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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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I feel like EAGs applications are by default relatively short (≤ 2 hours), and as a general principle it seems good that CEA is actually asking for more information when needed (I didn't even know they did this).
As for whether the second request might be unreasonable, it seems like we don't have enough context on the project, your application, or the specific CEA email to make any strong judgements on this.
What I'm surprised about is that at this point it doesn't seem like you've had “endless rounds of edits”, but rather just two email exchanges. This feels uncharitable. Perhaps someone in the organizing team screwed up, so my natural response would be to ask for clarification if I felt the request was vague or unexpected?
I understand applications to EAGs can be burdensome and frustrating, but this also applies to the team reviewing them. Applications are not “the simplest part of organizing a conference”. They're challenging to get right, especially at scale.
Update: While I still think my general opinion was right, I have heard examples from other people getting asked extra information with vague emails as well. For me this suggests that there are issues worth fixing with the process.
I asked for clarification the first time around, in addition to providing copious information about my involvement. There is no further information to provide. At this point they should admit or reject, not ask for further edits. Yes, I am sure it's burdensome for the reviewing team if they are creating extra work for themselves by not just making a decision, but that's a burden created by their poor work process, not by the task itself.