Dylan Richardson
Bio
Participation2
Graduate student at Johns Hopkins. Looking for part-time work.
Posts 3
Comments57
"Grok/xAI is a greater threat to AI Safety than either Open AI or Google DeepMind"
- (Controversial because the later presumably have a better chance of reaching AGI first. I take the question to mean "which one, everything else being equal and investment/human capital not being redistributed, would you prefer to not exist?"
Mostly I just want a way to provoke more discussion on the relative harms of Grok as a model, which has fallen into the "so obvious we don't mention it" category. I would welcome better framings.)
Really cool! Easy to use and looks great. Some feedback:
The word "offsetting" seems to have bad PR. But I quite like "Leave no harm" and "a clean slate". I think the general idea could be really compelling to certain parts of the population. There is at least some subsection of the population that thinks about charity in a "guilty conscious" sense. Maybe guilt is a good framing, especially since it is more generalizable here than most charities are capable of eliciting.
I'm certainly not an expert on this, but I wonder if this could have particular appeal to religious groups? The concept of "Ahimsa" in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism seems relevant.
Last suggestion: Air pollution may be a good additional category of harms. I'm not sure what the best charity target would be though, given that it is hyper regional. Medical research? Could also add second-hand cigarette smoke to that.
Seems like the best bet is to make it as comprehensive as possible, without overly diluting the most important and evidence backed stuff like farmed animal welfare.
"Mass Animal Welfare social change has at least a 40% chance of occurring before TAI"
(Social change, not necessarily material or policy change - hard to specify what qualifies, but maybe quadrupling the number of individual donors, or the sizes and frequency of protests.)
I actually started drafting a post called "Do Vegan Advocacy Like Yud" for this reason!
It seems to me that many orgs and individuals stick to language like "factory farming is very bad" when what they actually believe is that it is the biggest current moral catastrophe in the world. That and they side step the issue by highlighting environmental and conservation concerns.
Woah! Agreed. I have a somewhat more positive view of go-vegan/meat reduction campaigns; but even disregarding that, this doesn't make sense. Current vegans are probably the best targets for a donate-more campaign and I can tell from experience reading r/vegan that this is unlikely to go down well!
I'm ranking the Animal Welfare Fund first - the Shrimp Welfare Project is already a grantee of the fund; and in general I don't think that it is clearly much more effective than others on the fund. Much of these are emerging interventions and causes which plausibly benefit considerably from the marginal dollar (at least until we have better evidence for tractability).
I'm ranking Forethought higher than I usually would for a research org, primarily because I've been impressed by their research agenda which seems particularly on-point, as well as effective public communication.
I'm not familiar with the examples you listed @mal_graham🔸(anticoagulant bans and bird-safe glass), are these really robustly examples of palatability? I'm betting that they are more motivated by safety for dogs, children and predatory birds, not the rats? And I'm guessing that even the glass succeeded more on conservation grounds?
Certainly, even if so, it's good to see that there are some palatability workarounds. But given the small-body problem, this doesn't encourage great confidence that there could be more latent palatability for important interventions. Especially once the palatable low-hanging fruit are plucked.
Good topic, but I think it would need to be opened to plant based as well and reduced to something like "more than 60%" to split debate adequately.