Reddit user blueshoesrcool discovered that Effective Ventures (the umbrella organization for the Centre for Effective Altruism, 80000 hours, GWWC, etc) has missed its charity reporting deadline by 27 days.

Given that there's already a regulatory inquiry into Effective Ventures Foundation, maybe someone should look into this.

The Netherlands passed a law that would ban factory farming.

It was introduced by the Party for the Animals  and passed in 2021. However, it only passed because the government had just fallen and the senate was distracted by passing covid laws, which meant they were very busy and didn't have a debate about it. Since the law is rather vague there's a good chance it wouldn't have passed without the covid crisis.

It was supposed to start this year, but the minister of agriculture has decided he will straight up ignore the law . The current government is not in favor of this law and so they're looking at ways to circumvent it.

It's very unusual for the Dutch government to ignore laws, so they might get sued by animal rights activists. I expect they will introduce a new law rather quickly that repeals this ban, but the fact that it passed at all and that this will now become a big issue in the news is very promising for the 116 million Dutch farm animals.

The results of the Dutch provincial elections are in. The Party for the Animals (the party that banned factory farming, but people ignored it) has increased its number of seats in the senate from 3 to 4 (out of 75).

Before you start cheering I should mention that the Farmer–Citizen Movement (who are very conservative when it comes to animal rights) have burst onto the scene with 16 seats (making them the largest party).

With farming and livestock becoming a hot button issue in the Netherlands there's a chance that animal rights will now become a polarizing issue, with a lot of people who previously didn't think about it becoming explicitly for or against expanding animal rights. While this would increase the amount of vegetarians and vegans, it remains to be seen if this will turn out positive for animal welfare overall.

Jobst and I want to improve AI-safety by supplementing RLHF with a consensus generating voting system. Last week we did a small experiment at a conference. Here is the poster we used to explain this idea to the attendants:

Here's the PDF

After years of using this forum I started to have problems with my writings not appearing on the frontpage and the mods not answering my messages the day I started criticizing EA.

This may very well be a coincidence in which case I genuinely apologize for the implied accusal. I still think it's important to mention it in case other people are having the same problem.

EDIT: After commenting this I suddenly lost a lot of karma due to downvotes:

Beauty vs Happiness Thought Experiment

Say a genie were to give you the choice between:

1) Creating a stunningly beautiful world that is uninhabited and won’t influence sentient beings in any way or 2) Not creating it.

In addition, both the genie’s and your memories of this event are immediately erased once you make the choice, so no one knows about this world and you cannot derive happiness from the memory.

Would you choose option one or two?
 

I would choose option one, because I prefer a more beautiful universe to an uglier one (even if no one experiences it). This forms an argument against classic utilitarianism.

Classic Utilitarianism says that I’m wrong. The choice doesn’t create any happiness, only beauty. This means that, according to classic utilitarianism, I should have no preferences between the two options.
 

There are several moral theories that do allow you to prefer option one. One of which is preference utilitarianism which states that it’s okay to have preferences that don’t bottom out in happiness. For this reason, I find preference utilitarianism more persuasive than classic utilitarianism.

A possible counterargument would be that the new world isn't really beautiful since no one experiences it. Here we have a disagreement over whether beauty needs to be experienced to even exist.

A third way of looking at this thought experiment would be through the lens of value uncertainty. Through this lens, it does make sense to pick option one. Even if you have a thousand times more credence in the theory that happiness is the arbiter of value, the fact that no happiness is created either way leaves the door open for your tiny credence that beauty might be the arbiter of value. Value uncertainty suggests that you take the first option, just in case.

EDIT: Biden Backs $8 Billion Alaska Oil Project. I don't know why someone gave this shortform an immediate -9 downvote, but for those EAs that still care about climate change, thank you.

A massive and controversial new oil production project in Alaska is under review by the US Department of the Interior.

ConocoPhillips' massive Willow Project would be a climate disaster, locking in at least 30 years of fossil fuel production on sensitive Arctic ecosystems near Indigenous communities. It would unleash high levels of pollution - roughly the equivalent of 66-76 coal plants worth of carbon to the air - and directly undermine President Biden's climate goals.

The Biden administration has the power to stop this massive fossil fuel development. Click here to send them a letter (2 minutes).