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...
I downvoted this post, not because I disagree with EA needing to look at reforms more carefully, and take reputational risks more seriously (in fact on the object level, I think we're aligned a fair bit). Instead, I don't think it's the right medium. In its current form this post could have been a shortform, or perhaps the beginnings of a more fleshed-out post about the potential reforms once the dust of the last few days has settled. (Though I do grant your prior post might already have this covered from your perspective.)
I also think the title is quite unkind. It's not clear which 'Senior EAs' you are talking about, what your definition of them is, or why the scandals of the last few days have changed your mind about them. The overwhelming majority of them are likely to have no involvement in Bostrom's decision to publish his letter or Tegmark's actions regarding the FLI/NDF grant. It's also a little bit presumptous to talk about 'we', though I think it would make an interesting survey question to get some reliable data on the community's opinions.
Most importantly, however, those 'Senior EAs' are also people who have sacrificed a lot personally to get the movement to where it is today, and regardless of whether they have or have not made poor decisions as leaders they are probably hurting just as much as you or me, and possibly more so, about where the movement finds itself in January 2023.[1]
This is a completely biased view. I have met people I would consider to be 'Senior EAs' and they are unanimously kind, inspiring people that I care a lot for. Please adjust your opinion of my comment appropriately.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that most EAs will have updated down on how much they trust the decision making of the entire set of senior EAs given that 3 have now caused large amounts of damage to EA's reputation, even though we probably don't expect any other senior EAs to be directly responsible for the Bostrom and Tegmark issues.
I disagree with the title being unkind, I think it's fair to not trust a small number of people with this much power over EA's reputation, even if we are grateful for everything they have put into the movement. They shouldn't even be trusting themselves with this power and I'm sure a decent proportion don't.