CB

Karma: 2

CB 25 Sep 2025 7:24 UTC
1 point
0
on: Launching the $10,000 Existential Hope Meme Prize
Hi, here’s my feedback, hope it helps.
Memes are powerful and it’s a good thing to recognise that. It could also help people access positive ideas. However, $10,000 seems to be a lot for this. I would think that $1000 would be enough.
Another worry I have is that I am not sure anybody got a good track record at trying to force a specific meme. I feel like they tend to emerge in an unpredictable way. The examples you gave took a lot of time to spread in culture (maybe less so for the P(Doom) one?). But maybe I am wrong.
Also, how do we balance things to promote a message that doesn’t result in something like e/acc?
Another note: your website doesn’t fit correctly the width of the screen on mobile.

CB 14 Sep 2025 6:42 UTC
0 points
−1
in reply to: Kristaps Zilgalvis’s comment on: Contra Shrimp Welfare.
“If you believe shrimp suffer, the 20 minutes of their life when they are harvested being a little more unpleasant [...]”

What a wild way to describe suffocating to death. From an evolutionary standpoint, it would make sense that dying would feel like something horrible you’d want to avoid. If I try to hold my breath for too long, I feel horrible, and I don’t think it would be that different even if I were just able to feel “raw sensation without context, meaning, or emotional depth”.

Regarding the other point, I don’t see why the fact that shrimp suffering is a small percentage of the Malacostran family’s suffering is relevant. Yes, there are tons of wild animals. And their suffering is likely to be pretty large. This is why the field of wild animal welfare exists.
But just because there are quintillions of wild animals, this doesn’t mean that helping billions of shrimps isn’t good. That’s still a large number of individuals that we can help, so it’s good to do so. It even means we should devote more effort to the topic than just having a single charity.

As an analogy, I don’t ignore a friend who is hurt because they represent less than 0.000001% of human suffering.

From my standpoint, it feels like you’re saying that the implications of having to care about wild animal suffering would be so big that we have to reject the premise. It feels like when people often fail to acknowledge that cows are likely sentient when they eat them, because it would mean confronting a significant moral issue. But maybe I’m entirely wrong, please feel free to correct me.

CB 13 Sep 2025 7:14 UTC
4 points
−4
on: Contra Shrimp Welfare.
Given how many well-informed people disagree on the origin and intensity of suffering and consciousness, your conclusions feel extremely confident.
You say a shrimp stunner, which prevents in the order of a billion shrimp a year from suffocating to death, reduces suffering as much as making the carts in a single Walmart less squeaky for 20 minutes a year.
I am pretty sure that the vast majority of and animal welfare scientists would disagree strongly with that.
For instance, someone who worked on the moral weight project said that:
“As a philosophy of consciousness PhD, it’s not just that I, personally, from an inside point of view, think weighting by neuron count is bad idea, it’s that I can’t think of any philosopher or scientist who maintains that “more neurons make for more intense experiences”, or any philosophical or scientific theory of consciousness that clearly supports this. ”
Source : https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/E9NnR9cJMM7m5G2r4/is-rp-s-moral-weights-project-too-animal-friendly-four?commentId=T2TsnfPFy6jgs3j4p
Moreover, it’s worth remembering that if your advice is wrong, this would have terrible consequences. If you manage to convince one donor to switch their donations, you would cause millions of additional shrimps suffocating to death. Of course, maybe you are right, and I think it’s worth discussing the topic and questioning the assumptions.
But you are doing a public post with clear cut confident advice, and I think doing that before at least having a large number of competent people to agree with you is irresponsible.

CB 15 Jul 2025 6:23 UTC
1 point
−2
on: Lessons from the Iraq War for AI policy
I think this post is missing a huge factor : oil.
“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007.
The Bush family had massive ties with the oil industry, including election funds, and there were apparently plans to invade Iraq before 9/11 according to former Treasury secretary (without a politically acceptable opportunity to do so, though).
More data in this article and the excellent book ‘Oil, power and war’, which shows that getting oil has always been a major factor in geopolitics over the last 100 years.
Oil is not like any other resource—without it, the world’s economies, food system and armies would crash within a week. Access to energy and resources is likely to be a major factor in political decisions as well.

CB 8 Apr 2025 7:29 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: Jemist’s Shortform
Your disagreement, from what I understand, seems mostly to stem from the fact that shrimps have less neuron than humans.
Did you check RP’s piece on that topic, “Why Neuron Counts Shouldn’t Be Used as Proxies for Moral Weight?”
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Mfq7KxQRvkeLnJvoB/why-neuron-counts-shouldn-t-be-used-as-proxies-for-moral
They say this:
“In regards to intelligence, we can question both the extent to which more neurons are correlated with intelligence and whether more intelligence in fact predicts greater moral weight;
Many ways of arguing that more neurons results in more valenced consciousness seem incompatible with our current understanding of how the brain is likely to work; and
There is no straightforward empirical evidence or compelling conceptual arguments indicating that relative differences in neuron counts within or between species reliably predicts welfare relevant functional capacities.
Overall, we suggest that neuron counts should not be used as a sole proxy for moral weight, but cannot be dismissed entirely”