This makes me think that countries who as of yet don't have an entrenched factory farming lobby/industry would benefit advocacy groups similar to Shrimp Welfare Project (work in the reverent countries with stakeholders to improve the wellbeing of farmed animals).
I began wondering if any org was approaching this similar to SWP. There seem to be two EA groups working on this:
It would have made sense for there to be a bit more discussion about ethical side-constraints, but including transparency in the list of core principles would honestly be just weird because transparency isn't distinctly EA. Beyond that, the importance of transparency is significantly complicated by the concept of infohazards in areas like biohazards or AI safety. I really don't see it as CEA's role to take a side in these debates. I think it makes sense for CEA to embrace transparency as a key organisational value, but it's not a core principle of EA in general and we should accept that different orgs will occupy different positions on the spectrum.
I agree that absolute transparency is not ideal. That said, there is a version of transparency (i.e 'reasoning transparency') that is a somewhat distinct EA value.
is filled with bizarre factual errors, one of which was so egregious that it merited a connection.
Small nitpick; this is a typo or 'connection' is something I'm not familiar with in this context.
I am going to engage less with EA forum/LW as a result of this and a few similar interactions, and I am especially going to be more hesitant to be critical of EA/LW sacred cows.
This makes me sad as I enjoy reading your comments and find them insightful. That said, I understand and support your reasoning. I feel as though some amount of "mistake mindset" has disappeared a little in the two years I've been reading the forum.
Thanks for sharing your post!
Pharmaceutical companies won't go and release hundreds of dud or dangerous drugs just because they can. That would ruin their brand and shut down their business.
I briefly skimmed through the wikipedia list of withdrawn drugs. I looked at those withdrawn in the US or worldwide since 2007 (only eleven).
As far as I could tell (and I easily could have missed something) none of the associated pharma companies seem to have been financially ruined. The only ones who no longer existed (Wyeth and Celltech) were bought out by other pharma companies for princely sums (Wyeth by Pfizer for $68billion and Celltech by UCB for £1.5billion) before the recalls happened.
I guess doesn't seem clear to me that pharma companies face threatening risks of ruining their brands and shutting down their business if they produce more inefficient or even more dangerous drugs than already. Even thalidomide didn't destroy its parent company (Grünenthal).
I'm sure someone who knows more can correct me, but the only example of this happening in recent times Purdue Pharma.
Can you point to specific cases of that happening? I haven't seen this happen before. My sense is that most people who quote Rethinks moral weights project are familiar with the limitations.
Can you say more on this?