Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
I want to start by noting that I am amazed and somewhat in awe of what's been accomplished by the EA animal welfare movement. I am enthusiastically supportive of all campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals.
I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm proud of that work.
That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change.&n...
The swarm has made me feel AI risk in my bones for the first time
Until the Hugging Face / OpenAI swarm thing, I think I deep down felt pretty skeptical that extinction or serious loss of control scenarios were plausible in the next few years.
I’ve been lurking on LessWrong for years, and I remember being freaked out by Yudkowsky’s ‘List of Lethalities’ in 2022, and thinking that this did seem intellectually convincing, and maybe I should do something about it. But it didn...
Should "agree" and "disagree" be anonymous?
What's the reason that "agree" and "disagree" are anonymous? I find it frustrating when someone clicks the "disagree" button, and then there's no accompanying post to explain the disagreement. I assume that most (all? almost all?) people on the forum would be happy to own their disagreements here, and that would also be good for transparency, etc. Curious to hear others' thoughts (and worried that I'm being incredibly obtuse).
I disagree-voted, here is my explanation of why:
It is good for people to write a comment explaining their disagreement. But if you de-anonymize agree-voting, the main outcome won't be that people explain their reasoning; it will be that people stop voting. Some people will not feel comfortable attaching their name to a dissenting vote.
I think it's better to make it easy for people to leave cheap anonymous signals. Writing an explanatory comment should be encouraged but not required.
I appreciate you explaining your disagree vote, Michael - thank you. I thought it would be really funny if folks just flooded my comment with disagree votes, with no explanation, LOL.
That said, it seems to me that the value of an anonymous disagree vote is negligible (or perhaps even negative), unless there's an explanation. What do you see as the value of "cheap anonymous signals"?
Here's why I think they're not valuable (and likely counter-productive):
For a lengthy post (i.e., this one) where someone clicks "disagree," I guess it's just with the top-line message? I don't know if that assumption is correct. And even if it is, I don't know why they disagree. Does this add to understanding in some way? Or is there some other value I'm not seeing?
If someone simply wrote "No" as their comment (the practical effect of a disagree vote, I think), is that a useful contribution? I think that would run afoul of the forum's posting guidance in multiple ways. How is an anonymous disagree vote different from that?
There are forum principles around respectful disagreement and general EA principles around transparency. Anonymous disagree votes feel to me like they violate both of those.
What principles do anonymous disagree votes uphold?
This is for anyone, of course, not just Michael!