Saul Munn

@ Manifest, Manifund, OPTIC
621 karmaJoined Pursuing an undergraduate degreeWorking (0-5 years)
saulmunn.com

Comments
70

i’ll add $250, with exactly the same commentary as austin :)

to the extent that others are also interested in contributing to the prize pool, you might consider making a manifund page. if you’re not sure how to do this or just want help getting started, let me (or austin/rachel) know!

also, you might adjust the “prize pool” amount at the top of the metaculus page — it currently reads “$0.”

epistemic status: extremely quickly written thoughts, haven't thought these through deeply, these are mostly vibes. i spent 10 minutes writing this out. i do not cite sources.

  • seems like non-human animals are suffering much more than humans, both in quantity of beings suffering & extent of suffering per being
    • it might be that non-human animals are less morally valuable than humans — i think i buy into this to some extent, but, like, you'd have to buy into this to a ridiculously extreme extent to think that humans are suffering more than non-human animals in aggregate
  • seems like animal welfare has been pretty tractable — in-particular, e.g. shrimp or insect welfare, where magnitudinal differences
  • it seems like there's currently substantially more of a global focus (in terms of $ for sure, but also in terms of general vibes) on global health than on animal welfare, even holding suffering between the two groups constant
  • i generally feel pretty cautious about expanding into new(er) causes, for epistemic modesty reasons (for both empirical & moral uncertainty reasons)
    • this is particularly true for the sub-cause-areas within animal welfare that seem most promising, like shrimp & insect welfare as well as wild animal welfare
    • this is what's preventing me from moving the dial ~all the way to the right
  • some things this question doesn't take into acct:
    • within each of these areas, how is the $100mm being spent?
    • how would other funders react to this? would e.g. some other funder pull out of [cause] because $100mm just appeared?
    • etc — though i don't think that these questions are particularly relevant to the debate
  • some cruxes around which i have the most uncertainty:
    • extent to which there continue to be tractable interventions in AW (compared to GH)
    • extent to which i believe that non-human lives have moral significance
    • probably some others that i'm not thinking of

i'd be curious to see the results of e.g. focus groups on this — i'm just now realizing how awful of a name "lab grown meat" is, re: the connotations.

There has been a lot of discussion of this, some studies were done on different names

could you link to a few of the discussions & studies?

thanks for the response!

looks like the link in the footnotes is private. maybe there’s a public version you could share?

re: the rest — makes sense. 1%-5% doesn’t seem crazy to me, i think i would’ve “made up” 0.5%-2%, and these aren’t way off.

It looks to me that forecasting was 1 - 5% of the Democrats dropping Biden from their ticket.

curious where you're getting this from?

thanks, this has cleared things up quite a bit for me. i edited my comment to reflect it!

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