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...
This announcement of a World Economic Forum meeting on "The Great Reset"
https://www.weforum.org/great-reset/?fbclid=IwAR2RAlV4cUx6-p_uAJ-uSjliuQYxyqLPh3PFH0ykpfBWXAFWmRed9anA7HQ
sounds very intriguing, and possibly hopeful, but it was hard for me to get a clear sense of whether this is going to mitigate x-risks from e.g. climate change all that much, or whether it's mostly just about providing more robust safety nets against major disasters. It wasn't clear to me from reading this whether it's (significantly) net-positive in terms of mitigating x-risk, and I was wondering what people's views were. I'm also somewhat worried that it's going to be highly politically polarising.