All of ag4000's Comments + Replies

A very common common counterargument to improving the lots of various animals is that the animals aren't conscious.  A letter signed by experts seems useful in debunking, or at least casting doubt, on such counterarguments.  You are right to point out that this doesn't solve the difficult problem of comparing welfare or rights between species, but it's still a very important step.

Why would this be a distraction even if not very significant?  Seems one could sign the letter and argue for the position while doing all the things you like.  

I think DC's point is that the donation one can makes from the proceeds of selling the kidney outweighs the counterfactual direct impact of donating the kidney.

Perhaps "moral obligation" has a specific legalistic/Christian etymology.

This is one of the positions G.E.M. Anscombe defends in her influential essay "Modern Moral Philosophy".  She argues in part that the moral "ought" is a vestige of religious ethics, which doesn't make much sense without a (divine) lawgiver.  Indeed, one of the starting points of many modern virtue theorists is arguing that the specific moral sense of "ought" and moral sense of "good" are spurious and unfounded.  One such view is in Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness, whic... (read more)

I found this list very helpful, thank you!

On exotic tofu: I am not yet convinced that Stiffman doesn't have the requisite charisma.  Is your concern that he's vegan (hence less relatable to non-vegans), his messaging in Broken Cuisine specifically, or something else?  I am sympathetic to the first concern, but not as convinced by the second.  In particular, from what little else I've read from Stiffman, his messaging is more like his original post on this Forum: positive and minimally doom-y.  See, for example, his article in Asterisk, ... (read more)

Although what you said might be part of the explanation for why many EAs focus on alignment or governance research rather than pause advocacy, I think the bigger part is that many EAs think that pause advocacy isn't as good as research.  See, e.g., some of these posts.  

 I haven't yet looked at the papers cited, but aren't they probably hopelessly confounded?  This seems to be one of the areas where it's hardest to measure causal effects.

Answers to this question could be relevant: What are some artworks relevant to EA?

Undoubtedly these are interesting questions, and I don't have much to contribute now.  Your thought experiment reminds me of Timmerman's Drowning Children case from "Sometimes there is nothing wrong with letting a child drown".  Timmerman argues with this case that we should reject the strong conclusion from "Famine, Affluence, and Morality".

I agree that the simple story of a producer reacting to changing demand directly is oversimplified.  I think we differ in that I think that absent specific information, we should assume that any commonly consumed animal product's supply response to changing demand should be similar to the ones from Compassion, by the Pound. In other words, we should have our prior on impact centered around some of the numbers from there, and update from there.  I can explain why I think this in more detail if we disagree on this.

Leather example:

Sure, I chose this... (read more)

Not an expert, but I think your impression is correct.  See this post, for example (I recommend the whole sequence).

Late to the party here but I'd check out Räuker et al. (2023), which provides one taxonomy of AI interpretability work.

Thanks, this makes things much clearer to me.

I agree that this style of reasoning depends heavily on the context studied (in particular, the mechanism at play), and that we can't automatically use numbers from one situation for another.  I also agree with what I take to be your main point: In many situations, the impact is less than 1:1 due to feedback loops and so on.

I'm still not sure I understand the specific examples you provide:

• Animal products used as food: For commonly-consumed food animal products, I would be surprised if the numbers were much

This position is commonly defended for consequentialist arguments for vegetarianism and veganism; see, e.g., Section 2 here, Section 2 here, and especially Day 2 here.  The argument usually goes something like: if you stop buying one person's worth of eggs, then in expectation, the industry will not produce something like one pound of eggs that they would've produced otherwise.  Even if you are not the tipping point to cause them to cause production, due to uncertainty you still have positive expected impact.  (I'm being a bit vague here, bu... (read more)

Thanks for the posts so far, I've briefly thought about trying some of these ideas but haven't had the courage to really go for them.

One thing I'm wondering: What "sample size" are you basing the takeaways of your posts on intro fellowships on?  That is, how many semesters, and how many people participated?  

Why is this post being downvoted?  I seriously doubt that EAs working to prevent school shootings would be cost-effective, but I don't get why there are downvotes here -- it's a fair question.

It seems that your original comment no longer holds under this version of "1% better", no?  In what way does being 1% better at all these skills translate to being 30x better over a year?  How do we even aggregate these 1% improvements under the new definition?

Anyway, even under this definition it seems hard to keep finding skills that one can get 1% better at within one day easily.  At some point you would probably run into diminishing returns across skills -- that is, the "low-hanging fruit" of skills you can improve at easily will have been picked.

I have not read much of Tetlock's research, so I could be mistaken, but isn't the evidence for Tetlock-style forecasting only for (at best) short-medium term forecasts?  Over this timescale, I would've expected forecasting to be very useful for non-EA actors, so the central puzzle remains.  Indeed, if there is not evidence for long-term forecasting, then wouldn't one expect non-EA actors (who place less importance on the long-term) to be at least as likely as EAs use this style of forecasting?
 

Of course, it would be hard to gather evidence f... (read more)

For more on this line of argument, I recommend one of my favorite articles on ethical vegetarianism: Alastair Norcross's "Puppies, Pigs, and People".

I enjoyed the new intro article, especially the focus on solutions.  Some nitpicks:

• I'm not sure that it's good to use 1DaySooner as the second example of positive EA interventions.  I agree that challenge trials are good, but in my experience (admittedly a convenience sample), a lot of people I talk to are very wary of challenge trials.  I worry that including it in an intro article could create needless controversy/turn people away.
• I also think that some of the solutions in the biodefense section are too vague.  For example, what exact

Thanks for writing this up so concisely -- I think that this is a nice list of pros and cons.  I agree that the weekly/seminar model works better for virtual reading groups.  I certainly would not want to spend 6+ hours on Zoom for a reading group continuously.

I'm not sure what all of the participants' motivation was for joining (I should've gathered that info).  As background, we mostly publicized the intensive to members of MIT EA interested in AI safety and to members of Harvard EA.  Here are, I think, the main motivations I noticed:

• Considering pursuing AI safety technical research as a career, and thus wanting to develop a foundation/overview (~2 participants);
• Wanting to learn about an important EA cause area to get a more well-rounded view of EA, or to help with work in an adjacent cause area like

Good luck!  I'm excited to hear how this goes.

Agreed, although it's possible to use Messenger with a deactivated Facebook account, which seems to solve this issue.

Back of the envelope calculation

Thanks for sharing this!   I agree that learning about Bayes' Theorem is important for EAs, and really anyone in the world.  Small typo: it is Bayes' Theorem, not Baye's Theorem, as it's named after Thomas Bayes.

I absolutely LOVE these dialogues; they're my go-to introduction to why I think that animal welfare and veganism are so important.  I especially like to have people read them one day at a time, discussing each day with them after they've read it.  The dialogues are engaging and far more comprehensive for the size than anything else I know. 

One criticism I have is that the dialogues don't mention much the conditions in which animals on factory farms live.  I find that one bottleneck is that people don't always believe that factory farmin... (read more)

Does the short causal pitch not run the risk of limiting EA's scope too much to philanthropy?  To me, it seems to miss the core of EA: figuring out how to better improve the world, given the resources we have.

Sorry if this is a very dumb question -- can non-EU people fill out the survey/will it make any difference if they do?  For example, I see that a small number of people from the US filled out the survey.  Are those just people from NGOs/consumer organizations or food business operators?

Unfortunately, at this point I have relatively limited contact with current LDers -- there are some I know, but not very well.  I do know some people who are important within the LD community (e.g., run debate camps or major tournaments), but I am not very involved in LD anymore.

I also wanted to chime in about debate.  For context, I did Lincoln-Douglas debate (LD) competitively throughout high school.  

I think many LDers could be good targets for outreach.  Many ideas from EA come up extensively in LD.  In particular: different moral theories and arguments for/against them, cost/benefit analysis, moral hedging to deal with moral uncertainty, arguments for existential risk reduction, and focus on existential risks.  Note that debaters bastardize many of these arguments and concepts, but I think this introd... (read more)

I was planning to donate some money to a climate cause a few months ago, and I decide to give some money to Giving Green (this was after the post here recommending GG).  There were some problems with the money going through (unrelated to GG), but anyways now I can still decide to send the money elsewhere.  I'm thinking about giving the money elsewhere due to the big post criticizing GG.  However, I still think it's probably a good giving opportunity, given that it's at an important stage of its growth and seems to have gotten a lot of public... (read more)

Thanks so much! I've been doing some stuff related to GTD, but haven't read the whole book -- will do so.

Sorry if this isn't directly related to EA.  What is a good way to measure one's own productivity?  I tend to measure the amount of time that I spend doing productive activities, but the discussion here seems to make a convincing case that measuring hours worked isn't the best method to do so.