I went to jail yesterday in Wisconsin. I helped rescue 23 beagles in a large mass open rescue against a factory farm, Ridglan Farms, near Madison. We were trying to push the police to act on documented animal cruelty at Ridglan. Instead they arrested me and 26 other activists. I wrote a blog post about why I did it.. Excerpt: More info and stories from Wayne Hsiung: https://blog.simpleheart.org/p/im-in-jail-for-rescuing-dogs-its If you're in the DC area, I'll be sharing more about my experience at Revolutionists' Night, an animal welfare meetup, this Thursday. Reach out for an invite.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" One thing I've been floating about for a while, and haven't really seen anybody else deeply explore[1], is what I call "further moral goods": further axes of moral value as yet inaccessible to us, that is qualitatively not just quantitatively different from anything we've observed to date. For background, I think normal, secular, humans live in 3 conceptually distinct but overlapping worlds: 1. The physical world: matter, energy, atoms, stars, cells. An detached external observer might think that's all there is to our universe. 2. The mathematical world. Mathematics, logic, abstract structure, rationality, "natural laws." Even many otherwise-strict "materialists" can see how the mathematical world is conceptually distinct from the physical one: mathematical truths seem conceptually different and perhaps deeper than mere physical facts. And if you're a robot/present-day LLM, you might just live in the first two worlds[2]. Some Kantians try to ground morality entirely within this world, in the logic of cooperation and strategic interaction. 3. The world of consciousness. The experiential realm. Qualia, subjective experience, "what it's like to be me." Most secular moral philosophers treat this as where the real moral action is. A pure hedonic utilitarian might think conscious experience is the only thing that matters, but even other moral philosophies would consider conscious experience extremely important (usually the most important). For the purposes of this post, I'm not that interested in the delineating between whether these worlds are truly different or just conceptually interesting ways to talk about things (ie I'm not positing a strong position on mathematical platonism or consciousness dualism) But what's interesting to me is how these different worlds ground morality/value, what some philosophers would call "axiology." When people try to solely ground morality

We're sadly no longer accepting sign-ups for our founder's programme. We've had an influx of demand and we're now fully at capacity for the foreseeable future. It's funding situation is a precarious and I've sadly got to focus on that now. Results are nuts, but mental health funders are focussed on LMICs, meta funders don't like mental health interventions, so it's a challenging category to even survive in. For now, I've got to focus on doing a good good for our existing clients. I'm sorry!  

Extended anecdote from My Willing Complicity In "Human Rights Abuse", by a former doctor (GP) working at a Qatari visa center in India to process "the enormous number of would-be Indian laborers who wished to take up jobs there": Zooming out to the author's main argument: It's a bummer that this situation is hard to improve affordability-, accessibility-, and safety-wise. CE-incubated Rahi Impact tried, but after deeper and frankly disheartening-to-read investigation concluded this was neither tractable nor cost-effective for them due to inability to source jobs at scale from Gulf employers due to their commitment to ethical recruitment disadvantaging them -- folks are so desperate to work in the Gulf that the resulting huge labor oversupply gives Gulf employers significant leverage which they use to monetise visas by demanding bribes from recruiting agents for access to job slots, which then get passed on to workers as exorbitant fees or garnished pay (worth 2.5 years of wages in their home country, a lot of this paid upfront). The recruiters also screw over the workers often enough to drive a ~30% migration failure rate, here's a real case study from Rahi's investigation: Asif will still try it again, damn.  As a silver lining, Rahi's cofounders list many other potential impactful solutions to be trialed for improving Gulf migration from South Asia for the >1.2 million workers who make the journey every year. But I think the ex-GP's point stands that taking away the option to work in the Gulf, exploitation and fraud and elevated death risk included, is a non-solution, it would make things even worse than not doing anything at all. 

i'm confused about tithing. I yearn for the diamond emoji from GWWC, and I'm not comfortable enough to do it since I took like a 50% pay cut to do AI safety nonprofit stuff. Seems weird to make such a financial commitment, which implicates my future wife, who I have presumably not met yet, especially when I'm scraping by without too many savings per paycheck.  Is there a sense in which I already am diamond emoji eligible, because I'm "donating 50% of my income" in the sense of opportunity cost? 50 is, famously, greater than 10.