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...
Hi, Everyone
I dare to insert here a proposal which is, at the same time, vague and ambitious; just to discuss about it. It is nothing firm, just an idea. I excuse for my defective English.
After a long life and many books read, I realize that if we want to improve human life in the sense of prosociality the real target must be human behaviour. If we improve our moral view –our ethos- in a sense of benevolence, altruism and non-aggression –in a rational way, of course- the charities, the economic acts, the deeds must be a necessary consequence of this previous human change.
We know that moral evolution exists. Humanitarian movements like EA show that. Why not to try to go farther? Which is the limit to moral change?
I don´t see anything in this forum dealing with the possibilities of improving moral behavior in individuals –and, consequently, in groups and societies- in order to achieve the highest effective altruism. I mean, doing the job that in the past did the moralistic religions of the Axial Age... but now, independently from irrational religious traditions. So, doing it finally the right way: non-political social change.
We have today the experience, the knowledge in social sciences and the clarity of thought enough to ponder the means for improving human behavior in the sense of extreme prosociality. I realize that no one is just discussing the question. You write about getting as much as possible –with charitable goals- from the people as they are. Don´t you realize that you could get much more by changing morally the people first?
A person is made out of motivations, feelings, rewards and desires. Moral change can act on them. This is historical evidence… And if the outcome of that process of change turns to be unconventional, is not that also the usual result of social change along the history?
At least, just to discuss it…