All of James Faville's Comments + Replies

The object-level arguments here have merit, but they aren't novel and there are plausible counterarguments to them. It remains unclear to me what the sign of talking about these topics more or less openly is, and I do think there's a lot of room for reasonable disagreement. (I'd probably recommend maintaining roughly the current level of caution on the whole - maybe a little more on some axes and a little less on others.)

But on the meta-level, I think posting a public argument for treating a potential infohazard more casually - especially with a somewhat a... (read more)

Thanks for checking - it's not, as the CRS S-risk Introductory Fellowship doesn't go into sufficient detail on some of the risks that CLR prioritises. I've added this to the seminar EOI form now.

I think the CRS S-risk Introductory Fellowship and CLR Foundations Course are pretty complementary. We're taking a more targeted / object-level approach of mostly discussing a few specific risks CLR prioritises. We won't spend significant time on the broader overview of s-risks and reasons for prioritising them that the CRS fellowship focuses on.

I've noticed in my work that some people assume that "moral circle expansion" is a benefit of some animal advocacy campaigns (e.g. fish welfare) and not others (e.g. dog welfare).

I think the main difference is fish are not considered worthy of significant moral concern by most people, who view them more as living objects. With companion animal species, at least in many communities it is understood that their interests are very important. This doesn't prevent there from being serious welfare concerns involving them, but I think these are usually more ... (read more)

Thanks for the post—I've encountered this "consciousness must arise from an analog substrate" view before  in places like this conversation with Magnus Vinding and David Pearce, and am interested in understanding it better.

I don't think I really follow the argument for this view, but even granting that consciousness requires an analog substrate, would that change our priorities? It seems as though those who want to create artificial sentience (including conscious uploads of human minds) would just use analog computers instead.  I suppose if you'r... (read more)

I agree that veg*n retention is important, thanks for writing this up!

Another reason for concern here is that ex-veg*ns might be a significant source of opposition to animal advocacy, because they are motivated to express a sense of disillusionment/betrayal (e.g. see https://www.reddit.com/r/exvegans/) and because their stories can provide powerful support to other opponents of animal advocacy.

Note that the Faunalytics study finds that a decent number (37%) of ex-vegetarians are interested in trying again in the future, which bodes well for future outreach to them and mitigates my concern above a little bit.

There's another very large disadvantage to speeding up research here—once we have digital minds, it might be fairly trivial for bad actors to create many instances of minds in states of extreme suffering (for reasons such as sadism). This seems like a dominant consideration to me, to the extent that I'd support any promising non-confrontational efforts to slow down research into WBE, despite the benefits to individuals that would come about from achieving digital immortality.

I also think digital people (especially those whose cognition is deliberately modi... (read more)

Another potential application of an urban design background is in wild animal welfare: some aspects of city planning might predictably affect the number of urban wild animals living there and their quality of life.

I have some draft reports on this matter (one on longtermist animal advocacy and one on work to help artificial sentience) written during two internships I did, which I can share with anyone doing relevant work. I really ought to finish editing those and post them soon! In the meantime here are some takeaways—apologies in advance for listing these out without the supporting argumentation, but I felt it would probably be helpful on net to do so.

• Astronomically many animals could experience tremendous suffering far into the future on farms, in the wild, and i

Pablo Stafforini has a great bibliography of articles on wild animal welfare that includes some earlier work coming from outside the EA space.