BLUF:
* To determine whether AI is ‘improving exponentially’, ‘hitting the wall’, or any other claim which involves a quantity or magnitude (e.g. ‘This model was a big leap/small increment’). We need a good y-axis: an interval scale of AI capability which means +1 unit always represents the same degree of ‘how much better’, in the same way +1 degree Celsius is always the same amount of ‘how much hotter’.
* Yet there is no good y-axis for AI capability. All our...
Summary
* The animal welfare movement has already seen an influx in funding and should prepare for the possibility of more.
* The EA Animal Welfare Fund is encouraging those working in animal advocacy to actively set aside time and resources now to concretely plan for scaling sustainably, and we’ll support you in doing that.
* We’re requesting advocates set concrete ambitious goals and submit plans t...
Public service announcement
1. Applications are now open for our first ever round of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program dedicated exclusively to animal welfare. Learn more about what’s different this round here and apply...
We've banned the user denyeverywhere for a month for promoting violence on the forum.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account(s).
If anyone has questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out, and if you think we made a mistake here, you can appeal the decision
I don't have any strong views on whether this user should have been given a temporary ban vs a warning, but (unless the ban was for a comment which is now deleted or a private message, which are each possible, and feel free to correct me if so), from reading their public comments, I think it's inaccurate (or at least misleading) to describing them as "promoting violence". Specifically, they do not seem to have been advocating that anyone actually use violence, which is what I think the most natural interpretation of "promoting violence" would be. Instead, they appear to have been expressing that they'd emotionally desire that people who hypothetically would do the thing in question would face violence, that (in the hypothetical example) they'd feel the urge to use violence, and so on.
I'm not defending their behavior, but it does feel importantly less bad than what I initially assumed from the moderator comment, and I think it's important to use precise language when making these sorts of public accusations.