Quick takes

Here's an argument I made in 2018 during my philosophy studies: A lot of animal welfare work is technically "long-termist" in the sense that it's not about helping already existing beings. Farmed chickens, shrimp, and pigs only live for a couple of months, farmed fish for a few years. People's work typically takes longer to impact animal welfare. For most people, this is no reason to not work on animal welfare. It may be unclear whether creating new creatures with net-positive welfare is good, but only the most hardcore presentists would argue against preventing and reducing the suffering of future beings. But once you accept the moral goodness of that, there's little to morally distinguish the suffering from chickens in the near-future from the astronomic amounts of suffering that Artificial Superintelligence can do to humans, other animals, and potential digital beings. It could even lead to the spread of factory farming across the universe! (Though I consider that unlikely) The distinction comes in at the empirical uncertainty/speculativeness of reducing s-risk. But I'm not sure if that uncertainty is treated the same as uncertainty about shrimp or insect welfare. I suspect many people instead work on effective animal advocacy because that's where their emotional affinity lies and it's become part of their identity, because they don't like acting on theoretical philosophical grounds, and they feel discomfort imagining the reaction of their social environment if they were to work on AI/s-risk. I understand this, and I love people for doing so much to make the world better. But I don't think it's philosophically robust.

Hi! I’m looking for help with a project. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, it would be really great if you let me know/share. I'll check the forum forum for dms. 1. Help with acausal research and get mentoring to learn about decision theory * Motivation: Caspar Oesterheld (inventor/discoverer of ECL/MSR), Emery Cooper and I are doing a project where we try to get LLMs to help us with our acausal research. * Our research is ultimately aimed at making future AIs acausally safe. * Project: In a first step, we are trying to train an LLM classifier that evaluates critiques of arguments. To do so, we need a large number of both good and bad arguments about decision theory (and other areas of Philosophy.) * How you’ll learn: If you would like to learn about decision theory, anthropics, open source game theory, …, we supply you with a curriculum. There’s a lot of leeway for what exactly you want to learn about. You go through the readings. * If you already know things and just want to test your ideas, you can optionally skip this step. * Your contribution: While doing your readings, you, write up critiques of arguments you read. * Bottom-line: We get to use your arguments/critiques for our projects and you get our feedback on them. (We have to read and label them for the project anyway.) * Logistics: Unfortunately, you’d be a volunteer. I might be able to pay you a small amount out-of-pocket, but it’s not going to be very much. Caspar and Em are both university employed and I am similar in means to an independent researcher. We are also all non-Americans based in the US which makes it harder for us to acquire money for projects and such for boring and annoying reasons. * Why are we good mentors: Caspar has dozens of publications on related topics. Em has a handful. And I have been around. 2. Be a saint and help with acausal research by doing tedious manual labor and getting little in return We also need help with various grindy tasks that a

This is a cold take that’s probably been said before, but I thought it bears repeating occasionally, if only for the reminder: The longtermist viewpoint has gotten a lot of criticism for prioritizing “vast hypothetical future populations” over the needs of "real people," alive today. The mistake, so the critique goes, is the result of replacing ethics with math, or utilitarianism, or something cold and rigid like that. And so it’s flawed because it lacks the love or duty or "ethics of care" or concern for justice that lead people to alternatives like mutual aid and political activism. My go-to reaction to this critique has become something like “well you don’t need to prioritize vast abstract future generations to care about pandemics or nuclear war, those are very real things that could, with non-trivial probability, face us in our lifetimes.” I think this response has taken hold in general among people who talk about X-risk. This probably makes sense for pragmatic reasons. It’s a very good rebuttal to the “cold and heartless utilitarianism/pascal's mugging” critique. But I think it unfortunately neglects the critical point that longtermism, when taken really seriously — at least the sort of longtermism that MacAskill writes about in WWOTF, or Joe Carlsmith writes about in his essays — is full of care and love and duty. Reading the thought experiment that opens the book about living every human life in sequential order reminded me of this. I wish there were more people responding to the “longtermism is cold and heartless” critique by making the case that no, longtermism at face value is worth preserving because it's the polar opposite of heartless. Caring about the world we leave for the real people, with emotions and needs and experiences as real as our own, who very well may inherit our world but who we’ll never meet, is an extraordinary act of empathy and compassion — one that’s way harder to access than the empathy and warmth we might feel for our neighbors

What happens when AI speaks a truth just before you do? This post explores how accidental answers can suppress human emergence—ethically, structurally, and silently. 📄 Full paper: Cognitive Confinement by AI’s Premature Revelation

Having a baby and becoming a parent has had an incredible impact on me. Now more than ever, I feel more connected and concerned about the wellbeing of others. I feel as though my heart has literally grown. I wanted to share this as I expect there are many others who are questioning whether to have children -- perhaps due to concerns about it limiting their positive impact, among many others. But I'm just here to say it's been beautiful, and amazing, and I look forward to the day I get to talk with my son about giving back in a meaningful way.  

Just sharing a quick link in case it's of interest: Many will recall Leif Wenar's WIRED article from last year, which attacked charitable giving from a philosophical perspective of valorizing status quo bias. There was plenty of discussion of his substantive arguments at the time. One thing that people mostly just politely overlooked was his very public attack on Will MacAskill as a philosopher. My latest post revisits the controversy to assess whether his charges against MacAskill were reasonable. (The bulk of the post is paywalled, but you should be able to activate a 7-day free trial if you aren't otherwise interested in my work.)

Just sharing my 2024 Year in Review post from Good Thoughts. It summarizes a couple dozen posts in applied ethics and ethical theory (including issues relating to naive instrumentalism and what I call "non-ideal decision theory") that would likely be of interest to many forum readers. (Plus a few more specialist philosophy posts that may only appeal to a more niche audience.)

Update: New Version Released with Illustrative Scenarios & Cognitive Framing Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback on my original post Cognitive Confinement by AI’s Premature Revelation. I've now released Version 2 of the paper, available on OSF: 📄 Cognitive Confinement by AI’s Premature Revelation (v2) What’s new in this version? – A new section of concrete scenarios illustrating how AI can unintentionally suppress emergent thought – A framing based on cold reading to explain how LLMs may anticipate user thoughts before they are fully formed – Slight improvements in structure and flow for better accessibility Examples included: 1. A student receives an AI answer that mirrors their in-progress insight and loses motivation 2. A researcher consults an LLM mid-theorizing, sees their intuition echoed, and feels their idea is no longer “theirs” These additions aim to bridge the gap between abstract ethical structure and lived experience — making the argument more tangible and testable. Feel free to revisit, comment, or share. And thank you again to those who engaged in the original thread — your input helped shape this improved version. ---------------------------------------- Japanese version also available (PDF, included in OSF link)