(to be clear, I don't think I'm saying something that RP doesn't understand and I still think this is a highly valuable project)

Thanks for taking action here!

I am wondering aloud about the value of cross-cause prioritization here, considering donor preferences. My intuition is that most donors, including in the EA space, are considerably less cause-neutral than we may have been accustomed to from the amazingly rational and generous Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna. Different donors may also have specific worldviews; in particular we may expect some particular distribution of worldviews related to AI progress.

Still, we should definitely prepare for donors that are open-minded and are interested in rethinking or being persuaded on fundamental ethical and worldview questions. 

I guess my point is that the benefits of the different prioritization research questions depend on what new donors are interested in and open to, and where they would choose to delegate. 

In particular, we still lack robust, general answers to questions such as:

• Will text-based AI eventually be able to reason over raw genomes, or is biological data too fundamentally different?
• How much training data will biological models need before qualitatively new capabilities emerge, or they “grok”?
• What is the tradeoff between evading sequence-based screening and preserving biological function?
• If a model was never trained on viral sequences, how well will it generalize to viruses from other domains of life?

In addition to these kind of general questions, it could also be valuable to just have a dedicated per-model evaluation to inform decisions BAIM creators do. 

@Aaron Gertler 🔸 weird bug where the fields don't show:

Seriously, I love this EA forum holiday ❤️ I genuinely feel like this helps the community do more good, get more silly-but-perhaps-with-a-grain-of-usefulness ideas across, and waste time in a way which feels a bit productive

It hurts my prefontal cortex 

If the FTX Future Fund was still running, you could get from them easy money, no strings attached!

Cab(W)el(l)?

How do you see the long-term goals and outcomes? I'm particularly interested in how this kind of work interact with abolishment / animal-rights. In particular, the following seem important to me:

1. The kind of work that makes the right option cheaper (by technological improvement of productivity on less cruel methods of production) could, for instance, decrease the cost and thus increase the demand.
2. Improved welfare could legitimize meat eating and overall decrease public opinion toward preventing animal cruelty. 

   1. (It is hard for me to come up with a version of this argument that I believe. If anything, I believe the opposite - that increased regulation and action for improved welfare will continuously raise the minimal level of acceptable welfare)

       

Downvoted. I felt that the post was making a bunch of assertions in a way that was aimed at persuading rather than explaining. That said, I would really be interested in reading more from you about this topic. 

I think there is a lot to learn about the nature of consciousness and suffering from buddhist philosophy and practice, and I think that it is worthwhile to investigate how to apply it for AI risk.

In particular, there are some possibly interesting points here that I'd love to see expanded and explained in a way which I'd also feel comfortable engaging with the ideas.