Effective Altruism Forum

Welcome to the EA Forum bot site. If you are trying to access the Forum programmatically (either by scraping or via the api) please use this site rather than forum.effectivealtruism.org.

This site has the same content as the main site, but is run in a separate environment to avoid bots overloading the main site and affecting performance for human users.

Selected posts to help us answer: How can we do the most good with our resources?

Curated

Do AI safety talent programmes work? Nobody has run the study that would tell us.

Laura Thomas-Walters·2w ago·8m read

Targeting High-Risk Pregnancies: A Cost-Effectiveness Case for Low-Dose Aspirin

Marshall·9h ago·9m read

Swarm Scaling

Toby_Ord·1d ago·10m read

Grantmakers: Consider sharing rough probabilities & brief feedback with grantees/applicants

david_reinstein·3d ago·5m read

The J-Space Debate, Agent Swarms, and Pacing Frontier AI — Digital Minds Newsletter #4

Lucius Caviola, Ria Viswanathan, Will Millership, Mitch Alexander, Bradford Saad·4d ago·45m read

Popular comments and quick takes

EA Should Invest in Animal Liberation and Diet Change Advocacy

View in thread

LewisBollard

158

Thanks for the post. I think this is an important strategic debate to have, so I'll reply in more length than usual.

I agree with you that we should be honest about what we believe, pursue a variety of strategies, and try to expand the moral circle. I also think you're right that animal liberation played an important role in recruiting many of the movement's current leaders. And I have immense respect for liberation-focused activists like Wayne Hsiung who do courageous work to help animals. None of the following is intended as a criticism of their work. That said, I disagree with you on a number of other points:

EA didn't just ignore diet change -- it deprioritized it based on evidence it wasn't working. You write that in EA, "there appears to be scant (and in many cases zero) room for diet change advocacy." But the EA Forum has a whole section on diet change with 198 posts. It includes numerous posts by EAs going deep into the evidence on dietary change -- and finding little evidence of impact. A post arguing for more resources to go to dietary change should at least engage with the evidence that suggests it doesn't work.
We've tried many versions of diet change. You write, "A failed attempt does not test an idea for all time. It tests one version of that idea..." But we've tested many versions of the idea! EAs have tested -- and funded the testing of -- leafletting, online ads, documentaries, institutional meat reduction, pledges, and just about every dietary change idea produced. Other funders have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into diet change with limited effects. We should keep testing new approaches to diet change. But, until we find one that works, I don't think we should invest dramatically more in an approach that has repeatedly failed.
It's not clear to me why AI and more resources will change the relative cost-effectiveness of dietary change vs. other strategies. You write, "Animal liberation and diet change advocacy have never operated at the scale that may soon be possible with 1) AI and 2) dramatically more resources." This is true. It's also true of all other interventions. What matters is not whether AI or vastly more resources could increase animal liberation / diet change's impact -- I'm sure they could -- but whether they will make those interventions relatively more impactful than the other interventions we could deploy AI and those resources toward. Again, the post doesn't explain why they would.
I'm skeptical that animal liberation activism made farm animal welfare improvements possible. You suggest that "It seems to me quite possible that advocacy on behalf of animal liberation is what shifted the Overton Window with regard to farm animal welfare." But you don't point to evidence for that claim, so consider some evidence to the contrary. All federal US farm animal welfare improvements (the 28 Hour Law, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act) preceded any liberation activism, as did critical UK, Swiss, Scandinavian, German, and EU reforms. All the recent corporate animal welfare wins came after the movement pivoted away from vegan outreach (2015 onward) and toward focusing on welfare wins. Animal liberation activists largely opposed these campaigns. It's not clear to me how liberationist activists chanting that cage-free is evil encouraged corporations to go cage-free.
The justice movement analogy points to the challenge with dietary change. You ask "Are there other justice movements that ignored the fact that they were justice movements?" To which I reply: "Are there other justice movements that succeeded through individual behavioral change as dietary change seeks to?" I can't think of any. (Also, as Elliot notes in the comments, there are lots of social movements that have succeeded without the liberation / justice frame.)
I think the talent section presents a false choice. You write, "If we don’t tell the world why animals matter ... will we attract people with the passion and focus on maximum impact that comes with knowing you’re in a liberation struggle?" But EAs are constantly telling the world why animals matter, and constantly attracting people who are passionate and focused on maximum impact. I think EA in general is a rebuttal to the idea that you can only attract passionate and impactful people to doing good by framing things as a liberation struggle. AI safety doesn't, global health doesn't, and it's not clear why animals should be the exception.
This is a good case for some funding of animal liberation / diet change, but not a good case for spending more at the current margin. If you include PETA's $80M annual budget, and the ~$50M annually spent on diet change globally, animal liberation and diet change currently account for over a third of the animal movement's funding. So the question is not "should animal liberation and diet change get any funding," but rather "at the margin, will increasing animal liberation / diet change advocacy from ~$130M to $X do more to help animals than the alternatives?" I think we should keep assessing that on the merits of each opportunity.

Thanks again for this thoughtful post, which I think makes an important point.

Geoffrey Miller's Quick takes

View in thread

Geoffrey Miller

EA is facing its most serious PR crisis in history, and nobody in EA seems to be discussing it or doing anything effective about it. Everyone seems to be carrying on as if this is business as usual.

President Donald Trump, AI Czar David Sacks, and the Department of War have launched a coordinated campaign in the last week to portray EA as treasonous and toxic.

Their campaign motto is 'Americanism, not Effective Altruism'. Tens of thousands of MAGA political influencers are attacking EA (often from positions of total ignorance) on social media platforms such as X, Truth Social, and Facebook. They're also portraying all concerns about catastrophic risks from AI as a 'hoax', a 'psyop', and a CCP influence campaign -- part of a 'Doomer Industrial Complex'.

This is unprecedented. It's far worse than any previous scandal or crisis that EA has faced. Even the SBF/FTX debacle didn't lead to key American leaders and legions of influencers directly attacking EA.

Are we going to do anything about this, or just let the pro-AI accelerationists, in the current White House administration and the Pentagon, trash-talk the movement that we've spent the last 15 years growing and defending?

Maxwell Love's Quick Takes

Some quick observations on the attacks on METR, EA, and other AI safety orgs (from my perspective as a political campaigner and former Communications Director for a union and mayor during COVID):

If you're explaining, you're losing: Every rebuttal repeats the accusation to people who haven't heard it yet. Answer the accusation once, link to it, and stop explaining. This is the "illusory truth" effect (information is true when it's repeated).
Silence doesn't work either: Not responding on the record suggests something is being hidden. Make one clear statement rather than amplifying in multiple twitter threads.
Concede what you can: A concept I know from political comms is the "admission against interest". This buys trust, disarms cynical voters, and establishes credibility. Saying "yes, AND here's what we're doing about it" will take some air out of the critique.
Messenger > message: Ideally people who know the organization being attacked, are from outside the AI safety world, have independent standing, or better yet, have disagreed with the organization publicly will land the defense better.
Going after people's personal lives or spouses is overreach: Ordinary people will obviously find this unfair and it's where their attacks will backfire.
Don't quote tweet and rebut: You're just distributing their message for them.

I want to write something longer on this but don't have time right now. Lots of opportunity for good crisis comms here. Let me know what's wrong about this take and if you'd like to hear more!

Julia_Wise's Quick takes

View in thread

Julia_Wise🔸

Stuff I tell student organizers: Do more meta communication.

Represent the range of views that are in your group. If some people in your student group think “do the normal thing in university and explore your career options” and others think “drop out to urgently work on 2-person AI safety projects," represent to your group members that those are both views held in your group.

If you always serve vegan food, people will assume all EAs are vegan / you’re supposed to be vegan if you’re in EA. I suggest saying something like “We serve vegan food because that’s what works best for the combination of people in our group, but it’s not that everybody is vegan.” About half the people in the EA survey are vegetarian or vegan.

YCombinator companies still aren’t growing faster due to AI

View in thread

David T

YC never had any sort of monopoly on the best startups though, its own terms are much better than they used to be, and its still definitely the most prestigious. The question isn't "why didn't Anthropic join YC", it's "why, if AI truly makes most developers 10x more productive and transforms the unit economics of customers, are the valuations of a cohort of prestigious "AI-enabled" startups round about their non-AI enabled 2019 peers?". There really aren't enough people founding research labs for that to be the issue

Of course, any early stage valuations graph is as much a graph of investor sentiment as anything else, but if AI was really making these companies significantly more productive, investors would have to be very bearish on AI or YC selection effect to have gone down the toilet for that not to show in the data. I presume median data looks similar?

The best counterargument is that AI also makes it easier for competitors leading to less defensible business models even if AI actually enables them to grow faster, but if that was the case investor sentiment should be much more bearish on incumbents...

Ciaran Marshall's Quick Takes

I'm not convinced the recent capabilities advancements (highly concentrated in pure math, the section which by definition can't be applied) support the forecasts that misaligned superintelligence is on balance harmful. In general, I think there is not enough evidence to draw the conclusion that multi-agent alignment (which was far from inevitable ex-ante in comparison to the sometimes monotheist conceptions of ASI) is impossible, especially with AI eventually automating and enforcing the institutional mechanisms.

However, this is not guaranteed either. The labs are making the biggest bet that humanity has taken by far; that RSI will automate and solve the alignment problem, and the ensuing intelligence explosion will solve most of humanity's suffering. This explains much of the race dynamics until now, where the balance of tail-risks are now undoubtedly on the upside. Note also the competition with China, which plays particular relevance for open-source.

My p(doom) probably sits somewhere just over halfway (to account for the right-tailed distribution here) between my pre and (initial) post Hugging-Face likelihoods: perhaps 8%. It would be unwise not to update since this saga unfolded.

Some of the latest macroeconomic models from the likes of Anthropic and Acemoglu suggest rather grim futures for employment relative to what economists were previously predicting, hence its fair to say our methods lean overly conservative towards excess rigour here. Perhaps the recent backlash from the mathematicians, and some of the sentiment behind the anti data-centre movement, reflect these (increasingly justified) anxieties.

Nonetheless, this is orders of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear weapons. That's enough for me to take AI-safety incredibly seriously!

Grantmakers: Consider sharing rough probabilities & brief feedback with grantees/applicants

david_reinstein·3d ago·5m read

The J-Space Debate, Agent Swarms, and Pacing Frontier AI — Digital Minds Newsletter #4

Lucius Caviola, Ria Viswanathan, Will Millership, Mitch Alexander, Bradford Saad·4d ago·45m read

What even is an incubator?

Aidan Alexander, Ambitious Impact, Jacintha Baas, SamanthaK·4d ago·8m read

Pacing the Frontier: A Framework & Research Agenda

Charles Dillon 🔸, Raymond D, technicalities·4d ago·2m read

New weighted factor model tool for career planning

Sam Roth 🔸·5d ago·1m read

4 historical big goal projects - and what we can learn from them

Andrew Youn·5d ago·5m read

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: One Year Closer

So8res·6d ago·9m read

55% of the US public is now aware of AI xrisk

Otto·6d ago·2m read

Selected posts to help us answer: How can we do the most good with our resources?

Popular comments and quick takes

EA Should Invest in Animal Liberation and Diet Change Advocacy

View in thread

LewisBollard

158

Thanks for the post. I think this is an important strategic debate to have, so I'll reply in more length than usual.

EA didn't just ignore diet change -- it deprioritized it based on evidence it wasn't working. You write that in EA, "there appears to be scant (and in many cases zero) room for diet change advocacy." But the EA Forum has a whole section on diet change with 198 posts. It includes numerous posts by EAs going deep into the evidence on dietary change -- and finding little evidence of impact. A post arguing for more resources to go to dietary change should at least engage with the evidence that suggests it doesn't work.
We've tried many versions of diet change. You write, "A failed attempt does not test an idea for all time. It tests one version of that idea..." But we've tested many versions of the idea! EAs have tested -- and funded the testing of -- leafletting, online ads, documentaries, institutional meat reduction, pledges, and just about every dietary change idea produced. Other funders have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into diet change with limited effects. We should keep testing new approaches to diet change. But, until we find one that works, I don't think we should invest dramatically more in an approach that has repeatedly failed.
It's not clear to me why AI and more resources will change the relative cost-effectiveness of dietary change vs. other strategies. You write, "Animal liberation and diet change advocacy have never operated at the scale that may soon be possible with 1) AI and 2) dramatically more resources." This is true. It's also true of all other interventions. What matters is not whether AI or vastly more resources could increase animal liberation / diet change's impact -- I'm sure they could -- but whether they will make those interventions relatively more impactful than the other interventions we could deploy AI and those resources toward. Again, the post doesn't explain why they would.
I'm skeptical that animal liberation activism made farm animal welfare improvements possible. You suggest that "It seems to me quite possible that advocacy on behalf of animal liberation is what shifted the Overton Window with regard to farm animal welfare." But you don't point to evidence for that claim, so consider some evidence to the contrary. All federal US farm animal welfare improvements (the 28 Hour Law, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act) preceded any liberation activism, as did critical UK, Swiss, Scandinavian, German, and EU reforms. All the recent corporate animal welfare wins came after the movement pivoted away from vegan outreach (2015 onward) and toward focusing on welfare wins. Animal liberation activists largely opposed these campaigns. It's not clear to me how liberationist activists chanting that cage-free is evil encouraged corporations to go cage-free.
The justice movement analogy points to the challenge with dietary change. You ask "Are there other justice movements that ignored the fact that they were justice movements?" To which I reply: "Are there other justice movements that succeeded through individual behavioral change as dietary change seeks to?" I can't think of any. (Also, as Elliot notes in the comments, there are lots of social movements that have succeeded without the liberation / justice frame.)
I think the talent section presents a false choice. You write, "If we don’t tell the world why animals matter ... will we attract people with the passion and focus on maximum impact that comes with knowing you’re in a liberation struggle?" But EAs are constantly telling the world why animals matter, and constantly attracting people who are passionate and focused on maximum impact. I think EA in general is a rebuttal to the idea that you can only attract passionate and impactful people to doing good by framing things as a liberation struggle. AI safety doesn't, global health doesn't, and it's not clear why animals should be the exception.
This is a good case for some funding of animal liberation / diet change, but not a good case for spending more at the current margin. If you include PETA's $80M annual budget, and the ~$50M annually spent on diet change globally, animal liberation and diet change currently account for over a third of the animal movement's funding. So the question is not "should animal liberation and diet change get any funding," but rather "at the margin, will increasing animal liberation / diet change advocacy from ~$130M to $X do more to help animals than the alternatives?" I think we should keep assessing that on the merits of each opportunity.

Thanks again for this thoughtful post, which I think makes an important point.