Today, somewhat, but that's just because human brains can't prove the state of their beliefs or share specifications with each other (ie, humans can lie about anything). There is no reason for artificial brains to have these limitations, and any trend towards communal/social factors in intelligence, or self-reflection (which is required for recursive self-improvement), then it's actively costly to be cognitively opaque.

Lots of great stuff here. Strongly recommend following Asterisk.

I wonder to what extent MIRI's Functional Decision Theory's categorical imperative relates to this. In FDT, there is no such thing as an independent agent, it's essentially an acknowledgement that we can't escape the bonds, the entrainment/entanglement, the synchronies, created by the universality of the mathematics of decisionmaking.
To practice FDT, you have to be aware that your decisions will be mirrored by others, EG, you don't defect against other FDT agents in prisoner's dilemmas, because you're aware that you'll both tend to make the same decision, and defecting stops making sense when that's the case.

That does seem to be a compatible interpretation of the phrasing "I am because we are" (in the sense of "I am (a certain way) because we (our agent-class) are (a certain way)"). I'd be interested to know if that reading works in the original language too, it wouldn't be surprising, FDT-synchrony isn't a new or original idea, it's a formalization of a recurring one. Kant's categorical imperative was an attempt to grasp the same thing, and Reflectivism, culture, norms and contracts (and open source game theory) are kind of more embedded (less abstract) implementations of it.

Btw, I'd generally recommend always at least skimreading a thing before you put it down, IME it leads to much better outcomes than just not reading it at all.

Yeah this seems like a silly thought to me. Are you optimistic that there'll be a significant period of time after intellectual labor is automated/automatable and before humans no longer control history?

We shouldn't actually do this because mastodon is not good software and will probably be obsolete soon, but if that were not the case.

It would be a strategic win for EA to conspicuously fund the development of a community notes feature for Mastodon.

Here's what I think would happen: most mastodon communities would shit on it and refuse to use it because it had EA funding, but not vehemently enough to remove the feature from their forks, so this would just result in them looking incredibly wrong and bad and guilty every time anyone saw a successful community note.

And also: Community notes is the kind of feature that we should expect to actually substantially improve public policy discourse so it's the kind of thing we should be funding in earnest.

But I'm not sure we should work in that area. It's unfortunate that a global forum probably can't rise to prominence if it's received partisan funding, even if it's bi-partisan, as Argumentum ad Aurum is live and well and cavorting all around.

I can certainly wait, as I still don't eat pork for nutritional reasons (fat composition). I guess it should be you who makes contact, I'd be a lot less rigorous. If you need locals, I could connect you with people in the community. I don't know anyone who's been involved in pig welfare, but I know some people who've done chicken stuff (meat chicken welfare in NZ is still bad, but egg chicken welfare is mostly fine.)

At this point I'm expecting we're going to find that yes, humane farms would benefit from aggregating, but still, very large contiguous parcels of land are just rare or hard to acquire, so a large number of stock on a single farm is going to be strongly correlated with overcrowding, as you expect.

the 'factory' element of factory farms

You still haven't explained what you mean by this. A factory is just a process that produces something. A factory can have humans monitoring every stage of the process and making sure nothing is going wrong. A factory can be subject to certification requirements.

Do you believe such farms exist? Do you have any evidence they exist?

I do know of one non-atrocity pig farm franchise that runs at least 5000 pigs worth of farms (IIRC they're the main pork brand at most supermarkets in NZ) freedom farms. I'm having difficulty finding specifics about where the farms are and whether any individual freedom farm is huge. But they'd be good people to ask about this. Shall I?

Slow-growing chicken operations exist, why wouldn't they aggregate into huge farms for economies of scale for the same reasons any industry does that?

That sure is some information. Doesn't address my question.

by using USDA data on the size of farms, and then defining any farm over a certain size as a 'factory' farm

Does the size tell you what sorts of methods are being used? I'm confused as to how it could.