NR

Nithin Ravi🔸

182 karmaJoined Colorado, USA

Bio

Participation
3

I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in '22 with a BS in Information Systems and minors in Economics/Software Engineering.

I currently work as a Software Engineer at a mid-sized medical company and advise family members on their donations.

I'm interested in reducing suffering!

Comments
52

Wow, with tool use, pretty much every SOTA model from 6 months ago outperforms the public median forecast! I'd be curious to see how gpt-5/4.5 sonnet/4.1 opus do on this

Do you have an alternative that you would use?

I was thinking similarly, Norwegians seem especially accepting of both democracy and EA ideas, so hard to generalize.

I think it's similar to the FPP dynamics you're referencing. Essentially, it's most advantageous to vote for candidates with broader appeal in the hopes they actually make it to the general election.

RCV wasn't always proposed as a way to improve democracies. Take for instance this ballot initiative in my home state of Colorado https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado_Proposition_131,_Top-Four_Ranked-Choice_Voting_Initiative_(2024)

I very narrowly leaned yes on this (rather than a clear yes), because the Top Four Ranked Choice as proposed, would have only allowed political moderates to even make it to the ranked choice election. 

I still generally support RCV and there's definitely other reasons why these initiatives failed (like being anti-endorsed by incumbent/establishment politics) but wanted to point out that specific implementations of RCV aren't always in favor of increasing democracy and this may be part of why many initiatives failed.

It's certainly a problem that AVA LA is inaccessible for organizations operating in LMIC's. We're navigating some unfortunate tradeoffs here primarily because of wealth inequality in the world (something that is far outside the scope of animal advocacy to fix). I think funders are far more likely to come to a US based conference as most funders are US (and to a lesser extent Europe) based.

A couple questions I have:

  • Do you have suggestions for alternative cities that are both accessible to funders (primarily based in the US and to a lesser extent Europe) and cheaper? Mexico City, some Texan cities, etc.. come to mind but still face tradeoffs.
    • I do think Reducetarian faces some of these tradeoffs a little better by being in slightly cheaper cities.
  • What is the benefit of coming to AVA that your organization is missing (i.e. are you primarily seeking funding, connections, etc...)?

I agree, it felt like a smug condemnation of anti-capitalism; followed by a statement about smug condemnations being bad!

"At the very least, you shouldn’t smugly condemn those who endorse doing something about those kids dying"

What would it even look like to truly live in accordance with this? I try to make altruistic decision with this lens (of a close to AGI world). Outside of altruism, I need to preserve my own sanity and just exist day by day!

Side note: beeper will kill the e2e encryption for any messaging platforms you trust. It looks like a good tool for everything but signal for me personally!

Thanks for writing this! I've wondered this and would be interested in seeing something similar for screwworms as well, if you ever get around to estimating that.

I'm also curious to know why you chose the same median welfare range as black soldier flies. Is this just the best guess you had, or is there a reason that mosquitoes would have similar experiences to them?

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