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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...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
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Timidity seems unobjectionable to me, and the arguments against it in section 3 seem unconvincing.
3.1: Marginal utility in number of lives already dropping off very steeply by 1000 seems implausible, but if we replace 1000 with a sufficiently large number, an agent with a bounded utility function would deny that these prospects keep getting better for the same (rational, imo) reasons they would eventually stop taking the devil's deals to get more years of happy life with high probability.
3.2: It seems perfectly reasonable to me to selectively create valuable things in situations in which value isn't already nearly maxed out, even if you can create valuable things much less efficiently in those situations, which is all that's going on here. Also disagree that it's strange for the value of creating lives to depend on what's happening far away to any significant degree at all; for an example that might seem more intuitive to some, what if the lives you're about to create already exist elsewhere? Wouldn't it be much better to create different ones instead?
3.3: If we replace 10^10 and 10^80 with 10^1000 and 10^8000, then I'd prefer A over B. I'm not sure what this is supposed to add that the initial example with the devil's deals for more years of happy life didn't.
3.4: Longshot bets like the "Lingering doubt" scenario are very different from longshot bets like Pascal's mugger, in ways that make them seem much more palatable to me (see 3.2). Furthermore, longshot bets as a criticism of recklessness can be seen as a finitistic stand-in for issues of nonconvergence of expected utility, which isn't a problem for timidity.
Furthermore, I think the paper seriously undersells (in section 4) how damning it is that recklessness violates prospect-outcome dominance. This implies vulnerability to Dutch books. After playing the St. Petersburg lottery, no matter what the outcome, it will only have finite value, less than the St. Petersburg lottery is worth in expectation, so if given the option, the agent with spend 1 util to try again, and replace their payout with whatever they get the next time around. They will do this no matter what the outcome is the first time, even though their prospects are no better on the second attempt.