I hastily vibecoded a ~live-updating EA Forum (posts + comments; I think users are static) database + semantic search because software is ~free now. I haven't rigorously checked anything over because it was/is just a random side project so use at your own risk and discretion. Enjoy!

Full database is ~17GB 

Link: https://eaforum.up.railway.app/

Re the grand “does individual giving/etg still matter post Anthropic IPO” question:

I think it pushes towards individuals acting more like grantmakers themselves. Anthropic billionaires don’t know about your Twitter follower who could do something great with $1k and they aren’t gonna have the capacity to find out, but you do! 

There are just a lot of freedoms one has as an individual donor who isn’t a public figure:

You…

• Don’t have to justify yourself on the EA Forum to friends and colleagues for something illegible
• Know about lots of random things that others don’t, like which of your friends you trust to do a good job at X Y or Z
• Don’t have to worry about smear campaigns or hostile journalists bc nobody is going to know or care how you spent $2k
• Can own whatever reputational stuff there is if you want to (or not, your call)
• Probably don’t have to worry about the community-level effects of some policy unless you’re giving away say at least 6 figures/year and probably more like 7
• Can set arbitrary terms and conditions like “here’s a bounty that I’ll pay out at my own discretion”
• Don’t have to worry about giving some project or other entity any sort of reputation
• Regrant to your trusted friend who finds micro-granting fun and interesting
• Probably can do other cool things I’m not thinking of rn

Also: the same dynamic between Anthropic ~billionaires and folks reading this as a group also holds within that latter group: there are diminishing returns even at low margins so Jane Street should look a little less good than it used to (still pretty good tbc) and “having a couple thousand bucks around and being on the lookout for one-off opportunities” should seem a bit better than it used to. 

Not addressing every point but I think in some respects I agree that crime is C but then how much benefit the criminal gets/values is a case-by-case question, and we can’t just assume that in the irl case at hand that the benefit is (in the analogy) $101 instead of $1000

There’s real deadweight loss from the mineshaft drop/spending money on prisons, but also potentially real value to be gained from the crime itself (canonical case = speeding bc wife is going in to labor)

Remember, property damage as activism isn’t like simple theft - the property damage can cost society amount $X and benefits of activism feature can separately benefit society or be valued by the perpetrator at any other number $Y

Ok yeah I was using terms too loosely. But still:

1. I think we disagree about whether the harms of lawbreaking are mostly internalized. The degradation of social trust in the deliberative process seems bigger to me than the consequences to the individual? As an analogy, shoplifting is an ordinary crime where individuals do face real consequences, but the diffuse harms to consumers and businesses (goods locked up, stores closing) are large and dominate the social calculus.

I don't think we should speak of "lawbreaking" as a general case in this context; some argue that shoplifting is too lightly punished/prosecuted (especially in eg liberal US cities), but even assuming that's true, the question remains as to whether the more specific category of say "property damage via protest" is punished too lightly, too harshely, or about right.

My best guess is that it's not "too lightly" from a purely normie "law and order and human welfare right now" perspective. Many people believe moral-ish things strongly and don't find property destruction immoral, but far far fewer actually destroy the property of those they think are doing something immoral. This seems like good evidence that the expected punishment (including via informal mechanisms) is not too light.

2. The Pigouvian tax comparison doesn't quite work here because paying a tax contributes to public resources that can directly address the harms of the act or improve welfare elsewhere, making the net outcome neutral. Going to jail doesn't repair damaged property or restore trust in the democratic process.

I think we are/were both sort failing to decouple Pigouvian taxes and restitution. My understanding about both how the term "Pigouvian tax" is used in econ and about the real world is that even without restitution, you can get to the socially optimal level of some bad with a tax alone and no transfer to victims.

I think the motivating intuition is that the tax is affecting the amount of eg "social disorder" supplied, but the tax revenue is just a transfer of economic power from one party to another - it's not creating real wealth that can then be given to the victims. So the same amount of real wealth exists before and after the transfer and a separate question is what to do with that wealth given the state of the world (eg you might think that the very well-off who are harmed slightly by some negative externality, say ambient noise, should not be given restitution and a tax on decibels should really flow to some other party like the very poor) 

consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars

I think this is a good/fine question and the answer is “they’ll go to jail and then stop”. I think maybe you're conflating this question and the following:

⁠consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars and also we live in a tenuous society with only vigilante or no law enforcement

Plausibly the morally correct answers are different. If your policy might cause total collapse of social order (irl, not in a nested thought experiment), maybe you shouldn’t do the nonviolent disruptive protest, but if you live in the real US where you largely internalize the negative consequences and others are similarly dissuaded and you still find the ~1st order effect worthwhile, then go right ahead

It’s like a sin tax (not a perfect term here tbc) - you want some amount of Pigouvian tax on the thing that you're worried is not generalizable (or good if it generalizes). If you find that the action is worth it to you tax included, then godspeed. It would be fallacious to say “in addition to the correctly priced carbon tax you'd be paying on the gas, consider your impact on the environment by driving”

I'm not sure this matters at all, but I tentatively think that percent of value of the best possible future, (we can call it 'PVBPF')  which I've heard brought up by Will MacAskill a couple times now^[1] (and maybe by others?) isn't an ideal metric by which to measure or even mental/conceptual model by which to understand how good the world is.

My main concern is illustrated by the following:

• Suppose we do a survey in 100 years^[2] and conclude that the current world is, to our best guess, 50% as good as the best possible counterfactual^[3]. So PVBPF = 50%
• Then somehow we realize that actually there was actually ex ante a $p={10}^{-1,000,000}$ chance of a counterfactual outcome 5 times better than what we previously thought was the maximum of the distribution
• What was originally PVBPF = 50% now becomes  $50\%\ast \left(1/5\right)=1/10$. So PVBPF = 10%

So the addition of an astronomically unlikely outcome- one that for all intents and purposes doesn't change the ex ante the EV at all - radically effects our assessment of PVBPF.

Maybe this is fine - I'm not really claiming there's a technical issue here (although maybe there is; more to think about).

But maybe there's a vibes issue: 10% and 50% sound like really different numbers, and they are! But a 5x difference in PVBPF can correspond to either a 5x difference in actual moral value or the addition of an arbitrarily unlikely 5x-as-good-as-previously-believed-maximum counterfactual.^[4]

1. ^{^}

   Eg on the latest 80k podcast, Will says:

   So the concept of viatopia is that it’s a state of society that is on track to produce a near-best future — something that’s at least 90% as good as a future that we could have.

2. ^{^}

   To get around the fact that I think the current world is net-negative. That's a modeling inconvenience but one that I do think one that neither is nor reveals a fundamental weakness with the idea being gestured at.

3. ^{^}

   You might be able to make this more well-defined via the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics

^{^}

I.e. as we make $p={10}^{-1,000,000}$ smaller and smaller, PVBPF doesn't change but the delta between ex ante EVs represented by the original guess of the distribution of probabilities and moral values and the updated guess goes to zero

Show all footnotes

I made a podcast feed for the posts highlighted in Best of: AGI & Animals Debate Week 

RSS Feed to paste into your favorite podcast app: https://f004.backblazeb2.com/file/aaronbergman-public/podcast/agi_animals/feed.xml 

I also like the cover art Gemini made so here it is:

I mostly strongly agree with this but think it's worth considering "being an official, recognized, and funded part of an organization" rather than constituting one's own from scratch. I know Rethink Priorities and Hive have sponsored projects before - that seems like a possibly-good intermediate step, with the possibility of spinning out independently later

Does anyone know why @William_MacAskill says he is "not convinced by the shrimp argument" on his recent appearance on Sam Harris's podcast? 
 

SAM HARRIS

So yeah, so this is one area where perhaps my own cynicism creeps in. I worry that any focus on suffering beyond human suffering, it risks confusing enough people so as to damage people's commitment to these principles. So I mean, I'm not, there's zero defense of factory farming coming from me here, but When I see a philosopher who's clearly EA or EA-adjacent arguing on behalf of the welfare of shrimp and claiming that maybe the worst atrocity perpetrated by humans is all of the mistreatment of shrimp because they exist in such numbers and live such terrible lives, one imagines. 

...

WILL MACASKILL

Okay, great. So lots to unpack there. And so I actually personally am not convinced by the shrimp argument. But the thing I want to defend is people really taking ethical, including quite weird-seeming ethical ideas seriously and trying to reason that through for themselves. 

Full unofficial transcript here and video below

Vibes, I have no idea, I hope someone convinces me with good takes