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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...
Hello! I'm Justin Portela. I got hired by GWWC to make YouTube videos after AI in Context did such a kickass job.
My channel is using that same cinematic, high-production value beauty to talk about everything in the EA universe that isn't AI.
...
“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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Zero-bounded vs negative-tail risks
(adapted from a comment on LessWrong)
In light of the FTX thing, maybe a particularly important heuristic is to notice cases where the worst-case is not lower-bounded at zero. Examples:
Not that you should definitely not do things that potentially have large-negative downsides, but you can be a lot more willing to experiment when the downside is capped at zero.
Indeed, a good norm in many circumstances is to do lots of exploration and iteration. This is how science, software development, and most research happens. Things get a lot tricker when even this stage has potential deep harms -- as in research with advanced AI. (Or, more boundedly & fixably, infohazard risks from x- and s-risk reduction research.)
In practice, people will argue about what counts as effectively zero harm, vs nonzero. Human psychology, culture, and institutions are sticky, so exploration that naively looks zero-bounded can have harm potential via locking in bad ideas or norms. I think that harm is often fairly small, but it might be both important and nontrivial to notice when it's large -- e.g., which new drugs are safe to explore for a particular person? caffeine vs SSRIs vs weed vs alcohol vs opioids...
(Note that the "zero point" I'm talking about here is an outcome where you've added zero value to the world. I'm thinking of the opportunity cost of the time or money you invested as a separate term.)