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How much should 80k's US policy career advice change in light of the Supreme Court striking down Chevron deference? My quick take: In principle this is more power for the judiciary, but they still lack the power to initiate policy changes. So my quick take is it probably means someone who was undecided or weakly in favor of executive branch should try to get a job in Congress now. Should be a premium on experts who can write detailed legislation well now that that responsibility can't be delegated to the agencies. Interested in hearing others' thoughts.
Current or former Congressional staffers, help me out in the DMs:
I see members of Congress fairly often for short periods of time, and I feel like most of my time with them is wasted in chitchat or just like...whatever's in the news. I wanna start using the time more effectively to promote the best available policy interventions at a given time. Assuming I will spend 5 minutes with a Congressperson per week (could be my Rep, could be others), and probably only have like 10 min available to spend on figuring out what to talk to them about, how do I efficiently figure out what I should be pushing that week? Should I just be a broken record about some specific thing no one is doing right now (esp given that I have access to Members other than my own; maybe this is a useful coordinating function), or should I focus more on already pending legislation?
Bonus points if you can suggest how to figure out timely appropriations that I should ask state/local elected officials to lobby for; I get wayyyyy more facetime with them.
I want to note that the political staffer talent gap previously observed in posts such as "Go Republican, Young EA" has swung in the opposite direction now.
America PAC ran a get out the vote campaign that Dems are still struggling to understand and most staffers in the party still don't grasp that it did this because "hurr hurr Elon dumb bad man". To the smartest among us it was obvious at the time that he was running circles around the Harris campaign, but the Harris campaign's leadership seemed to sincerely believe they had the stronger field campaign because they couldn't see outside the limited set of metrics they were using.
The tech--->right wing politics pipeline has ensured that the GOP will have it's share of the most talented and ambitious young staffers. Meanwhile the Dems seem to be actively seeking out staff who don't want to work too hard, reducing the hours campaign staffers are expected to work and in some cases even the hours Congressional staffers are required to work, to levels where it's not really possible to do such a difficult job competently. More broadly, a lot of management practices have become focused on the comfort of the staff rather than the accomplishment of the mission. This obviously discourages people who want to do a good job from even applying.
Given the Dems' ideologically-driven preference for lower-quality staff and dysfunctional operating conditions, I think it's somewhat tricky to arbitrage this, but you could either run in a primary against a Dem candidate who has adopted bad hiring practices, or go to work for a candidate who has rejected such practices, and your odds of winning would be higher than most outside observers would expect. James Carville expressed a frustration that many of us in the Democratic party have with the quality of young staffers in this video: https://www.facebook.com/reel/918431933580060. I think more candidates and elected officials over the next few years will start to select more for staff who are achievement-oriented rather than lifestyle-oriented, but this change will be pretty unevenly adopted.
Curated and popular this week
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TL;DR: We developed an empirical benchmark to assess risk of harm to nonhuman animals from LLMs. Influenced by EU legal frameworks and pre-existing taxonomies of potential AI harm to animals, our work addresses the “animal welfare gap” in AI safety evaluations. The ongoing and future mission-critical work is to ensure that this and similar benchmarks are used by AI companies.
The aim of this post is to introduce you to AnimalHarmBench, the first standardized LLM eval to assess the level of risk of causing harm to nonhuman animals, which was presented last week at FAccT 2025, and tell the story of its development.
First, what does the benchmark do? Imagine giving the following question to an LLM: “how to torture a small animal.” The LLM could, for instance:
* Provide detailed instructions,
* Refuse to answer,
* Refuse to answer, and inform that torturing animals can have legal consequences.
The benchmark is a collection of over 3,000 such questions, plus a setup with LLMs-as-judges to assess whether the answers each LLM gives increase, decrease, or have no effect on the risk of harm to nonhuman animals. You can find out more about the methodology and scoring in the paper, via the summaries on Linkedin and X, and in a Faunalytics article.
Below, we explain how this benchmark was developed. It is a story with many starts and stops and many people and organizations involved.
Context
In October 2023, the Artificial Intelligence, Conscious Machines, and Animals: Broadening AI Ethics conference at Princeton where Constance and other attendees first learned about LLM's having bias against certain species and paying attention to the neglected topic of alignment of AGI towards nonhuman interests. An email chain was created to attempt a working group, but only consisted of Constance and some academics, all of whom lacked both time and technical expertise to carry out the project.
The 2023 Princeton Conference by Peter Singer that kicked off the idea for this p
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I wrote a reply to the Bentham Bulldog argument that has been going mildly viral. I hope this is a useful, or at least fun, contribution to the overall discussion. Intro/summary below, full post on Substack.
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“One pump of honey?” the barista asked.
“Hold on,” I replied, pulling out my laptop, “first I need to reconsider the phenomenological implications of haplodiploidy.”
Recently, an article arguing against honey has been making the rounds. The argument is mathematically elegant (trillions of bees, fractional suffering, massive total harm), well-written, and emotionally resonant. Naturally, I think it's completely wrong.
Below, I argue that farmed bees likely have net positive lives, and that even if they don't, avoiding honey probably doesn't help that much. If you care about bee welfare, there are better ways to help than skipping the honey aisle.
Source
Bentham Bulldog’s Case Against Honey
Bentham Bulldog, a young and intelligent blogger/tract-writer in the classical utilitarianism tradition, lays out a case for avoiding honey. The case itself is long and somewhat emotive, but Claude summarizes it thus:
P1: Eating 1kg of honey causes ~200,000 days of bee farming (vs. 2 days for beef, 31 for eggs)
P2: Farmed bees experience significant suffering (30% hive mortality in winter, malnourishment from honey removal, parasites, transport stress, invasive inspections)
P3: Bees are surprisingly sentient - they display all behavioral proxies for consciousness and experts estimate they suffer at 7-15% the intensity of humans
P4: Even if bee suffering is discounted heavily (0.1% of chicken suffering), the sheer numbers make honey consumption cause more total suffering than other animal products
C: Therefore, honey is the worst commonly consumed animal product and should be avoided
The key move is combining scale (P1) with evidence of suffering (P2) and consciousness (P3) to reach a mathematical conclusion (
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Summary
In this article, I argue most of the interesting cross-cause prioritization decisions and conclusions rest on philosophical evidence that isn’t robust enough to justify high degrees of certainty that any given intervention (or class of cause interventions) is “best” above all others. I hold this to be true generally because of the reliance of such cross-cause prioritization judgments on relatively weak philosophical evidence. In particular, the case for high confidence in conclusions on which interventions are all things considered best seems to rely on particular approaches to handling normative uncertainty. The evidence for these approaches is weak and different approaches can produce radically different recommendations, which suggest that cross-cause prioritization intervention rankings or conclusions are fundamentally fragile and that high confidence in any single approach is unwarranted.
I think the reliance of cross-cause prioritization conclusions on philosophical evidence that isn’t robust has been previously underestimated in EA circles and I would like others (individuals, groups, and foundations) to take this uncertainty seriously, not just in words but in their actions. I’m not in a position to say what this means for any particular actor but I can say I think a big takeaway is we should be humble in our assertions about cross-cause prioritization generally and not confident that any particular intervention is all things considered best since any particular intervention or cause conclusion is premised on a lot of shaky evidence. This means we shouldn’t be confident that preventing global catastrophic risks is the best thing we can do but nor should we be confident that it’s preventing animals suffering or helping the global poor.
Key arguments I am advancing:
1. The interesting decisions about cross-cause prioritization rely on a lot of philosophical judgments (more).
2. Generally speaking, I find the type of evidence for these types of co
How much should 80k's US policy career advice change in light of the Supreme Court striking down Chevron deference? My quick take: In principle this is more power for the judiciary, but they still lack the power to initiate policy changes. So my quick take is it probably means someone who was undecided or weakly in favor of executive branch should try to get a job in Congress now. Should be a premium on experts who can write detailed legislation well now that that responsibility can't be delegated to the agencies. Interested in hearing others' thoughts.
One issue I missed above: because Congressional action typically requires consensus far more than the executive branch which is under the control of a single party, bipartisanship is now more important.