I’m a bit unsettled by this. I hope they actually do assign value for non-human animals. But even if that’s the case, failing to mention it would be weird.
In general, I’m concerned that longtermists don’t value animals enough. From my experience visiting rationalist/longermist events & spaces, veganism/vegetarianism is less popular than I would have thought. I consider vegetarianism one of the least costly virtue signals, which is why I would expect most healthy people concerned about animal welfare to be vegetarians.
SanteriK’s Quick takes
The link to a paper of diffusion capacity in the article about China by Jeffrey Ding seems to be broken.
Does there exist an equivalent for Master’s degrees?
The strategy doesn’t seem to be available anymore. The link gives me “404 - page not found”.
As the program is about forecasting, what is your stance on the broader field of foresight & futures studies? Why is forecasting more promising than some other approaches to foresight?