Comments
Curated and popular this week
65
This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
50
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
What does it actually mean to have "serendipity" as a model in one's toolkit? Would you be open to writing a brief summary of the "how", or do you strongly recommend just watching the video?
I think the "how" is roughly:
If you do not know the steps to your goal with high confidence, then do the following:
You can imagine that you're looking at a map, and your distant goal is somewhere on the map, but the map is blurry / not yet revealed all the way to your distant goal
So then identify what options you *do* know the steps to (the ones that _are_ visible on the map), and then pick the option from those that is most novel
This is because the more novel it is, the more likely it is to reveal large and unexpected portions of the map, potentially including the part that gives you a visible path to your distant goal
So when uncertain, identify the most novel thing you know how to do/achieve, and repeat that, and that's likely the best (albeit very roundabout!) route for getting to your distant not-yet-visible-path goal.
If the above is intriguing, I'd highly recommend watching the video – I think it's a very well spent 15 minutes if watching on 2x speed.