I think you could argue that "open source fades, propreitary moat" is a miss but not a clear miss. Yes there is a proliferation of decent open source models, but they are waaaaaay behind the fronteir and considering the money that's pouring into the frontier companies, investors clearly think propreitary has a moat.

If the arms race argument is the central argument, I would argue that there is a clear moat. The open source models are not close enough to the frontier to reduce the urgency of an arms race.

This is a great idea, although this would be a big call for many of us to do who might hope that our org could get some of that funding. Even someone like myself who fires shots pretty freely might think twice. We wouldn't want to rule our organisation out by writing too strong a Steelman against this. Any steelman would involve arguing that previous promises from founders and employees don't carry much weight, which could be seen as a personal slight against someone who could conceivably give you money. Sometimes I wonder if I've already said too much!

@Marcus Abramovitch 🔸has written a bit on this he might have a comment here?

"but the WiFi was incredibly bad (maximum 1mbps)".

Not only in Uganda huh..

I love your honesty about the issues with the retreat. I think at least one external speaker is always a boon to increase the excitement/novelty levels. 

I remember when we were at Cambridge we combined the retreat with Wawrick university and that was absolutely rocking. Great to have new faces and people running sessions and increased the buzz a bit.

I like how you grounded the retreat in concrete practical thinking about the future. Nice one!

This could be correct but is so speculative and so many steps removed from the present that I give it very little weight. There are so many assumptions at play here. I think most of these assumptions  are more likely than not, but with those probabilities multiplied together the whole scenario becomes less likely. Here are just a few potential ones.

1. More humans will always = more productive person-years. There are lots of war / resource shortage /climate change scenarios 
2. We will invent cultured meat that everyone switches to.
3. AI just increases progress and doesn't take the world in weird directions
4. More people reduces X-risk? 
 

I couldn't disagree more here, I think we need more of these kind of jobs on the jobboard.

Imagine if you are a kitchenhand and you are good at and like your job. Perhaps you don't have any tertiary education but you'd love to be more impactful then your current work at Starbucks. 

What a rare and great opportunity.

Yep I 100 percent agree.

First I wasn't making any big claims about what's most important, I'm just responding to Lewis's comment there which confused me a bit, and suggesting that perhaps more research in that in particular might not be so useful.

On your comment I would though expect mortality to not be a direct, ideal measure of suffering but still be important as one of the few objective measures we have. If chickens are dying early that could indicate health issues which might also cause suffering Some of the same things that would  kill a chicken would be heavily correlated with what makes them suffer I imagine? 

I agree it's not going to be the most important metric but it is objective at least.

"How much do increased egg costs and the resulting reduced egg demand mitigate the potential harms of cage-free transitions? Could the reduction in number outweigh any potential increases in harms on average per hen?"

This seems a weird, potentially epistemiclally dangerous situation. If a cage free system is mostly better for chickens just because it is more expensive and drives down demand, then that's a dishonest play on our end. If we're going for better hen welfare, I don't think this should be part of our calculation.