tobycrisford 🔸

Karma: 497

tobycrisford 🔸 17 Dec 2024 8:06 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Sam Tucker’s comment on: Why our goal should be to end factory farming within our lifetime, and why that goal is realistically achievable
I’ve been vegan for 11 years, and to me the growth felt faster in the first 5 years than it did in the second. This could easily just be due to my changing life circumstances (first 5 years as a student and living with other vegans), but that’s my personal anecdotal evidence. Recently it also seems like all the vegan restaurants have been closing in my city (Manchester, UK) although hopefully(?) that is more to do with the economic situation than with a decline in veganism.
The link you’ve shared on the proportion of the population identifying as vegan is encouraging, but I’m finding it hard to figure out the data source for their graph. I’m sure I saw some data shared by someone on the EA forum recently that suggested the growth of veganism had been stagnating recently, but not sure how to find that now!
This seems like a really important question though and I’d love to read an in-depth analysis of what the answer is likely to be.

tobycrisford 🔸 10 Dec 2024 13:27 UTC
3 points
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on: Are fishing and agriculture bad for animals?
This is a fascinating analysis, but if I understand it correctly, you are estimating the impact of fishing and agriculture on average wild animal wellbeing (which you estimate by its effect on the death rate), not total wellbeing, as the first sentence of your post states. Is that correct?
This seems important, as I don’t think there are many who would defend the idea that average welfare is what matters in population ethics? So I’m not sure how important the considerations you point out are. The change in population size seems like it’s going to be the much more important effect here.
It also doesn’t seem obvious to me that we should be able to estimate the impact of fishing or agriculture on average welfare purely by its impact on the death rate. Aren’t there lots of other ways they could impact wild animal welfare too (e.g. by changing the cause of death for wild-animals)?

tobycrisford 🔸 4 Dec 2024 13:19 UTC
1 point
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on: Why our goal should be to end factory farming within our lifetime, and why that goal is realistically achievable
I hope you are right, but is there evidence that veganism is growing exponentially?

tobycrisford 🔸 3 Dec 2024 17:42 UTC
2 points
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on: [Linkpost] Will MacAskill coauthors new book titled “An Introduction to Utilitarianism”, with Richard Chappell and Darius Meissner
Same content on bluesky, for those avoiding twitter now: https://bsky.app/profile/wdmacaskill.bsky.social/post/3lcdlb4lbdk2m

tobycrisford 🔸 15 Nov 2024 17:36 UTC
3 points
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on: The Case for Quantum Technologies
I think this is a fascinating area, and the problems you’ve highlighted seem like important problems. I find it hard to believe it’s a cause area EAs should focus on though.
As you explain, the clearest threat is the impact on cryptography, but it doesn’t seem likely to me that that problem is neglected. There are huge incentives for governments and companies to solve that problem, and I think they are probably already doing lots of work on it..?

tobycrisford 🔸 12 Nov 2024 7:52 UTC
1 point
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on: How much (more) data do we need to claim extreme cost-effectiveness?
A question jumped out at me when reading these results. I should caveat this by emphasizing that I am very much not an expert in this kind of evaluation and this question may be naive.
Is there any seasonal effect on mortality in Malawi? If so, is it ok for the pre-intervention period to be 12-months while the post-intervention period is 18-months?

tobycrisford 🔸 10 Nov 2024 11:29 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: VettedCauses’s comment on: A Critique of Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE)
This is very helpful, thanks!

tobycrisford 🔸 8 Nov 2024 17:59 UTC
12 points
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on: A Critique of Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE)
If you’re correct in the linked analysis, this sounds like a really important limitation in ACE’s methodology, and I’m very glad you’ve shared this!
In case anyone else has the same confusion as me when reading your summary: I think there is nothing wrong with calculating a charity’s cost effectiveness by taking the weighted sum of the cost-effectiveness of all of their interventions (weighted by share of total funding that intervention receives). This should mathematically be the same as (Total Impact / Total cost), and so should indeed go up if their spending on a particular intervention goes down (while achieving the same impact).
The (claimed) cause of the problem is just that ACE’s cost-effectiveness estimate does not go up by anywhere near as much as it should when the cost of an intervention is reduced, leading the cost-effectiveness of the charity as a whole to actually change in the wrong direction when doing the above weighted sum!
If this is true it sounds pretty bad. Would be interested to read a response from them.
Of course, the other thing that could be going on here, is that average cost-effectiveness is not the same as cost-effectiveness on the margin, which is presumably what ACE should care about. Though I don’t see why an intervention representing a smaller share of a charity’s expenditure should automatically mean that this is not where extra dollars would be allocated. The two things seem independent to me.

tobycrisford 🔸 31 Oct 2024 18:31 UTC
1 point
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on: Marginal Revolution: Effective Altruists and Finance Theory
I would be very interested to read a summary of what Tyler Cowen means by all this!
I know it was left as an exercise for the reader, but if someone wants to do the work for me it would be appreciated :)

tobycrisford 🔸 31 Oct 2024 17:49 UTC
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in reply to: jenny_kudymowa’s comment on: Fungal diseases: Health burden, neglectedness, and potential interventions
Makes sense, thank you for the reply and clarification!

tobycrisford 🔸 21 Oct 2024 6:36 UTC
1 point
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on: Fungal diseases: Health burden, neglectedness, and potential interventions
This is a fascinating summary!
I have a bit of a nitpicky question on the use of the phrase ‘confidence intervals’ throughout the report. Are these really supposed to be interpreted as confidence intervals? Rather than the Bayesian alternative, ‘credible intervals’..?
My understanding was that the phrase ‘confidence interval’ has a very particular and subtle definition, coming from frequentist statistics:
- 80% Confidence Interval: For any possible value of the unknown parameter, there is an 80% chance that your data-collection and estimation process would produce an interval which contained that value.
- 80% Credible interval: Given the data you actually have, there is an 80% chance that the unknown parameter is contained in the interval.
From my reading of the estimation procedure, it sounds a lot more like these CIs are supposed to be interpreted as the latter rather than the former? Or is that wrong?
Appreciate this is a bit of a pedantic question, that the same terms can have different definitions in different fields, and that discussions about the definitions of terms aren’t the most interesting discussions to have anyway. But the term jumped out at me when reading and so thought I would ask the question!

tobycrisford 🔸 17 Oct 2024 16:32 UTC
3 points
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on: AI data gaps could lead to ongoing Animal Suffering
This is a really interesting post, and I appreciate how clearly it is laid out. Thank you for sharing it! But I’m not sure I agree with it, particularly the way that everything is pinned to the imminent arrival of AGI.
Firstly, the two assumptions you spell out in your introduction, that AGI is likely only a few years away, and that it will most likely come from scaled up and refined versions of moden LLMs, are both much more controversial than you suggest (I think)! (Although I’m not confident they are false either)
But even if we accept those assumptions, the third big assumption here is that we can alter a superintelligent AGI’s values in a predictable and straightforward way by just adding in some synethetic training data which expresses the views we like, when building some of its component LLMs. This seems like a strange idea to me!
If we removed some concept from the training data completely, or introduced a new concept that had never appeared otherwise, then I can imagine that having some impact on the AGI’s behaviour. But if all kinds of content are included in significant quantities anyway, then i find it hard to get my head around the inclusion of additional carefully chosen synthetic data having this kind of effect. I guess it clashes with my understanding of what a superintelligent AGI means, to think that its behaviour could be altered with such simple manipulation.
I think an important aspect of this is that even if AGI does come from scaling up and refining LLMs, it is not going to just be a LLM in a straightforward definition of that term (i.e. something that communicates by generating each word with a single forward pass through a neural network). At the very least it must also have some sort of hidden internal monologue where it does chain of thought reasoning, and stores memories, etc.
But I don’t know much about AI alignment, so would be very interested to read and understand more about the reasoning behind this third assumption.
All that said, even ignoring AGI, LLMs are likely going to be used more and more in people’s every day lives over the next few years, so training them to express kinder views towards animal seems like a potentially worthwhile goal anyway. I don’t think AGI needs to come into it!

tobycrisford 🔸 24 Sep 2024 7:47 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Utilitarianism and the replaceability of desires and attachments
I agree that we can imagine a similar scenario where your identity is changed to a much lesser degree. But I’m still not convinced that we can straightforwardly apply the Platinum rule to such a scenario.
If your subjective wellbeing is increased after taking the pill, then one of the preferences that must be changed is your preference not to take the pill. This means that when we try to apply the Platinum rule: “treat others as they would have us treat them”, we are naturally led to ask: “as they would have us treat them when?” If their preference to have taken the pill after taking it is stronger than their preference not to take the pill before taking it, the Platinum rule becomes less straightforward.
I can imagine two ways of clarifying the rule here, to explain why forcing someone to take the pill would be wrong, which you already allude to in your post:
- We should treat others as they would have us treat them at the time we are making the decision. But this would imply that if someone’s preferences are about to naturally, predictably, change for the rest of their life, then we should disregard that when trying to decide what is best for them, and only consider what they want right now. This seems much more controversial than the original statement of the rule.
- We should treat others as they would have us treat them, considering the preferences they would have over their lifetime if we did not act. But this would imply that if someone was about to eat the pill by accident, thinking it was just a sweet, and we knew it was against their current wishes, then we should not try to stop them or warn them. This would create a very odd action/inaction distinction. Again, this seems much more controversial than the original statement of the rule.
In the post you say the Platinum rule might be the most important thing for a moral theory to get right, and I think I agree with you on this. It is something that seems so natural and obvious that I want to take it as a kind of axiom. But neither of these two extensions to it feel this obvious any more. They both seem very controversial.
I think the rule only properly makes sense when applied to a person-moment, rather than to a whole person throughout their life. If this is true, then I think my original objection still applies. We aren’t dealing with a situation where we can apply the platinum rule in isolation. Instead, we have just another utilitarian trade-off between the welfare of one (set of) person(-moments) and another.

tobycrisford 🔸 23 Sep 2024 7:32 UTC
3 points
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on: Utilitarianism and the replaceability of desires and attachments
This was a really thought-provoking read, thank you!
I think I agree with Richard Chappell’s comment that: “the more you manipulate my values, the less the future person is me”.
In this particular case, if I take the pill, my preferences, dispositions, and attitudes are being completely transformed in an instant. These are a huge part of what makes me who I am, so I think that after taking this pill I would become a completely different person, in a very literal sense. It would be a new person who had access to all of my memories, but it would not be me.
From this point of view, there is no essential difference between this thought experiment, and the common objection to total utilitarianism where you consider killing one person and replacing them with someone new, so that total well-being is increased.
This is still a troubling thought experiment of course, but I think it does weaken the strength of your appeal to the Platinum rule? We are no longer talking about treating a person differently to how they would want to be treated, in isolation. We just have another utilitarian thought experiment where we are considering harming person X in order to benefit a different person Y.
And I think my response to both thought experiments is the same. Killing a person who does not want to be killed, or changing the preferences of someone who does not want them changed, does a huge amount of harm (at least on a preference-satisfaction version of utilitarianism), so the assumption in these thought experiments that overall preference satisfaction is nevertheless increased is doing a lot of work, more work than it might appear at first.

tobycrisford 🔸 21 Sep 2024 19:41 UTC
1 point
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on: Does the Self-Sampling Assumption Imply Clairvoyance?
I really like this thought experiment, thank you for sharing!
Personally, I agree with you, and I think the answer to your headline question is: yes! Your reasoning makes sense to me anyway. (At least if we don’t combine the Self-Sampling Assumption with another assumption like the Self-Indication Assumption as well).
I think that your example is essentially equivalent to the Doomsday argument, or the Adam+Eve paradox, see here: https://anthropic-principle.com/preprints/cau/paradoxes But I like that your thought experiment really isolates the key problem and puts precise numbers on it!

tobycrisford 🔸 9 Sep 2024 16:58 UTC
15 points
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in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Dispelling the Anthropic Shadow
I haven’t digested the full paper yet, but based on the summary pasted below, this is precisely the claim I was trying to argue for in the “Against Anthropic Shadow” post of mine that you have linked.
It looks like this claim has been fleshed out in a lot more detail here though, and I’m looking forward to reading it properly!
In the post you linked I also went on quite a long digression trying to figure out if it was possible to rescue Anthropic Shadow by appealing to the fact that there might be large numbers of other worlds containing life (this plausibly weakens the strength of evidence provided by A, which may then stop the cancellation in C). I decided it technically was possible, but only if you take a strange approach to anthropic reasoning, with a strange and difficult-to-define observer reference class.
Possibly focusing so much on this digression was a mistake though, since the summary above is really pointing to the important flaw in the original argument!

tobycrisford 🔸 4 Sep 2024 16:42 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Oisín Considine’s comment on: What are the best charities working in vegan outreach?
This is a fantastic answer, thank you!

tobycrisford 🔸 4 Sep 2024 12:21 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: What are the best charities working in vegan outreach?
I think (2) is the relevant one here. Maybe in the not too distant future there will be a massive shift in global public opinion, and the farming of animals (at least at industrial scale) will become a thing of the past. If you think most farmed animals lead lives so bad that they would be better off not being born, then the impact of this change would be huge. (And if you’re a non-consequentialist vegan who doesn’t like to view the issue in these terms, then it’s harder to quantify the impact, but you probably care even more about doing everything possible to make this scenario happen)
I think this is what is hoped for by the vegans who prioritise outreach. The idea would be that outreach either increases the probability of this scenario becoming reality, or it means that this scenario happens sooner than it otherwise would. I think this is a conceivable way that vegan outreach could have the kind of huge, hard to measure, benefit you’re talking about.
Of course there’s a whole argument to be had here. I’m sure lots of people would find this scenario so implausible as to not be worth considering (or they would think it will only happen if and when we get good cheap lab grown meat, or that we can’t do anything to influence if and when it happens… etc).
I wasn’t really trying to start that argument with this question, but just asking what someone who wants to give some weight to this argument in their donations should do.

tobycrisford 🔸 4 Sep 2024 12:09 UTC
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Reducing the nearterm risk of human extinction is not astronomically cost-effective?
Sure, but once you’ve assumed that already, you don’t need to rely any more on an argument about shifts to P(X_1 > x) being cancelled out by shifts to P(X_n > x) for larger n (which if I understand correctly is the argument you’re making about existential risk).
If P(X_N > x) is very small to begin with for some large N, then it will stay small, even if we adjust P(X_1 > x) by a lot (we can’t make it bigger than 1!) So we can safely say under your assumption that adjusting the P(X_1 > x) factor by a large amount does influence P(X_N > x) as well, it’s just that it can’t make it not small.
The existential risk set-up is fundamentally different. We are assuming the future has astronomical value to begin with, before we intervene. That now means non-tiny changes to P(Making it through the next year) must have astronomical value too (unless there is some weird conspiracy among the probability of making it through later years which precisely cancels this out, but that seems very weird, and not something you can justify by pointing to global health as an analogy).

tobycrisford 🔸 4 Sep 2024 7:34 UTC
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Reducing the nearterm risk of human extinction is not astronomically cost-effective?
I don’t see why the same argument holds for global health interventions....?
Why should X_N > x require X_1 > x....?