Devon Fritz🔸

COO at Ambitious Impact (Charity Entrepreneurship). I’ve taken the 🔸10% Pledge (@10percentpledge) to give to effective charities.

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

@MichaelAArouet 🤣

[Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin]

E/acc's Beff Jezos thinks we should build AGI faster because life accelerates entropy production, and that's supposedly good. 🧵

This is genuinely unprecedented in moral philosophy. Nobody – not Nietzsche, not the transhumanists, not even cosmic pessimists – ever argued that producing disorder faster is the moral good.

This hunger to "convert free energy into entropy" is really the first attempt in history to ground ethics in the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

By its logic, forest fires are morally superior to forests. Nuclear weapons produce a burst of moral value. A star that goes supernova tomorrow beats it continuing to burn steadily for years.

It's so weird that the opposite, preserving pockets of order and complexity for as long as possible, sounds as attractive or more so (though itself leads to perverse outcomes).

The physicists like Jeremy England who studied life and free energy intended only to describe what was happening, never claim it was the moral good.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics describes what does happen, not what should happen. This is-ought gap is philosophy 101.

(Note the universe will reach a maximum entropy state once the last black holes evaporate no matter what we do. Why our goal should be to make it happen a little sooner is beyond me.)

What's going on is simple enough: some SV tech accelerationists wanted their views to sound grounded in fundamental physics so they grabbed some technical terms from a thermodynamics textbook to propose a moral framework so bizarre people are too confused to see what it's really claiming.

If you want to argue for rapid AI development, just make the actual arguments: economic growth, international competition, solving diseases, or just sheer personal excitement to see what happens.

Don't pretend your AI startup is about the heat death of the universe.

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

We did it! Dwarkesh's fundraiser raised $2M+ for high impact work to end the worst abuses of factory farming.

I'm so grateful for everyone who contributed. It's a great reminder of how many people want to help end the horrors of factory farming.

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

@redbites @itsme_urstruly I am usually open about people’s tastes but Lost is instablock material.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

We’ve raised $2,027,084 for @farmkind_giving (with matching).

This will improve the lives of over 20 million animals. We’ve increased the global funding for farmed animal welfare by 1%. That’s crazy - the world is really big place!

Thank you all so much for the incredible generosity!

The point of this podcast was not to fundraise for the cause. Originally, it was just to understand how we can reduce (and eventually eliminate) this massive source of unnecessary suffering in the world: close to 100 billion land animals are factory farmed every year.

But it was astounding to learn about how much low-hanging fruit there is to improve the lives of billions of animals (for example, $1 spent on securing corporate commitments against battery cages corresponds to 10 years of animal well-being improved).

There’s <$200M/year of smart philanthropic money spent on this problem globally. Compare that to global health ($50b+/year) or climate change ($15b+/year). The ratio is $1 donated : 40,000 animals.

Even though this particular match has been fully saturated, the ability to have an impact here is truly shocking. There are many individual readers of this tweet who have the opportunity to increase the amount of smart funding our entire civilization dedicates to this issue by double or triple digit percentages.

For those considering contributing much more, please get in touch with [email protected].

Again, thank you so much to everyone who contributed!

Some highlights from the group that helped us cross the $2 million finish line:

@scottgray76: $50,000
@hanrelan: $50,000
@DKokotajlo: $50,000
Anonymous: $50,000
@garymigu: $10,000
Anonymous: $10,082
Anonymous: $10,000
@tszzl: $5,000
@ben_d_norman: $3,791
@a_nnawang: $3,000
@rgblong: $1,500
@jamesnelmore: $1,100
@incredutility: $1,000
@MillsxArt: $1,000
@NathanCalvin: $1,000
@Will_Hackspeare: $1,000
@coulthardm: $1,000
@nsthorat: $1,000
@ericjmichaud: $1,000

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

@growing_daniel @newmachines Weird theory of change.

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

This is so, so good.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

A group of generous donors have pledged to match ANOTHER $500,000 of donations for @farmkind_giving. Huge thanks to:

@seemaychou & @JedMcCaleb: $250,000
@gauravkapadia: $100,000
@ArielNessel: $50,000 (2nd donation)
@tylermaule: $50,000
The Dahna Foundation: $50,000

If we saturate this next round of matching, we’ll have raised over $2,000,000. This amount would likely improve the lives of over 20 million animals!

Again, it's hard to overstate how neglected this area is, and how crazy cheap the interventions that have spared hundreds of millions of animals from painful lives have been: https://t.co/KWa3EzYW8O

I also want to thank everyone who helped saturate the previous matches. A few highlights:

Anonymous: $13,000
@v_maini: $10,000
Anonymous: $10,000
@d_m_ziegler: $5,000
Nick Bostrom: $5,000
Anonymous: $5,000
Anonymous: $5,000
@tessybarton: $3,000
@idavidrein: $3,000
@CFGeek: $2,500
@silas_strawn: $2,000
@tysheaff: $2,000
Anonymous: $2,000
Alexa Stone Fund (@tyler_m_john): $1,500
@Vincessant_: $1,500
@ravioli817: $1,500
@michaeljelly: $1,500
@_sholtodouglas: $1,000 (2nd donation)
@verdadcap: $1,000
@jackm2003: $1,000
@RosieCampbell: $1,000
@sevdeawesome: $1,000
@gauravsett: $1,000

Link to donate below. DM me if you donate over 1k.

We've already raised over $1.35 million dollars! With donation matching, we just need $300k in contributions to reach $2 million!

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

@jeremymstamper What are the odds that two of you are 97 IQ? One in a million?

[Daniel Eth (yes, Eth is my actual last name) @daniel_271828]

Also, strong +1 to this point

[Giving What We Can 🔸 @givingwhatwecan]

10,000 people across the globe have now taken the 🔸10% Pledge 🚀

&gt; $300M already donated
&gt; $1B lifetime committed
10,000 people from 116 countries 🌐

This is a movement of action and optimism, funding work to solve the world’s most pressing problems 🔥

https://t.co/TEwmZcwOKi

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

@___frye See @bryan_caplan and eating meat.

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

@hazhubble @paulg Scrolled down hoping to see a @paulg reply saying "I never said that" and was let down.

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

“the train will be too noisy for my dead father” is probably the funniest NIMBY argument I’ve ever heard

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

@AndyMasley I just deleted some emails with the biggest attachments. #doingmypart

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

The internet unites in outrage when someone slaughters a majestic jungle animal.

Yet billions of sentient, emotionally and intellectually complex animals are tortured by industrialized factory farms. Here's @dwarkesh_sp with @Lewis_Bollard on how to help improve conditions:

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

People don’t appreciate how effective corporate campaigns have been on animal welfare.

As opposed to policy change (often gets gridlocked by the meat industry) or moonshot cultivated meat tech (might be decades away from being competitive).

This is a pro-market story! We can improve the lives of billions of animals by convincing food companies that consumers would prefer them to use meat from farms with marginally more expensive but far lower suffering practices.

@Lewis_Bollard: US has gone from less than 10% cage-free to 47% cage-free. This transition has already spared over 200 million hens A YEAR from these battery cages.”

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

@gabriel1 There are way more mundane reasons that this could be true and you pick ones that are not generous to other people.

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

@robinhanson I don't think most people care about this at all if you take their revealed preferences as the real indicator of concern.

Most could e.g. give 10% of their income to the poorest 10% of earners and yet almost no one does this.

[Devon Fritz🔸 @fritzdev]

@Austen People are still not lean startuping??