Comments
One question that a Universal Application Dealing With Suffering might suggest to a user: “How can I make good use of my suffering to help solve my own suffering and that of others?”.
Curated and popular this week
63
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...
“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...
Recent opportunities to take action
Is there much reason for this to be an app as opposed to a website, or an LLM?
Thank you for asking the question. I'm not competent enough to answer with confidence, but here's how I see things.
Questions we may ask about suffering are countless. A static website could deal with only a tiny fraction of them. I imagine a dynamic website could amount to an app, but don't we use Google Maps a lot more as an app than the website at https://www.google.com/maps/? As for the LLM, it would be an indispensable part of the envisaged application, but I imagine that the latter would specify the domain of research or discussion and allow the whole subject of suffering to be specifically organized in a more general, complete, and logical way, which would add much to the usefulness of the query for users.
What I have in mind is access, for the first time in history, to a comprehensive body of knowledge on suffering. I hope that an application such as the one proposed could become so popular, both with ordinary people and specialists in various fields of work, that it would help fund a center for the systematic study and control of excessive suffering in the world.