Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week

How does Animal Welfare/Global Health affect AI Safety? Very brief considerations.

I think someone might build super strong AI in the next few years, and this could affect most of the value of the future. If true, I think it implies that the majority of any value from an intervention or cause area comes from how it affects whether AI goes well. Even if that's very slight and indirect. Relatedly, I think whether AI goes well depends on whether states will be able to coordinate.

How do Animal Welfare interventions affect whether AI goes well? 
– I think the Moral Circle expansion is relevant.
– Helping reach climate targets seems relevant to help with international coordination.
– But I think that Animal Welfare interventions place a cost on society such as by raising the price of food and increasing pressure on our governments in high-income countries.

How do Global Health interventions affect whether AI goes well? 
– I think that it reduces the pressure on governments in LMICs and gives them a safer society. This gives their Governments slightly more room to come to peaceful international agreements. 
– But it may also enable more people to contribute to AI, whether that be AI capabilities development, chip manufacture (or AI safety/governance)

Overall, I slightly lean towards global health being better. Perhaps RP's tools shed light on this. (I haven't checked!)

We've just shipped an update to the debate week banner, so you can expand the columns to see more of the distribution, as it's getting a bit squashed. You just have to click on one of the "+N" circles.

(Feel free to downvote this quick take if it hangs around on the Frontpage for too long)

With the debate week discussion thread getting so long, it is now a community service (even more than usual) to sort the comments by "new" and upvote/ downvote or comment. Let's not let quality content get buried!

I'm starting to think it was a mistake for me to engage in this debate week thing. I just spent a good chunk of my baby's first birthday arguing with strangers on the Internet about what amounts to animals vs. humans. This does not seem like a good use of my time, but I'm too pedantic to resist replying to comments I feel the need to reply to. -_-

In general, I feel like this debate week thing seems somewhat divisive as well. At least, it doesn't feel nice to have so many disagrees on my posts, even if they still somehow got a positive amount of karma.

I really don't have time to make high-effort posts, and it seems like low-effort posts do a disservice to people who are making high-effort posts, so I might just stop.

I really like the vote and discussion thread. In part because I think that aggregating votes will improve our coordination and impact. 

Without trying to unpack my whole model of movement building; I think that the community needs to understand itself (as a collective and as individuals) to have the most impact, and this approach may really help.

EA basically operates on a "wisdom of wise crowds" principle, where individuals base decisions on researchers' and thinkers' qualitative data (e.g., forum posts and other outputs)

However, at our current scale, quantitative data is much easier to aggregate and update on.

For instance, in this case, we are now seeing strong evidence that most people in EA think that AW is undervalued (as seems will be the case) relative to global development. Also who thinks what in relation to that claim and why. This is extremely useful for community and individual decision-making. It would never be captured in the prior system of coordinating via posts and comments.

Many people may/will act on or reference this information when they seek funding, write response posts, or choose a new career option. In a world without the vote, and just forum posts, these actions might otherwise not occur.

In short, very keen on this and to see more of this. 

I was surprised to find that I felt slightly uncomfortable positioning myself on the 'animal welfare' side of the debate week scale. I guess I generally think of myself as more of a 'global health & development' person, and might have subconscious concerns about this as an implicit affiliational exercise (even though I very much like and respect a lot of AW folks, I guess I probably feel more "at home" with GHD)? Obviously those kinds of personal factors shouldn't influence our judgments about an objective question like the debate week question is asking. But I guess they inevitably do.

I don't know if this observation is even worth sharing, but there it is, fwiw. I guess I'd just like to encourage folks to be aware of their personal biases and try to bracket them as best they can. (I'd like to think of all EAs as ultimately "on the same side" even when we disagree about particular questions of cause prioritization, so I feel kind of bad that I evidently have separate mental categories of "GHD folks" and "AW folks" as though it were some kind of political/coalitional competition.)

I'm not really focused on animal rights nor do I spend much time thinking about it, so take this comment with a grain of salt.

However, if I wanted to make the future go well for animals I'd be offering free vegan meals in the Bay Area or running a conference on how to ensure that the transition to advanced AI systems goes well for animals in the Bay Area.

Reality check: Sorry for being harsh, but you're not going to end factory farming before the transition to advanced AI technologies. Max 1-2% chance of that happening. So the best thing to do is to ensure that this goes well for animals and not just humans.

Anyway, that concludes my hot-take.