AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Millett and Snyder-Beattie's (2017) 'Existential Risk and Cost-Effective Biosecurity' is good for back of the envelope calculations on GCBRs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5576214/
I can't be sure this is the paper I'm remembering but it looks pretty good - Bernstein et al. (2022) find that activities to prevent zoonotic pandemics save lives for a cost roughly comparable to top Givewell charities (I get this from their claim of saving lives at less than 1/20th of the low-end of the value of a statistical life, which they say is ~$107,000 - though beware unequal application of rigour). This estimate does not include economic losses due to a pandemic. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abl4183
And more indirectly, if you wanted to make your own back-of-the-envelopes, Marani et al. (2021) provide a well grounded probability estimate to work with (though the historical record would not be reliable for emerging risks from biotechnology): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2105482118
Thanks for the sources, Ben! I have used them in this post I have just published:
Thanks Ben!
No worries! Although these were just ones I remembered off the cuff - I'm sure there's other good ones you could find