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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...
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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...
Recent opportunities to take action
CRS has written about career advice for s-risks.
CLR does some coaching.
HLI seems to be working on career recommendations.
So cool, basically CRS focuses on careers in reducing suffering or s-risks (various roles and individualized approach), CLR on s-risks (perhaps more networking referrals in order to promote CLR's values if these are shared with the applicant), HLI on near-term/current generation happiness improvement (suffering prioritization or deprioritization is not explicitly stated) (which may however have long-term effects, e. g. if positive education leads to malevolence prevention) learning with the applicant about top opportunities for impact in the applicant's area of interest that would have not otherwise been taken (rather than subtracting the counterfactual contribution of the next best hire) (while career profiles are being further developed).
These are somewhat different lines of understanding specialization (suffering prioritization and impact metric (wellbeing vs. health) wise) but may be perhaps even better in supporting overall enjoyed systems!