Do you think decreasing the consumption of animals is good/bad? For which groups of farmed animals?
I stopped eating animals 4 years ago mostly to decrease the suffering of farmed animals[1]. I am glad I did that based on the information I had at the time, and published in online journals of my former university a series of 3 articles whose title reads "Why we should decrease the consumption of animals?". However, I am no longer confident that decreasing the consumption of animals is good/bad. It has many effects:
Great point, Jason!
So I am not confident a small-to-medium refuction in animal feed demand would ultimately impact crop acreage that much.
I agree confidence is not warranted.
I don't know about other markets though!
It looks like there is significant variation across countries (the relevant metric is per capita production, but I did not immediately find it):
There's also the fact that, as a society and subject to certain exceptions, we've decided that employers shouldn't be using an employee's religious beliefs or lack thereof as an assessment factor in hiring. I think that's a good rule from a rule-utilitarian framework. And we can't allow people to utilize their assumptions about theists, non-theists, or particular theists in hiring without the rule breaking down.
The exceptions generally revolve around personal/family autonomy or expressive association, which don't seem to be in play in the situation you describe.
OPTIC is an in-person, intercollegiate forecasting competition where undergraduate forecasters compete to make accurate predictions about the future. Think olympiad/debate tournament/hackathon, but for forecasting — teams compete for thousands of dollars in cash prizes on question topics ranging from geopolitics to celebrity twitter patterns to financial asset prices.
We ran the pilot event on Saturday, April 22 in Boston and are scaling up to an academic league/olympiad. We’ll be hosting tournaments in Boston, London, and San Francisco in the fall — see our website at opticforecasting.com, and contact us at opticforecasting@gmail.com (or by dropping a comment below)!
114 competitors from 5 different countries and 13 different US states initially registered interest. A significant proportion indicated that they wouldn’t be able to compete in this iteration (logistical/scheduling concerns), but...
A trial of #2 would have some information value -- you could discern how strong the correlation was between the rationale scores and final standings to decide if rationales were a good way to produce a same-week result.
Maybe you could also use idea #1 with only the top-scoring teams making it to the rationale round, to cut down on time spent scoring rationales?
Dear EA Forum readers,
The EA charity, Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC), just filed our second lawsuit!
As many of you know, LIC is a litigation nonprofit dedicated to making factory-farm cruelty a liability. We focus on chickens because of the huge numbers in which they suffer and the extreme severity of that suffering.
Today, we sued one of the country’s largest poultry producers and a KFC supplier, Case Farms, for animal cruelty.
The complaint comes on the heels of a 2021 undercover investigation by Animal Outlook, revealing abuse at a Morganton, N.C. Case Farms hatchery that processes more than 200,000 chicks daily.
Our lawsuit attacks the notion that Big Ag is above the law. We are suing under North Carolina's 19A statute, which lets private parties enjoin animal cruelty.
Case Farms...
One of my current favorite substacks: this author just takes a random selection of Weibo posts every day and translates them to English, including providing copies of all the videos. Weibo is sort of like "Chinese Twitter".
One of my most consistently read newsletters! H/T to @JS Denain for recommending this newsletter to me a while ago :)
[This post was written in a purely personal capacity, etc.]
I[1] recently had several long conversations with a friend about whether my regular doom-scrolling regarding the Ukraine war had sharpened my understanding of the world or mostly been a waste of time.
Unfortunately, it seems more of the latter. When my mind has changed, it's been slight, and it’s unclear what actions my new views justify. Personally, this means I should probably go back to thinking about happiness and RCTs.
I set out what I think are some relevant questions Russia's invasion of Ukraine could change your mind about and provide some sloppy commentary, but I'm interested to know what other EAs and rationalists think about this issue.
It seems like the Metaculus forecasting community is now...
Conditional on Russia losing, is the world a safer place?
I think maybe a bit, in a general “don’t reward conquest” sort of way
I would like to add another reason in favor: Russia broke the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum where they and other states provided security guarantees to post-Soviet states (including Ukraine) to hand over their nuclear weapons. If Russia wins this war it clearly sends a message that one should never get rid of nukes since it increases the risk of an invasion. I mean it has already sent these signals since th...
The pipeline for (x-risk-focused) AI strategy/governance/forecasting careers has never been strong, especially for new researchers. But it feels particularly weak recently (e.g. no summer research programs this year from Rethink Priorities, SERI SRF, or AI Impacts, at least as of now, and as few job openings as ever). (Also no governance course from AGI Safety Fundamentals in a while and no governance-focused programs elsewhere.)[1] We're presumably missing out on a lot of talent.
I'm not sure what the solution is, or even what the problem is-- I think it's somewhat about funding and somewhat about mentorship and mostly about [orgs not prioritizing boosting early-career folks and not supporting them for various idiosyncratic reasons] + [the community being insufficiently coordinated to realize that it's dropping the ball and it's nobody's...
We recently doubled our full-time climate team (hi Megan!), and we are just going through another doubling (hiring a third researcher, as well as a climate communications manager, job ad for the latter coming soon, for now reach out to sally@founderspledge.com).
Apart from getting a bulk rate for wedding cake, we thought this would be a good moment to update on our progress and what we have in the pipeline for the next months, both in terms of research to be released as well as grantmaking with the FP Climate Fund and beyond.
As discussed in the next section, If you are not interested in climate, but in EA grantmaking research in general, we think it still might be interesting reading. Being part of Founders Pledge and the effective altruist endeavor at large, we...
Thanks for sharing your thought! They seem right to me. A typical argument against "overall-comparative-methodology-and-estimate building" is that the opportunity cost is high, but it seems worth it on the margin given the large sums of money being granted. However, grantmakers have disagreed with this at least implicitly, in the sense the estimation infrastructure is apparently not super developped.
Here’s a version of the database that you filter and sort however you wish, and here’s a version you can add comments to.
Update: I've been slow to properly update the database, but am collecting additional orgs in this thread for now.
I’m addicted to creating collections and have struck once more.
The titular database includes >130 organizations that are relevant to people working on longtermism- or existential-risk-related issues, along with info on:
I aimed for (but likely missed) comprehensive coverage
...Hi, we are the Confido Institute and we believe in a world where decision makers (even outside the EA-rationalist bubble) can make important decisions with less overconfidence and more awareness of the uncertainties involved. We believe that almost all strategic decision-makers (or their advisors) can understand and use forecasting, quantified uncertainty and public forecasting platforms as valuable resources for making better and more informed decisions.
We design tools, workshops and materials to support this mission. This is the first in