I agree that animal welfare is underfunded, but who is this post trying to convince? If funders should fund the most cost-effective interventions or cause areas, then the argument needs to be made on the merits, which are not covered here. Animals don't just automatically win because there is lots of animal suffering today (unless maybe you are a fairly near-termist negative utilitarian).
Did you have any system prompt or other instructions active when you asked these things? As someone else mentioned in another comment, incognito mode just means that Anthropic doesn't save the chat, but your general instructions for Claude are still accessible to it in incognito mode.
I agree that the Forum is (fairly) dead; I don't read it much anymore, and feel somewhat sad about this. I also think a lot of energy has moved to Substack, and would guess that this is a stronger effect than LessWrong cross-posting.
It's true that technological progress so far has been largely good for humans and bad for animals (due to factory farms, but the effects on wild animals complicate this a lot).
But I also think human values towards animals have improved compared to how they were historically, and e.g., house and work animals are likely treated better on the whole now than in the past. So I think there's been some moral progress, but this improvement has been dominated by technology simultaneously making animal food production much more cost-effective (and, as a side-effect, more suffering-producing).
I think eventually technological progress will make it cheaper to act on animal-friendly values, because I'm guessing the taste/price/convenience/friction of animal meat is hitting diminishing returns, while there's much more room for improvement with non-animal-based foods. So I think there will be a crossover point at some point, sort of the way it was with the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, where the economic effects of technology first made many people probably worse off, but eventually the better values won out and people were left better off on the whole.
I separately also think AGI and especially ASI, if aligned with human values, can wisely advise us on good courses of actions and help improve our values and promote good values, which would also help. ASI could also help a lot with wild animal welfare, where we are currently quite at a loss.
Yet nobody is building the I-O equivalent for AI compute governance.
I'm kind of skeptical that the data exists to create a good input-output model for AI chip export controls. For example, we know very little about which companies (especially in China) rent which AI chips from which cloud providers, and in which volumes; about any of the substation elasticities; or about smuggling volumes. We know more about AI chip sales now, but still little about which companies are buying them. But I'd be very interested in knowing if I'm wrong about this lack of data being a problem for input-output models?
Also, I feel quite confident, based on style, that this post was at least partially AI-written, in a way that made me like it less and take it less seriously. Make of that what you will!
A much better order of operations would be to 1) try to negotiate with China to establish an international regulatory framework (plan A), with export control and other stuff being imposed as something that is explicitly linked to China not agreeing to that framework, in the same way sanctions on Russia are imposed explicitly because its aggression against Ukraine, and 2) only if they refuse, try to crush them (plan B).
Maybe if you are President of the United States you can first try the one thing, and then the other. But from the perspective of an individual, you have to assume there's some probability of each of these plans (and other strategies) being executed, and that everything will be really messy (e.g., different actors having different strategies in mind, even within the US). Softening export controls seems like something you could do as part of executing Plan A, but as I mentioned above, it's very unclear to me whether unilaterally doing so makes Plan A more likely to be the chosen strategy, and it does likely make Plan B and Plan C go worse.
When political will in the US to try for plan A is lacking, I think waiting until circumstances make that plan realistic while preparing the groundwork for it is a better strategy than going straight ahead for plan B.
I think you're thinking people have more control over which strategy is adopted than I think they do? Or, what circumstances do you have in mind? Because waiting seems pretty costly.
But I think maybe the cruxiest bits are (a) I think export controls seem great in Plan B/C worlds, which seem much likelier than Plan A worlds, and (b) I think unilaterally easing export controls is unlikely to substantially affect the likelihood of Plan A happening (all else equal). It seems like you disagree with both, or at least with (b)?
I think if your sole objective is to enact a bilateral pause, then easing export controls may be the best option, or maybe not. It's pretty unclear to me how that shakes out, I could definitely also see unilateral concessions as being quite detrimental (for reasons similar to those Peter mention in the other comment).
But I would guess most of the people you are responding to think enacting a cooperative pause is some combination of very unlikely and/or undesirable, and also that export controls help a lot in the absence of such an agreement. The main way export controls help for other plans are by giving the US more slack to (one can hope) spend on safety, and/or because superintelligence developed in the US would imo likely be safer (cf. this comment), and/or because imo US values are better, and this would likely be reflected in the AIs (cf. Claude versus Grok).
If you thought Yudkowsky and Soares used overly confident language and would have taken the "QED" as further evidence of that, but this particular example turns out not to have been written by Yudkowsky and Soares, that's some evidence against your hypothesis. But instead of updating away a little, you seemed to dismiss that evidence and double down. (I think you originally replied to the original comment approvingly or at least non-critically, but then deleted that comment after I replied to it, but I could be misremembering that.)
For what it's worth, I think you're right that Yudkowsky at least uses overly confident language sometimes -- or I should say, is overly confident sometimes, because I think his language generally reflects his beliefs -- but I would've been surprised to see him use "QED" in that way, which is why I reacted to the original comment here with skepticism and checked whether "QED" actually appeared in the book (it didn't). I take that to imply I was better calibrated than anyone who did not so react.
(I have already read these posts and much prefer them over the post we're commenting on here.)
I agree that animal welfare is underfunded, but who is this post trying to convince? If funders should fund the most cost-effective interventions or cause areas, then the argument needs to be made on the merits, which are not covered here. Animals don't just automatically win because there is lots of animal suffering today (unless maybe you are a fairly near-termist negative utilitarian).
Did you have any system prompt or other instructions active when you asked these things? As someone else mentioned in another comment, incognito mode just means that Anthropic doesn't save the chat, but your general instructions for Claude are still accessible to it in incognito mode.
I agree that the Forum is (fairly) dead; I don't read it much anymore, and feel somewhat sad about this. I also think a lot of energy has moved to Substack, and would guess that this is a stronger effect than LessWrong cross-posting.
It's true that technological progress so far has been largely good for humans and bad for animals (due to factory farms, but the effects on wild animals complicate this a lot).
But I also think human values towards animals have improved compared to how they were historically, and e.g., house and work animals are likely treated better on the whole now than in the past. So I think there's been some moral progress, but this improvement has been dominated by technology simultaneously making animal food production much more cost-effective (and, as a side-effect, more suffering-producing).
I think eventually technological progress will make it cheaper to act on animal-friendly values, because I'm guessing the taste/price/convenience/friction of animal meat is hitting diminishing returns, while there's much more room for improvement with non-animal-based foods. So I think there will be a crossover point at some point, sort of the way it was with the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, where the economic effects of technology first made many people probably worse off, but eventually the better values won out and people were left better off on the whole.
I separately also think AGI and especially ASI, if aligned with human values, can wisely advise us on good courses of actions and help improve our values and promote good values, which would also help. ASI could also help a lot with wild animal welfare, where we are currently quite at a loss.
I think this is beautiful and touching and a little scary.
I'm kind of skeptical that the data exists to create a good input-output model for AI chip export controls. For example, we know very little about which companies (especially in China) rent which AI chips from which cloud providers, and in which volumes; about any of the substation elasticities; or about smuggling volumes. We know more about AI chip sales now, but still little about which companies are buying them. But I'd be very interested in knowing if I'm wrong about this lack of data being a problem for input-output models?
Also, I feel quite confident, based on style, that this post was at least partially AI-written, in a way that made me like it less and take it less seriously. Make of that what you will!
Maybe if you are President of the United States you can first try the one thing, and then the other. But from the perspective of an individual, you have to assume there's some probability of each of these plans (and other strategies) being executed, and that everything will be really messy (e.g., different actors having different strategies in mind, even within the US). Softening export controls seems like something you could do as part of executing Plan A, but as I mentioned above, it's very unclear to me whether unilaterally doing so makes Plan A more likely to be the chosen strategy, and it does likely make Plan B and Plan C go worse.
I think you're thinking people have more control over which strategy is adopted than I think they do? Or, what circumstances do you have in mind? Because waiting seems pretty costly.
But I think maybe the cruxiest bits are (a) I think export controls seem great in Plan B/C worlds, which seem much likelier than Plan A worlds, and (b) I think unilaterally easing export controls is unlikely to substantially affect the likelihood of Plan A happening (all else equal). It seems like you disagree with both, or at least with (b)?
I think if your sole objective is to enact a bilateral pause, then easing export controls may be the best option, or maybe not. It's pretty unclear to me how that shakes out, I could definitely also see unilateral concessions as being quite detrimental (for reasons similar to those Peter mention in the other comment).
But I would guess most of the people you are responding to think enacting a cooperative pause is some combination of very unlikely and/or undesirable, and also that export controls help a lot in the absence of such an agreement. The main way export controls help for other plans are by giving the US more slack to (one can hope) spend on safety, and/or because superintelligence developed in the US would imo likely be safer (cf. this comment), and/or because imo US values are better, and this would likely be reflected in the AIs (cf. Claude versus Grok).
If you thought Yudkowsky and Soares used overly confident language and would have taken the "QED" as further evidence of that, but this particular example turns out not to have been written by Yudkowsky and Soares, that's some evidence against your hypothesis. But instead of updating away a little, you seemed to dismiss that evidence and double down. (I think you originally replied to the original comment approvingly or at least non-critically, but then deleted that comment after I replied to it, but I could be misremembering that.)
For what it's worth, I think you're right that Yudkowsky at least uses overly confident language sometimes -- or I should say, is overly confident sometimes, because I think his language generally reflects his beliefs -- but I would've been surprised to see him use "QED" in that way, which is why I reacted to the original comment here with skepticism and checked whether "QED" actually appeared in the book (it didn't). I take that to imply I was better calibrated than anyone who did not so react.