@Aaron Gertler 🔸 weird bug where the fields don't show:

Seriously, I love this EA forum holiday ❤️ I genuinely feel like this helps the community do more good, get more silly-but-perhaps-with-a-grain-of-usefulness ideas across, and waste time in a way which feels a bit productive

It hurts my prefontal cortex 

If the FTX Future Fund was still running, you could get from them easy money, no strings attached!

Cab(W)el(l)?

How do you see the long-term goals and outcomes? I'm particularly interested in how this kind of work interact with abolishment / animal-rights. In particular, the following seem important to me:

1. The kind of work that makes the right option cheaper (by technological improvement of productivity on less cruel methods of production) could, for instance, decrease the cost and thus increase the demand.
2. Improved welfare could legitimize meat eating and overall decrease public opinion toward preventing animal cruelty. 

   1. (It is hard for me to come up with a version of this argument that I believe. If anything, I believe the opposite - that increased regulation and action for improved welfare will continuously raise the minimal level of acceptable welfare)

       

Downvoted. I felt that the post was making a bunch of assertions in a way that was aimed at persuading rather than explaining. That said, I would really be interested in reading more from you about this topic. 

I think there is a lot to learn about the nature of consciousness and suffering from buddhist philosophy and practice, and I think that it is worthwhile to investigate how to apply it for AI risk.

In particular, there are some possibly interesting points here that I'd love to see expanded and explained in a way which I'd also feel comfortable engaging with the ideas.

Happy to help, feel free to DM me if still relevant :) 
 

This is really important and interesting to read, thank you!

Would the general point apply for insect farming? Seems like the recommendations are particularly relevant there

I'm really looking forward to the debate on this topic! 

Some thoughts:

1. I like that debate topics aren't overly operationalized. Allowing people to take slightly different interpretations means that people can focus on the variation which seem most important to them. This can come at the expense of understanding each other crisply and when interpreting the (quantified) agreement scale.
   1. I'm not sure what were the main takeaways from previous debates, but I felt that I cared more about hearing interesting new takes and people's reactions to them than I cared about assessing the overall community opinion.
2. "By default" - One possible ambiguity here is whether this means with >50% probability or with >99.9% probability.
3. "The world where" -> "The worlds where". Also, perhaps this notion of conceiving of possible futures as possible worlds is a bit too heavy on EA/rationalist-lingo.
4. "AI goes well for humans" - I broadly like this. I would be interested in people's opinion for both neartermist and lontermist worldviews, and under maxipok or flourishing futures.
5. "Sentient beings" - Here I think the discussion should be contained to nonhuman animals because the other case seemed to be handled in the previous AI welfare debate.
6. I don't think that the statement of the debate should be about "what we should do" but rather about the worldview directly. It's a bit hard for me to pinpoint exactly why I think so and I may regret this.
   1. I think that an operationalization which is too close to people's actual decisions may cause more people to defend their existing views or to take a stance based on what's more salient. I'm not sure why exactly, but framings like "Without extra animal-focused work, even aligned superintelligence would be bad for non-human animals" feel like they would generate more ideologically-oriented responses.
   2. This makes the question more complex with more moving parts.
7. I think that the framing of "AGI which doesn't cause human extinction or disempowerment will value animal welfare" is quite good. Perhaps this should include CAIS or multipolar scenarios.