(Even in the roles where it has produced productivity improvements, such as programming, that doesn’t necessarily imply job loss, as companies could get more ambitious with their existing budgets)

Are there also just, concerns about misinterpretation? There’s not really a good way of checking baselines on hallucinations or unconfident predictions from the AI, since 99% of humans don’t know what these sounds mean.

Furthermore, since these seem to be based on the behaviours humans observe co-occurring with the communication, they’d necessarily be lower-fidelity than that animal’s thought process (as you note). That seems a bit lame and the website certainly isn’t trying to dispel their own mythmaking around ‘talk to animals’, which isn’t really what’s happening here in any meaningful sense.

Hmm, I think that’s not the right framing for this. UBI is just not settled as a universally good idea in academic or political circles (sorry, no definitive citation for this), let alone that there’s an urgent unemployment crisis (the statistic I think you’re citing is for job openings, not actual employment rates) or that such a crisis, if it did exist, has structural causes which could be expected to increase (i.e. it might not be AI, nor should we necessarily expect AI to become orders of magnitude more advanced in the next 5 years; there was plausibly a very different shock to the global economic system beginning around Liberation Day, 2025).

I’d also be curious about whether Abundance money could fund this, too. Urban sprawl is a big driver of habitat destruction!

That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that some orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.

I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.

Well the blackouts are the only way to ensure a free & fair election Nick :)

Late to this, but something I didn’t catch in the comments—Global Health looks overfunded in your calculations, but my sense is that Global Health is quite efficient at spending money. Much of the money in global health goes directly to programmes and beneficiaries, or working-class talent that often gets excluded as ‘not what we mean’ in these kinds of surveys. I would argue, too, that the other cause areas here are often quite talent-dense. Under these terms, it’s probably still valid to argue that Animal Welfare is under-resourced relative to Existential Risks though :)

Just generally, I like the idea of putting something out there in the world even if the first version isn’t perfect :)

I’m a little confused about your problem statement, indeed, most of the extreme politicians in the U.S. seem to win outright, in ranked-choice primaries, or systems with two-candidate runoffs.

In the Democratic party, which I’m more familiar with, their most extreme (this is not an endorsement or disendorsement of their policies, just to note that these politicians are the furthest left in the party) elected officials tend to win outright majorities or in reformed elections:

• Mamdani won a ranked-choice primary and then an outright majority in the general
• AOC won an outright primary in 2018 against a single candidate (no coalescing issue)
• Although Rashida Tlaib won her first successful primary in FTTP, in 2020 she won outright against a single candidate
• Ilhan Omar similarly won her first two primaries with a minority of the vote, but won her last three outright, in 2 cases against one ‘reasonable’ candidate (i.e. all other candidates got a small share of the vote)
• Bernie Sanders has a very strange electoral history due to running as an independent but usually being on the Democratic primary ticket. Nevertheless, he has pretty much always won his elections outright.

Similarly, I skimmed the Wikipedias for a few far-right politicians, whom I’m less familiar with, and they demonstrated similar trends. MTG, for example, won a contested primary with 40%, but then won a two-candidate runoff and has seen outright wins since.

It seems as though extreme politicians are genuinely popular—enough that people don’t form coalitions to oppose them in future elections, even when there’s only one other candidate on the ballot. I am not very convinced that your proposed form would work.