Announcing the Publication of Animal Liberation Now

Thank you for your comment. I appreciate that from you especially as someone with a specialized focus on AI safety. 

Sometimes, I have the impression that perhaps most of those working in AI safety perceive only a small minority among themselves in the field as seriously considering the risk of adverse impacts on non-human life from advancing AI. I suspect it might even be a majority of those working in AI safety who afford some level of consideration to what impact advancing AI may have on other lifeforms. If that's true, it may not be common knowledge only because some working in AI safety are too shy to opine based in a concern they won't be taken seriously by their peers. 

I'm not aware of any survey data that substantiates with precision either way the extent to which the welfare of non-human lifeforms may be a priority for those working in AI safety. Yet your comment here increases even more the visibility of the endorsement of cross-cause collaboration in EA. It can inspire others convinced of the same to speak up in ways catalyzing the positive feedback loop of such collaboration. 

Given how much you care about this and how much it seems like you may still be gaining awareness of the intersection between animal welfare and AI safety, I'll inform you of how an independent cause at that intersection has been gradually growing in the last several years.

David Pearce, Brian Tomasik and Andres Emilsson are three utilitarians who perhaps more than any others have for almost 20 years have inspired the launch of longtermist animal welfare as its own field. That has resulted in at least a few dozen researchers dedicated full time to that effort across a few organizations, perhaps most prominently at Rethink Priorities, and the Center for Long-Term Risk, as research institutes. 

Among those in AI safety in the Bay Area whose work you may be more familiar with, Buck Shlegeris is one of the biggest proponent of this approach. Rob Bensinger, Andrew Critch and Nate Soares are two other prominent individuals who've publicly expressed their appreciation of others doing this work.

I don't mention all this with an expectation you should take any significant amount of time away from your specialized work in AI safety to dive deeply into learning about this other research. I only figure you'd appreciate knowing the names of some individual researchers and also organizations for you or your curious peers to learn more when you might have spare time for that. 

being as overwhelmingly correct about something as EA is on animal welfare.

I identify with the EA animal welfare cause area, and I believe I can claim to "come from" the farmed animal side of EA animal welfare. And I have to say that EA is still not yet "correct enough" about wild animal welfare - too little attention and resources relatively and absolutely.

But also, to be fair, EA is already one of the rare communities in the world, if not the THE community, that cares the most about wild animal welfare. So maybe EA is still more correct (or less wrong) than most others when it comes to wild animal welfare.

I'm really glad that this new book can focus on the last ~50 years of sociological changes since the last one; detailed research the phenomena of large numbers of people being slow to update their thinking on easily-provable moral matters is broadly applicable to global health and existential risk as well.

This is an excellent point. Not that this statement necessarily implies ignorance of other recent developments in animal welfare research originating in effective altruism, though sociology is far from the only field from which dramatic transformations in animal welfare should be appreciated.

 It has often been hard to categorize much of the animal welfare research out of the EA community because it is always interdisciplinary, often abstract and yet, at the same time, narrowly applied. Yet some of the most significant developments in research analysis relevant to animal welfare in fields from economics to neurobiology have originated from within EA. I'll highlight Rethink Priorities as a leading research organization in that domain.

I've done a lot of reading about Soft Power, how elites around the world are attracted to things that are actually good, like freedom of speech and science[...]meanwhile, hard power like military force and economic influence systematically repels elites.

The best historical example of this I'm aware of is how scientists from ethnically Jewish backgrounds fled Germany in the 1930s for the United States in the face of persecution for propagating "Jewish science." The proof of the importance of prioritizing the pursuit of soft power as much as the pursuit of hard power is how because of that the US went on to gain more hard power than every other country anyway, never mind just Germany. The world shouldn't be such that the fruitful pursuit of knowledge is driven by the pursuit of power by one country to gain advantages over others. For as long as the world is stuck that way, it's better for the rest of us when countries are incentivized to advance knowledge for more humane ends. 

I just wish there was a way to scale it up more effectively e.g. at university EA groups doing outreach.

The last few months have been relatively misfortunate for the entire effective altruism community, though they've been especially unfortunate for the intersection of animal welfare and EA. A decade's worth of work on animal welfare out of EA is finally coming to fruition, as evidenced through Singer writing this new book, at the same time the EA community as a whole is trying to recover from the worst crises in the history of its own movement. This has resulted in a responsible slowdown in EA community-building to ensure the fidelity of future efforts to grow the movement, though animal advocates are tragically unable to rely on that infrastructure at the time we'd look to it most. The question of how effective animal advocacy as a field ought to reorient in light of all that is still being answered, though it's appreciated you're acknowledging that as a solvable challenge we face.

actually agree on the template!