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...
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...
Question for anyone who has interest/means/time to look into it: which topics on the EA forum are overrepresented/underrepresented? I would be interested in comparisons of (posts/views/karma/comments) per (person/dollar/survey interest) in various cause areas. Mostly interested in the situation now, but viewing changes over time would be great!
My hypothesis [DO NOT VIEW IF YOU INTEND TO INVESTIGATE]:
I expect longtermism to be WILDLY, like 20x, overrepresented. If this is the case I think it may be responsible for a lot of the recent angst about the relationship between longtermism and EA more broadly, and would point to some concrete actions to take.
There was a post on this recently.
Even a brief glance through posts indicates that there is relatively little discussion about global health issues like malaria nets, vitamin A deficiency, and parasitic worms, even though those are among the top EA priorities.