I think this post is overall great, even though I favour animal over global health stuff right now, but doing stuff just for the optics feels really sleazy and naive utilitarian to me. 

"Right now, if humans and farmed animals are considered together, total global welfare may be declining at increasing speed, and could already be well below zero."  Given that there are way more wild animals than farmed animals, this is probably determined by whether wild animal lives are net negative, and how much humans are reducing their population overall, right? 

Most serious EA analysis I've seen seems to conclude helping animals is much more effective (i.e. Rethink Priorities work for example), so that's the view I currently weakly hold. Also, helping humans harms animals via the meat eater problem, reducing its value on meat, but there is no large effect the other way. Very open to changing my mind.

Suggests Newsom is going to be very hostile to any legislation that is designed to deal with X-risk concerns, and that he, frankly thinks they are bullshit. (I personally am also pretty skeptical of X-risk from AI, but I don't want nothing done given how bad the risk would be if it did manifest.) 

Probably far beyond as well, right? There's nothing distinctive about EA projects that make them [EDIT: more] subject to potential far future bad consequences we don't know about. And even (sane) non-consequentialists should care about consequences amongst other things, even if they don't care only about consequences. 

I still don't think you have  posted anything from the bill which clearly shows that you only get sued if A) [you fail to follow precautions and cause critical harms], but not if B) [you fail to follow precautions the bill says are designed to prevent critical harms, and some loss of life occurs]. In both cases you could reasonably characterise it as "you fail to follow precautions the bill says are designed to prevent critical harms" and hence "violate" the "chapter". 

Wait, what makes PauseAI "not EA" exactly? I'm extremely surprised to hear that claim: people post promoting it on here, it has clear connections to a central EA goal, a founder with a background in EA. It might represent a minority view in the community, but so does "we should prioritise animal welfare above X-risk and development", but I've never thought of people who think that as "not EA". 

I strongly disagree that Lincoln was correct to prioritize the union over ending slavery (though remember that this was when he was facing a risk of a massive war, a war which when it did break out killed hundreds of thousands). For one thing he probably wasn't doing that to preserve "freedom" in some universalist sense after cost benefit analysis, but rather because he valued US nationalism over Black lives. But I still think this is a little simplistic. In the late 18th century, many, probably most countries and cultures in the world either had slavery internally, or used slavery as part of a colonial Empire. For example, slavery was widepsread in Africa internally, many European countries had empires that used slave labour, Arabs had a large slave trade in East Africa, the Mughals sold slaves from India, and if you pick up the great 18th century Chinese novel The Story of the Stone, you'll find many characters are slaves. Meanwhile, the founding ideals of the US were unusually liberal and egalitarian relative to the vast majority of places at the time, and this probably did effect the internal experience of the average US citizen. The US reached a relatively expanded franchise with many working class male citizens able to vote far before almost anywhere else. So the US was not exceptional in its support for slavery or colonialist expansion (against Native Americans), but it was exceptional in its levels of internal (relative) liberal democracy. I think its plausible that on net the existence of the US therefore advanced the cause of "freedom" in some sense.  Moving forward, it seems plausible that overall having the world's largest and most powerful country be a liberal democracy has plausibly advanced the cause of liberal democracy overall, and the US is primarily responsible for the fact that German and Japan, two other major powers, are liberal democracies. Against that, you can point to the fact that the US has certainly supported dictatorship when it's suited it, or when it's been in the private interests of US businesses (particularly egregiously in Guatemala was genuinely genocidal results*). But there are also plenty places where the US really has supported democracy (i.e. in the former socialist states of Eastern Europe), so I don't think this overcomes the prior that having the world's most powerful and one of its richest nations, with the dominant popular culture, be a liberal democracy was good for freedom overall. Washington and the other revolutionaries plausibly bear a fair amount of responsibility for this. And in particular, Washington's decision to leave power willingly, when he probably could have carried on being re-elected as a war hero until he died probably did a lot to consolidate democracy (such as it was) at the time. Of course, those founders who DID oppose slavery are much more unambiguously admirable. 


*More people should know about this, it was genuinely hideously evil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide

I feel like this answer to the problem is easily forgotten by me, and probably a lot of similar-minded people who post here, because it's not a clever, principled philosophical solution. But on reflection, it sounds quite reasonable! 

This doesn't really solve the problem, but most animal suffering is likely not in factory farms but in nature, so getting rid of humans isn't necessarily net good for animals. (To be clear, I am strongly against murdering humans even if it is net good for animals.)