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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...
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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...
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It doesn't seem to me this has much relevance to EA.
In addition to what Aaron said, I’d guess Scott is responsible for probably 10% of EA recruiting over the last few years.
As someone who first encountered EA through Slate Star Codex, this is also my sense.
I'll add some context to clarify to readers why this could be seen as relevant:
Scott Alexander has done a huge amount of writing about effective altruism, including the following posts that many would regard as "classic" (or at least I do):
His most recent reader survey found that 13% of his readers self-identified as being "effective altruists" (this is from his summary of the survey; I don't know the original text of the question). That's about 1600 people.