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This was a great short post and I enjoyed it a lot, thanks!
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...
This is an attitude I hold strongly, though my internal spin on it is something like:
This really works for me as a framing, personally. Someone pointed out to me today it's very MTG red, if that means anything to you.
(Obviously, this only works well if 'whatever you want' is ~always harmless)
This is of course, pretty much the conclusion of Yudkowsky's classic Purchase fuzzies and utilons separately.
Yep. As the author of https://nothingismere.com/2014/12/03/chaos-altruism/ , I think of myself as an MtG red person who cosplays as esper because I happen to have found myself in a world that has a lot of urgent WUB-shaped problems.
(The world has plenty of fiery outrage and impulsive action and going-with-the-flow, but not a lot of cold utilitarian calculus, principled integrity, rationalism, utopian humanism, and technical alignment research. If I don't want humanity's potential to be snuffed out, I need to prioritize filling those gaps over pure self-expression.)
The specific phrasing "ruthlessly do whatever you want all the time" sounds more MtG-black to me than MtG-red, but if I interpret it as MtG-red, I think I understand what it's trying to convey. :)