I wonder if the crux here is the effectiveness of your particular call to action: "Please strive to be less stupid, and call it out when you see it in others."
I am guessing I am a pretty typical ea-forum reader in that I am appalled by the anti-vaccine turn of the u.s. government. I cannot do much to "be less stupid" by your lights in this particular respect because I generally agree with you on the immorality of preventing vaccine access. But I also don't think calling out the stupidity when I see it is necessarily a good strategy. That could be very alienating, reduce trust, make anti-vaccine advocates feel victimized, inadvertently associate my various controversial views with vaccines, and increase backlash in the form of more anti-vaccine advocacy. I'm surr in some instances it is in fact the exactly right thing to do, but I also don't think it's the straightforward correct response towards people who genuinely think that vaccines cause autism, death, or other harms.
If you could set the dial on how interested you wanted candidates to be in taking a position before applying, do you have any thoughts on where you would set it? For example, would you generally hope that candidates who would put their probability of taking the job if offered at 25 percent apply?
If that seems too abstract, could you generally comment on how much resources you put into evaluating the marginal candidate in a hiring round?
Relatedly, how often do your top candidates decline offers and how much does that throw off your process?
Thanks for doing this! I'm a mid-career policy person currently in what I consider to be a relatively high-impact role in a non-ai cause area. I am good at my job but keep thinking about ai and and whether I should be pivoting to an ai policy role. I've been reading books about ai and I've listened to lots of 80k hours, Dwarkesh, and other podcasts on the topic. I have a strong sense of various threat models from ai but I still don't have developed views on what good ai policy would look like. What should I be reading/listening to in order to develop these views? Do you think it make sense to apply to ai policy roles before my views on optimal policy are well-developed?
This is correct and equally but less visibly so at current margins. This would increase the profitability of animal farming and also legitimize the idea that as a farmer, my Coase-ian property rights over my animals include the right to effectively torture. I am not saying this on balance makes it bad. I don't know, but it's extremely important to carefully think through this trade off.
Christianity is interpreted wildly differently by different people. I agree that there is a coherent version of Christianity that is not only compatible with ea, but demands it. There are also many equally coherent versions of Christianity that are strictly incompatible at least on some elements. I'm all for religious people making inroads about ea to their co-religionists in religious forums but I don't think it's a good idea for people on this forum, who have no common religion that unites us, to be discussing the Christian theology of ea. The conversation gets extremely muddled extremely quickly because most participants are not Christian at all and those who are likely do not share a common version of Christianity. It is extremely difficult to progress the conversation under these circumstances and is likely to come off to religious people (who could be entirely swayed by secular arguments) as quite alienating.
I think moral cluelessness is the best argument against effective altruism in general, and that this post makes that point better than any other I have seen. I do not mean that as a criticism or even a bad thing. Merely, this sort of thinking (possibly correctly, I don't even know) suggests to me that it might be time to give up on doing good.
I think your coverage of Scott Alexander's alleged association with HBD is both unfair and unethical. This is evidenced in part by the fact that you lead your post about him with an allegedly leaked private email. You acknowledge deep into your post that you are largely basing your accusations on various unconfirmed sources yet you repeatedly summarize your claims about him without such disclaimers. Even if the email was real, it seems to form almost the entire basis of your case against him and you don't know the context of a private email. Taking the email at face value, it does not say the things you imply it says.
I don't know Scott personally but I have been a reader of his blog and various associated forums for many years. Contrary to your characterization, he has in fact actively pushed back against a lot of discussion around HBD on his blog and related spaces. I think your posting about him undermines your credibility elsewhere.
Thanks for writing this up. I would be really interested in thoughts about whether this makes working on U.S. policy less worthwhile compared to other interventions. Some reasons it might not see that a) there is a lot of infrastructure work to be done on policy that spans multiple administrations, b) there are elements of a trump administration that might be good for animals that we could capitalize on(see for example project 2025 recommendations for cutting farm subsidies; also consider some people in trumps orbit who seem to care about animals and wild influence; also consider that trumps last secretary of ag said more positive things about alt proteins than biden's, etc).
Animal welfare has also been somewhat salient for Republicans. As far as I am aware, they have all been focused on pet-related issues but I still think it says something that it's been a focus. There was the peanut the squirrel saga (arguably not welfare per se, but still revolved around the life of a non-human animal); there was the dog-shooting thing that seemed to sink Kristi Neom; and there was the baseless accusations that immigrants were eating cats and dogs. Maybe there is a way to leverage some of this sentiment into broader animal welfare initiatives?
I wonder if the crux here is the effectiveness of your particular call to action: "Please strive to be less stupid, and call it out when you see it in others."
I am guessing I am a pretty typical ea-forum reader in that I am appalled by the anti-vaccine turn of the u.s. government. I cannot do much to "be less stupid" by your lights in this particular respect because I generally agree with you on the immorality of preventing vaccine access. But I also don't think calling out the stupidity when I see it is necessarily a good strategy. That could be very alienating, reduce trust, make anti-vaccine advocates feel victimized, inadvertently associate my various controversial views with vaccines, and increase backlash in the form of more anti-vaccine advocacy. I'm surr in some instances it is in fact the exactly right thing to do, but I also don't think it's the straightforward correct response towards people who genuinely think that vaccines cause autism, death, or other harms.
Hi Vasco, I am curious why you stop at nemotodes and don't extend your conclusions to single-called organisms such as bacteria.
If you could set the dial on how interested you wanted candidates to be in taking a position before applying, do you have any thoughts on where you would set it? For example, would you generally hope that candidates who would put their probability of taking the job if offered at 25 percent apply?
If that seems too abstract, could you generally comment on how much resources you put into evaluating the marginal candidate in a hiring round?
Relatedly, how often do your top candidates decline offers and how much does that throw off your process?
Thanks for doing this! I'm a mid-career policy person currently in what I consider to be a relatively high-impact role in a non-ai cause area. I am good at my job but keep thinking about ai and and whether I should be pivoting to an ai policy role. I've been reading books about ai and I've listened to lots of 80k hours, Dwarkesh, and other podcasts on the topic. I have a strong sense of various threat models from ai but I still don't have developed views on what good ai policy would look like. What should I be reading/listening to in order to develop these views? Do you think it make sense to apply to ai policy roles before my views on optimal policy are well-developed?
This is correct and equally but less visibly so at current margins. This would increase the profitability of animal farming and also legitimize the idea that as a farmer, my Coase-ian property rights over my animals include the right to effectively torture. I am not saying this on balance makes it bad. I don't know, but it's extremely important to carefully think through this trade off.
Christianity is interpreted wildly differently by different people. I agree that there is a coherent version of Christianity that is not only compatible with ea, but demands it. There are also many equally coherent versions of Christianity that are strictly incompatible at least on some elements. I'm all for religious people making inroads about ea to their co-religionists in religious forums but I don't think it's a good idea for people on this forum, who have no common religion that unites us, to be discussing the Christian theology of ea. The conversation gets extremely muddled extremely quickly because most participants are not Christian at all and those who are likely do not share a common version of Christianity. It is extremely difficult to progress the conversation under these circumstances and is likely to come off to religious people (who could be entirely swayed by secular arguments) as quite alienating.
I think moral cluelessness is the best argument against effective altruism in general, and that this post makes that point better than any other I have seen. I do not mean that as a criticism or even a bad thing. Merely, this sort of thinking (possibly correctly, I don't even know) suggests to me that it might be time to give up on doing good.
I think your coverage of Scott Alexander's alleged association with HBD is both unfair and unethical. This is evidenced in part by the fact that you lead your post about him with an allegedly leaked private email. You acknowledge deep into your post that you are largely basing your accusations on various unconfirmed sources yet you repeatedly summarize your claims about him without such disclaimers. Even if the email was real, it seems to form almost the entire basis of your case against him and you don't know the context of a private email. Taking the email at face value, it does not say the things you imply it says.
I don't know Scott personally but I have been a reader of his blog and various associated forums for many years. Contrary to your characterization, he has in fact actively pushed back against a lot of discussion around HBD on his blog and related spaces. I think your posting about him undermines your credibility elsewhere.
Did you see this blog post from Wayne Hsuing? https://blog.simpleheart.org/p/the-mass-extermination-of-animals
Thanks for writing this up. I would be really interested in thoughts about whether this makes working on U.S. policy less worthwhile compared to other interventions. Some reasons it might not see that a) there is a lot of infrastructure work to be done on policy that spans multiple administrations, b) there are elements of a trump administration that might be good for animals that we could capitalize on(see for example project 2025 recommendations for cutting farm subsidies; also consider some people in trumps orbit who seem to care about animals and wild influence; also consider that trumps last secretary of ag said more positive things about alt proteins than biden's, etc).
Animal welfare has also been somewhat salient for Republicans. As far as I am aware, they have all been focused on pet-related issues but I still think it says something that it's been a focus. There was the peanut the squirrel saga (arguably not welfare per se, but still revolved around the life of a non-human animal); there was the dog-shooting thing that seemed to sink Kristi Neom; and there was the baseless accusations that immigrants were eating cats and dogs. Maybe there is a way to leverage some of this sentiment into broader animal welfare initiatives?