Just noticed that I tend to up/downvote and agree/disagree vote more or less depending on what the current vote count is at.

Standard herding bias at work.

Hoping that saying it out loud will make it weaker, and maybe other people can relate.

Many people hold up 'AI As Normal Technology' as a reasonable "normal-people" case against the doomer position. I actually think it's wrong on a number of ways and falls flat on its own terms. I think I believe this for reasons mostly orthogonal to being a doomer (except inasomuch as being a doomer makes me more interested in thinking about AI). If anybody here is interested in fighting the good fight, it might be valuable to do a Andy Masley-style annilihation of the AI As Normal Technology position, trying to stick to minimally controversial arguments an... (read more)

Some women on the Facebook support group "Cluster Headache Patients" comparing labor pain to cluster headache pain:

• "Honestly, I had a natural childbirth and a cesarean and cluster headaches are 10 times worse than both."
• "2 unmedicated births for me. Would rather do that every day than have another cluster"
  • "every day though, really?"
  • "yes. I'd rather go through childbirth without pain relief than CH."
• "tenfold worse than popping a baby out"
• "Nah, labour/giving birth is a walk in the park compared to ch […] I was in labour with my son for nearly 3 days, then th

I made a podcast feed for the posts highlighted in Best of: AGI & Animals Debate Week 

RSS Feed to paste into your favorite podcast app: https://f004.backblazeb2.com/file/aaronbergman-public/podcast/agi_animals/feed.xml 

I also like the cover art Gemini made so here it is:

With McIlroy at the Masters.

Success is a mess.

Golf, if you allow it, teaches forbearance.

Doing hard things is hard. One of the hardest things to do is hit a tiny ball in a tiny hole hundreds of yards away. Tiny errors cause terrible outcomes. Control is a phantom. The promise and perils don’t bear thinking about.

When it all comes together, though, my goodness, it’s a hell of a party.

If it’s worth going where you’re aiming, there’ll be no straight line from here to there. Next time you’re stuck, remember Rory and what we went through with him.

Help me find my replacement doing farmed animal advocacy grantmaking!

I wanted to share a job opening for, in my opinion, one of the coolest jobs to help animals: my job! I'm moving on from Mobius soon, so we're looking for the next person to lead our grantmaking and entrepreneurial projects.

The role: You'd manage the grantmaking portfolio for one of the top ten largest funders of farmed animal welfare work globally, plus lead entrepreneurial projects like incubating new organisations and identifying strategic gaps in the movement. You'd work with a small a... (read more)

🟪 Wide-spread epistemic anomaly detected || Global Risks Instant Message #01-04-2026

We are detecting today a shared collective delusion leading victims to degrade their epistemic standards. This anomaly is aimed towards no particular end, except perhaps for the amusement of its participants and the satisfaction of ingenious expression.

So far, it appears to be mostly harmless. Nonetheless, this phenomenon creates space for vulnerabilities. If some geopolitical actor were to take some implausible action on this day (for instance, US to invade Canada, Spain ... (read more)

Does anyone know why @William_MacAskill says he is "not convinced by the shrimp argument" on his recent appearance on Sam Harris's podcast? 
 

SAM HARRIS

So yeah, so this is one area where perhaps my own cynicism creeps in. I worry that any focus on suffering beyond human suffering, it risks confusing enough people so as to damage people's commitment to these principles. So I mean, I'm not, there's zero defense of factory farming coming from me here, but When I see a philosopher who's clearly EA or EA-adjacent arguing on behalf of the welfare of shr

So, who is this?

You should turn your project into an organization

If your team's work is worth doing, it's worth doing as an org

When a few people are doing good work together, the question of whether to formally incorporate into an organization can feel like a distraction from doing the actual work. Why take time away from your exciting research project to create an org? There are some real up-front costs to incorporating – dealing with bureaucracy, legal overhead, governance obligations – but I think the benefits of doing so are usually greater and underappreciated.

Orgs a

Look I know I'm on the forum too much @Toby Tremlett🔹 , but I don't think its necessary to put "reading limit" controls on me....
 

How organisations with low AI usage can and should be using it more

There is a lot of discussion about how everyone should be using AI more, and efforts to increase use and literacy. So far in animal advocacy spaces where I work I’ve seen the following efforts to increase usage so far:

1. Orgs provide model subscriptions to their teams.
2. People share the ways they’ve been using AI in slack channels or recurring meetings.
3. There are educational webinars or fellowships. 

The above has made a real dent in AI usage, but much less than we should be aiming for given ... (read more)

[ETA: I posted a revised version of this essay here.]

AI pause advocates often say they are pro-technology and pro-economic growth, and that they simply make one exception for AI because of its unique risks. But this reasoning will grow less credible over time as AI comes to account for a larger and larger share of economic growth.

Simple growth models predict that AI capable of substituting for human labor will raise economic growth rates by an order of magnitude or more. If that's right, then AI will eventually be driving the vast majority of technological... (read more)