thanks, just donated. 

ok and sorry to bother but you still think it's high ev to donate (3 days since the last person said it still seemed useful).

can you explain (or do you have a link to someone who has already explained) the logic behind AMPA donation? I'm guessing it's just that they are completely on our side for this specific issue because animal welfare and small farmers are aligned here but I'm concerned I'm gonna give money to the "american meat producers" and they will spend some of it lobbying SOB but keep most of it in escrow and then spend it lobbying against e.g. plant based meat next year?

Relating to the Bernie news today, I don't think capitalism is compatible with believing in the singularity and some combo of humanism/utilitarianism. I have been a neolib for a long time before now fwiw. If you ran the zoo would you give the biggest banana to the sexiest gorilla?

I'm in the "killing/eating animals is (mostly) fine but torturing them/giving them intensely negative lives is not" camp. To me giving farm animals reasonable lives would basically be total victory (in this small slice of the total animal suffering).

I think the idea of "ending meat eating" without PBM seems very impossible in the medium term (10-30 years) (and maybe impossible with PBM), but forcing the government to regulate farms (adding as much utility as possible, with an allowed +30-50% price increase, effectively a tax on suffering) seems totally possible to me. Maybe not quite yet because we are too poor but at some point pretty soon (like potentially when the elasticity of meat starts approaching 0). I think the parsimonious answer is that people do in fact have compassion for farm animals. Just not as much as for dogs and they gain more from their suffering. I'd expect if we double US GDP in the next ~15 years even without a lot of other culture changes (ignoring that ai will rule the world for sec.) it will be much more politically palatable to ban (or tax) animal torture of all mammals at least. 

I'm sure ACE and others have thought much more about this and have actual psychological evidence, for my part I guess I just feel a little bit optimistic that humanity can fix this soonish.  
 

Broadly in agreement but I don't think the examples are actually the pure version of what he is saying. It sounds like he is classifying goods based on the ratio of private benefit/social effect ish, so yes things with a very high private benefit and plausibly low externalities are definitely good but I feel less confident than him we could say that about refrigerators for instance. 

OpenAI is claiming a legitimate breakthrough on a "prominent open question". I don't know exactly how to phrase this, but I'm well past the point where i'm interested in arguing whether or not we are on the precipice of some insane stuff. Yes there are still reasonable disputes about exact timelines, foom, economic impacts, diffusion curves, etc. I'm not saying the world is gonna end in 2029. But if you are legitimately arguing anything approximating stochastic parrots, or that this is just a hype train, I'm going to immediately assume you have motivated reasoning or need to think harder. 

I disagree, Yarrow seems to be quite solider mindset on this issue for a while and it's annoying. I don't believe they are coming from a place of good faith (obv not confident). 

Agreed, and honestly I think it's ok to be a little rude if people seem to be acting in bad faith.

It's pretty easy to argue with the claim that solving cancer or aging is good. 

"Science advances one funeral at a time."  replace science with culture if you want. 

I think the truth is the only way you can ensure technology is good is if you live in a non chaotic world, like a total dictatorship. We live in a chaotic world. Without a well defined, very high % enforceable social contract, you are simply guessing what might happen.