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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
If you think about the fraud SBF did, it could technically be thought of as merely a redistribution of wealth from those who held FTX to those who shorted ftx and almeda.
Could it be possible that this redistribution was good?
Among other reasons to disagree with this statement, I don't think it is accurate to say that depositors "held FTX."
Was anyone able to short FTX or Alameda? Neither was publicly traded.
Presumably could short the FTT token, which was a form of psuedo-equity in FTX.
For every dollar someone lost, someone else gained a dollar, I wonder where that money went.
Overpriced private equity investments, bad crypto trades, celebrity endorsers, etc. Pretty sure the marginal utility of Tom Brady having more money is minimal at best!
Michael Lewis tries to provide some rough estimates in the last chapter or two of "Going Infinite". From memory, his answer is more or less along the same lines as Jason's comment. Also, some of the money was stolen in hacks, and some has now gone to the bankruptcy lawyers etc.