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...
I've been running into something I think of as "The Narrow Band Dilemma" where a moderate ethical position is fragile because it is in a battle on two fronts between a popular more pure ethical position and a popular unethical or a-moral position.
The first example is ethically produced meat / free-range farming, where a slightly more expensive product tries to find a market that loses patrons on both sides, either people who don't care about where their meat comes from, or care more about the expense than the ethics on the one hand, and the people who forgo meat altogether (vegans / vegetarians) on the other. As messaging successfully advertises the benefits of ethical meat production, it gains market share from one end of the spectrum (the "I care about ethics but can't justify the additional expense") but loses them on the other because the heightened awareness of animal cruelty drives ethical meat eaters away from eating meat altogether.
I noticed another example today in moderate Christianity, where it is flanked by fundamentalism and atheism. The more that Christians want to align their beliefs with modern secular ethics (moving away from fundamentalism), the more they are likely to leave the faith altogether.
Now, I'm not actually saying this is a problem, just a phenomenon I've noticed, I'm an atheist, so don't mind if more people come to think as I do, but I'd also like more Christians to be more moderate, but I can see it's difficult to build critical mass when they exist in a narrow band. I am in the narrow band when it comes to ethical meat, and I have seen how long it has taken for ethical meat products to become ubiquitous and accessible, and truly ethical real meat (lab grown) is still a way off. I imagine, if a much larger market had emerged (without the pressures of the narrow band), it's possible this could be available already.