Meet at the Davenport Branch of the Toronto Public Library (1246 Shaw St) at 1:50 pm. We'll leave for my place at 2:00 pm sharp, so try not to be late.
If you've been around a few times and know the address, feel free to go directly to my house for 2pm.
Vegan snacks provided.
If you think you are >75% likely to come, please RSVP. If you haven't RSVPed but you would still like to come day-of, please come anyways!
Discussion Topic
Waterline is a new series of rationalist and EA events in Toronto. Events are biweekly, and are designed to focus on a broader and more principles-first set of EA topics to complement Trajectory Labs' AI safety events.
This week, we'll be discussing the neglected and currently intractable(?) cause area of wild animal suffering.
Please note that the readings have fairly explicit text and image depictions of animal suffering. If you find discussion of animal suffering to be very distressing, this meetup may not be for you and you might want to just catch us at the next one.
Readings
Please complete these before the meetup and come prepared to discuss them.
Note graphic photos in the "How Wild Animals Suffer" section, and at the end of the article. Photos can be avoided by accessing the PDF version of the article.
In this paper, we challenge the primary lines of evidence employed in support of wild animal suffering, to provide an alternative picture in which wild animals may often have lives that are far more positive than is commonly assumed. Nevertheless, while it is useful to have an alternative model to challenge unexamined assumptions, our real emphasis in this paper is the need for the development of effective methods for applying animal welfare science in the wild, including new means of data collection, the ability to determine the extent and scope of welfare challenges and opportunities, and their effects on welfare. Until such methods are developed, discussions of wild animal welfare cannot go beyond trading of intuitions, which as we show here can just as easily go in either direction.
A good wild-animal welfare intervention is persistent and reversible: that is, it sticks around without us having to do anything active to maintain it, but if we decide it’s a bad idea we can shut it down quickly. Obviously, persistence and reversibility trade off, but some potential interventions are both persistent and reversible. For example, avoiding irreversible interventions like climate change or extinction is both persistent and reversible, and so are many uses of gene drives. (Summary yoinked from Ozy)
We need a lot of brainpower on this problem. In any universe where AI doesn’t kill us all, we want to make sure all sentient life is having a good time. The problem of how AI affects animals is happening on large scales already, even with just consumers using LLMs. We need to address it. There are a huge number of people working on technical alignment, but only one tiny org doing direct work on alignment for animals. This avenue of work is important in its own right, but there may also be an argument that this line of work will help in getting AI to not kill us as well. Animals are a subset of sentient beings, and we will see in real time how alignment is playing out as all these animals are hugely affected.
Discussion Questions
These should be taken as starting points for guiding discussion, rather than an agenda.
What is your current stance on and extent of support for animal welfare cause areas? More broadly, what is inside and outside of your moral circle currently? How did the readings challenge or reinforce your existing views on animal welfare, if at all?
If we accept the argument that we should expand our moral circle to include a wider range of sentient beings, what practical changes, if any, should we make in our personal lives and as a society? How might this affect one's dietary choices, consumer habits, political priorities, and broader social norms around the treatment of animals?
The idea of intervening in nature to reduce wild animal suffering is controversial, even among animal advocates. What are your intuitions about the desirability and feasibility of such interventions? If you had infinite energy and resources and a perfect understanding of biology and ecosystem dynamics, what do you think your ideal solution looks like?
Tomasik argues that while we don't have sufficient knowledge or resources to work on wild animal suffering today, it's important to spread the meme so that if we ever end up staggeringly resource-rich and knowledgeable as a species, we will dedicate some resources to working on this issue.
How do you feel about this kind of argument, in general?
Do you know of any historical cases of communities/societies/nations acknowledging an issue that they don't feel like they can solve at their current technological/wealth level? How did that go for them?
Most people find rescuing one deer from a wolf admirable and sterilizing every wolf monstrous. Is this an inconsistency?
Meet at the Davenport Branch of the Toronto Public Library (1246 Shaw St) at 1:50 pm. We'll leave for my place at 2:00 pm sharp, so try not to be late.
If you've been around a few times and know the address, feel free to go directly to my house for 2pm.
Vegan snacks provided.
If you think you are >75% likely to come, please RSVP. If you haven't RSVPed but you would still like to come day-of, please come anyways!
Discussion Topic
Waterline is a new series of rationalist and EA events in Toronto. Events are biweekly, and are designed to focus on a broader and more principles-first set of EA topics to complement Trajectory Labs' AI safety events.
This week, we'll be discussing the neglected and currently intractable(?) cause area of wild animal suffering.
Please note that the readings have fairly explicit text and image depictions of animal suffering. If you find discussion of animal suffering to be very distressing, this meetup may not be for you and you might want to just catch us at the next one.
Readings
Please complete these before the meetup and come prepared to discuss them.
Optional:
Please read as many of these as you like.
Discussion Questions
These should be taken as starting points for guiding discussion, rather than an agenda.
Posted on: