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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...
Recent opportunities to take action
Hi Adrian!
I’d recommend donating to the American Meat Producers Association (AMPA), an organization of family farmers who have already implemented animal welfare improvements like California’s Prop 12 and are running ad campaigns against Save Our Bacon. Among EAs I know, their intervention is considered the best for this issue.
While I haven’t seen a formal cost-effectiveness analysis, I’ve heard estimates from EAs I know of AMPA’s multiple ranging between 2x and >10x as valuable as the marginal animal welfare 501(c)3. This is partially because of the urgency around Save Our Bacon, and partially because the largest EA grantmakers are legally restricted in how much they can contribute. It is completely legal for foreign nationals to donate.
For these reasons, I’ve donated $10k to AMPA, and I’m convinced it’s an especially worthy intervention for farmed animal welfare.