All of Kat Woods 🔶 ⏸️'s Comments + Replies

Yeah, I've already spoken privately to a bunch of people about this and haven't heard any arguments that have changed my mind. 

I'd love to hear counterarguments though! Perhaps there are ones I haven't heard that would change my mind. 

"humans evolved eating a variety of diets in different places"

Yes, but none of them were ever vegan. I think this is important. It makes it much more likely that our bodies are not evolved for veganism. 

Ooh, thanks for tracking this down!

It looks like creatine supplementation does mildly affect cognitive performance but it doesn't help vegetarians more than omnivores. 

But isn't creatine really hard or impossible to get with a vegan diet? So presumably then it would be affecting their regular cognitive performances? 

This study shows that supplementing causes a similar increase of cognitive abilities compared to omnivores, but it could be that they're starting from a worse spot than they would have been had they been omnivores? 

It'll be hard ... (read more)

vegans live longer in observational studies. 

Vegetarians (not vegans), but then if you find a comparison group that also doesn't drink/smoke but isn't vegetarian, the non-vegetarians live longer. 

Also this larger study shows that meat consumption predicts longer lifespan. 

I'm sure I'm healthier than the majority of the population too. So if you're willing to put in this amount of work, I don't think the argument applies.

If you can control your diet enough to be vegan, you can probably control it enough to eat healthier with a non-vegan diet as well. 

The important thing isn't that you're healthier compared to a SAD diet. Pretty much anything is better than a SAD diet. The important thing is whether you're healthier than your realistic alternative. 

If you eat in the way I describe you still get the signalling benefits and you don't have to do expected value calculations with every decision. 

In fact, you might have better signalling effects because it shows you're not just blindly virtue signalling but actually trying to solve the problem. 

Also, if you look and are healthier, people will find that more persuasive. 

Ozempic seems potentially good. Also, many other diets also cause weight loss (e.g. Mediterranean, paleo, etc). As I understand it, most diets lead to weight loss as long as you can keep them up. So just pick a diet that you can maintain long term. 

I think if you have enough control over your diet to be a vegan, you have enough control to do one of the other diets that has the weight effects without health side effects. 

Thanks! And I totally agree, cultivated meat seems like a good solution. 

Love this. For others curious about trying to understand conservative values and thinking more, I recommend Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

I also recommend Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt

Aw, that's so good to hear! Glad you've been finding it beneficial. 

Thanks! You mean the Israel/Gaza one?

How about now? I tried changing something. 

I've known a few people who say this. 

And there are some people online who promote this, but I think for most of them they had kids for the usual reasons (they wanted them) and then post hoc came up with reasons for why it's actually the best thing for the world.

You can tell because they don't actually do cause prioritization like they do with the other causes. There are no cost-effectiveness analyzes comparing having children to mentorship etc. 

It usually feels more like how most people talk about ordinary charities. Exaggerated claims of impact... (read more)

I can't figure out how to hand over authoriship to you entirely, so let's just leave it as is. 

Ah great! I added you as a co-author. Wondering if I can then remove myself and then you can just be the author?

Not sure if you can edit it from there or not now. 

People often neglect to compare the costs/risks to the benefits (which I think this post largely does).

In the case of alcohol, I think the benefits of alcohol are smaller than most people believe. 

I think in the majority of cases, the feelings of happiness from alcohol are not actually coming from alcohol, but from socializing, then being misattributed to the alcohol.

One easy way to verify this: try drinking alone. You'll find it doesn't make you happy. It just accentuates existing feelings.

Then, try talking to people for awhile without drinking. You'... (read more)

Seems hard to prevent s-risks if nobody knows they're a potential problem. 

Reminds me of this argument I made awhile back. 

Maybe ;) 

I remember excessively looking into this and it's quite complicated. Depends on where they are (e.g. if they're urban, they're more likely to buy factory farmed animals)

Also, in rural areas, they still sometimes actually often do what is essentially small scale factory farming of hens. For example, the Rwandan family I stayed with in a rural village had previously been running a small scale factory farm (~30 hens) who were kept in pretty similar conditions to large scale factory farms.

Also, their pigs were kept in stalls just slightly larger ... (read more)

Well reasoned post!

I wonder how this compares to eating mussels and oysters

On the one hand I think oysters are much less likely to be conscious. 

On the other hand, they are also farmed, which tends to lead to worse well-being than if they're in their natural habitat.

When I look at the farming practices for oysters and mussels they look to be pretty similar to their natural habitat but I have not investigated super thoroughly.

Thanks for writing this! Changed my mind. 

I do wonder if there are certain brands or sources where the bees are treated well. I imagine ones that go outside to find natural food sources. My grandparents kept a couple of bee hives and they seemed pretty good. The vast majority of the time they're just living a natural lifestyle, which is most likely what they've evolved to enjoy. 

On that note, I've found that o3 is really good for researching the welfare of various animal products. Here's what I just did for the honey at my house (TLDR; I won't be buying it again). 

You can find a map of the funders in the space here

Amazing! Thank you! 

OK, thanks!

You speak of the difference between jhana and breath practice. Is it mainly just the object of concentration (i.e. the breath vs creating a whole body positive feeling)? Or is it more than that? 

Thanks for writing this up! 

Few questions:

• How long does the happiness continue when you're not meditating? A range of times would be helpful
• How long does it take you to get into the state each time?
• How many hours of meditation did you have to do before you could reliably achieve the state?
• What percentage of the time when you try to get into the state do you succeed? 

I had really good success with the book Stop Beings Your Symptoms, Start Being Yourself. 

I still have my chronic mystery ailment, but it reduced its impact on my life by about 80%. 

I think "labs" has the connotation of mad scientists and somebody creating something that escapes the lab, so has some "good" connotations for AI safety comms.

Of course, depending on the context and audience. 

Loved this post! Thanks for writing it. 

I've been having some pretty good success doing online outreach that I think is replicable but don't want to share strategies publicly. I'd be happy to give advice and/or swap tips privately with anybody else interested in the area. 

Just DM me telling me what you're working on/want to work on. 

Thank you for writing this. I think this really does make a difference for people's motivation and the vibe of the community.

This doesn't change your conclusions at all, but it's hard to count the Nonlinear Network donations without accidentally double counting because a lot of the largest donors are also on the platform.

The Nonlinear Network was designed to help increase funding diversification in the movement. 

It was also designed to be maximally low effort on both the funder and the applicant side. This is why we allow people to apply with any existing fundraising materials and there are very few required questions so if you've already fundraised, it should take you minutes to apply. 

It's not nearly enough to solve the whole problem, but it's low cost and high upside so good EV for most AI safety orgs

A couple of articles relevant to this topic:

• Parable of the Boy Who Cried 5% Chance of Wolf by me
• Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument by Scott Alexander

You mentioned looking for longtermist donation opportunities. One thing that might help is the Nonlinear Network, where donors can see a wide variety of AI safety donation opportunities, and also see expert reviewers ratings and comments. You can also see other donors' opinions and voting on various donation opportunities. This allows you to avoid the unilateralist curse and use elite common sense. 

Seems worth mentioning that if you're a funder, you can see tons of AI safety funding opportunities, sorted by votes, expert reviews, intervention type, and more, if you join the Nonlinear Network. 

You also might want to check out the AI safety funding opportunities Zvi recommends

You could also consider joining Catalyze's seed funding network that donates to new AI safety orgs on their "demo days" after they've gone through the incubation program

Seems like a good place to remind people of the Nonlinear Network, where donors can see a ton of AI safety projects with room for funding, see what experts think of different applications, sort by votes and intervention, etc. 

Love it! 

I also really like reading mantras because it helps engage so many different parts of your brain, so helps you stay focused. 

Huzzah! 

I did the technical magic of turning something on the website off and on again and apparently that fixed it. 

Thanks for pointing that out! 

It was happening on my colleague's computer too, and we did something that fixed it on his end. Is it still happening on your computer? 

Regardless, it should always be fine if you type in www.nonlinear.org/network (for some reason, it wasn't liking it if you didn't write the "www" )

Thanks for writing this! Found it really inspiring and uplifting.

I think you're right that Benjamin Lay, who we're currently celebrating, would totally be banned from EA events and blacklisted by the Community Health Team. 

The same would happen for most historical moral heroes, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. 

If a community that is trying to be morally ambitious would ban people who, in retrospect, are considered moral heroes, this should make us reconsider our current starndards and processes. 

So there's no confirmed person aside from the one listed, but there could feasibly be more? 

Is there anybody aside from the one person publicly listed who asked you to stop expressing interest or asked you to stop talking to them or anything like that? 

When this is a situation involving a junior woman and a senior man, social behavior patterns of women being afraid of telling someone "no" often make this worse.

I do think many women experience fear around this, and many have troubles expressing their wants in general. Many don't though. What's the solution then? 

Should we encourage women to be strong, to do things that scare them, to stand up for themselves? Should we encourage women to tell people what they want instead of holding it in and not getting their needs met?

Or should we make it so they're... (read more)

It might mean, especially when the person who's doing that is your boss/mentor/someone more senior than you, that you don't feel like you can (clearly) refuse

It looks like this is saying that women can't say no to powerful men? Why is that? 

I assume that women are strong and independent and if a powerful person tells them to do something, they can say no just fine, just like anybody else. 

Am I missing something? 

OK. Does it make a difference that the only instance where we have public details, Owen wasn't making sexual advances in his house? He just mentioned, to a friend where they were both doing radical honesty with each other, inspired by circling, that he was going to masturbate that day. When she wasn't in the house. Not masturbating about her or anything. Just that he'd do what the vast majority of guys do every day. 

She was a friend, not a colleague. He wasn't doing professional connecting people with jobs or anything like that. He only started that r... (read more)

I would like to recognize that I have a lot of empathy for the EV board. I think that no matter what decision they made, they would get criticized. That's a really hard position to be in and I hope that their friends are reaching out to them and sending them comfort and funny gifs. 

I personally don't hold anything against them, because I think it's really hard to do things like this and ethics is complicated and fundamentally unsolved. 

I hope they can find some solace in this situation: if people are going to critcize you no matter what you do, you can simply make the decision you think is right instead of trying to please the public, which are fundamentally unpleasable, because there's too many of us.  

Owen says in his response

My understanding is that I always followed the letter of policy on when to recuse. 

I'm curious to hear whether the OP disagree with this. Do they think that he broke the rules on conflict of interest? Or do they think that he did indeed follow the rules, but there were some instances where there were unspoken rules or hard to make judgment calls that he didn't realize? 

I assumed it's obvious to everyone that it's a bad idea to make [things that are perceived as] unwanted romantic or sexual advances towards people, and that serious action should be taken if someone receives repeated complaints about that.

@lyra Can you clarify what you mean by this? 

It reads like you're saying that if you ask somebody out and they say no (aka unwanted romantic advances), that this is obviously bad and that serious action should be taken against you? This seems clearly wrong, because it would mean that virtually all people who've ever ... (read more)

concerning inconsistent recognition (and thus, management) of conflicts of interest

In the same article they say that Julia Wise also did this and had troubles managing conflicts of interest. Should she be banished for 2 years? 

There are plenty of EA leaders who've had this problem (managing COIs is hard and not straightforward!) and they are not being banished. 

It seems that the more likely explanation is that there was a big blow up for EA's reputation with that Time magazine article, and EV is trying to protect themselves by making a public example of somebody. 

it was difficult for the women to avoid interacting with Owen while the inappropriate actions were taking place, e.g. with a woman staying at Owen’s house.

Is this cruxy for anybody? If people found out that he'd expressed romantic interest in somebody at his house, would people think that's an bannishable offense? 

frequency and the content of the advances contributed to the women’s feelings.

If somebody doesn't express disinterest in the romantic interest, why is frequency a problem? There is only one claimed case where a person says he didn't stop when she said no, and he says he has written evidence against that. 

For "content", this could be reframed as saying "don't ask people out in the wrong way" which seems like a vague and impossible standard. There is no right or wrong way to ask somebody out (of course, I'm sure there are edge cases).