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If you find such markets, please can someone post them here?
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
We didn't get a vaccine for SARS-1 in time to be useful, and we don't have one for the 4 endemic coronaviruses, and it seems very likely that covid19 will become endemic/seasonal, so it is possible that much money spent on vaccines will be wasted, as many don't work, and most arrive after the 3rd and final wave. Also they may give only 6-12 months protection so may need to be repeated annually, and it's hard enough getting people to do an annual flu vaccine.
So if you really have that money available, it may be better to spend it on
# improving treatment and primary prevention (ventilation, humidity, distancing discipline, homework) and secondary prevention (humidity, exercise, weight loss, micronutrients)
# protecting doctors, health staff and family members better (eg. better PPE negative pressure rooms)
# improving your health system or nutrition for all-causes mortality
#better preparedness for the next pandemic, which may have far higher mortality, including rapid testing/isolation ramp up capacity
# low dose effect Challenge Trials, as proposed by Prof Robin Hanson, especially for humanitarian/relief workers and young Navy teams
The author mentioned veterinary vaccines near the end of the post. I search around this and was surprised to find there are already commercially available veterinary vaccines against coronaviruses (that link lists 5). This raised my expectation that a human coronavirus vaccine could be successfully developed.