I’m earning to give as a Quant Researcher at the Quantic group at Walleye Capital, a hedge fund. In my free time, I enjoy reading, discussing moral philosophy, and dancing bachata and salsa.
I’m also on the EA Forum and have a Substack blog.
Ariel Simnegar 🔸
Karma: 20
The slush fund is a cool idea and might make sense from a variance reduction (and ease of life) standpoint.
On food culture, I appreciate you keeping me in the loop on the latest omnivorous developments :)
It seems to me like the courting cost of vegan food for American events is much lower than the cost in China. If I went to an American event which served Indian food or chips & salsa or pretzels etc, I wouldn’t think much of it. Pizza is also popular for events and is lacto-vegetarian which is nearly neutral from an animal welfare perspective. I have a hard time imagining most meat-eating Americans getting that offended by these food options, though maybe this shows a lack of perspective on my part since I’ve been vegan for the past 5 years.
On offsetting, your argument seems to imply we should feel free to do whatever near term harm we want in pursuit of AI safety, because the ends justify the means. Most EAs would object to this. Also, most levels of risk aversion would recommend doing at least a little of the direct offset, because its payoff distribution much more precisely cancels the animal welfare harm, in contrast to AIS fieldbuilding which has a very different payoff distribution.
As an animal-welfare-pilled EA, my view is that if Chinese AI researchers react so negatively to vegan food, it’s probably better to be pragmatic, serve the meat, and offset the suffering with donations to animal charities.
To animal-pilled people, being asked to serve meat in this situation is similar to being asked to purchase and offer slaves to people we’re courting in a slaveholding society. Maybe that’s what we need to do for the greater good, but maybe that helps pump the intuition for why animal-pilled EAs find offering meat to be distasteful (pun intended).
Of course, other EAs will have their own views.
Strong agree here. I can’t think of any benefit to AI safety that would arise from alienating Trump. He’ll be President until 2029 whether we like it or not. Trump’s “paced the frontier” before by limiting Fable access when it was in his interest, and he may pace the frontier in a more constructive way in the future if he perceives it to be in his interest.
I’d expect he’s referring to the Trump administration’s unprecedented level of exercise of unitary executive power.