ben.smith
Posts 19
Comments123
Topic contributions1
Can you say something about what N-D lasers are and why they present such a strong threat? A google search for "N-D laser" just turns up neodymium lasers and it isn't clear why they would be as threatening as you present. In the worst case, you build a probe with a very powerful fusion energy source which is able to fire a laser at people sufficiently powerful to kill them, you could probably also build a laser or defense system to strike and kill the probe before existential loss has been caused.
Interstellar travel will probably doom the long-term future
My intuition is that most of the galactic existential risks listed are highly unlikely, and it is possible that the likely ones (self-replicating machines and ASI) may be defense-dominant. An advanced civilization capable of creating self-replicating machines to destroy life in other systems could well be capable of building defense systems against a threat like that.
You could substantially increase your weekly active users, converting monthly active users (MAU) into weekly and even daily users, and increasing MAU as well, by using push notifications to inform users of replies to their posts and comments and other events that are currently only sent as in-forum notifications to most users. Many, many times, I have posted on the forum, sent a comment or reply, and only weeks later seen that there was a response. On the other hand, I will get an email from twitter or bluesky if one person likes my post, and I immediately go on to see who it was. In doing so you will draw people to the forum at the exact time their engagement will encourage others to come back, building up a positive flywheel of engagement.
These features are already built into your forum but are off by default! This surprised me greatly because most online forum--not only feedscrolling websites like X and Facebook, but also forum-style websites like Substack and Wordpress--make it easy or default to get push notifications via email. That builds engagement as I've described. Often when I post on Tyler Cowen's Wordpress-based Marginal Revolution blog, I get a tonne of email notifications of replies and discussions about that topic. It's a bit overwhelming, but it's fun!
Users who just use your notification default (notifications within the website, but no few push notifications) probably make up the vast majority of active users and passive users (if not the most active users). If it is possible to identify users who have not deliberately turned off notifications, I strongly suggest that you flip the default to affect those users who haven't deliberately set a notification policy to send push notifications. This will get a small hit from people who dislike this, but you could mitigate this by e.g., an email in your next digest to inform people of why you are making the change.
I have long thought this was a missing feature on EA Forum; now I know it exists, but is turned off.
@titotal said that it's not a lot of fun to post here. I agree, and I also think that making it more immediately rewarding to post, by informing people of others' engagement with their content as soon as it happens, would make it a lot more fun. It will make me personally very happy if you do this!
Fair enough.
My central expectation is that value of one more human life created is roughly about even with the amount of nonhuman suffering that life would cause (based on here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eomJTLnuhHAJ2KcjW/comparison-between-the-hedonic-utility-of-human-life-and#Poultry_living_time_per_capita). I'm also willing to assume cultured meat is not too long away. Then the childhood delay til contribution only makes a fractional difference and I tip very slightly back into the pro natalist camp, while still accepting that the meat eater problem is relevant.
I think no one here is trying to use pronatalism to improve animal welfare. The crux for me is more whether pronatalism is net-negative, neutral, or net-positive, and its marginal impact on animal welfare seems to matter in that case. But the total impact of animal suffering dwarfs whatever positive or negative impact pronatalism might have.
I think Richard is right about the general case. It was a bit unintuitive to me until I ran the numbers in a spreadsheet, which you can see here:
Basically, yes, assume that meat eating increases with the size of human population. But the scientific effort towards ending the need to meat eat also increases with the size of the human population, assuming marginal extra people are as equally likely to go into researching the problem as the average person. Under a simple model the two exactly balance out, as you can see in the spreadsheet.
I just think real life breaks the simple model in ways I have described below, in a way that preserves a meat-eater problem.
right--in that simple model, each extra marginal average person decreases the time taken to invent cultured meat at the same rate as they contribute to the problem, and there's an exact identity between those rates. But there are complicating factors that I think work against assuring us there's no meat-eater problem:
- An extra person starts eating animals from a very young age, but won't start contributing to the meat-eater problem until they're intellectually developed enough to make a contribution (21 yers to graduate undergraduate, 25-30 to get a PhD).
- There's a delay between when they invent a solution and when meat eating can actually be phased out, though perhaps that's implicitly built into the model by the previous point
I do concede that the problem is mitigated somewhat because if we expect cultured meat to take over within the lifetime of a new person, then their harm (and impact) is scaled down proportionately, but the intrinsic hedonic value of their existence isn't similarly scaled down.
But it doesn't sound as simple as just "there's no meat-eater problem".
Ok, I missed the citation to your source initially because the citation wasn't in your comment when you first posted it. The source does say less insect abundance in land converted to agricultural use from natural space. So then what i said about increased agricultural use supports your point rather than mine.
When I pit depopulation against causes that capture the popular imagination and that take up the most time in contemporary political discourse, I think depopulation scores pretty high as a cause and I am glad it is getting more attention.
When I pit it against causes that the EA movement spends the most time on, including AI x-risk, farmed animal welfare, perhaps even wild animal welfare, and global poverty, I find it hard to justify giving it my considered attention because of the outsized importance of the other problems.
AI x-risk is important because the long term future could be at stake in the next few years or decades. The other two causes are important because billions of people and trillions of animals are experiencing needless suffering now. It's hard to see depopulation holding a candle to those cause areas.
I would like to see more mainstream funding and attention given to working on depopulation. On the other hand, unless I'm missing something, I would not like to see any funding or human capital diverted from ai x-risk, animal welfare, and global poverty.