Alexander Saeri's Quick takes

This is a crosspost for The Case for Insect Consciousness by Bob Fischer, which was originally published on Asterisk in January 2025. [Subtitle.] The evidence that insects feel pain is mounting, however we approach the issue. For years, I was on the fence about the possibility of insects feeling pain — sometimes, I defended the hypothesis;[1] more often, I argued against it.[2] Then, in 2021, I started working on the puzzle of how to compare pain intensity across species. If a human and a pig are suffering as much as each one can, are they suffering the same amount? Or is the human’s pain worse? When my colleagues and I looked at several species, investigating both the probability of pain and its relative intensity,[3] we found something unexpected: on both scores, insects aren’t that different from many other animals.  Around the same time, I started working with an entomologist with a background in neuroscience. She helped me appreciate the weaknesses of the arguments against insect pain. (For instance, people make a big deal of stories about praying mantises mating while being eaten; they ignore how often male mantises fight fiercely to avoid being devoured.) The more I studied the science of sentience, the less confident I became about any theory that would let us rule insect sentience out.  I’m a philosopher, and philosophers pride themselves on following arguments wherever they lead. But we all have our limits, and I worry, quite sincerely, that I’ve been too willing to give insects the benefit of the doubt. I’ve been troubled by what we do to farmed animals for my entire adult life, whereas it’s hard to feel much for flies. Still, I find the argument for insect pain persuasive enough to devote a lot of my time to insect welfare research. In brief, the apparent evidence for the capacity of insects to feel pain is uncomfortably strong.[4] We could dismiss it if we had a consensus-commanding theory of sentience that explained why the apparent evidence is ir

I am Jason Green-Lowe, the executive director of the Center for AI Policy (CAIP). Our mission is to directly convince Congress to pass strong AI safety legislation. As I explain in some detail in this post, I think our organization has been doing extremely important work, and that we’ve been doing well at it. Unfortunately, we have been unable to get funding from traditional donors to continue our operations. If we don’t get more funding in the next 30 days, we will have to shut down, which will damage our relationships with Congress and make it harder for future advocates to get traction on AI governance. In this post, I explain what we’ve been doing, why I think it’s valuable, and how your donations could help.  This is the first post in what I expect will be a 3-part series. The first post focuses on CAIP’s particular need for funding. The second post will lay out a more general case for why effective altruists and others who worry about AI safety should spend more money on advocacy and less money on research – even if you don’t think my organization in particular deserves any more funding, you might be convinced that it’s a priority to make sure other advocates get more funding. The third post will take a look at some institutional problems that might be part of why our movement has been systematically underfunding advocacy and offer suggestions about how to correct those problems. OUR MISSION AND STRATEGY The Center for AI Policy’s mission is to directly and openly urge the US Congress to pass strong AI safety legislation. By “strong AI safety legislation,” we mean laws that will significantly change AI developers’ incentives and make them less likely to develop or deploy extremely dangerous AI models. The particular dangers we are most worried about are (a) bioweapons, (b) intelligence explosions, and (c) gradual disempowerment. Most AI models do not significantly increase these risks, and so we advocate for narrowly-targeted laws that would focus their att

Are you looking for a project where you could substantially improve indoor air quality, with benefits both to general health and reducing pandemic risk? I've written a bunch about air purifiers over the past few years, and its frustrating how bad commercial market is. The most glaring problem is the widespread use of HEPA filters. These are very effective filters that, unavoidably, offer significant resistance to air flow. HEPA is a great option for filtering air in single pass, such as with an outdoor air intake or a biosafety cabinet, but it's the wrong set of tradeoffs for cleaning the air that's already in the room. Air passing through a HEPA filter removes 99.97% of particles, but then it's mixed back in with the rest of the room air. If you can instead remove 99% of particles from 2% more air, or 90% from 15% more air, you're delivering more clean air. We should compare in-room purifiers on their Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR), not whether the filters are HEPA. Next is noise. Let's say you do know that CADR is what counts, and you go looking at purifiers. You've decided you need 250 CFM, and you get something that says it can do that. Except once it's set up in the room it's too noisy and you end up running it on low, getting just 75 CFM. Everywhere I go I see purifiers that are either set too low to achieve much or are just switched off. High CADR with low noise is critical. Then consider filter replacement. There's a competitive market for standardized filters, where most HVAC systems use one of a small number of filter sizes. Air purifiers, though, just about always use their own custom filters. Some of this is the mistaken insistence on HEPA filters, but I suspect there's also a "cheap razors, expensive blades" component where manufacturers make their real money on consumables. Then there's placement. Manufacturers put the buttons on the top and send air upwards, because they're designing them to sit on the floor. But a purifier on the floor takes up