Hello, my name's Bella Forristal. I work at 80,000 Hours, as the head of marketing.
I'm interested in animal advocacy, moral circle expansion, and normative ethics.
Previously, I worked in community building with the Global Challenges Project and EA Oxford, and have interned at Charity Entrepreneurship.
Please feel free to email me to connect at bellaforristal@gmail.com, or leave anonymous feedback at https://www.admonymous.co/bellaforristal :)
That makes sense!
Again, very much not an expert, but some examples that might qualify:
[I'm an unaffiliated amateur]
I think this comment misunderstands the kind of work I expect the Arthropoda foundation to be doing.
Right now, we are farming insects, but we don't know very much about what is good or bad for them.
We might like to make recommendations like 'don't torture very large numbers of insects', but because we don't have really robust science on what conditions they might find torturous, this is hard.
I expect that the Arthropoda foundation will be focused on non-civilisation-upturning, action-relevant questions like that.
Thanks for writing up your experiences here; I found them interesting to read/reflect on!
A 3rd-year undergrad asked me for career advice in a 1-1. I provided my thoughts, but more importantly, I gave them the ‘obvious’ idea of asking 80,000 Hours for advice. They already knew about them, but somehow did not consider it.
Woo thanks so much for doing this! My impression is that a lot of people just need this kind of nudge :)
I couldn't find independent replications, but the study was preceded by two similar tests by the same team, which address concerns about weaknesses in the study setup.
I'm a bit confused by your second point. If the fish didn't have detectable feelings towards fish children, wouldn't you think this was evidence that fish don't experience empathy? Or would you think it was no evidence one way or the other?
If it's no evidence, then it can't 'prove people wrong' who currently think that fish feel empathy. But it seems like you think it could prove people wrong. So I'm confused...!
Are there any situations in which you expect fish to feel empathy?
Maybe; I'm a bit unsure. I don't know much about fish behaviour or evolution.
The general reason I disagree-voted is that this post seems to make a leap from: A) 'We have less solid evidence for non-humans experiencing qualia than we do for humans' to B) 'We can be certain (some) non-humans don't experience qualia, and it's appropriate to behave towards them as if they don't.'
I agree with A), but I don't think your argument can support B).
I certainly wouldn't eat anything that passes the mirror test
Some fish, such as the cleaner wrasse, pass the mirror test.
evidence that the fish has empathy towards other fish parents
Fish have very different approaches to rearing young than mammals. Many fish species do not spend much effort caring for young, and probably don't meaningfully think of themselves as parents. I think this experiment stacks the deck against fish by expecting them to respond as mammals do.
It can be difficult to have conversations about socialism without it becoming politically and emotionally charged.
Still, when I have been able to, my experience is that EAs generally share a great deal of the core beliefs that socialists do about what an ideally organised society looks like, and what capitalism gets wrong.
The question is then 'should (some) EAs advocate for socialism?' I think I'm rather more uncertain than you are on that front. Some broad intuitions driving my pessimism:
Should this comment be a top-level Forum post?