Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
I want to start by noting that I am amazed and somewhat in awe of what's been accomplished by the EA animal welfare movement. I am enthusiastically supportive of all campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals.
I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm proud of that work.
That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change.&n...
The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time
Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.
I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn...
Survey on Suffering Focused Ethics:
A short survey on how people come to suffering-focused views, or run into them and don't.
Arguments that appear in print are selected for being defensible rather than persuasive, and there is no particular reason those two should coincide. The survey separates four things that usually get run together. What moved you, what was decisive, what you encountered and found unpersuasive, and what you now consider the strongest justification.
If you are not suffering-focused, this is aimed at you as much as at anyone. Half of what makes a survey about persuasion worth running is the people who met the arguments and were not persuaded, and that half is normally missing: these things get posted where the converted are, and come back reporting that the arguments work. There is a shorter branch for you, and answering it does not require holding any view you don't hold or having read anything in particular.
The same goes if you used to hold the view and no longer do; that branch asks what changed.
Seven or eight minutes, anonymous, every question skippable except the first. Aggregate results will be posted, along with the anonymised data
https://forms.gle/vZJhQGLB7wbdsTVg8