Random idea: a yearly community retreat or a mini-conference for EtG folks?
akash đ¸
Karma: 413
I would be interested to see what proportion of group organizer request funding primarily due to difficult financial situations. My guess would be that this number is fairly small, but I could be wrong.
I agree with so much here.
I have my responses to the question you raised: âSo why do I feel inclined to double down on effective altruism rather than move onto other endeavours?â
I have doubled down a lot over the last ~1.5 years. I am not at all shy about being an EA; it is even on my LinkedIn!
This is partly because of integrity and honesty reasons. Yes, I care about animals and AI and like math and rationality and whatnot. All this is a part of who I am.
Funnily enough, a non-negligible reason why I have doubled down (and am more pro-EA than before) is the sheer quantity of not-so-good critiques. And they keep publishing them.
Another reason is because there are bizarre caricatures of EAs out there. No, we are not robotic utility maximizers. In my personal interactions, when people hopefully realize that âokay this is a just another feel-y human with a bunch of interests who happens to be vegan and feels strongly about donations.â
âI have personally benefited massively in achieving my own goals.â â I hope this experience is more common!
I feel EA/âadjacent community epistemics have enormously improved my mental health and decision-making; being in the larger EA-sphere has improved my view of life; I have more agency; I am much more open to newer ideas, even those I vehemently disagree with; I am much more sympathetic to value and normative pluralism than before!
I wish more ever day EAs were louder about their EA-ness.
Related Q: is there a list of EA media project that you would like to see more of but ones that currently do not exist?
I honestly donât know. When I think of an arms race, I typically think of rapid manufacturing and accumulation of âweapons.â
Do you think export controls between two countries are a sufficient condition for an arms race?
I donât disagree with this at all. But does this mean that blame can be attributed to the entire EA community? I think not.
Re mentorship/âfunding: I doubt that his mentors were hoping that he would accelerate the chances of an arms race conflict. As a corollary, I am sure nukes wouldnât have been developed if the physics community in the 1930s didnât exist or mentored different people or adopted better ethical norms. Even if they did the latter, it is unclear if that would have prevented the creation of the bomb.
(I found your comments under Ben Westâs posts insightful; if true, it highlights a divergence between the beliefs of the broader EA community and certain influential EAs in DC and AI policy circles.)
Currently, it is just a report, and I hope it stays that way.
And we contributed to this.
What makes you say this? I agree that it is likely that Aschenbrennerâs report was influential here, but did we make Aschenbrenner write chapter IIId of Situational Awareness the way he did?
But the background work predates Leopoldâs involvement.
Is there some background EA/âaligned work that argues for an arms race? Because the consensus seems to be against starting a great power war.
Which software/âapplication did you use to create these visualizations?
âbut could be significant if the average American were to replace the majority of their meat consumption with soy-based products.â
Could you elaborate how you conclude that the effects of soy isoflavones could be significant if consumption were higher?
I read this summary article from the Linus Pauling institute a while ago and concluded, âokay, isoflavones donât seem like an issue at all, and in some cases might have health benefitsâ (and this matches my experience so far).[1] The relevant section from the article:
Male reproductive health
Claims that soy food/âisoflavone consumption can have adverse effects on male reproductive function, including feminization, erectile dysfunction, and infertility, are primarily based on animal studies and case reports (181). Exposure to isoflavones (including at levels above typical Asian dietary intakes) has not been shown to affect either the concentrations of estrogen and testosterone, or the quality of sperm and semen (181, 182). Thorough reviews of the literature found no basis for concern but emphasized the need for long-term, large scale comprehensive human studies (181, 183).
Unless there is some new piece of information that fairly moderately/âstrongly suggests that isoflavones do have feminizing effects, this seems like a non-issue.
- ^
A personal anecdote, not that it bears much weight, I have been consuming >15 ounces of tofu and >250 ml of soy milk nearly every day for the last four years, and I have noticed how âfeminineâ or âmasculineâ my body looks is almost entirely dependent on how much weight I lift in a week and my nutritional intake, rather than my soy intake.
- ^
A few quick pushbacks/âquestions:
I donât think the perceived epistemic strength of the animal welfare folks in EA should have any bearing on this debate unless you think that nearly everyone running prominent organizations like Good Food Institute, Faunalytics, the Humane League, and others is not truth-seeking (i.e., animal welfare organizations are culturally not truth-seeking and consequently have shoddy interventions and goals).
To what extent do you think EA funding be allocated based on broader social perception? I think we should near-completely discount broader social perceptions in most cases.
The social perception point, which has been brought up by others, is confusing because animal welfare has broad social support. The public is negatively primed towards veganism but overwhelmingly positively so towards the general idea of not being unkind to (euphemism) farm animals.
âGoing all-in on animal welfare at the expense of global development seems bad for the movement.â â I donât think this is being debated here though. Could you elaborate on why you think if an additional $100 million were allocated to Animal Welfare, it would be at the expense of Global Health & Development (GHD)? Isnât $100 million a mere fraction of the yearly GHD budget?
Causing unnecessary suffering is morally bad. Causing intense unnecessary suffering is morally worse.
Non-humans have the capacity to physically and psychologically suffer. The intensity of suffering they can experience is non-negligible, and plausibly, not that far off from that of humans. Non-humans have a dispreference towards being in such states of agony.
Non-human individuals are in constant and often intense states of agony in farmed settings. They also live short lives, sometimes less than 1/â10th of their natural lifespan, which leads to loss of welfare they would have experienced if they were allowed to live till old age.
The scale of farmed animal suffering is enormous beyond comprehension; if we only consider land animals, it is around 100 billion; if crustaceans and fish are included, the number is close to 1000 billion; if insects are accounted for, then the number is in several 1000s of billions. Nearly all of these animals have lives not worth living.
The total dollar spent per unit of suffering experienced is arguably more than a thousand times lower for non-humans compared to humans. This seems unreasonable given the vast number of individuals who suffer in farmed settings. Doing a quick and dirty calculation, and only considering OpenPhil funding, we get ~$1 spent per human and ~0.0003 spent per non-human individual. Including non-EA funding into this estimation would make the discrepancy worser.
We are nowhere close to reducing the amount of non-humans in farmed settings. Meat consumption is predicted to rise by 50% in the next three decades, which would drastically increase the number of farmed animals living short, agony-filled lives. We also havenât yet had a breakthrough in cultivated meat, and if the Humbird report is to be believed, we should be skeptical of any such breakthroughs in the near future (if anything, we are seeing the first wave of cultivated meat bans, which may delay the transition to animal-free products).
Reducing farm animal suffering, via policy, advocacy, and development of alternative proteins, is tractable and solvable (for the last one in the list, we may need moonshot projects, which may imply raising even more funding).
Therefore, the additional $100 million is better spent on animal welfare than global health.
This was an April Foolsâ Day post, so it shouldnât be taken that seriously!
I think that a human being in a constant blissful state might endanger someoneâs existence or make them non-functional
But if pure suffering elimination was the only thing that mattered, no one would be endangered, right? I am guessing there are some other factors you account for when valuing human lives?
which isnât much of an issue for a farm animal.
I suspect we share very different ethical intuitions about the intrinsic value of non-human lives.
But even from an amoral perspective, this would be an issue because if a substantial number of engineered chickens pecked each other to death (which happens even now), it would reduce profitability and uptake of this method.
The second-order considerations are definitely a problem once there is more widespread adoption. If only 0.001% of the population is using genetic enhancement, there are very little in the way of collective action problems.
I partially agree, but even a couple of malevolent actor who enhance themselves considerably could cause large amounts of trouble. See this section of Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors.
If it is indeed possible to modify animal minds to such an extent that we would be 100% certain that previously displeasing experiences are now blissful, then couldnât we extend this logic and âsolveâ every single problem? Like, making starvation and poverty and disease and extinction blissful as well?
I feel there are crucial moral and practical (e.g., 2nd order effects) considerations to account for here.
Fascinating â skimmed his wikipedia and this video, and I think he is 100% serious. He even wrote a paper with Sandberg and Roache arguing the same.
I posted this because it is an inside joke at our university group, but I appreciate that some professional philosophers have given it a more serious treatment.
Such rich literature! I think the major flaw in their methodology is lack of coordinated, incremental scaling (which seems to be the reason why the test subject faced quite a bit of trouble). That said, it still reinforces the arguments of the proposal above, so thank you for sharing these!
Tiny huÂmans: the most promisÂing new cause canÂdiÂdate?
I was skeptical, and then I saw the menu.
If Dustin wants to further diversify his investment portfolio, this might be a great choice.
David Nashâs Monthly Overload of Effective Altruism seems highly underrated, and you should most probably give it a follow.
I donât think any other newsletter captures and highlights EAâs cause-neutral impartial beneficence better than the Monthly Overload of EA. For example, this monthâs newsletter has updates about Conferences, Virtual Events, Meta-EA, Effective Giving, Global Health and Development, Careers, Animal Welfare, Organization updates, Grants, Biosecurity, Emissions & CO2 Removal, Environment, AI Safety, AI Governance, AI in China, Improving Institutions, Progress, Innovation & Metascience, Longtermism, Forecasting, Miscellaneous causes and links, Stories & EA Around the World, Good News, and more. Compiling all this must be hard work!
Until September 2022, the monthly overloads were also posted on the Forum and received higher engagement than the Substack. I find the posts super informative, so I am giving the newsletter a shout-out and putting it back on everyoneâs radar!
I donât disagree. I was simply airing my suspicion that most group organizers who applied for the OP fellowship did so because they thought something akin to âI will be organizing for 8-20 hours a week and I want to be incentivized for doing soâ â which is perfectly a-ok and a valid reason â rather than âI am applying to the fellowship as I will not be able to sustain myself without the funding.â
In cases where people need to make trade-offs between taking some random university job vs. organizing part time, assuming that they are genuinely interested in organizing and that the university has potential, I think it would be valuable for them to get funding.