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...
“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...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recently, I was reading David Thorstad’s new paper “Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils”. In it, he models the value of reducing existential risk on a range of different assumptions.
The headline result is that 1) most plausibly, existential risk reduction is not overwhelmingly valuable–though it may still be quite valuable, it doesn’t probably swamp all other cause areas. And 2) thinking that extinction is more likely tends to weaken the case for existential risk reduction rather than strengthen it.
It struck me that one of the results is particularly interesting, I call it the repugnant solution:
If we can reduce existential risk to 0% per century across all future centuries, this act is infinitely valuable, even if the initial risk was absolutely tiny and each century is only just of positive value. This act is therefore, better than basically anything else we could do.
Perhaps, in a Pascalian way, if we think there is a tiny chance that some particular action will lead to a permanent reduction in existential risk, that act too is infinitely valuable, and everything breaks.
This is also true even if we decrease the value of each century from “really amazingly great” to “only just net positive”.