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Crosspost of my blog.
You shouldn’t eat animals in normal circumstances. That much is, in my view, quite thoroughly obvious. Animals undergo cruel, hellish conditions that we’d confidently describe as torture if they were inflicted on a human (or even a dog). No hamburger...
Not opining on the overall question, but FWIW I'm not sure on-farm slaughter is better. Reason being — I think that large slaughterhouses have "smoother" processes and (per animal killed) are less likely to end up with e.g. no stunning, stunning but resuscitation before being killed, etc.
But this does have to be weighed against the stress of transport, and I bet in a lot of cases it'd have been better to have on-farm slaughter given the length & conditions of transport.
In a recent announcement, Manifold Markets say they will change the exchange rate for your play-money (called "Mana") from 1:100 to 1:1000. Importantly, one of the ways to use this Mana is to do charity donations.
TLDR: The CTA here is to log in to your Manifold account ...
GiveWell and Open Philanthropy just made a $1.5M grant to Malengo!
Congratulations to @Johannes Haushofer and the whole team, this seems such a promising intervention from a wide variety of views
Cool! For context, Malengo is helping students from Uganda attend university in Germany, and it also has a program to support students from French-speaking African countries [link in French]. I'm excited about this program not only for its economic benefits, but also for its potential to enable more people to live in liberal democratic countries, and in the long term, increase support for liberal democracy around the globe.
As a quick reply, I'm wondering what evidence you have that education in democratic liberal countries increases support for liberal democracy accross the globe? There's arguments for and against this thesis, but I don't think there's good evidence that it helps.
Many dictators in Africa for example were educated in top universities, which gave them better connections and influence which might have helped them oppress their people. Also during the 20ths centure a growing intelligent and motivated middle class seems correlated with higher chance of democracy. - its unclear whether highly skilled migration helps grow this middle class through increasing remittances and a growing economy, or removes the most capable people who could be starting businesses and making their home country a better place. Its worth noting that programs like this don't just take high school graduates, they usually take the cream of the crop who were likely to do very well in their home conutry as well.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that its complicated and far from a slamdunk that this will increase support for liberal democracies.
Regulators should review the 2014 DeepMind acquisition. When Google bought DeepMind in 2014, no regulator, not the FTC, not the EC's DG COMP, nor the CMA, scrutinized the impact. Why? AI startups have high value but low revenues. And so they avoid regulation (...
At least from an AI risk perspective, it's not at all clear to me that this would improve things as it would lead to a further dispersion of this knowledge outward.
Inspired by Aaron Gertler’s notes on hiring a copyeditor for CEA and more recently ERA’s hiring retrospective, I am writing a retrospective on Giving What We Can’s hiring for the Research Communicator role. This is written in my capacity as a Researcher for...
I hadn't seen this until now. I still hope you'll do a follow up on the most recent round, since as I've said (repeatedly) elsewhere, I think you guys are the gold standard in the EA movement about how to do this well :)
One not necessarily very helpful thought:
Our work trial was overly intense and stressful, and unrepresentative of working at GWWC.
is a noble goal, but somewhat in tension with this goal:
In retrospect, we could have ensured this was done on a time-limited basis, or provided a more reasonable estimate.
It's really hard to make a strictly timed...
This post is easily the weirdest thing I've ever written. I also consider it the best I've ever written - I hope you give it a chance. If you're not sold by the first section, you can safely skip the rest.
I
Imagine an alternate version of the Effective Altruism movement,...
I essentially agree with the basic point of this post - and think it was a great post!
I have some what feel like nitpicks about the specific story that you told that and I'm sort of confused about how much they matter. My guess is that this actually is a counterargument to the point being made in the post and imply that trapped priors are less of a problem than the example used in the post would imply.
I think that the broadly libertarian view and Scandinavian-style social democracy views are much more similar than this post gives them credit for. In ...
Concerns over AI safety and calls for government control over the technology are highly correlated but they should not be.
There are two major forms of AI risk: misuse and misalignment. Misuse risks come from humans using AIs as tools in dangerous ways. Misalignment risks...
Yes, some regulations backfire, and this is a good flag to keep in mind when designing policy, but to actually make the reference-class argument here work, you'd have to show that this is what we should expect from AI policy, which would include showing that failures like NEPA are either much more relevant for the AI case or more numerous than other, more successful regulations, like (in my opinion) the Clean Air Act, Sarbanes-Oxley, bans on CFCs or leaded gasoline, etc. I know it's not quite as simple as "I would simply design good regulations instead of ...
Written by Claude, and very lightly edited.
In a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast, guest Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and the Blueprint project, laid out a thought-provoking perspective on what he sees as the most important challenge and opportunity of our...
This is an extremely "EA" request from me but I feel like we need a word for people (i.e. me) who are Vegans but will eat animal products if they're about to be thrown out. OpportuVegan? UtilaVegan?