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I’m looking for podcasts, papers, or reviews on fish sentience.
Specifically:
- Long form interview about the moral weight of fish.
- Papers which estimate their moral weight
- Information on the long term damage of fish hooks, being out of water, or the moral harm of fishing.
I would also like to know if there are practical methods to reduce the amount of harm done if you are fishing.
Rethink priorities had their moral weights report which placed salmon at 0.056, I’m not sure I understood completely what that figure meant. I think this means they have 5% of the sentience of a human? I also don’t know how to interpret that number.
I would like to read or listen to academic discussion about the ethics of catch and release fishing.
There actually was an EA-adjacent podcast about this in 2018, from Future Perfect. It discusses a japanese method called ikejime, which instantly kills the fish and renders it immobile.
Alternatively, just get into (legal) magnet fishing instead. No harm done.
If there are any EAs who fish, do you have any practices for making the experience as painless as possible for the fish?
Are there any advancements being made to create a fishing experience which is nearly completely pain free?
I would love to hear from someone who has thought this through.
Here’s what I know can reduce the suffering of the fish if you do decide to fish:
- Remove the barbs on the hook
- Choose a small hook and use only one hook rather than three-pronged hooks
- Reduce the amount of time the fish has out of the water and gently hold the fish.
But if I could I would like to remove the hook out of the experience entirely and just move towards something that gently reels in the fish. I would love to hear if there’s some technology that does this.
Carrick Flynn lost the nomination, and over $10 million dollars from EA aligned individuals went to support his nomination.
So these questions may sound pointed:
There was surely a lot of expected value in having an EA aligned thinker in congress supporting pandemic preparedness, but there were a lot of bottlenecks that he would have had to go through to make a change.
He would have been one of hundreds of congresspeople. He would have had to get bills passed. He would have had to win enough votes to make it past the primary. He would have had to have his policies get churned through the bureaucratic agencies and it’s not entirely clear any bill he would’ve supported would have kept it’s same form through that process.
What can we learn from the political gambling that was done in this situation? Should we try this again? What are the long term side effects of aligning EA with any political side or making EA a political topic?
Could that $10+ million wasted on Flynn have been better used in just trying to get EA or longtermist bureaucrats in the CDC or other important decision making institutions?
We know the path that individuals take to get these positions, we know what people usually get selected to run pandemic preparedness for the government, why not spend $10 million in gaining the attention of bureaucrats or placing bureaucrats in federal agencies?
Should we consider political gambling in the name of EA a type of intervention that is meant for us to get warm fuzzies rather than do the most good?
I think seeing the attacks that he's captured by crypto interests was useful, in that future EA political forays will know that attack is coming and be able to fend it off better. Worth $11 mil in itself, probably not, but the expected value was already pretty high (a decent probability of having someone in congress who can champion bills no one disagrees with but doesn't want to spend time and effort on) so this information gained is helpful and might make either future campaigns more successful or alternatively dissuade future spending in this area. Definitely good to try once, we'll see how it plays out in the long run. We didn't know he'd lose until he lost!
A question for the community
Is a there a web page which gives rewards for solving problems in philanthropy? I’m imagining something like a Fiverr or website which lists bounties for problems.
If this hasn’t been made yet it should be! Imagine someone had a lot of free time or an organization was looking for a new project to work. They could go to the CharityBounty website and select a problem to work on.
You could have problems which are small such as “build a website for our new charity”or as large as “create a medicine which cures this neglected tropical disease”.
Donors would contribute to project ideas like “XYZ Foundation has attached a $300 million dollar bounty for any team which cures malaria” or “XYZ individual is offering $5000 to whoever can make a spreadsheet which discovers regions likely to be hit by an earthquake”.
Bounty hunters would go on this website and work on projects to solve problems and get money. These bounty hunters could sort problems by difficulty or reward amount.
Metaculus betters could bet on the likelihood that each bounty would be solved or when it would be solved.
The likelihood that a project would be completed would increase as more money was donated towards the award.
The website could list all of the active people working on a project so teams could get formed in real time (and they could work together to get the money).
Everyday people could become grant makers and people who are passionate about a particular cause area could target the cause they find most important.
Forums could list and organize knowledge related to solving the bounty to encourage people who might solve the bounty and lower the barriers for people who might end of solving the problem.
There could be grand challenges. Maybe open philanthropy creates a major problems list. “$100 million dollar questions” like “cure Alzheimer’s” or something very ambitious. And researchers could list minor problems which their field sees as important steps towards solving a major problem (find the mechanism which causes Alzheimer’s)
There could even be a bounty attached to creating the bounty list.
You might be interested in Impact Certificates, Markets for Altruism and https://www.super-linear.org/
Has anyone ever considered the possibility that if the cyclic theory of the universe is correct then that would create an opportunity for agents to encode messages into the big bang seconds before it occurs?
Kinda bizarre idea there, but I wrote up something quick and choppy to get out this idea. It must have been thought before. This is all almost certainly incorrect.
Forgive me if this has been thought of before.
Has anyone considered the idea of setting up independent arbitration courts for artificial intelligence research labs that keeps them ethically aligned? So here is the problem and a possible (poorly thought out) solution:
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US courts would probably be overly punitive if they were policing AI research. They would undoubtedly be unintentionally regressive, limit the growth of the field, and create a situation in which other worse actors in other localities would get AGI first. It would probably move AI research offshores. The strong hammer of the law is not well equipped or agile enough to thread this small needle. In the worst case federal regulation on AI would be dangerous and harmful, at best it would be clumsy. The rules to govern AI labs would also have to be international, and agreeable to all parties.
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Private arbitration courts work well for many corporations. There is a lot of precedent here. Both parties voluntarily enter into the arbitration court and agree on the outcome.
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Imagine independent courts established to ensure AI safety measures are taken. Individuals from different labs could peek into other labs, “view the soviet warheads”, and ensure everyone is behaving responsibly. If one lab has repeated ethics concerns all major AI labs or corporations could agree to not work with that lab, raise concern with their local government, or lose some agreed upon deposit they agreed they would forfeit if they had too many ethics violations.
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Individual AI labs benefit from sharing research, promoting a healthy community, and all working towards the common good to have a safe launch of AGI if it happens.
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There are many out of the box ways to run this. All AI labs could pool money for courts in return for shared research, Open Phil could establish grants for smaller non profits to create courts, grant making organizations could withhold money for ethics violations. There are many other ways of setting it up. There’s a rich history of creative ways for individuals to combat collective action or externality problems voluntarily in a way that is often more effective than top down monopolistic legal systems.
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There could be strong incentives to take part in the courts for public image reasons. It would tarnish Googles image if DeepMind was the only major AI lab that didn’t play by the community’s rules. Activists could draw attention to this.
Just an idea I had
Marketing AI reform:
You might be able to have a big impact on AI reform by changing the framing. Right now framing it as “AI” alignment sells the idea that there will be computers with agency. Or something like free will. Or they will choose acts like a human.
It could instead be marketed as something like preventing “automated weapons” or “computational genocide”.
By emphasizing the fact that a large part of the reason we work on this problem is that humans could use computers to systematically cleanse populations, we could win people to our side.
Proposal: change the framing from “Computers might choose to kill us” to “Humans will use computers to kill us” regardless of whether either potential outcome is more likely than the other.
You could probably get more funding, more serious attention, and better reception by just marketing the idea in a better way.
Who knows, maybe some previously unsympathetic billionaire or government would be willing to commit hundreds of millions to this area just by changing the way we talk about it.
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EA's greatest strength, in my mind, is our epistemic ability - our willingness to weigh the evidence and carefully think through problems. All of the billions of dollars and thousands of people working on the world's most pressing problems came from that, and we should continue to have that as our top priority.
Thus, I'm not comfortable with sentences like "Proposal: change the framing from “Computers might choose to kill us” to “Humans will use computers to kill us” regardless of whether either potential outcome is more likely than the other." We shouldn't be misleading people, including by misrepresenting our beliefs. Plus, remember - if you tell one lie, the truth is forever after your enemy. What if I'm a new EA engaging with AI safety arguments, and you use that argument on me, and I push back? Maybe I say something like "Well, if the problem is that humans will use computers to kill us, why not give the computer enough agency that, if the humans tell it to kill us, the computer tells us to shove it?"
This would obviously be a TERRIBLE idea, but it's not obvious how you could argue against it within the framework you've just constructed where humans are the real danger. Every good argument against this comes from the idea that agentic AI's are super dangerous, which contrasts the claim you just made. If the danger is humans using these weapons to kill each other, giving the AI's more agency might be a good idea. If the danger is computers choosing to kill humans, giving the AI's more agency is a terrible idea. I'm sure you could come up with a way of reconciling these examples, but you'll notice that it sounds a bit forced, and I bet there are more sophisticated arguments I couldn't come up with in two minutes that would further separate these two worlds.
We have to be able to think clearly about these problems to solve them, especially AI alignment, which is such a difficult problem to even properly comprehend. I feel like this would be both counterproductive and just not the direction EA should be going. Accuracy is super important - it's what brought EA from a few people wanting to find the world's best charities to what we have today.
Curated and popular this week
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Or on the types of prioritization, their strengths, pitfalls, and how EA should balance them
The cause prioritization landscape in EA is changing. Prominent groups have shut down, others have been founded, and everyone is trying to figure out how to prepare for AI. This is the first in a series of posts examining the state of cause prioritization and proposing strategies for moving forward.
Executive Summary
* Performing prioritization work has been one of the main tasks, and arguably achievements, of EA.
* We highlight three types of prioritization: Cause Prioritization, Within-Cause (Intervention) Prioritization, and Cross-Cause (Intervention) Prioritization.
* We ask how much of EA prioritization work falls in each of these categories:
* Our estimates suggest that, for the organizations we investigated, the current split is 89% within-cause work, 2% cross-cause, and 9% cause prioritization.
* We then explore strengths and potential pitfalls of each level:
* Cause prioritization offers a big-picture view for identifying pressing problems but can fail to capture the practical nuances that often determine real-world success.
* Within-cause prioritization focuses on a narrower set of interventions with deeper more specialised analysis but risks missing higher-impact alternatives elsewhere.
* Cross-cause prioritization broadens the scope to find synergies and the potential for greater impact, yet demands complex assumptions and compromises on measurement.
* See the Summary Table below to view the considerations.
* We encourage reflection and future work on what the best ways of prioritizing are and how EA should allocate resources between the three types.
* With this in mind, we outline eight cruxes that sketch what factors could favor some types over others.
* We also suggest some potential next steps aimed at refining our approach to prioritization by exploring variance, value of information, tractability, and the
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[Cross-posted from my Substack here]
If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right?
The answer is all of them and none of them.
This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say:
* Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement.
* Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick.
* Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement.
* Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964.
* Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly.
* And so on…
To paint this picture, we can see this in action below:
Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption
Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising
What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things:
1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing
2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
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I wanted to share a small but important challenge I've encountered as a student engaging with Effective Altruism from a lower-income country (Nigeria), and invite thoughts or suggestions from the community.
Recently, I tried to make a one-time donation to one of the EA-aligned charities listed on the Giving What We Can platform. However, I discovered that I could not donate an amount less than $5.
While this might seem like a minor limit for many, for someone like me — a student without a steady income or job, $5 is a significant amount.
To provide some context:
According to Numbeo, the average monthly income of a Nigerian worker is around $130–$150, and students often rely on even less — sometimes just $20–$50 per month for all expenses. For many students here, having $5 "lying around" isn't common at all; it could represent a week's worth of meals or transportation.
I personally want to make small, one-time donations whenever I can, rather than commit to a recurring pledge like the 10% Giving What We Can pledge, which isn't feasible for me right now. I also want to encourage members of my local EA group, who are in similar financial situations, to practice giving through small but meaningful donations.
In light of this, I would like to:
* Recommend that Giving What We Can (and similar platforms) consider allowing smaller minimum donation amounts to make giving more accessible to students and people in lower-income countries.
* Suggest that more organizations be added to the platform, to give donors a wider range of causes they can support with their small contributions.
Uncertainties:
* Are there alternative platforms or methods that allow very small one-time donations to EA-aligned charities?
* Is there a reason behind the $5 minimum that I'm unaware of, and could it be adjusted to be more inclusive?
I strongly believe that cultivating a habit of giving, even with small amounts, helps build a long-term culture of altruism — and it would
There actually was an EA-adjacent podcast about this in 2018, from Future Perfect. It discusses a japanese method called ikejime, which instantly kills the fish and renders it immobile.
Alternatively, just get into (legal) magnet fishing instead. No harm done.