>I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering it it's what you meant.
On re-read this sounds passive aggressive and I didn't mean it that way, I'm just jet lagged on a train in Europe!
>EA appears to have largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals.
What I think you're saying is that EA work on behalf of animals is not as rooted in morality as it was previously or as it should be. My reason for objecting is that I think this conflates using moral arguments as a means with being motivated by morality in the end. When I hear other people (e.g. abolitionist critics of EA animal advocacy) say this, I often think they think mean that EAs are motivated by something like an apathetic drive to optimize a spreadsheet rather than a burning moral conviction to help animals. I think this is an incorrect belief that interferes with constructive debates over strategy.
Yet I don't think it's likely that you would be making this argument so I wanted to ask what you thought.
As for bad faith, I linked the article to indicate that I'm using the term in the low-threshold way, which doesn't mean "malicious" but can include "saying something other than what you think is true for rhetorical reasons," which is a subconscious thing that I do quite often in my writing and invite people to call me out on more often.
I think it's helpful to split these three. I had the same "factors of production" in my latest post: people, money, strategies. They also weave back together in interesting ways. I see a lot of 2 in the liberatory approaches I've been part of or around, and it would be easy for someone to argue for 1 as well.
But the persistent appearance of 2 might ultimately point to 3. It may be that some strategies are possible but would require a larger number of extremely disciplined operatives to execute. Part of why I feel discouraged about more attempts like that is it seems really hard to me to get a large enough group of sufficiently clear-headed people on the same page to pursue it– instead, I expect the human shortcomings to keep emerging. Like, corporate campaigns are badly bottlenecked on capable talent right now; if abolitionist campaigns would require a larger pool of cracked people, then without a realistic plan to solve 2 we wind up at 3.
Project Slingshot arguably is trying to plug the 2 gap with 1, and with a ton of AI money that might work. One factor of production can make up for a deficit in another but it gets more inefficient the greater the imbalance between them.
Yeah that seems correct and I think that my post tomorrow is probably guilty of this. I'd even say I'm doing it intentionally to try to pull the best new founders into this area. I think the actual outlook for helping animals is just terribly bleak across the board and that's probably not going to inspire people to join welfare tech incubators.
Bubble in the sense of railroad bubbles successfully building railroads we still use, dot-com bubble laying fiber optic cable, etc. It could be a perfectly wise action for us to direct most of our spare energy/resources in this direction for a while.
The early research behind leafleting was low-quality in a way that should have been noticeable, and a better-calibrated version of the movement would not have spent so much time and money on it. Whereas the cage-free bubble was a necessary way of getting a massive worldwide campaign off the ground. I'd like use to have higher standards for our fads than we did for leafletting but I think the fad phenomenon is inevitable for a movement as constrained on talent and resources as we are.
I think the bubble framing is a useful and accurate description of welfare tech excitement. I just don't think that's a bad thing. From a longer post on this topic I'm publishing tomorrow:
From the outside, it might seem like the EA wing of the animal advocacy movement goes through fads. That’s because it does. In each cycle, funders get excited about a shiny new object, and put out a call for established organizations and new startup founders to rush into that space by making it clear funding will be available for anyone who does. Vegan leafleting was one such fad, followed by corporate cage-free campaigns, then cultivated meat and alternative proteins in general. Politics is the current fad, and welfare innovation will be the next one.
This can be frustrating for people working on an intervention that never gets popular. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually suboptimal. Some of our fads have worked out, and others haven’t; so it goes.
Animal advocates have limited resources, both money and people, spread thin across researchers, campaigners, and grantmakers. It’s probably the case that we needed to put all of our spare energy into cage-free campaigning to get the ball rolling there, and indeed, while the cage-free fight has been a big success, it’s hardly over despite all the energy invested. I’m glad that increasing our political capacity has been a major influence for the last few years and that it will continue to get attention.
But I’m also glad that there’s about to be a major infusion of money and attention into welfare innovation. And because of that, it’s quickly becoming clear that the pace of this innovation will be limited not by funding, but by talent.
You're splitting this the same way I meant to, though the quote you point out wasn't as clear as it could have been: in strictly verifiable domains, AIs will eventually be so much better than humans that having humans involved will only lead to worse decisions. But the line between verifiable and unverifiable is gradual and fuzzy. My expectation in practice is that humans will develop such a strong habit of deferring to AIs that even if there are still humans "in charge" of certain things in the sense that they could implement one decision or another, they will not effectively differentiate the domains in which they by their own lights should maintain informed control, and will end up giving over complete control.
Keeping humans in the loop is a bigger question! I treated "humans eventually wind up not in the loop" as a premise for this post in part because I think it's the default and in part because my primary audience of people focused on anima welfare probably don't have the means to help keep humans in control, but maybe that's giving up too easily.
>I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering it it's what you meant.
On re-read this sounds passive aggressive and I didn't mean it that way, I'm just jet lagged on a train in Europe!
>EA appears to have largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals.
What I think you're saying is that EA work on behalf of animals is not as rooted in morality as it was previously or as it should be. My reason for objecting is that I think this conflates using moral arguments as a means with being motivated by morality in the end. When I hear other people (e.g. abolitionist critics of EA animal advocacy) say this, I often think they think mean that EAs are motivated by something like an apathetic drive to optimize a spreadsheet rather than a burning moral conviction to help animals. I think this is an incorrect belief that interferes with constructive debates over strategy.
Yet I don't think it's likely that you would be making this argument so I wanted to ask what you thought.
As for bad faith, I linked the article to indicate that I'm using the term in the low-threshold way, which doesn't mean "malicious" but can include "saying something other than what you think is true for rhetorical reasons," which is a subconscious thing that I do quite often in my writing and invite people to call me out on more often.
I think this post was a good contribution to this topic and I'm excited to respond to different parts of it more in future posts.
>EA appears to have largely walked away from the moral foundation of our work on behalf of animals.
I strongly disagree with this. I think you can guess my reasons and I'm wondering it it's what you meant.
On its face, I think it's a bad faith argument for basing our strategies on what feels aesthetically satisfying to us.
Hey Mark! We should catch up.
I think it's helpful to split these three. I had the same "factors of production" in my latest post: people, money, strategies. They also weave back together in interesting ways. I see a lot of 2 in the liberatory approaches I've been part of or around, and it would be easy for someone to argue for 1 as well.
But the persistent appearance of 2 might ultimately point to 3. It may be that some strategies are possible but would require a larger number of extremely disciplined operatives to execute. Part of why I feel discouraged about more attempts like that is it seems really hard to me to get a large enough group of sufficiently clear-headed people on the same page to pursue it– instead, I expect the human shortcomings to keep emerging. Like, corporate campaigns are badly bottlenecked on capable talent right now; if abolitionist campaigns would require a larger pool of cracked people, then without a realistic plan to solve 2 we wind up at 3.
Project Slingshot arguably is trying to plug the 2 gap with 1, and with a ton of AI money that might work. One factor of production can make up for a deficit in another but it gets more inefficient the greater the imbalance between them.
If you end up reading it I'd particularly value your feedback on how I'm striking this balance.
Yeah that seems correct and I think that my post tomorrow is probably guilty of this. I'd even say I'm doing it intentionally to try to pull the best new founders into this area. I think the actual outlook for helping animals is just terribly bleak across the board and that's probably not going to inspire people to join welfare tech incubators.
lol I actually held it back a week because of some infohazard concerns and I'm kicking myself for not beating you to the punch
Bubble in the sense of railroad bubbles successfully building railroads we still use, dot-com bubble laying fiber optic cable, etc. It could be a perfectly wise action for us to direct most of our spare energy/resources in this direction for a while.
The early research behind leafleting was low-quality in a way that should have been noticeable, and a better-calibrated version of the movement would not have spent so much time and money on it. Whereas the cage-free bubble was a necessary way of getting a massive worldwide campaign off the ground. I'd like use to have higher standards for our fads than we did for leafletting but I think the fad phenomenon is inevitable for a movement as constrained on talent and resources as we are.
I think the bubble framing is a useful and accurate description of welfare tech excitement. I just don't think that's a bad thing. From a longer post on this topic I'm publishing tomorrow:
You're splitting this the same way I meant to, though the quote you point out wasn't as clear as it could have been: in strictly verifiable domains, AIs will eventually be so much better than humans that having humans involved will only lead to worse decisions. But the line between verifiable and unverifiable is gradual and fuzzy. My expectation in practice is that humans will develop such a strong habit of deferring to AIs that even if there are still humans "in charge" of certain things in the sense that they could implement one decision or another, they will not effectively differentiate the domains in which they by their own lights should maintain informed control, and will end up giving over complete control.
Keeping humans in the loop is a bigger question! I treated "humans eventually wind up not in the loop" as a premise for this post in part because I think it's the default and in part because my primary audience of people focused on anima welfare probably don't have the means to help keep humans in control, but maybe that's giving up too easily.