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...
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...
Why isn't anyone talking about the Israel-Gaza situation much on the EA Forum? I know it's a big time for AI, but I just read that number of Palestinian deaths, the vast majority of whom are innocent people, and 65% are women and children, is approaching the level of civilians killed in Ukraine since the Russian invasion 21 months ago; just in the last 3-4 weeks.
The Israel-Gaza situation doesn't strike me as very neglected or tractable. The eyes of much of the world are on that situation, and it's not clear to me that EA actors have much to add to the broader conversation. It's also not clear to me why we would expect that actions that EA actors could take would be expected to have a significant impact on the situation.
This is a non-comprehensive and lightly held view -- for example, it focuses on intellectual and financial contributions. I'd be interested in hearing why you think the Israel-Gaza situation is more neglected and tractable than I tentatively think it is.
Hm what would you expect/hope people discuss about it here? As far as I remember, people didn't talk much about the Ukraine-Russia war either. Probably because there's not much that most EAs (or people in general) can do about it (not tractable) + not something that people aren't discussing enough (not neglected).