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...
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* The animal welfare movement has already seen an influx in funding and should prepare for the possibility of more.
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* We’re requesting advocates set concrete ambitious goals and submit plans t...
I recently learned that there's a intense and growing "dogfree" movement, and I'm curious if there's an effective altruist take on this topic. This subreddit post seems to capture dogfree activists' objections to dog ownership: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dogfree/comments/7bk3wo/just_curious_what_is_the_reason_why_you/
Here are some quick observations about the dogfree movement vis a vis effective altruism:
I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on this subject!
I had never considered the first point regarding a local maximum - interesting thing to explore but I’m unsure, except perhaps in a more ideal world, that we are at all capable of consistently getting more than local maxes at times (and yeah dogs seem to be one of the best (easiest) one-time actions someone can take for their happiness (https://jamesclear.com/how-to-automate-a-habit), author surveys his own audience and they produce this tidbit and it matches my intuition).
And this sort of strikes me of my impression of dog-free (or pet-free?) as a movement overall - I recall a friend discussing it with me as a potential ongoing moral catastrophe that people in the future would be horrified with - which I agree with (particularly with the pug example (I can imagine this being extrapolated to all dogs somewhat perhaps), as you said!) but I feel quite horrified by a lot of more horrifying things now than this specific cause area (others with way more scale). It feels like a step for later moral progress, somewhat along the lines of the discounting argument: “people are starving now, why pursue better lives for animals before them.” (I don’t really subscribe to this argument).
I think the idea of dogs replacing children is really interesting and I will definitely think about that a bit more in the future!
Thanks for sharing.