There is an Avaaz signature campaign to "Establish National Licensing systems for AGI before it is fully achieved" (started by the director of the Millennium Project, Jerome Glenn) you may want to sign.

I'm not sure how fitting such a petition is for the forum, that's why I put it here. If somebody more involved (forum admins, maybe?) thinks it is worth for it to have a real post, please do it.

Yes, it is frustrating the downvoting-without-explanation dynamics of this forum. From the one side, forum admins encourage people to write more rather than less and then people downvoting without giving any reason. Maybe they don't realise it, but that's harming the forum and the movement. Anyway, thanks for the moral support.

Interested to hear other thoughts

Same here! :-)

Ok, thanks. I leave it like this, then. Then everyone will have answered to the same question :-)

And actually, since some time I tend to think that he's probably been vastly less net-good in the past than I previously thought. Not really because of him, but because Chinese companies are beating everyone, including Tesla, with their EVs (and I don't think he's had any influence in China betting hard for EVs, though I might be wrong here); so if Tesla would have not existed, the adoption of EVs would just have been only delayed for few years (and mostly only in the west). So his net-positive contribution -for me and now- seems much lower than it seemed before.

Oh, I meant it to include everything, sorry for the confusion. So, he's done a bunch of net-good stuff but now he's doing a bunch of net-bad stuff, is the former still larger than the latter? How should I express it in the title so that it is clear?

I like your posts. They are short and informative.

I really wonder how you manage to have the time to work, take care of the kids and do other stuff like writing... good posts. It is not only that the topic is usually interesting, but writing short informative posts is usually much more time-consuming that writing the same post as a long and not specific/without links version. How do you do it?

Replacing chicken meat with plant-based foods only decreases pain slightly more than replacing it with beef or pork.

This is very surprising to me! Super interesting! To be honest, I find this as important as the numbers you give in the post.

Hi Vasco, merry Christmas and so on!

It is great that you base your arguments on other people's research. Then add a sentence or two clarifying it (in addition, this would add some information on the values you used). All these are very speculative still, but this is not the issue -though it could be mentioned.

The issue with your post is that you claim something you do not demonstrate at all. If you'd framed the post as something similar to "Replacing chicken meat with beef or pork: pain vs emissions analysis", your post would be really very good. I still think you should add some description to the values used, but just including the reference from RP would probably suffice for this. And if it'd include the information that replacing chicken with no-meat does not move the needle nearly as much as replacing it for beef or pork, it would be even better, as this is very relevant context.

But this is not what you do. You have done very interesting and useful calculations. But your claims go much, much further than what you can claim with them. You narrow your analysis to a comparison of two specific aspects of the issue, basically neglecting the rest. I hope you see that the issue goes beyond pain and emissions. You most likely think that these two aspects are the most important ones for the analysis but do no support -or even mention- this. Doing it would probably clarify the values behind your analysis --if you really want to go broad. Or you could just say sth like "assuming pain and emissions are the driving aspects of this problem...". But do not even do this. 

A stupid example. There's people who care mostly about the amount of pleasure in the universe and (claim) not to care much for suffering. Assuming chickens get some pleasure at all in their lives, the amount of pleasure in the universe would increase by eating more chicken and less pork or beef. Even if they currently wouldn't experience any pleasure, the potential would be huge... and the analysis completely opposite to yours. And this is not taking into account any other aspects than animal pleasure.

I am sure you see all this, and that you wanted to write as short an essay as possible. But to do this, then you have to be very specific --otherwise, a very good analysis like yours ends up not holding the water you claim it holds.

I didn't want to go beyond commenting the form --how the post is presented. But as you answered, I'd like to ask you something about the content as well:

I'm so confused on why you wrote the post given the preferences you believe people (EAs?) have and that you are (almost?) vegetarian/vegan. Making the change you propose decreases a bit animal pain... while decreasing the amount of meat one eats decreases it much more.