Amrit (recovered acc.)
Bio
Participation3
Advocating for suffering-focused ethics. Negative Utilitarian.* Learning, growing, fallible. Only human.
Doing my bit to address present & future challenges faced by our society around food-health security, human & other-than-human suffering, and civilizational downfall/collapse risks.
Currently, I'm contributing in the alternative proteins sector in lab R&D capacity. Also an organiser/core team at an animal advocacy group based in Bangalore. I frequent EA-adj meet-ups or events in and around Bangalore and look for opportunities to contribute/collab.
Keywords that I may get deeply engaged with: what/how/why/can/should/ought, morality, futurism, uncertainty, food tech, AGI/ASI/HLAI, animal advocacy, rationality/LW. physicalism, STEAM, s-risks, societal progress, QALY improvement, uplifting LMICs, entropy, physics, cosmology, astrobiology, pandemics, epidemiology, nutrition, intelligence, computing, cogsci, neurosci, suffering, sentience, and any other adjacent spaces.
See anything that makes you nod along? Feel free to ping me! :)
How others can help me
Better understanding of the local & global situation in my cause areas of interest (TAI, s-risks, food security, biological risks, healthspan improvement and suffering reduction), and connecting with people who share the same concerns or are in the same/adjacent field as I am to (hopefully) brainstorm certain tangible & deployable solutions or experiment with them.
How I can help others
Offer my experience and insights on the local EA, animal advocacy movement, and alternative proteins (esp. precision fermentation/alt. proteins). I may also be available to help or volunteer for related causes and initiatives depending on my available bandwidth, location, and competence/fit.
Yeah well a lot of neglectedness discourse does end up being "here's a big number, here's a small number, therefore neglected" without asking whether those numbers actually inform anyone's marginal decision? I think shrimp welfare is also interesting because the bottleneck isn't "people who care about shrimp don't know it's important" it's that very few people care about shrimp at all.
One thing I'd find useful is more on how to handle cases where something is at the edge of your circle because of empirical uncertainty rather than moral uncertainty. I might be unsure whether to include shrimp because I'm uncertain about their sentience (empirical), or because I'm uncertain how to weigh their interests even if sentient (moral). These feel like they should cash out differently. The first suggests investing in research, the latte4 suggests the "neglected because few include them" logic you allude to.