What if we decide that the Amazon rainforest has a negative WAW sign? Would you be in favor of completely replacing it with a parking lot, if doing so could be done without undue suffering of the animals that already exist there?

Definitely not completely replacing because biodiversity has diminishing returns to land. If we pave the whole Amazon we'll probably extinct entire families (not to mention we probably cause ecological crises elsewhere and disrupt ecosystem services etc), whereas on the margin we'll only extinct species endemic to the deforested regions.

If the research on WAW comes out super negative I could imagine it being OK to replace half the Amazon with higher-welfare ecosystems now, and work on replacing the rest when some crazy AI tech allows all changes to be fully reversible. But the moral parliament would probably still not be happy about this. Eg killing is probably bad, and there is no feasible way to destroy half the Amazon in the near term without killing most of the animals in it.

It's plausible to me that biodiversity is valuable, but with AGI on the horizon it seems a lot cheaper in expectation to do more out-there interventions, like influencing AI companies to care about biodiversity (alongside wild animal welfare), recording the DNA of undiscovered rainforest species about to go extinct, and buying the cheapest land possible (middle of Siberia or Australian desert, not productive farmland). Then when the technology is available in a few decades and we're better at constructing stable ecosystems de novo, we can terraform the deserts into highly biodiverse nature preserves. Another advantage of this is that we'll know more about animal welfare-- as it stands now the sign of habitat preservation is pretty unclear.

Nukit ships to many countries.

Thanks for the reply.

• Everyone has different emotional reactions so I would be wary about generalizing here. Of the vegetarians I know, certainly not all are disgusted by meat. Disgust is often more correlated with whether they use a purity frame of morality or experience disgust in general than how much they empathize with animals [1]. Empathy is not an end; it's not required for virtuous action, and many people have utilitarian, justice-centered, or other frames that can prescribe actions with empathy taking a lesser role. As for me, I feel that after experiencing heightened empathy for those 40 days in 2021 and occasionally since, I understand its psychological effects on me well enough to know I'm not making a grave moral error.
  • I would only feel averse to eating human meat if the human were murdered just for people to eat, and wouldn't feel much disgust unless it still looked like human body parts, so maybe I'm an exception. But I'm not sure how this is relevant.
• Agree with the social signal purpose being different. I guess which one is better would depend on the social group. Around my friends who are either omnivores or vegan, I feel ok just signaling it's bad to eat the worst treated animals. But if everyone else avoided chicken and seemed to think eating everything else were fine, I would give up something else for signaling purposes, and maybe at some point it's better just to go vegan.

[1] Or just whether they grew up vegetarian, like how people are often disgusted by any strange food

Didn't realize my only post of the year was from April 1st. Longforms are just so scary to write other than on April Fool's Day!

Are you interested in betting on these beliefs? I couldn't find a bet with Vasco but it seems more likely we could find one, because it seems like you're more confident

• You're shooting the messenger. I'm not advocating for downvoting posts that smell of "the outgroup", just saying that this happens in most communities that are centered around an ideological or even methodological framework. It's a way you can be downvoted while still being correct, especially from the LEAST thoughtful 25% of EA forum voters
• Please read the quote from Claude more carefully. MacAskill is not an "anti-utilitarian" who thinks consequentialism is "fundamentally misguided", he's the moral uncertainty guy. The moral parliament usually recommends actions similar to consequentialism with side constraints in practice.

I probably won't engage more with this conversation.

Claude thinks possible outgroups include the following, which is similar to what I had in mind

Based on the EA Forum's general orientation, here are five individuals/groups whose characteristic opinions would likely face downvotes:

1. Effective accelerationists (e/acc) - Advocates for rapid AI development with minimal safety precautions, viewing existential risk concerns as overblown or counterproductive
2. TESCREAL critics (like Emile Torres, as you mentioned) - Scholars who frame longtermism/EA as ideologically dangerous, often linking it to eugenics, colonialism, or techno-utopianism
3. Anti-utilitarian philosophers - Strong deontologists or virtue ethicists who reject consequentialist frameworks as fundamentally misguided, particularly on issues like population ethics or AI risk trade-offs
4. Degrowth/anti-progress advocates - Those who argue economic/technological growth is net-negative and should be reduced, contrary to EA's generally pro-progress orientation
5. Left-accelerationists and systemic change advocates - Critics who view EA as a "neoliberal" distraction from necessary revolutionary change, or who see philanthropic approaches as fundamentally illegitimate compared to state redistribution

Yeah, while I think truth-seeking is a real thing I agree it's often hard to judge in practice and vulnerable to being a weasel word.

Basically I have two concerns with deferring to experts. First is that when the world lacks people with true subject matter expertise, whoever has the most prestige--maybe not CEOs but certainly mainstream researchers on slightly related questions-- will be seen as experts and we will need to worry about deferring to them.

Second, because EA topics are selected for being too weird/unpopular to attract mainstream attention/funding, I think a common pattern is that of the best interventions, some are already funded, some are recommended by mainstream experts and remain underfunded, and some are too weird for the mainstream. It's not really possible to find the "too weird" kind without forming an inside view. We can start out deferring to experts, but by the time we've spent enough resources investigating the question that you're at all confident in what to do, the deferral to experts is partially replaced with understanding the research yourself as well as the load-bearing assumptions and biases of the experts. The mainstream experts will always get some weight, but it diminishes as your views start to incorporate their models rather than their views (example that comes to mind is economists on whether AGI will create explosive growth, and how recently good economic models have been developed by EA sources, now including some economists that vary assumptions and justify differences from the mainstream economists' assumptions).

Wish I could give more concrete examples but I'm a bit swamped at work right now.