AI safety researcher
Thanks, I've started donating $33/month to the FarmKind bonus fund, which is double the calculator estimate for my diet. [1] I will probably donate ~$10k of stocks in 2025 to offset my lifetime diet impact-- is there any reason not to do this? I've already looked at the non-counterfactual matching argument, which I don't find convincing.
[1] I basically never eat chicken, substituting it with other meats, so I reduced the poultry category by 2/3 and allocated that proportionally between the beef and pork categories.
I disagree with a few points, especially paragraph 1. Are you saying that people were worried about abolition slowing down economic growth and lowering standards of living? I haven't heard this as a significant concern-- free labor was perfectly capable of producing cotton at a small premium, and there were significant British boycotts of slave-produced products like cotton and sugar.
As for utilitarian arguments, that's not the main way I imagine EAs would help. EA pragmatists would prioritize the cause for utilitarian reasons and do whatever is best to achieve their policy goals, much as we are already doing for animal welfare. The success of EAs in animal welfare, or indeed anywhere other than x-risk, is in implementation of things like corporate campaigns rather than mass spreading of arguments. Even in x-risk, an alliance with natsec people has effected concrete policy outcomes like compute export controls.
To paragraph 2, the number of philosophers is pretty low in contemporary EA. We just hear about them more. And while abolition might have been relatively intractable in the US, my guess is the UK could have been sped up.
I basically agree with paragraph 3, though I would hope if it came to it we would find something more economical than directly freeing slaves.
Overall thanks for the thoughtful response! I wouldn't mind discussing this more.
How do I offset my animal product consumption as easily as possible? The ideal product would be a basket of offsets that's
I know I could potentially have higher impact just betting on saving 10 million shrimp or whatever, but I have enough moral uncertainty that I would highly value this kind of offset package. My guess is there are lots of people for whom going vegan is not possible or desirable, who would be in the same boat.
Suppose that the EA community were transported to the UK and US in 1776. How fast would slavery have been abolished? Recall that the slave trade ended in 1807 in the UK and 1808 in the US, and abolition happened between 1838-1843 in the British Empire and 1865 in the US.
Assumptions:
Note that (according to ChatGPT) Quakers were more dedicated to abolition than EAs are to animal advocacy, have a much larger population, and deserve lots of moral credit for abolition in real life. But my guess would be that EAs could find some angles the Quakers wouldn't due to the consequentialist principles of EA. Maybe more evangelism and growth (Quaker population declined in the early 1800s), pragmatism about compensating slaveholders in the US as was done in the UK, or direct political action. Could EAs have gotten the Fugitive Slave Clause out of the Constitution?
It is not clear to me that EA branding is net positive for the movement overall or if it's been tarnished beyond repair by various scandals. Like, it might be that people should make a small personal sacrifice to be publicly EA, but it might also be that the pragmatic collective action is to completely rebrand and/or hope that EA provides a positive radical flank effect.
The reputation of EA at least in the news and on Twitter is pretty bad; something like 90% of the news articles mentioning EA are negative. I do not think it inherently compromises integrity to not publicly associate with EA even if you agree with most EA beliefs, because people who read opinion pieces will assume you agree with everything FTX did, or are a Luddite, or have some other strawman beliefs. I don't know whether EAF readers calling themselves EAs would make others' beliefs about their moral stances more or less accurate.
I don't think this is currently true, but if the rate of scandals continues, anyone holding on to the EA label would be suffering from the toxoplasma of rage, where the EA meme survives by sounding slightly good to the ingroup but extremely negative to anyone else. Therefore, as someone who is disillusioned with the EA community but not various principles, I need to see some data before owning any sort of EA affiliation, to know I'm not making some anti-useful sacrifice.
I want to slightly push back against this post in two ways:
In conclusion, I think that while care and empathy can be an important motivator to longtermists, and it is valid for us to think of longtermist actions as the ultimate act of care, we are motivated by a conjunction of empathy/care and other attributes, and it is the other attributes that are by far more important. For someone who has empathy/care and values beneficentrism and scope-sensitivity, preventing an extinction-level pandemic is an important act of care; for someone like me or a utilitarian, pandemic prevention is also an important act. But for someone who values justice more, applying more care does not make them prioritize pandemic prevention over helping a sex trafficking victim, and in the larger altruistically-inclined population, I think a greater focus on care and empathy conflict with longtermist values more than they contribute.
[1] More important for me are: feeling moral obligation to make others' lives better rather than worse, wanting to do my best when it matters, wanting future glory and social status for producing so much utility.
Not sure how to post these two thoughts so I might as well combine them.
In an ideal world, SBF should have been sentenced to thousands of years in prison. This is partially due to the enormous harm done to both FTX depositors and EA, but mainly for basic deterrence reasons; a risk-neutral person will not mind 25 years in prison if the ex ante upside was becoming a trillionaire.
However, I also think many lessons from SBF's personal statements e.g. his interview on 80k are still as valid as ever. Just off the top of my head:
Just because SBF stole billions of dollars does not mean he has fewer virtuous personality traits than the average person. He hits at least as many multipliers than the average reader of this forum. But importantly, maximization is perilous; some particular qualities like integrity and good decision-making are absolutely essential, and if you lack them your impact could be multiplied by minus 20.
[1] The unregulated nature of crypto may have allowed the FTX fraud, but things like the zero-sum zero-NPV nature of many cryptoassets, or its negative climate impacts, seem unrelated. Many industries are about this bad for the world, like HFT or some kinds of social media. I do not think people who criticized FTX on these grounds score many points. However, perhaps it was (weak) evidence towards FTX being willing to do harm in general for a perceived greater good, which is maybe plausible especially if Ben Delo also did market manipulation or otherwise acted immorally.
Also note that in the interview, SBF didn't claim his donations offset a negative direct impact; he said the impact was likely positive, which seems dubious.
The Pulse survey has now basically allayed all of my concerns.