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...
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...
An important note about this is that the tag relevance feature is a special feature designed to counter the exact effect you describe. The way most tagging systems work, if you tag a very popular post with tag "Foo" then it will be shown first to people looking for Foo-related posts. But with our tagging system, users can say "this isn't very relevant" and it will stay with a low "tag relevance". See the Forecasting tag, and notice how the Forecasting newsletter comes above the LTF Fund grant post, despite being less popular overall.
So I'd say to be liberal with your application of tags and let the relevance system do the filtering.