This. I do not see off-world animal farming as a real issue. It's such an energy and resource inefficient way of making food. Indeed, a prerequisite or a proxy indicator for Earth-independent sustainable civilization seems to be extremely good efficiency in food production. You can't possibly be on Mars or make an interstellar ship and still have a thousand cows in it for making some cheese.

Oh wow, the selection effect at hiring is an incredibly solid point I missed. The convergence I'm worried about downstream is indeed partly initiated at the door. 

On the rest, the unplugged controller bit is... intriguing. I'm not where you are yet on giving up but I respect that you've been watching this pattern longer than I have. If you're right that posts like this just drift away, I guess we'll find out. I'd rather write it and be wrong about its impact than not write it and be right about the concern. Appreciate you sharing all this very much.

Thanks for thinking about all this! You're right about Anthropic in that sense. I do state that canonical Moloch doesn't quite fit here. But my concern is a lil downstream from Ant choosing/trapped. I don't see that as being particularly consequential. My concern is about what happens when their employees' wealth becomes the dominant funding source for the organizations meant to oversee them. That dynamic operates the same way whether we think Ant is trapped or a willing one, IMO.

Whoa. Is this your parable? This is beautifully put and it captures something my essay only gestures at. My worry is narrower though I suppose: the city is about to get a lot richer and the new money is coming from people who built a specific tower. 'the city wished them well and did not study where they went.' will stay with me, thanks. That's the selection mechanism I'm worried about. 

Hmm this is interesting because I'm actually not sure whether to treat the survey numbers or the funding numbers as the better signal of what the community actually believes! Surveys capture what people say when asked in the abstract. Funding decisions capture what people do when they have to make tradeoffs with real stakes. To me, neither is obviously more "true"
When I answer a survey about ideal resource allocation, I'm not doing the same kind of thinking as when I'm actually deciding where my money goes. surveys feels more like "what do I want the world to look like" whereas the donation feels more like "given my uncertainty about sentience, tractability and what others are funding, where's my/our marginal money best spent." These can reasonably diverge as you can see.
That said, I do think your lost in translation hypothesis is true in a way. The discourse is more AI-dominated than the MCF survey would predict or at least feels so. And if the community's stated preferences are roughly right but people are deferring to a perceived consensus that doesn't actually exist, that's a coordination failure worth pointing out!
Also resonate with @SiobhanBall's point about psychological friction. Animal advocacy is the one cause area where most of us are personally implicated and that creates a kind of discomfort that's easy to avoid by just... focusing elsewhere. A kind of moral responsibility offsetting. I'd be curious whether the stated/revealed gap is smaller for vegans in the community!

Yeah well a lot of neglectedness discourse does end up being "here's a big number, here's a small number, therefore neglected" without asking whether those numbers actually inform anyone's marginal decision? I think shrimp welfare is also interesting because the bottleneck isn't "people who care about shrimp don't know it's important" it's that very few people care about shrimp at all.

One thing I'd find useful is more on how to handle cases where something is at the edge of your circle because of empirical uncertainty rather than moral uncertainty. I might be unsure whether to include shrimp because I'm uncertain about their sentience (empirical), or because I'm uncertain how to weigh their interests even if sentient (moral). These feel like they should cash out differently. The first suggests investing in research, the latte4 suggests the "neglected because few include them" logic you allude to.