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...
Three social forces at the root of FTX's collapse
Hi folks, I shared some thoughts I wrote up about Sam Bankman-Fried. I worry that there's a bit of a social cascade that's leading us to draw the wrong lessons from what happened. I'm not 100% confident in either the facts of what happened -- though, as a former securities litigator in the post 2008 period, I think I have more experience than most -- but I don't see a particularly compelling case for fraud. I also think the focus on a single person's supposed indiscretions, whether true or otherwise, may distract us from deeper systemic problems that FTX's collapse represents.
Very interested in others' thoughts, and especially thoughts on my diagnosis of cultural norms in EA that may have contributed to the problem at FTX. Here's the link:
https://simpleheart.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-sam-bankman-fried
Haha, I wrote a similarly titled article sharing the premise that Sam's actions seem more indicative of a mistake than a fraud: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/w6aLsNppuwnqccHmC/in-defense-of-sbf
I appreciated the personal notes about SBFs interactions with the animal welfare community. I do think the tribalism EA tribalism element is very real as well. Also appreciate the point about trying to work on something intrinsically motivating - I'm not sure that it's possible for every individual but I do feel like my own intrinsic love of work helps a lot with putting in a lot of time and effort!
Great post.