Comments
I found this post and the transitive links useful: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/guvsD78ZXhfCaT7SH/the-unproven-and-unprovable-case-for-net-wild-animal
Curated and popular this week
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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...
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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...
Recent opportunities to take action
Brian Tomasik wrote about it here. I should note that linking to this doesn't mean that I endorse what is written. It is written from a negative utilitarian perspective and with an assumption that invertebrate lives are net-negative, therefore it's good to reduce their population. Personally, I'm unconvinced that this assumption is correct, I think that we simply don't know. Also, I think it is likely that indirect effects of reducing invertebrate populations dominate direct effects. E.g., it seems that insect populations are already declining at an absurdly fast pace, and (pure speculation) this could maybe decrease the probability of the long-term survival of humanity in some way.
Brian also put AMF in his donation recommendations, seemingly for the sole reason that it "plausibly reduces invertebrate populations" (by increasing human population).
You might also be interested in a discussion about AMF's indirect effects here.