I recently completed a PhD exploring the implications of wild animal suffering for environmental management. You can read my research here: https://scholar.google.ch/citations?user=9gSjtY4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
I am now working at RP as part of their Animal Welfare Talent Program
Tristan Katz
Karma: 787
As @RyanCarey pointed out, it is true but also tautological, so I’m not sure how useful it can be.
I would be interested in more posts about the risks new funding might bring. But I don’t want people to be so worried about irreversibility that they don’t use that funding, when it could do a hell of a lot of good, and there might be good reasons to spend it quickly.
Right, but there are arguments behind those moves that this post doesn’t engage with, because it remains at an abstract level.
Oh! I had the idea that new posts start with 3 karma, but then I was wrong.
In that case, I suppose downvoting is less common than I thought. I did still see one or two new posts with 0 or −1 karma, so my argument would still stand for them. But this is clearly less of an issue than I thought.
Suggestion for the forum: prompt anyone who downvotes a (new) post to leave a comment
If you look at the newest posts on any given day, you’ll see a number with 0 or 1 karma. If my understanding is correct, this means they have been downvoted. Yet a lot of these posts clearly involved a lot of work and are well intended. I imagine that to put so much effort into a post only to be immediately downvoted, and possibly have your post disappear from the front page and be read by very few people as a result, must be quite disheartening.Of course many of these posts have flaws. But it would be good then for anyone who downvotes it—or even disagree-votes—to say why and provide feedback. I think requiring this would be too much, but if downvoting triggered a comment-box to pop up, that might help to encourage such feedback to be given. I’m imagining this working the same way voting on a poll prompts you to also add a comment. And if doing this across the board seems too annoying, it could be made to apply only to posts with, idk, <10 karma?
Hmm I think you’d have to really think this is a big threat to justify downvoting rather than disagree-voting. The post itself was well written, so isn’t it something we can discuss and politely disagree with?
I also feel like this meme has been present in EA for a long time already, and although some people have burnout I imagine a lot of others (like me) could do more and might find this kind of post motivating.
I understand where this post is coming from, but I disagree with it pretty strongly. I might write a full post to flesh out my disagreement, but here are my messy thoughts:
I agree with downgrading the importance of being vegan, but I disagree strongly with making it taboo.
Many vegans actually define veganism not as a diet but as an ethical position. I embrace this—I actually think we should broaden the scope of veganism. If you eat vegan normally, and for the right reasons, but make the odd exception (I’m guilty as well!) then I want to say you’re vegan.
Implicit in the framing of this post is that the thing we’re against is factory farming. For me, and I expect many animal advocates, this isn’t enough—I think all killing of animals is murder, and I’m against all of it. This distinction is important because it requires adopting a stronger moral position, which veganism reflects.
The climate change analogy doesn’t work, because emitting some GHGs is morally unproblematic—the problem is how much we emit. Eating animals, however, is always to be complicit in murder.
Yes there is a personal cost. I also experience a cost from not being allowed to murder people—but I don’t question that cost. Similarly, I never question the cost of not eating meat. I would never want to be complicit in murder.
I agree that we should embrace non-vegans in the animal rights movement. We want as many on board as possible. But I would be uncomfortable with non-vegans leading the animal rights movement. I like the ‘monk’ analogy—I want those who are seriously non-speciesist to lead.
Making it taboo is a bit like saying… “being strictly against the murder of innocent children, such that you boycott all products that require the murder of innocent children to be made? We don’t do that here. We’re against the torture of innocent children, but you go ahead and purchase fragments of their corpses if you want.” The alternative, of course is to take an approach where you view veganism as an ideal that all should strive for, but acknowledge that it’s hard, people face different challenges, and so are also not judgy of people who fail to meet that standard. My perception is that many animal advocacy groups already do this well.
I think these all seem like petitions worth signing. But I think statements with unfounded impact estimates should be avoided on the forum. Not only do the numbers seem arbitrary, and then the result of 1000x very arbitrary, they also aren’t obviously true—I’m not sure that 1, 2, or in fact any of these are 10x as easy to mitigate or solve as the average petition.
Assuming we end factory farming before 2100, which factor will have contributed the most?
I don’t have a lot of hope for cultivated meat. But I have more for the plant based meat we already have, and I think it’s already instrumental in getting more people to go vegan. That said, I don’t think any meat alternatives will get us all the way (I think so far we mostly have evidence against that), so social change seems essential.
I like this post, it raises some good points. But I can think of several reasons not mentioned for why big cities are natural hubs:
EAs who work on policy have to work in capitals (like London).
EAs generally benefit from being adjacent to tech (AI safety, alt proteins) and field experts (e.g. in biosecurity), both of which tend to be found in big cities.
England is a bit unusual in how easy it is to get into London. Living outside of San Fran or most other big cities outside of Europe will not offer the same access.
Although rent is high in big cities, the ability to save is often greater due to high salaries (for high skilled jobs outside EA). So you can do even better there—for example, @Imma🔸 moved to Zurich to earn to give, which has some of the highest salaries in the world.
That all said, why not both? It might make sense to push for hubs in cheap cities for those who can work remotely, and also have hubs in big cities for those who need the network and opportunities. So I don’t think the above necessarily contradict your argument.
There’s since been a post articulating similar concerns to my own but in much better words. Interested to see what you think of it.
Oh—that went totally over my head 😅
Pretty controversial. I’d like to see more of an argument and consideration of counterarguments. Or alternatively, constructive advice for how to avoid this.
On the Margin, I’d like more funding to
I want more money spent on improving AW. But I don’t think we’re as confident as I’d like us to be about which interventions are best. I’d especially like us to have more worked-out theories of change not just the next 10 years, but for the next 100. But theorizing needs to be backed up by good data.
I think it’s a good response, but definitely techno-optimism.
Firstly, we’re yet to see whether synthetic meat actually can be made more cheaply, right? Currently it seems like animals actually do make meat fairy efficiently when you consider the important work that their immune systems do (unless I’m mistaken, contamination is one of the main barriers to scaling up synthetic meat). And then, who’s to say that ASI won’t genetically engineer animals to produce meat more efficiently while ignoring their suffering.
Secondly, there’s the more complicated cultural reasons for continuing animal use. Consider that a lentil dal, seitan curry and beyond burger are already delicious—if it was only about efficiency we’d have stopped abusing animals already. But people like eating animals.
I’m very uncertain about these arguments, but I think it’s hard to know so I’m wary of anyone who’s too optimistic!
Partially aligned transformative AIs are likely to be stable under reflection
I’m not sure what this means (stable, under reflection) - can someone help?
AI alignment to humans will in practice avoid moral catastrophes to digital minds
I have very low certainty on this, but it seems plausible to me that if AGI shares humanity’s goals, it might just have a good time fulfilling them with few conflicts.
But it also seems quite possible that this won’t happen, I.e. AGI pursues humanity’s goals but is constantly frustrated that it can’t achieve them better.
So my stance is unlikely but possible.
Research into digital mind suffering is sufficiently tractable to work on
I am yet to see any reliable way to test for consciousness in AI systems. More fundamentally, since current LLMs are trained to respond in human-like ways, any appearance of suffering should be viewed with great scepticism. The likes of Anthropic’s welfare report strikes me as nothing more than humane-washing.
Until more reliable methods are devised, I do not view this as tractable (but I hope to be proven wrong). I think it is important for some people to work on, but people already are and I think the marginal benefit of additional labor is likely low.
AI alignment to humans will in practice avoid moral catastrophes to animals
I think this is pretty obvious—we already have a moral catastrophe for animals, there’s no reason why alignment to humans would avoid this.
I didn’t vote at the extreme because alignment to humans might still be a precondition for avoiding catastrophes.
If there’s SOME chance that any significant money gets directed to mainstream EA orgs for unrestricted use, then surely that shifts the scales somewhat? There’s also the fact that, as others on the forum have pointed out, there’s now a greater need to work on making orgs able to absorb additional funds, making the ‘direct impact’ career pathway more promising/urgent.
But I agree I’d like to see the maths, I’ve got no idea what chances of what amount of money we’re talking about here.
I didn’t notice at all how old the post was before I made this comment 😂