Co-Founder of Aalto EA, undergraduate in Mathematics in Aalto University, and a Pro Forecaster at INFER
Looking for work opportunities in X-risk research for next year
I can share my experience as an EA group organiser
Is this/other episodes available on Spotify or other podcast platforms? I couldn't find it with a quick search
Thanks for the response! It's great to see that animals are mentioned in many other pages on the website. I understand the difficulty of tradeoffs between succintness and precision.
I'm not sure if I follow. I guess strict veganism would be a more effective signal then, since it would be more costly? But I see even less people in the EA/rationalist circles being vegan rather than vegetarian.
I agree that it makes sense, although using the term "people" and mentioning that it means also non-human animals in a footnote seems a bit dishonest to me. I'm uncertain about the tradeoffs between telling the truth and trying to maximize impact here.
That's helpful to know, thanks! I still think the word "people" is quite misleading in the sense that people rarely associate it with nonhuman animals. I also think there might be an additional reason for not mentioning animals, which is to avoid alienating people who don't care about animals but who are interested in longtermist causes.
I was quite suprised to see that 80k doesn't mention animals in their definition of 'impartial positive impact'.
Their definition: "We define ‘impartial positive impact’ as what helps the most people live better lives in the long term, treating everyone’s interests as equal."
I'm a bit unsettled by this. I hope they actually do assign value for non-human animals. But even if that's the case, failing to mention it would be weird.
In general, I'm concerned that longtermists don't value animals enough. From my experience visiting rationalist/longermist events & spaces, veganism/vegetarianism is less popular than I would have thought. I consider vegetarianism one of the least costly virtue signals, which is why I would expect most healthy people concerned about animal welfare to be vegetarians.
As the program is about forecasting, what is your stance on the broader field of foresight & futures studies? Why is forecasting more promising than some other approaches to foresight?