I am having a hard time following this. We aren't, to my knowledge, asking people whose loved ones are at significant risk of dying of malaria and TB for money. AFAIK, we're not asking them to prioritize animal welfare over their loved ones in non-finamcial ways either. Could you explain what specifically we're asking of this class of people?
Are we not discussing the situation with them? What about a Rawlsian veil of ignorance? A social contract? If these people were in the same room with you, a mother holding her dying child in her arms, and you were holding a community meeting about whether to save her child or save a cage with some chickens in it... wouldn't she be expected to have a right to at least argue in favor of her child's life?
The very fact that humans are able to be part of the discussion is in fact an important argument in favor of prioritizing the needs of humans.
I feel like animal welfare is based on incorrect philosophical arguments. I do not think that animals (sentient) suffer in the same sense that humans (sapient) suffer. I do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering. They are non-commensurate. For more detail, see here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Htu55gzoiYHS6TREB/sentience-matters?commentId=wusCgxN9qK8HzLAiw In accordance with this view, I argue that not a single dollar should be spent on animal suffering while there is still a single human at risk of dying from malnourishment or preventable disease.
Aside from this argument, I believe there is a separate argument from urgency. I think that the immediate concerns of AI outweigh any possible impact from any spending on animal suffering. The continued existence of humanity and the prevention of suffering of sapient digital beings are both at a hinge in history, where the effort put into these causes now matters far more than the non-urgent cause of animal suffering. Animal suffering is increasing only relatively slowly, whereas these other causes may explode in importance in a matter of a few months. No sense in reupholstering the backseat of your car while your car is speeding down a steep mountain road with no one at the wheel...
I think this level of incommensurability is both contradictory with folk ethics(most people I speak with agree that preventing animal torture is more important than preventing mild human headache) and it's a pretty confident view that assigns a very low weight to the animals' interests. Do you think our reasoning in moral philosophy and understanding of animal biology is reliable enough to be that confident?
I feel like animal welfare is based on incorrect philosophical arguments. I do not think that animals (sentient) suffer in the same sense that humans (sapient) suffer. I do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering. They are non-commensurate. For more detail, see here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Htu55gzoiYHS6TREB/sentience-matters?commentId=wusCgxN9qK8HzLAiw In accordance with this view, I argue that not a single dollar should be spent on animal suffering while there is still a single human at risk of dying from malnourishment or preventable disease.
Aside from this argument, I believe there is a separate argument from urgency. I think that the immediate concerns of AI outweigh any possible impact from any spending on animal suffering. The continued existence of humanity and the prevention of suffering of sapient digital beings are both at a hinge in history, where the effort put into these causes now matters far more than the non-urgent cause of animal suffering. Animal suffering is increasing only relatively slowly, whereas these other causes may explode in importance in a matter of a few months. No sense in reupholstering the backseat of your car while your car is speeding down a steep mountain road with no one at the wheel...
Laura Duffy's analyses of this comes close to my view. On the margin, the question between global health charity and animal charity is something like GiveWell top charities *e.g. AMF) vs. ACE top charity (e.g. The Humane League), which is something like "Would you rather save 1 DALY or 40 years of hens from cages to cage-free.
I'm pretty split between the two and my donation habits reflect this; however, I don't think we know how to scale effective animal interventions past the current funding gaps in the low $10ms. For Global health, we do.
Edit: Learned that Laura has posted more on this since we last talked! Her posts seem to use RP's human:animal welfare moral weight comparisons, which place less compariative weight to human suffering than I do!
Not thinking very hard. I think it's more likely to be an overestimate of the necessary disparity than an underestimate.
There are about 500m humans in tractably dire straits, so if there were 500t animals in an equivalently bad situation, you might be very naĂŻvely indifferent between intervening on one vs the other at a million to one. 500t is probably an oom too high if we're not counting insects and several ooms too low if we are.
I think the delta for helping animals (life of intense suffering -> non-existence) is probably higher (they are in a worse situation), tractability is lower, but neglectedness is way higher such that careful interventions might create compounding benefits in the future in a way I don't think is very likely in global health given how established the field is.
I think of this question mostly in terms of the trajectory I think this nudges us towards. It feels like there's something of a hierarchy of needs for humanity as a whole, and getting out of the zone where we have extreme poverty feels like the right first step, in a way that makes me feel more optimistic about wise decision processes being able to rise to the top thereafter.
I'm not certain what current spending looks like; that might make me change my mind here. (I think it's definitely right to start ramping up spending on animal welfare at some point before poverty is entirely eliminated.)
Generally I think that those in richer countries are going to shape the future not those in poorer countries, so I'm not sure I agree with you about "wide decision processes" rising to the top if we end extreme poverty.
For example, if we create AI that causes an existential catastrophe, that is going to be the fault of people in richer countries.
Another example - I am concerned about risks of lock in which could enable mass suffering to persist for a very long time. E.g. we spread to the stars while factory farming is still widespread and so end up spreading factory farming too. Or we create digital sentience while we still don't really care about non-human sentience and so end up creating vast amounts of digital suffering. I can't see how ending poverty in lower income countries is going to reduce these risks which, if they happen, will be the fault of those in richer countries. Furthermore, ending factory farming seems important to widen the moral circle and reduce these risks.
It's fair to point out that the majority has been wrong historically many times. I'm not saying this should be our final decision procedure and to lock in those values. But we need some kind of decision procedure for things, and I find when I'm uncertain, that "asking the audience" or democracy seem like a good way to use the "wisdom of crowds" effect to get a relatively good prior.
I'm actually quite surprised by how quickly and how much that post has been upvoted. This definitely makes me update my priors positively about how receptive the forums are to contrarian viewpoints and civil debate. At least, I'm feeling less negativity than when I wrote that post.
One could also consider the general EA / EA-adjacent sentiment over time as a cross-check on the risk of current groupthink. Of course, later EAs could be responding to better evidence not available to earlier EAs. But I would also consider the possibility of changes in other factors (like perceived status, available funding for EAs, perceived lack of novel opportunities in a mature cause area that has strong interventions with near-limitless room for more funding) playing a major role.
Animal welfare space needs considerably more rigorous research (which should be done, but will cost much less than $100m) before knowing if it includes better investments than the top ones in global health.
The issue with majority opinion is that 500 years ago, the majority would have thought that most of what we do today is crazy.
I mean, even when I was 17, my opinion was close to the majority opinion (in my country), and I certainly wouldn't trust it today, because it was simply uninformed.
The risk of alienating other people is a valid concern. I'd be glad to see research to determine the threshold which would allow to maximise for both reach and impactful donations. Beyond what percentage of donations going to animal welfare will the movement get less traction ? 1% ? 90% ? Will people just not care about the raw numbers and maybe more about something else ?
For the groupthink point, I'm not sure if anything can be done. I'd be glad to read from people who think more donations should go to GHD (they can do it with an anonymous account as well). But your initial post got 21 karma, which makes it in the top 5 comments of the page, so I think there is potential for civil discussion here.
It's fair to point out that the majority has been wrong historically many times. I'm not saying this should be our final decision procedure and to lock in those values. But we need some kind of decision procedure for things, and I find when I'm uncertain, that "asking the audience" or democracy seem like a good way to use the "wisdom of crowds" effect to get a relatively good prior.
I'm actually quite surprised by how quickly and how much that post has been upvoted. This definitely makes me update my priors positively about how receptive the forums are to contrarian viewpoints and civil debate. At least, I'm feeling less negativity than when I wrote that post.
in regards to intelligence, we can question boththe extent to which more neurons are correlated with intelligence and whether more intelligence in fact predicts greater moral weight;
many ways of arguing that more neurons results in more valenced consciousness seem incompatible with our current understanding of how the brain is likely to work; and
there is no straightforward empirical evidence or compelling conceptual arguments indicating that relative differences in neuron counts within or between species reliably predicts welfare relevant functional capacities.
I use neuron counts as a very rough proxy for the information processing complexity of a given organism. I do make some assumptions, like that more sophisticated information processing enables more complex emotional states, things like memory, which compounds suffering across time, and so on.
It makes sense to me that sentience is probably on some kind of continuum, rather than an arbitrary threshold. I place things like photo-diodes on the bottom of this continuum and highly sophisticated minds like humans near the top, but I'll admit I don't have accurate numbers for a "sentience rating".
I hold my views on neuron counts being an acceptable proxy mostly because of what I learned from studying Cognitive Science in undergrad and then doing a Master's Thesis on Neural Networks. This doesn't make me an expert, but it means I formed my own opinions and disagree with the RP post somewhat. I have not had the time to formulate substantive objections in a rebuttal however. Most of my posts on these forums are relatively low-effort.
It’s worth noting that CE does consider cross-cause effects in all the interventions we consider/recommend, including possible animal effects and WAS effects.
I have searched for "animal" in all the 16 reports of CE's global health and development recommendations, and I did not find any discussion that extending human lives would increase the consumption of animals. In contrast, decreasing the birth rate is highlighted as being a positive externality in terms of animal welfare in 3 of the 16 reports:
"A lower birth rate is also associated with fewer CO2 emissions and a gain of welfare points due to averted consumption of animal products" (here).
"Finally we believe this intervention could have important positive externalities on animal welfare. Increasing uptake for contraception and preventing unintended births would reduce family sizes and their overall consumption in animal products. A lifetime of consumption of these products leads to an considerable amount of suffering for animals raised in factory farms. Preventing unintended births therefore indirectly decreases demand for these products, thereby decreasing the number of animals raised for food. We have modeled these effects using CEĚ—s welfare points system in our CEA" (here).
"We found that this intervention has two kinds of externalities. It positively affects climate change, with three tonnes of CO2 emissions per dollar spent. It also positively affects animal welfare, with 377 welfare points gained per dollar spent" (here).
I think CE's reports should mention the negative externalities on farmed animals due to extending human lives, considering CE's reports on family planning discuss the positive externalities on farmed animals due to decreasing fertility.
The last bullet above also illustrates your global health and development recommendations could be net harmful based on your own numbers. I think 100 welfare points (WPs) are roughly as good as averting 1 DALY (because 100 WPs is the maximum total welfare possible), so 377 WP/$ of positive externalities respect around 3.77 DALY/$. This is 379 (= 3.77/0.00994) times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities of 0.00994 DALY/$, i.e. the effects on animals are way larger than those on humans according to CE's report. This claims the effects on animals are positive due to decreasing population size, so it directly follows that saving lives (increasing population size) has negative effects on animals, and the negative effects on animals would be much larger than those on humans (trusting the numbers of the report).
Quick response below as I am limiting my time on the EA forum nowadays. I am far less convinced that life saving interventions are net population creating than I am that family planning decreases it. Written about 10 years ago, but still one of the better pieces on this IMO is David Roodman's report commissioned by GiveWell. In addition, our welfare points are far less certain estimates when compared to our global health estimates. This matters a lot, e.g., I would regress weaker CEAs by over 1 order of magnitude even from the same organization using similar methods, and it could be 3+ orders of magnitude across different orgs and methods. AIM in general is pretty confident e.g. that our best animal charities are not 379x better than a top GiveWell charity even if a first pass CEA might suggest that.
I think for externalities you can get yourself pretty lost down a rabbit hole based on pretty speculative assumptions if you are not careful. We try to think of it a bit like the weight quantitative modeling described here and only include effects that we think are major (e.g. 10%+ effect after uncertainty adjustments on the total impact). We also try to take into account what effects we expect founders considering these ideas would most likely consider to be decision relevant for them.
In general I think we aim to be more modest about moral estimates (particularly when they are uncertain or hotly debated) and try to recommend the peak intervention across different cause areas without making a final verdict. I also think this call in our case does not reduce our impact as there are pretty natural caps to every cause area, e.g., I do not think the animal movement could effectively absorbed 10 new charities a year anyways.
Some thoughts on what The Unjournal (unjournal.org) can offer, cf existing EA-aligned research orgs (naturally, there are pros and cons)
... both in terms of defining and assessing the 'pivotal questions/claims', and in evaluating specific research findings that most inform these.
Non-EA-aligned expertise and engagement: We can offer mainstream (not-EA aligned) feedback and evaluation, consulting experts who might not normally come into this orbit. We can help engage non-EA academics in the priorities and considerations relevant to EAs and EA-adjacent orgs. This can leverage the tremendous academic/government infrastructure to increase the relevant research base. Our processes can provide 'outside the EA bubble' feedback and perhaps measure/build the credibility of EA-aligned work.
Depth and focus on specific research and research findings: Many EA ~research orgs focus on shallow research and comms. Some build models of value and cost-effectiveness targeted to EA priorities and 'axiology'. In contrast, Unjournal expert evaluations can dig deeply into the credibility of specific findings/claims that may be pivotal to these models.
Publicity, fostering public feedback and communication: The Unjournal is building systems for publishing and promoting our evaluations. We work to link these to the scholarly/bibliometric tools and measures people are familiar with. We hope this generates further feedback, public discussion, research, and application of this research.
I don't know. Certainly just parroting them is wrong. I just think we should give some weight to majority opinion, as it represents an aggregate of many different human experiences that seem to have aligned together and found common ground.
Also, a lot of my worry is not so much that EAs might be wrong, so much as that if our views diverge too strongly from popular opinion, we run the risk of things like negative media coverage ("oh look, those EA cultists are misanthropic too"), and we also are less likely to have successful outreach to people outside of the EA filter bubble.
In particular, we already have a hard time with outreach in China, and this animal welfare emphasis is just going to further alienate them due to cultural differences, as you can probably tell from my Confucius quote. The Analects are taught in school in both China and Taiwan and are a significant influence in Asian societies.
It's also partly a concern that groupthink dynamics might be at play within EA. I noticed that there are many more comments from the animal welfare crowd, and I fear that many of the global health people might be too intellectually intimidated to voice their views at this point, which would be bad for the debate.
The issue with majority opinion is that 500 years ago, the majority would have thought that most of what we do today is crazy.
I mean, even when I was 17, my opinion was close to the majority opinion (in my country), and I certainly wouldn't trust it today, because it was simply uninformed.
The risk of alienating other people is a valid concern. I'd be glad to see research to determine the threshold which would allow to maximise for both reach and impactful donations. Beyond what percentage of donations going to animal welfare will the movement get less traction ? 1% ? 90% ? Will people just not care about the raw numbers and maybe more about something else ?
For the groupthink point, I'm not sure if anything can be done. I'd be glad to read from people who think more donations should go to GHD (they can do it with an anonymous account as well). But your initial post got 21 karma, which makes it in the top 5 comments of the page, so I think there is potential for civil discussion here.
If I drop the lower bound by 4 orders of magnitude, to "between 0.0000002 and 0.87 times", I get a result of 709 Dalys/1000$, which is basically unchanged. Do sufficiently low bounds basically do nothing here?
This parameter is set to a normal distribution (which, unfortunately you can't control) and the normal distribution doesn't change much when you lower the lower bound. A normal distribution between 0.002 and 0.87 is about the same as a normal distribution between 0 and 0.87. (Incidentally, if the distribution were a lognormal distribution with the same range, then the average result would fall halfway between the bounds in terms of orders of magnitude. This would mean cutting the lower bound would have a significant effect. However, the effect would actually raise the effectiveness estimate because it would raise the uncertainty about the precise order of magnitude. The increase of scale outside the 90% confidence range represented by the distribution would more than make up for the lowering of the median.)
Also, this default (if you set it to "constant") is saying that a chicken has around half the capacity weight of humans. Am I right in interpreting this as saying that if you see three chickens who are set to be imprisoned in a cage for a year, and also see a human who is set to be imprisoned in a similarly bad cage for a year, then you should preferentially free the former? Because if so, it might be worth mentioning that the intuitions of the average person is many, many orders of magnitudes lower than these estimates, not just 1-2.
The welfare capacity is supposed to describe the range between the worst and best possible experiences of a species and the numbers we provide are intended to be used as a tool for comparing harms and benefits across species. Still, it is hard to draw direct action-relevant comparisons of the sort that you describe because there are many potential side effects that would need to be considered. You may want to prioritize humans in the same way that you prioritize your family over others, or citizens of the same country over others. The capacities values are not in tension with that. You may also prefer to help humans because of their capacity for art, friendship, etc.
To grasp the concept, I think a better example application would be: if you had to give a human or three chickens a headache for an hour (which they would otherwise spend unproductively) which choice would introduce less harm into the world? Estimating the chickens' range as half that of the human would suggest that it is less bad overall from the perspective of total suffering to give the headache to the human.
The numbers are indeed unintuitive for many people but they were not selected by intuition. We have a fairly complex and thought-out methodology. However, we would love to see alternative principled ways of arriving at less animal-friendly estimates of welfare capacities (or moral weights).
This parameter is set to a normal distribution (which, unfortunately you can't control) and the normal distribution doesn't change much when you lower the lower bound. A normal distribution between 0.002 and 0.87 is about the same as a normal distribution between 0 and 0.87. (Incidentally, if the distribution were a lognormal distribution with the same range, then the average result would fall halfway between the bounds in terms of orders of magnitude. This would mean cutting the lower bound would have a significant effect. However, the effect would actually raise the effectiveness estimate because it would raise the uncertainty about the precise order of magnitude. The increase of scale outside the 90% confidence range represented by the distribution would more than make up for the lowering of the median.)
The upper end of the scale is already at " a chicken's suffering is worth 87% of a humans". I'm assuming that very few people are claiming that a chickens suffering is worth more than a humans. So wouldn't the lognormal distribution be skewed to account for this, meaning that the switch would substantially change the results?
There's not much to add beyond what everyone else has said. I think we would need to be exceedingly confident in particular views about sentience and moral patienthood and capacity for suffering for non-humans to think GHD was better. I very much wish I had written down more of my reasoning from years ago when I was mainly donating to GiveWell, I think I just hadn't thought it over much!
Thanks Vasco, I did vote for animal welfare, so on net I agree with most of your points. On some specific things:
You could donate to organisations improving instead of decreasing the lives of animals
This seems right, and is why I support chicken corporate campaigns which tend to increase welfare. Some reasons this is not quite satisfactory:
It feels a bit like a "helping slaves to live happier lives" intervention rather than "freeing the slaves"
I'm overall uncertain about whether animals lives are generally net positive, rather than strongly thinking they are
I'd still be worried about donations to these things generally growing the AW ecosystem as a side effect (e.g. due to fungibility of donations, training up people who then do work with more suffering-focused assumptions)
But these are just concerns and not deal breakers.
Rethink Priorities' median welfare range for shrimps of 0.031 is 31 k (= 0.031/10^-6) times their welfare range based on neurons of 10^-6. For you to get to this super low welfare range, you would have to justify putting a very low weight in all the other 11 models considered by Rethink Priorities.
I am sufficiently sceptical to put a low weight on the other 11 models (or at least withhold judgement until I've thought it through more). As I mentioned I'm writing a post I'm hoping to publish this week with at least one argument related to this.
The gist of that post will be: it's double counting to consider the 11 other models as separate lines of evidence, and similarly double counting to consider all the individual proxies (e.g. "anxiety-like behaviour" and "fear-like behaviour") as independent evidence within the models.
Many of the proxies (I claim most) collapse to the single factor of "does it behave as though it contains some kind of reinforcement learning system?". This itself may be predictive of sentience, because this is true of humans, but I consider this to be more like one factor, rather than many independent lines of evidence that are counted strongly under many different models.
Because of this (a lot of the proxies looking like side effects of some kind of reinforcement learning system), I would expect we will continue to see these proxies as we look at smaller and smaller animals, and this wouldn't be a big update. I would expect that if you look at a nematode worm for instance, it might show:
"Taste-aversion behaviour": Moving away from a noxious stimulus, or learning that a particular location contains a noxious stimulus
"Depression-like behaviour": Giving up/putting less energy into exploring after repeatedly failing
"Anxiety-like behaviour": Being put on edge or moving more quickly if you expose it to a stimulus which has previously preceded some kind of punishment
"Curiosity-like behaviour": Exploring things even when it has some clearly exploitable resource
It might not show all of these (maybe a nematode is in fact too small, I don't know much about them), but hopefully you get the point that these look like manifestations of the same underlying thing such that observing more of them becomes weak evidence once you have seen a few.
Even if you didn't accept that they were all exactly side effects of "a reinforcement learning type system" (which seems reasonable), still I believe this idea of there being common explanatory factors for different proxies which are not necessarily sentience related should be factored in.
(RP's model does do some non-linear weighting of proxies at various points, but not exactly accounting for this thing... hopefully my longer post will address this).
On the side of neuron counts, I don't think this is particularly strong evidence either. But I see it as evidence on the side of a factor like "their brain looks structurally similar to a human's", vs the factor of "they behave somewhat similarly to a human" for which the proxies are evidence.
To me neither of these lines of evidence ("brain structural similarity" and "behavioural similarity") seems obviously deserving of more weight.
Farmed animals are neglected, so I do not think worldview diversidication would be at risk due to moving 100 M$ to animal welfare
I definitely agree with this, I would only be concerned if we moved almost all funding to animal welfare.
I'd still be worried about donations to these things generally growing the AW ecosystem as a side effect (e.g. due to fungibility of donations, training up people who then do work with more suffering-focused assumptions)
Without more information, I would guess that funding work on improving rather than decreasing animal lives will at the margin incentivise people to follow the funding, and therefore skill up to work on improving rather than decreasing animal lives.
I am sufficiently sceptical to put a low weight on the other 11 models (or at least withhold judgement until I've thought it through more). As I mentioned I'm writing a post I'm hoping to publish this week with at least one argument related to this.
I am looking forward to the post. Thanks for sharing the gist and some details. You may want to share a draft with people from Rethink Priorities.
To me neither of these lines of evidence ("brain structural similarity" and "behavioural similarity") seems obviously deserving of more weight.
My model here is there would be transition to lab grown meat, and moving this transition few years / months / days into the earlier time is the thing that matters most
And also in general, I have really cautious stance on population ethics with respect to animals. And i think most utilitarian approaches handle it by not handling it, just refusing to think about it. And that's really weird. Like, if i donate to animals welfare of chickens? I bet the beneficiaries is next generation of chickens from the one currently existing. I want to donate in such a way as to prevent their existence, not supply them with band aids. I think causing creation of 20% less tortured chicken instead is like insane goal for my donation.
From what I've seen, lab grown meat (or rather cellular meat) will face significant challenges before it can replace meat at a large scale (regulatory, technical, opposition from the industry). I think it's still worth investing into, but even it does work, it will take a long time before getting becoming large scale (unless a super AI solves that for us). Some other alternative proteins might be more promising - such as single cell protein.
While certainly worth donating to, I think other venues are necessary, such as improving the conditions of animals in the decades before alternatives replace everything (hopefully).
Moreover, alternative proteins can't solve everything by themselves. Maybe fish or something else will be super hard to replace. In that case, other venues that help heving people care more about the topic is important - this includes corporate campaigns that shift the overton window, legal campaigns, research into wild animal suffering (population ethics is a tricky one here)...
If cellular meat takes 30 years to take hold, reducing by half the suffering of millions of beings in the meantime is still pretty incredible.
I think of this question mostly in terms of the trajectory I think this nudges us towards. It feels like there's something of a hierarchy of needs for humanity as a whole, and getting out of the zone where we have extreme poverty feels like the right first step, in a way that makes me feel more optimistic about wise decision processes being able to rise to the top thereafter.
I'm not certain what current spending looks like; that might make me change my mind here. (I think it's definitely right to start ramping up spending on animal welfare at some point before poverty is entirely eliminated.)
[trigger warning: allusions to pending US electoral candidate who identified as a Nazi and posted anti-trans content...]
Could you say more about why you think the challenges "largely stem from insufficient communication"? I don't disagree that a better comms strategy would be helpful and probably a prudent use for some of the additional $100MM. But I'm struggling to see how it would be a game-changer for most of the challenges Henry describes.
E.g.,: companies and consumers resist things that cost them money, and they use the political system to seek relief from those things. And no communication strategy is going to convince agricultural industries that EA AW wouldn't be at least a near-existential threat to many of their business lines if it achieved its hopes and dreams. Moreover, changing hearts and minds on such an emotionally laden topic as food would be a massive undertaking -- to give a vaguely relevant data point, PepsiCo spent ~$2B on advertising in the US alone in 2022. And getting people to believe things they don't want to believe on a mass scale is hard even when those things are scientifically true (yes the vaccines work, no they will not improve your 5G reception).
Also, the upside of an affirmative comms strategy is limited when you have provided a determined opponent a bunch of open goals to score on. For instance, right now there's a major candidate for governor of a US state who made a bunch of disturbing comments on an adult entertainment discussion board (e.g., calling himself a Nazi). For a significant portion of the US population, some of the things that are said on this Forum register as more offensive than that (e.g., meat-eater problem, implications that a human life is morally worth less than giving a few thousand shrimps a more humane death).[1]
I don't see how throwing money at developing and executing a better comms plan helps much with those kinds of vulnerabilities. I wouldn't be interested in engaging any more with content about the Nazi-identifying governor; it just wouldn't be worth my time on the very very slim chance further information would update my vote. I expect many people would have a similar reaction when opponents successfully tied EA AW to the meat-eater problem.
I am reporting, not endorsing, this view! I'm using it as an example because I think it's easy for people in/adjacent to the EA bubble to not understand how certain positions may play in (e.g.) the deep South where I grew up.
I guess I would revise my comment to be more modest in its proposition.
One part of what the OP is saying is that increased funding for animal welfare by EA would result in greater pushback against EA in general for putting resources toward something it considers strange or weird or otherwise contrary to their values.
I'm saying that the effect of this "EA is weird for prioritizing Animal Welfare" would probably be less than the effect of the better messaging, communication, and marketing, that the money would enable. So the net effect of more money in animal welfare (assuming prudent communications and marketing spend in the deployment) would be better public perception of EA rather than worse.
You're right that the underlying perceptions and views are unlikely to be adequately addressed even if all the $200 mil was going to marketing, but with a prudent portion of it going there, I would anticipate the net effect on public perception of EA to be positive rather than negative.
Right, I take this to be an implication of our best economic and demographic models (respectively).
I don't know what you mean by "a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions". Whether an intervention has a noticeable short-term effect on these targets? That would seem to address a different question.
I wouldn't expect to be able to identify the particular ripple that occurred in any given case, if that's what you mean. So I wouldn't take the failure to identify a particular ripple as evidence that there are no ripple effects. If there are good reasons to reject the standard models, I'd expect that to emerge in the debates over those macro models, not through micro evidence from RCTs or the like.
Right, I take this to be an implication of our best economic and demographic models (respectively).
Do you think we can trust the predictions of such models over more than a few decades? It looks like increasing population increases longterm income per capita, but not even this is clear (the conclusion relies on extrapolating historical trends, but it is unclear these will hold over long timeframes).
I don't know what you mean by "a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions". Whether an intervention has a noticeable short-term effect on these targets? That would seem to address a different question.
Yes. I see it is a different question. No difference between the treatment and control group after a few decades could be explained by the benefits spilling over to people outside those groups. However, an increasing population or income gap between the treatment and control group would still be evidence for increasing effects, so a decreasing population or income gap is also evidence againt increasing effects.
We need to make sure that job applications are assessed blindly at most stages in the application to avoid bias.
My understanding is that several places that have tried blinding found that this decreased the diversity of their hiring. Something to be cautious about!
I'm commenting on this a few years late, but for anyone reading this who wants to learn more, here is an excerpt from the book DEI Deconstructed, by Lily Zheng, along with a few references:
The “standard” best practice with resumes in the DEI space is to anonymize them, but I strongly advise caution. Proponents of resume anonymization argue that because the presence of gender and racial cues from names or hobbies can lead to hiring discrimination due to bias,24 removing this information will interrupt it. They advocate for names, hobbies, profile pictures, and any other identifying information to be scrubbed from resumes and in the hiring process. However, research has documented unintended adverse consequences of resume anonymization: namely, that “neutral” characteristics that candidates from disadvantaged communities might face, like unemployment gaps, are perceived even more negatively when identifying information is removed. Additionally, companies that anonymize resumes tend to be more progressive and care more about supporting people’s identities—increasing the damage done when identity is removed from the process. As a result, for the companies that deploy it, anonymization can backfire and result in even greater demographic disparity—opposite its intended effect.25 For organizations that value any aspect of their employees beyond purely skills and competencies, anonymization may harm rather than help.26 While it can be tempting to remove the human element from consideration (and many third-party firms have emerged to meet precisely this demand), consider taking the time to train hiring managers to handle identity with intentionality instead and collecting regular data on outcomes to maintain accountability.
24. Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2003. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” National Bureau of Economic Research.
Thanks so much for this excellent list Henry. Although I only agree with some as being make issues personally I think it's the best collection of well structured arguments of problems with a potential shift towards animal welfare that I've seen.
Things I really agree are big issues
approximations are too approximate
slippery slope argument moving towards pasc as lls mugging type scenarios
the weirdest stuff can put people off the more moderate stuff, I've seen this already while introducing people to EA. It's a tricky issue to manage though as I think we need to be researching and working on the weird regardless if the impact is enough.
Things I personally don't think are a big issue
Resistance, as many critically important stuff transformative movements in our time and before met huge resistance. Even things like giving it HIV drugs in Africa
outcomes harder to measure. Often animal welfare has great success feedback loops, often better than global health. Think shrimp stunners or battery farmed hens. I agree the benefits are hard to measure with huge error bars lije you say, but as a global health guy I'm actually quite envious of animal welfare feedback loops at times.
from a Ugandan perspective at least I don't think there's much risk of being called "culturally insensitive", that's more of a Western liberal framework I think. People here just laugh at me or give me weird looks when taking about animal welfare. I haven't yet met someone who cares but I'm also not going to be accused of being insensitive in a serious way.
I agree with many of the points made in the above comment but do not plan to change my vote. When one looks at current expenditures on public health (in the many $trillions of dollars) versus on animal welfare (around $9 billion in revenues annually in the USA), the marginal increase in the utility of grants in the animal welfare space are likely to be greater than those in public health. Open Philanthropy's history project comments on the challenge of producing positive impact in the health space given the large amounts currently devoted annually to support biomedical research let alone the much larger amounts devoted to health treatment, disease surveillance, and prevention.
There's not much to add beyond what everyone else has said. I think we would need to be exceedingly confident in particular views about sentience and moral patienthood and capacity for suffering for non-humans to think GHD was better. I very much wish I had written down more of my reasoning from years ago when I was mainly donating to GiveWell, I think I just hadn't thought it over much!
Sophia, I can't believe I didn't see this post until today. I've been interested in inclusion and accessibility-type topics for years, so I have no idea how I didn't see it when you first posted it. Things seem to have improved in some ways since August 2022, but there is still plenty of progress to be made.
Has anybody created a "Top Ten EA Jargon Words Explained"-type post? That seems like something that a person could create fairly easily, and I actually already have a comical version of it as a draft for an April Fool's post. I could easily create a post that could serve as a sort of reference page, so that people can easily link to it to explain jargon.
The challenges you've identified regarding the shift from global health to animal welfare—such as resistance, politicization, and cultural insensitivity—largely stem from insufficient communication, which can be significantly improved with more funding. By investing in effective messaging strategies, we can make animal welfare interventions more relatable and acceptable to the broader public, thereby increasing their popularity and impact. Moreover, the Effective Altruism community risks reputational damage by advocating for animal welfare without adequately investing in public communication; without a strong messaging system, we may alienate potential supporters and undermine our efforts. Therefore, allocating more resources to both animal welfare initiatives and their communication is crucial—not only to address these concerns but also to enhance the movement's credibility and ensure our interventions are both effective and well-received.
[trigger warning: allusions to pending US electoral candidate who identified as a Nazi and posted anti-trans content...]
Could you say more about why you think the challenges "largely stem from insufficient communication"? I don't disagree that a better comms strategy would be helpful and probably a prudent use for some of the additional $100MM. But I'm struggling to see how it would be a game-changer for most of the challenges Henry describes.
E.g.,: companies and consumers resist things that cost them money, and they use the political system to seek relief from those things. And no communication strategy is going to convince agricultural industries that EA AW wouldn't be at least a near-existential threat to many of their business lines if it achieved its hopes and dreams. Moreover, changing hearts and minds on such an emotionally laden topic as food would be a massive undertaking -- to give a vaguely relevant data point, PepsiCo spent ~$2B on advertising in the US alone in 2022. And getting people to believe things they don't want to believe on a mass scale is hard even when those things are scientifically true (yes the vaccines work, no they will not improve your 5G reception).
Also, the upside of an affirmative comms strategy is limited when you have provided a determined opponent a bunch of open goals to score on. For instance, right now there's a major candidate for governor of a US state who made a bunch of disturbing comments on an adult entertainment discussion board (e.g., calling himself a Nazi). For a significant portion of the US population, some of the things that are said on this Forum register as more offensive than that (e.g., meat-eater problem, implications that a human life is morally worth less than giving a few thousand shrimps a more humane death).[1]
I don't see how throwing money at developing and executing a better comms plan helps much with those kinds of vulnerabilities. I wouldn't be interested in engaging any more with content about the Nazi-identifying governor; it just wouldn't be worth my time on the very very slim chance further information would update my vote. I expect many people would have a similar reaction when opponents successfully tied EA AW to the meat-eater problem.
I am reporting, not endorsing, this view! I'm using it as an example because I think it's easy for people in/adjacent to the EA bubble to not understand how certain positions may play in (e.g.) the deep South where I grew up.
The marginal effect of increased spending (say $1 billion) on animal welfare is likely to be far greater than the marginal impact of an extra $1 billion on global health. Granted that public health challenges in low and middle-income countries can at times be substantially lessened with relatively small inputs (e.g., niacin enrichment of corn meal), overall, the impact of relatively small amounts of strategically invested money can have a significant impact on the animal space. For example, I believe the support ($1-2 million) Open Philanthropy has provided to Compassion in World Farming to support Compassion's End the Cage Age" citizen's initiative in Europe is going to have substantial global ramifications for how farmed animals are raised and treated down the road. The EU has temporarily stepped back on its commitment to end caged animal farming. Still, the recent Strategic Dialogue on Agriculture in Europe has again emphasized the importance of ending farmed animal cages. I would also refer readers to the recent papers on the impact of the vulture decline in India. The bat decline in the USA (look for documents by Eyal Frank and colleagues), which concluded that the loss of those wild animals has led to substantial increases in all cause human mortality in India and infant mortality in the USA. Calculating the economic impact of biodiversity decline is a significant challenge, but Frank has provided two fascinating and valuable examples of how animal welfare, human welfare and planetary well-being are connected!
I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following: 1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments
2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)
3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high
I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.
I weigh moral worth by degree of sentience based on neuron count as a rough proxy, which naturally tends to weigh helping an equal number of humans more than an equivalent number of any other currently known species.
in regards to intelligence, we can question boththe extent to which more neurons are correlated with intelligence and whether more intelligence in fact predicts greater moral weight;
many ways of arguing that more neurons results in more valenced consciousness seem incompatible with our current understanding of how the brain is likely to work; and
there is no straightforward empirical evidence or compelling conceptual arguments indicating that relative differences in neuron counts within or between species reliably predicts welfare relevant functional capacities.
Although I know many EAs will agree with you, I think second order concerns such as image and reference on the movement are valid considerations, although usually less important than first order.
I think I was unclear. I agree "second order concerns such as image and reference on the movement are valid considerations" and I even think these are often more important. (Perhaps 'indirect' is a better word than 'second order').
But it's more about how I interpreted the question
It would be better to spend an extra $100m on animal welfare than on global health
I interpreted this this a normative 'axiology' question ... if society could shift it's resources towards this by $100m, would that improve welfare?
Rather than a 'would it be strategic for EAs to publicly shift their donations in this way'. But I now see that other interpretations of this question are valid.
This post is mostly about how animal welfare is less popular than global health but I don't really see the tie-in for how this (probably correct) claim translates to it being less effective. Taking the first argument at face value, that some people won't like being in some ways forced to pay more or change their habits, does not seem to translate to "it is not cost effective to do successfully force them (and one hopes eventually change their hearts and minds) anyway." This was precisely the case for a lot of social movements (abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights, worker's rights, the environmental movement, etc.) but all these movements were to various degrees successful.
It seems to me that in order for any of these popularity based arguments to hold water, you need a follow-on of "and therefore it is not cost effective to invest in them, and here is the evidence." However, I think we have a lot of evidence for cost-effectiveness in investing animal interventions. See cage-free egg campaigns for example. I similarly don't understand the relevance of other popularity-based concerns, such as being accused of being culturally insensitive. What is the implication for effectiveness if such accusations are made? Why does that matter?
Yeah, I didn't intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the "intensity of experience" ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more "total experience" than wild animals.
I reviewed the piece you linked and fwiw strongly disagreed that the case it made was as clear cut as the authors conclude (in particular IIRC they observe a limited historical upside from RCT-backed interventions, but didn't seem to account for the far smaller amount of money that had been put into them; they also gave a number of priors that I didn't necessarily strongly disagree with, but seemed like they could be an order of magnitude off in either direction, and the end result was quite sensitive to these).
That's not to say I think global health interventions are clearly better - just that I think the case is open (but also that, given the much smaller global investment in RCTs, there's probably more exploratory value in those).
I could imagine any of the following turning out to be the best safeguard of the long term (and others):
Health and development interventions
Economic growth work
Differential focus on interplanetary settlement
Preventing ecological collapse
AI safety work
e/acc (their principles taken seriously, not the memes)
AI capabilities work (because of e/acc)
Work on any subset of global catastrophes (including seemingly minor ones like Kessler syndrome, which in itself has the potential to destabilise civilisation)
My best guess is the last one, but I'm wary of any blanket dismissal of any subset of the above.
What is the argument for Health and development interventions being best from a long-term perspective?
I think animal welfare work is underrated from a long-term perspective. There is a risk that we lock-in values that don't give adequate consideration to non-human sentience which could enable mass suffering to persist for a very long time. E.g. we spread to the stars while factory farming is still widespread and so end up spreading factory farming too. Or we create digital sentience while we still don't really care about non-human sentience and so end up creating vast amounts of digital suffering. I think working to end factory farming is one way to widen the moral circle and prevent these moral catastrophes from occurring.
Although I know many EAs will agree with you, I think second order concerns such as image and reference on the movement are valid considerations, although usually less important than first order.
Hi! As well as these roles, there are some remote international roles listed on the Palisade Notion site - are these still open, and if so, how should one apply to them?
Saving children from malaria, diarrheal disease, lead poisoning, or treating cataracts and obstetric fistula is hard to argue against without sounding like a bad person.
I think this is also true for some of the more moderate/less weird animal welfare reforms we ask for:
not keeping birds or mammals in cages or crates their whole lives,
not using breeds of chickens that grow so fast they have chronic pain, and
humane slaughter.
But this may be less true for plant-based advocacy, invertebrate welfare and wild animal welfare. Open Phil has stopped funding work in the last two.
Animal products are a core part of many cultures. EA Funds directs "grants to advocacy organizations working in 26 countries". Most of these are in Western countries currently. As time goes on (maybe already?) the majority of animals will be raised/killed/consumed in India, Southeast Asia and Africa.
Global health is less burdened with accusations of imposed Western Values because not dying of diarrhea, measles or lead poisoning and not having cataracts are mostly universal cultural traits
And costly welfare reforms will only go through where they are reasonably aligned with the values of the producers or consumers (possibly sometimes aligned only with end consumers in the West, not with the non-Western producers for imported products). I think EAA grantmakers and the EAA orgs they support are basically as sensitive to cultural values as they need to be. Outreach is usually carried out mostly by local advocates. Consideration of cultural values also affects organizational strategies, like what kind of outreach is done, e.g. less antagonistic in East Asia, if I recall correctly.
The challenges you've identified regarding the shift from global health to animal welfare—such as resistance, politicization, and cultural insensitivity—largely stem from insufficient communication, which can be significantly improved with more funding. By investing in effective messaging strategies, we can make animal welfare interventions more relatable and acceptable to the broader public, thereby increasing their popularity and impact. Moreover, the Effective Altruism community risks reputational damage by advocating for animal welfare without adequately investing in public communication; without a strong messaging system, we may alienate potential supporters and undermine our efforts. Therefore, allocating more resources to both animal welfare initiatives and their communication is crucial—not only to address these concerns but also to enhance the movement's credibility and ensure our interventions are both effective and well-received.
The attempts by the Rethink Priorities Welfare Range Estimates project to create a framework for comparing animal suffering is necessary for doing the cost-benefit analyses we would need to decide whether the cost to humans of an intervention is worth the benefit to animals. Unfortunately these ranges have such wide confidence intervals that, putting aside the question of whether the methodology and ranges are even valid, it doesn't seem to get us any closer to doing the necessary cost-benefit analyses.
we have no objective way to measure animal suffering and compare it to our intuitive feelings about human welfare
This can also cut the other way if we're trying to ensure we have a positive impact (difference-making risk averse or difference-making ambiguity averse). We have no objective way to measure how much potential harm saving humans or improving their incomes does to nonhuman animals through the meat eater problem or wild animal effects.
9. Outcomes will be harder to measure, we won't get feedback on progress
My understanding is that no one is seriously verifying how many deaths or disease cases GiveWell-recommended charities have prevented. Rather, studies of the effectiveness of the types of interventions these charities use are generalized, with adjustments for context. There's a risk that we're just missing something, say that the program isn't implemented as expected, or we've made the wrong adjustments for context. As far as I can tell, we're only tracking inputs, and then we're estimating the outputs. The cost-effectiveness analyses are effectively ex ante or prospective. (Maybe except for GiveDirectly, for which there have been RCTs.)
Animal welfare intervention cost-effectiveness analyses seem more ex post or retrospective. For corporate outreach, we track which companies have made commitments, and we track progress on those commitments, e.g. % of their eggs cage-free with EggTrack.
There is still the problem of assessing causal impact, of course, and there's been some formal (observational/non-RCT) research on this (Mendez & Peacock, 2022) and some more informal analyses, including fact-checking accomplishments and what the industry had otherwise planned.
We also do have analyses of the welfare effects of some major animal welfare reforms in terms of duration and intensity of suffering reduced through Welfare Footprint Project, and some other similar projects. But these are not specific to the work of specific non-profits, so not really ex post/retrospective.
A couple of survey results which may be interesting in light of this debate:
When we surveyed the community on what portion of the community's resources they believed should be allocated to these two cause areas, the average allocation to GHD was higher. This was true among both low/high engagement EAs, though the gap was smaller for highly engaged EAs.
However, if we compare this to actual allocations (in 2019, since these were the most up to date we had at the time), we see that the average preferred allocations are higher for AW and lower for GHD.
This is in line with the debate week results showing a strong preference for an additional $100mn going to AW, but the continued preference for a larger total percentage going to GHD seems worth noting.
Economic growth and population size both seem to have persisting effects.
Could you elaborate? Are you saying that increasing the economy or population size today will make the economy and population size larger for at least centuries? Would you consider a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions evidence against that?
Right, I take this to be an implication of our best economic and demographic models (respectively).
I don't know what you mean by "a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions". Whether an intervention has a noticeable short-term effect on these targets? That would seem to address a different question.
I wouldn't expect to be able to identify the particular ripple that occurred in any given case, if that's what you mean. So I wouldn't take the failure to identify a particular ripple as evidence that there are no ripple effects. If there are good reasons to reject the standard models, I'd expect that to emerge in the debates over those macro models, not through micro evidence from RCTs or the like.
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.
doing stuff just for the optics feels really sleazy and naive utilitarian to me.
I don't think Henry is suggesting that, though (although I see how one could read observation 7 that way and welcome his clarification). The post is about movement "towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions."
At most, I read his post as suggesting things like (1) we may need to leave some stuff on the table because poor optics doom an effort requiring public support to failure, and (2) partially withdrawing from GH may not be a good idea in part for optics reasons. While one could disagree with those kinds of conclusions as well, I think they are more subtle and sophisticated than "doing stuff just for the optics."
I am sceptical of suffering focused utilitarianism[2], and am worried that animal welfare interventions tend to lean strongly in favour of things that reduce the number of animals, on the assumption that their lives are net negative.
You could donate to organisations improving instead of decreasing the lives of animals. I estimated a past cost-effectiveness of Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) of 43.5 k times the marginal cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities.
I'm sceptical of Rethink's moral weight numbers[1], and am more convinced of something closer to anchoring on neuron counts (and even more convinced by extreme uncertainty). This puts animal charities more like 10x ahead rather than 1000 or 1 million times. I'm also sceptical of very small animals (insects) having a meaningful probability/degree of sentience.
I agree with the last sentence. Using Rethink Priorities' welfare range for chickens based on neurons, I would conclude corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 11.1 (= 1.51*10^3*0.00244/0.332) times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
Rethink Priorities' median welfare range for shrimps of 0.031 is 31 k (= 0.031/10^-6) times their welfare range based on neurons of 10^-6. For you to get to this super low welfare range, you would have to justify putting a very low weight in all the other 11 models considered by Rethink Priorities. In general, justifying a best guess so many orders of magnitude away from that coming out of the most in-depth research on the matter seems very hard.
2) I am sceptical of the intensity of pain and pleasure being logarithmically distributed (severe pain ~100x worse than moderate pain), and especially of this being biased in the negative direction. One reason for this is that I find the "first story" for interpreting Weber's law in this post much more intuitive, i.e. that logarithmically distributed stimuli get compressed to a more linear range of experience
Assuming in my cost-effectiveness analysis of HSI that disabling and excruciating pain are as intense as hurtful pain (setting B2 and B3 of tab "Types of pain" to 1), and maintaining the other assumptions, 1 day of e.g. "scalding and severe burning" would be neutralised by 1 day of fully healthy life. I think this massively underestimates the badness of severe suffering. Yet, even then, I conclude the past cost-effectiveness of HSI is 2.17 times the marginal cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities.
I think something like worldview diversification is essentially a reasonable idea, for reasons of risk aversion and optimising under expected future information.
Farmed animals are neglected, so I do not think worldview diversidication would be at risk due to moving 100 M$ to animal welfare instead of global health and development. I calculated 99.9 % of the annual philanthropic spending is on humans.
In contrast, based on Rethink Priorities' median welfare ranges, the annual disability of farmed animals is much larger than that of humans.
Thanks Vasco, I did vote for animal welfare, so on net I agree with most of your points. On some specific things:
You could donate to organisations improving instead of decreasing the lives of animals
This seems right, and is why I support chicken corporate campaigns which tend to increase welfare. Some reasons this is not quite satisfactory:
It feels a bit like a "helping slaves to live happier lives" intervention rather than "freeing the slaves"
I'm overall uncertain about whether animals lives are generally net positive, rather than strongly thinking they are
I'd still be worried about donations to these things generally growing the AW ecosystem as a side effect (e.g. due to fungibility of donations, training up people who then do work with more suffering-focused assumptions)
But these are just concerns and not deal breakers.
Rethink Priorities' median welfare range for shrimps of 0.031 is 31 k (= 0.031/10^-6) times their welfare range based on neurons of 10^-6. For you to get to this super low welfare range, you would have to justify putting a very low weight in all the other 11 models considered by Rethink Priorities.
I am sufficiently sceptical to put a low weight on the other 11 models (or at least withhold judgement until I've thought it through more). As I mentioned I'm writing a post I'm hoping to publish this week with at least one argument related to this.
The gist of that post will be: it's double counting to consider the 11 other models as separate lines of evidence, and similarly double counting to consider all the individual proxies (e.g. "anxiety-like behaviour" and "fear-like behaviour") as independent evidence within the models.
Many of the proxies (I claim most) collapse to the single factor of "does it behave as though it contains some kind of reinforcement learning system?". This itself may be predictive of sentience, because this is true of humans, but I consider this to be more like one factor, rather than many independent lines of evidence that are counted strongly under many different models.
Because of this (a lot of the proxies looking like side effects of some kind of reinforcement learning system), I would expect we will continue to see these proxies as we look at smaller and smaller animals, and this wouldn't be a big update. I would expect that if you look at a nematode worm for instance, it might show:
"Taste-aversion behaviour": Moving away from a noxious stimulus, or learning that a particular location contains a noxious stimulus
"Depression-like behaviour": Giving up/putting less energy into exploring after repeatedly failing
"Anxiety-like behaviour": Being put on edge or moving more quickly if you expose it to a stimulus which has previously preceded some kind of punishment
"Curiosity-like behaviour": Exploring things even when it has some clearly exploitable resource
It might not show all of these (maybe a nematode is in fact too small, I don't know much about them), but hopefully you get the point that these look like manifestations of the same underlying thing such that observing more of them becomes weak evidence once you have seen a few.
Even if you didn't accept that they were all exactly side effects of "a reinforcement learning type system" (which seems reasonable), still I believe this idea of there being common explanatory factors for different proxies which are not necessarily sentience related should be factored in.
(RP's model does do some non-linear weighting of proxies at various points, but not exactly accounting for this thing... hopefully my longer post will address this).
On the side of neuron counts, I don't think this is particularly strong evidence either. But I see it as evidence on the side of a factor like "their brain looks structurally similar to a human's", vs the factor of "they behave somewhat similarly to a human" for which the proxies are evidence.
To me neither of these lines of evidence ("brain structural similarity" and "behavioural similarity") seems obviously deserving of more weight.
Farmed animals are neglected, so I do not think worldview diversidication would be at risk due to moving 100 M$ to animal welfare
I definitely agree with this, I would only be concerned if we moved almost all funding to animal welfare.
I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following: 1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments
2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)
3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high
I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.
Love the post; I think it is super valuable to have these sorts of important conversations, directly thinking about cross-cause comparison. It’s worth noting that CE does consider cross-cause effects in all the interventions we consider/recommend, including possible animal effects and WAS effects. Despite this, CE does not come to the same conclusion as this post; here are a couple of notes on why:
Strength of evidence discounting: CEAs are not all equal when they are based on very different strengths of evidence, and I think we weight this factor a lot heavier. It's quite common for the impact of any given intervention to regress fairly heavily as more research/work is put into it. We have found this in CE’s, GW’s and other EAs’ research. This can be seen in even more depth in the GiveWell and EA forum writings on deworming and how to deal with speculative effects that possibly have very high upsides. For example, I would expect a five-hour CEA to be constantly off (almost always in a positive direction) compared to a 50-hour CEA. A calculation made at two different levels of rigor should not be directly compared. (This does not mean shorter-form CEAs are not worth doing, but I think we have to take their cons and likely regressions a lot more seriously than this post currently does.) This discounting should be even more heavily applied to flow-through effects, as the evidence for them is way lighter than the direct effects. We tend to use something akin to the weighted quantitative modeling used here.
Marginal funding and reliability in effects: Here’s a good example of how a CEA can regress really quickly; GiveWell typically does CEAs on marginal donations made, whereas many other CEAs - including the one you use from Saulius - do not consider marginal funding. I currently think that the marginal dollar to corporate campaigns is way less impactful when compared to the average dollar of spending pre-2018. This can affect a CEA quite drastically. Another example is the funding of numerous animal interventions through corporate campaigns, which have become the “hit” of the animal movement. However, these campaigns often are seen as cost-effectiveness without clear before hand knowledge of the impact an additional dollar of funding would have accomplished. It is a bit like measuring CE’s cost effectiveness by looking at the top charity we incubated and assuming future charities will be equal to that. Variance is a real pain, and it’s not even clear if other corporate campaigns will be equally cost-effective to cage-free. On the other hand, top GW charities have this built in; they are not estimating the average EV of AMF’s top three historical campaigns, they are estimating the impact of marginal average future funding.
Variable animal effects dependent on intervention: You touch on this, but I think there is an important point missed. The effects on animals vary quite a lot, depending on the intervention. Interventions that primarily affect mortality in Africa, for instance, end up looking like how you describe. But morbidity-focused interventions, mental health focused interventions, and family planning interventions are all significantly less affected by this consideration. Same goes for any intervention that operates in contexts where there is lower meat consumption (such as in India). I think if you remodeled this for an organization like Fortify Health (Iron fortification in India), it would result in rather different outcomes.
If you combine these factors and look at a marginal dollar to FH vs a marginal dollar to THL (both of them with similarly rigorous CEAs and flow-through effects that are discounted based on certainty), I think the outcomes would be different enough to change your endline conclusion. The non-epistemic difference I have is to do with ecosystem limitations, and is more specific to CE itself vs. general EA organizations. When we launch a charity, we need 1) founders 2) ideas, and 3) funding. Each of these are fairly cause area limited (and I think limiting factors are often more important than total scale). For example, if we aimed to found 10 animal charities a year (vs 10 charities across all the cause areas we currently focus on) I do not think the weakest two would be anywhere near as impactful as the top two, and only a small minority of them would get long-term funding. In fact, with animal charities making up around a third of those we have launched, I think we already run close to those limitations. This means that even if we thought that animal charities were more impactful than human ones on average, the difference would have to be pretty large for us to think that adding a 9th or 10th animal charity into the animal ecosystem would be more impactful than adding the first or second human-focused charity. I expect a version of this consideration can apply to other actors too. In general, I believe that given the current ecosystem, more than ~three-five charities founded per year within a given area would start to result in cannibalization between charities.
Thanks again for the consideration of this; I do think people should do a lot more cross-cause thinking, and I expect there are some really neglected areas that have significant intercausal impact.
It’s worth noting that CE does consider cross-cause effects in all the interventions we consider/recommend, including possible animal effects and WAS effects.
I have searched for "animal" in all the 16 reports of CE's global health and development recommendations, and I did not find any discussion that extending human lives would increase the consumption of animals. In contrast, decreasing the birth rate is highlighted as being a positive externality in terms of animal welfare in 3 of the 16 reports:
"A lower birth rate is also associated with fewer CO2 emissions and a gain of welfare points due to averted consumption of animal products" (here).
"Finally we believe this intervention could have important positive externalities on animal welfare. Increasing uptake for contraception and preventing unintended births would reduce family sizes and their overall consumption in animal products. A lifetime of consumption of these products leads to an considerable amount of suffering for animals raised in factory farms. Preventing unintended births therefore indirectly decreases demand for these products, thereby decreasing the number of animals raised for food. We have modeled these effects using CEĚ—s welfare points system in our CEA" (here).
"We found that this intervention has two kinds of externalities. It positively affects climate change, with three tonnes of CO2 emissions per dollar spent. It also positively affects animal welfare, with 377 welfare points gained per dollar spent" (here).
I think CE's reports should mention the negative externalities on farmed animals due to extending human lives, considering CE's reports on family planning discuss the positive externalities on farmed animals due to decreasing fertility.
The last bullet above also illustrates your global health and development recommendations could be net harmful based on your own numbers. I think 100 welfare points (WPs) are roughly as good as averting 1 DALY (because 100 WPs is the maximum total welfare possible), so 377 WP/$ of positive externalities respect around 3.77 DALY/$. This is 379 (= 3.77/0.00994) times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities of 0.00994 DALY/$, i.e. the effects on animals are way larger than those on humans according to CE's report. This claims the effects on animals are positive due to decreasing population size, so it directly follows that saving lives (increasing population size) has negative effects on animals, and the negative effects on animals would be much larger than those on humans (trusting the numbers of the report).
Pressuring people and entities to do things they would rather not do (like incurring business expenses to improve animal welfare) can be a powerful mechanism of action (MOA), both because of leverage and because certain objectives may be hard to accomplish otherwise.
But it has some important limitations as well, several of which relate to your points. The reliance on consumer, social, or political pressure limits the range of viable targets, likely requires pulling some punches to maintain the public support needed for the MOA to work, invites countermeasures by opponents who can appeal to (e.g.) a higher power like the legislature, and so on.
Thus, it doesn't generally play well with (e.g.) an attitude of truthseeking-and-damn-the-torpedoes or something that looks like an epistemic precommitment to not caring what outsiders think. Those stances may work with bednets and conducting certain types of research where little third-party support/cooperation is needed, but I'd note how those interventions are not nearly as leveraged.
Industrialised animal farming is the single biggest cause of suffering, the most neglected / under-reported and under-funded and therefore deserves all the funding it can possibly source. Moreover, reducing animal agriculture would also reduce risks (zoonoses / pandemics); environmental harms and improve human health outcomes. It would be a win-win for multiple cause areas.
You'd have to value animals at ~millionths of humans for scale and neglectedness not to be dispositive. Only countervailing considerations are things around cooperativeness, positive feedback loops, and civilizational stability, all of which are speculative and even sign uncertain
Hey Squeezy! I'm really sorry, but we're not going to be able to do this right now as we don't have the data from these organisations or it would take too long to categorise it at this point. Here you can find out more information about Open Philanthropy and Manifund's allocations. Unfortunately we don't have the data on other organisations.
The neglectedness and intensity of animal suffering would, in a triaging scenario, see me prioritizing it over many global health interventions. I am open to the idea that many animals do not indeed live lives not worth living; but personally I would rather avoid life than live as an industrially farmed chicken or fish.
I am sensitive to the idea that animal welfare work may not be able to productively absorb $100 million. At the same time, I would like to see more experimentation in the animal advocacy movement.
What is the most effective and appropriate relationship with "mainstream common sense morality views" in your opinion? At one extreme, if we just parrot them, then we can just cut out the expensive meta middlemen and give directly to whatever mainstream opinion says we should.
I do think the skew would be meaningfully different but for the significant discrepancy in GW vs AW funding in both EA and more generally.
I don't know. Certainly just parroting them is wrong. I just think we should give some weight to majority opinion, as it represents an aggregate of many different human experiences that seem to have aligned together and found common ground.
Also, a lot of my worry is not so much that EAs might be wrong, so much as that if our views diverge too strongly from popular opinion, we run the risk of things like negative media coverage ("oh look, those EA cultists are misanthropic too"), and we also are less likely to have successful outreach to people outside of the EA filter bubble.
In particular, we already have a hard time with outreach in China, and this animal welfare emphasis is just going to further alienate them due to cultural differences, as you can probably tell from my Confucius quote. The Analects are taught in school in both China and Taiwan and are a significant influence in Asian societies.
It's also partly a concern that groupthink dynamics might be at play within EA. I noticed that there are many more comments from the animal welfare crowd, and I fear that many of the global health people might be too intellectually intimidated to voice their views at this point, which would be bad for the debate.
Executive summary: The shift from global health to animal welfare interventions in effective altruism may backfire due to various challenges, including resistance to imposed changes, social dismissal, politicization, and difficulties in measuring outcomes.
Key points:
Animal welfare interventions often involve imposed regulations, leading to resistance from farmers and consumers.
Animal welfare arguments are more easily dismissed socially compared to global health initiatives.
Animal welfare is more politicized, potentially generating conspiracies and opposition.
Extreme animal welfare arguments may alienate people from supporting more moderate positions.
Research on animal welfare faces significant measurement challenges and may yield few actionable results.
Expanding moral circles to include more animals risks slippery slope arguments and accusations of valuing animals over humans.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: The "Otherness and control in the age of AGI" essay series explores how deep atheism and moral anti-realism in AI risk discourse can lead to problematic "yang" impulses for control, and proposes incorporating more balanced "yin" and "green" perspectives while still acknowledging key truths about AI risk.
Key points:
Deep atheism and moral anti-realism in AI risk discourse can promote an impulse for extreme control ("yang") over the future.
This yang impulse has concerning failure modes, like violating ethical boundaries and tyrannically shaping others' values.
We should incorporate more cooperative, liberal norms and "green" perspectives of humility and attunement.
However, we must balance this with acknowledging real risks from potentially alien AI systems.
A nuanced "humanism" is proposed that allows for improving the world while respecting ethical limits.
Our choices shape reality, so we have responsibility to choose wisely in steering the future.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following: 1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments
2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)
3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high
I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.
Executive summary: Subgame-perfect Nash Equilibrium in extensive-form games requires rational best responses at each decision point, but real-world behavior often deviates due to fairness considerations and social preferences.
Key points:
Normal-form games involve simultaneous decisions, while extensive-form games have sequential decisions represented by game trees.
Subgame-perfect Nash Equilibrium occurs when each decision point (subgame) represents a Nash Equilibrium.
The Ultimatum Game illustrates subgame perfection, with a theoretical optimal strategy of offering the smallest amount possible.
Behavioral studies show people often reject unfair offers, contradicting purely rational self-interest assumptions.
In repeated games, considering opponents' interests becomes part of rational self-interest, leading to fairer offers.
Understanding subgame perfection requires viewing payoffs in absolute rather than relative terms.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Last time I checked, improving the lives of animals was much cheaper than improving human lives; and I don't think that arguments saying that humans have more moral weight are enough to compensate.
Can you expand on why other animal interventions seem useless? For instance, developing plant-based alternatives, getting chickens out of cramped cages, stunning animals before slaughter... I'm not sure to see how these interventions do not improve the lives of other beings?
My model here is there would be transition to lab grown meat, and moving this transition few years / months / days into the earlier time is the thing that matters most
And also in general, I have really cautious stance on population ethics with respect to animals. And i think most utilitarian approaches handle it by not handling it, just refusing to think about it. And that's really weird. Like, if i donate to animals welfare of chickens? I bet the beneficiaries is next generation of chickens from the one currently existing. I want to donate in such a way as to prevent their existence, not supply them with band aids. I think causing creation of 20% less tortured chicken instead is like insane goal for my donation.
under neartermism, which is not my view but which may be the spirit of the question, animal welfare seems obviously better because non-human animals are extremely neglected by human civilization, either left to die in the wild or cut up in mechanized torture facilities.
under longtermism, it's basically a question of which could positively effect the values of the first agent superintelligence. probably neither would have a strong effect, but conditional on an effect being had, i'd guess it would route through the increased moral progress caused by animal welfare advocacy, somehow leading to a less human-centric forever-value.
(100% under neartermism, ~80% under longtermism in recognition of uncertainty)
Thanks to all for taking the time to discuss our paper. I don’t have time to read and comment on everything I’ve seen discussed in the forum, but I thought it would be worthwhile to comment on a few misunderstanding (some of which others have already pointed to):
Although our main focus is on strong longtermism, many things we say are relevant for weaker views as well.
Many of our arguments are related in the sense that if you bite the bullet on one, you end up in another problem.
I think there are good reason to think that the psychological constraints for distance in space and distance is time are different because distance is space can be overcome, and arguably the distance of “caring” is less today than it was in the past because distance can be reduced in so many ways, but the distance to far future individuals is for obvious reasons very different.
The difference-maker argument is not saying that we cannot do things that are good for the future, but that we don’t need to think about the far future to know that these things are good. I think this is important to keep in mind when one addresses the problem of predicting far future consequences and evaluating value weights for the far future.
Speaking for both me and Karolina, we’d be super happy if a longtermist would take the time to respond to our paper.
I would advise being careful with RP's Cross-cause effectiveness tool as it currently stands, especially with regards to the chicken campaign. There appears to be a very clear conversion error which I've detailed in the edit to my comment here. I was also unable to replicate their default values from their source data, but I may be missing something.
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.
I am having a hard time following this. We aren't, to my knowledge, asking people whose loved ones are at significant risk of dying of malaria and TB for money. AFAIK, we're not asking them to prioritize animal welfare over their loved ones in non-finamcial ways either. Could you explain what specifically we're asking of this class of people?
On top of Jason's point, this argument presupposes that animals are food and therefore not worthy of much if any moral concern, but there are many reasons to think animals are worthy of moral concern.
I'm not sure this metric is relevant : biomass weight is massively dominated by the largest mammals just for the reason that they are big.
Going by this metric, it would mean that having one super obese 400kg individual, or one small cow, counts the same as having 100 human babies (not to talk about elephants).
I think number of individuals is much more relevant here. And there just happens to be a lot of smaller individuals.
Yeah, I didn't intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the "intensity of experience" ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more "total experience" than wild animals.
I support lab grown meat research / production, other interventions seem useless. I support "global health" more broadly and strongly, you have less ways to burn money in ways i find useless
Can you expand on why other animal interventions seem useless? For instance, developing plant-based alternatives, getting chickens out of cramped cages, stunning animals before slaughter... I'm not sure to see how these interventions do not improve the lives of other beings?
I personally think that we shouldn't weigh the ripple effects too highly in our decisions - if you care about reducing short term suffering and long term expanding the moral circle, I would be skeptical that a single intervention would better accomplish both of those objectives than two separate interventions tailored to each.
Anyone know any Earn-To-Givers who might be interested in participating in an AMA during Giving Season? If a few are interested, it might be fun to experiment with an AMA panel, where Forum users ask questions, and any of the AMA co-authors can respond/ co-authors can disagree.
Why? Giving Season is, in my opinion, a really great time to highlight the earn-to-give work which is ongoing all year, but is generally under-celebrated by the EA community. + Earn-to-givers might have good insights on how to pick donation targets during the donation election, and Giving Season more generally.
If I drop the lower bound by 4 orders of magnitude, to "between 0.0000002 and 0.87 times", I get a result of 709 Dalys/1000$, which is basically unchanged. Do sufficiently low bounds basically do nothing here?
This parameter is set to a normal distribution (which, unfortunately you can't control) and the normal distribution doesn't change much when you lower the lower bound. A normal distribution between 0.002 and 0.87 is about the same as a normal distribution between 0 and 0.87. (Incidentally, if the distribution were a lognormal distribution with the same range, then the average result would fall halfway between the bounds in terms of orders of magnitude. This would mean cutting the lower bound would have a significant effect. However, the effect would actually raise the effectiveness estimate because it would raise the uncertainty about the precise order of magnitude. The increase of scale outside the 90% confidence range represented by the distribution would more than make up for the lowering of the median.)
Also, this default (if you set it to "constant") is saying that a chicken has around half the capacity weight of humans. Am I right in interpreting this as saying that if you see three chickens who are set to be imprisoned in a cage for a year, and also see a human who is set to be imprisoned in a similarly bad cage for a year, then you should preferentially free the former? Because if so, it might be worth mentioning that the intuitions of the average person is many, many orders of magnitudes lower than these estimates, not just 1-2.
The welfare capacity is supposed to describe the range between the worst and best possible experiences of a species and the numbers we provide are intended to be used as a tool for comparing harms and benefits across species. Still, it is hard to draw direct action-relevant comparisons of the sort that you describe because there are many potential side effects that would need to be considered. You may want to prioritize humans in the same way that you prioritize your family over others, or citizens of the same country over others. The capacities values are not in tension with that. You may also prefer to help humans because of their capacity for art, friendship, etc.
To grasp the concept, I think a better example application would be: if you had to give a human or three chickens a headache for an hour (which they would otherwise spend unproductively) which choice would introduce less harm into the world? Estimating the chickens' range as half that of the human would suggest that it is less bad overall from the perspective of total suffering to give the headache to the human.
The numbers are indeed unintuitive for many people but they were not selected by intuition. We have a fairly complex and thought-out methodology. However, we would love to see alternative principled ways of arriving at less animal-friendly estimates of welfare capacities (or moral weights).
Thanks for clarifying! I think these numbers are the crux of the whole debate, so it's worth digging into them.
You may want to prioritize humans in the same way that you prioritize your family over others, or citizens of the same country over others. The capacities values are not in tension with that. You may also prefer to help humans because of their capacity for art, friendship, etc.
I am understanding correctly that none of these factors are included in the global health and development effectiveness evaluation?
To grasp the concept, I think a better example application would be: if you had to give a human or three chickens a headache for an hour (which they would otherwise spend unproductively) which choice would introduce less harm into the world? Estimating the chickens' range as half that of the human would suggest that it is less bad overall from the perspective of total suffering to give the headache to the human.
I'm not sure how this is different to my hypothetical, except in degree?
Still, it is hard to draw direct action-relevant comparisons of the sort that you describe because there are many potential side effects that would need to be considered.
But the thing we are actually debating here is "should we prevent african children from dying of malaria, or prevent a lot of chickens from being confined to painful cages", which is an action. If you are using a weight of ~0.44 to make that decision, then shouldn't you similarly use it to make the "free 3 chickens or a human" decision?
Our estimate uses Saulius's years/$ estimates. To convert to DALYs/$, we weighted by the amount of pain experienced by chickens per year. The details can be found in Laura Dufffy's report here. The key bit:
I estimated the DALY equivalent of a year spent in each type of pain assessed by the Welfare Footprint Project by looking at the descriptions of and disability weights assigned to various conditions assessed by the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019 and comparing these to the descriptions of each type of pain tracked by the Welfare Footprint Project.
Thanks for clarifying! However, I'm still having trouble replicating the default values. I apologise for drilling down so much on this, but this calculation appears to be the crux of the whole debate. My third point is extremely important, as I seem to be getting two order of magnitude lower results? edit: also added a fourth point which is a very clear error.
First, The google doc states that the life-years affected per dollar is 12 to 120, but Sallius report says it's range is 12 to 160. Why the difference? Is this just a typo in the google doc?
Second, the default values in the tool are given as 160 to 3600. Why is this range higher (on a percentage basis) than the life years affected? Is this due to uncertainty somehow?
Finally and most importantly, the report here seems to state that each hen is in the laying phase for approximately 1 year (40-60 weeks), and that switching from cage to cage-free averts roughly 2000 hours of hurtful pain and 250 hours of disabling pain (and that excruciating pain is largely negligible). If I take the maximum DALY conversion of 10 for disabling and 0.25 for hurtful (and convert hours to years), I get an adjusted result of (250*10 + 0.25*2000)/(365*24) = 0.34 DALYs per chicken affected per year. If I multiply this by sallius estimate, I get a lower value than the straight "life years affected", but the default values are actually around 13 time higher. Have I made a mistake here? I couldn't find the exact calculations
Edit: Also, there is clearly a bug in the website: If I set everything else to 1, and put in "exactly 120 suffering-years per dollar", the result it gives me is 120 DALYs per thousand dollars. It seems like the site is forgetting to do the one dollar to a thousand dollar conversion, and thus underestimating the impact of the chicken charity by a factor of a thousand.
With my temperament and personality im a "direct work" kind of guy. As much as I might like to think otherwise, I don't think I'm likely any time soon to have the temperament or drive to work well in Meta or earn-to-give.
Given that, if my mind was changed here all it might mean is that I would give a small amount more to animal welfare orgs (given my very low salary by most people here's standards). I doubt given my stage of life (ancient), emotional biases and competitive advantage it is likely to make sense for me to do direct work for animal welfare orgs even if I believed it was quite a lot more cost effective, although if my mind was changed a lot this wouldnt be out of the question.
The question of capacity seems unrelated to the crux to me. I'm pretty confident that if it were known that there was 100mn to spend then people would spin up orgs. I guess there is a question whether all those would be more effective on the margin than global health, but I dunno, it seems to be missing the bit that I care about most.
The ability to "spin up orgs" is no joke, potentially even more so in the animal welfare space, where most orgs will be advocacy and policy based orgs and experience and connections are super important to actually be useful there.
I support lab grown meat research / production, other interventions seem useless. I support "global health" more broadly and strongly, you have less ways to burn money in ways i find useless
I'm not sure this metric is relevant : biomass weight is massively dominated by the largest mammals just for the reason that they are big.
Going by this metric, it would mean that having one super obese 400kg individual, or one small cow, counts the same as having 100 human babies (not to talk about elephants).
I think number of individuals is much more relevant here. And there just happens to be a lot of smaller individuals.
Economic growth and population size both seem to have persisting effects. If you limit attention to just what can be "accurately measured" (by some narrow conception that rules out the above), your final judgment will be badly distorted by measurability bias.
Economic growth and population size both seem to have persisting effects.
Could you elaborate? Are you saying that increasing the economy or population size today will make the economy and population size larger for at least centuries? Would you consider a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions evidence against that?
I also read sections of your link and skimmed through the rest, but I don't see any justification that relates to the idea that helping animals is misguided.
The argument of the link is that moral progress has sometimes meant correctly regarding some previous moral concern as unnecessary or based on false belief. I think the relevance here is to resist the idea that moral concern for animals must be correct by a "more moral concern is always better" heuristic.
(I think it's a useful argument to have in mind, but I think we have much better reasons to be morally concerned about animals.)
Great to go through this post again. Thanks, Saulius!
Fungibility. If a charity does multiple programs, donating to it could fail to increase spending on the program you want to support, even if you restrict your donation. Suppose a charity was planning to spend $1 million of its unrestricted funds on a program. If you donate $1,000 and restrict it to that program, the charity could still spend exactly $1 million on the program and use an additional $1,000 of unrestricted funds on other programs.
Here is a model of the cost-effectiveness of restricted donations.
"if you donate some bread to hungry civilians in this warzone, then this military group will divert all the excess recourses above subsistence to further its political / military goals". Guess now you have no way to increase their wellbeing! Just buy more troops for this military organization!
That's some top tier untrustworthy move. If some charity did that with my donation I would mentally blacklist it for eternity
I'm completely sold on the arguments in general EV terms (the vast suffering, tractability, importance, neglect - even within EA), up to the limits of how confident I can be about anything this complex. That's basically the fringe possibilities - weird second, third-order impacts from the messiness of life that mean I couldn't be >98% on something like this.
The deontological point was that maybe there is a good reason I should only care or vastly weight humans over animals through some moral obligation. I don't currently believe that but I'm hedging for it, because I could be convinced.
I realise now I'm basically saying I 90% agree that rolling a D20 for 3+ is a good idea, when it would be fair to also interpret it that I 100% agree it's a good idea ex ante.
(Also my first comment was terrible, sorry I just wanted to get on the board on priors before reading the debate)
Great piece. I really connected with the part about the vastness of the possibility of conscious experience.
That said, I’m inclined to think that Utopia, however weird, would also be, in a certain sense, recognizable — that if we really understood and experienced it, we would see in it the same thing that made us sit bolt upright, long ago, when we first touched love, joy, beauty; that we would feel, in front of the bonfire, the heat of the ember from which it was lit. There would be, I think, a kind of remembering. As Lewis puts it: “The gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange.” Utopia would be weird and alien and incomprehensible, yes; but it would still, I think, be our Utopia; still the Utopia that gives the fullest available expression to what we would actually seek, if we really understood.
It sounds a little bit like you're saying that utopia would be recognisable to modern day humans. If you are saying that, i'm not sure I would agree. Can a great ape have a revelatory experience that a human can have when taking in a piece of art? There exists art that can create the relevant experience, but I highly doubt if you showed every piece of art to any great ape that it would have such an experience. Therefore how can we expect the experiences available in utopia to be recognisable to a modern day human?
Many individuals and organizations are already concerned with global health and actively working to improve it. However, animal welfare requires a significant initial effort to elevate this pressing ethical issue in the public's priorities.
I don't think whether animals or humans are interchangeable (within each group) is the right question. If a human dies and another human is born, the latter does not replace the former in terms of their unique characteristics as an individual, their relationships, etc. But they both have lives worth living, and I don't think it's obviously the case that one long life is better than two half-long lives -- sure, there are some advantages to longer lives in terms of accumulation of knowledge, memories, relationships etc, but I think these effects are relatively minor among reasons why a life is good or rich or well-lived (e.g. I think children have rich and valuable lives -- although they miss some things about the adult experience, it's not so much to make them dramatically different).
If a human dies and we have a lot of humans very very similar to them, I think it is plausible that we've lost less. Still a negative, but not as much of one. (Which is one answer that I favor to the repugnant conclusion, you can't just add new people indefinitely). I also think this makes more sense for societies that can freely copy minds.
For animals my logic was much the same, but that there's less variation/uniqueness that is lost because (for example) chicken minds have less axes on which they vary notably.
Here's another argument:
I think the "one long life vs two half-long lives" is a good example, but that it matters how long they live. Better to have a parrot that lives for a year rather than two parrots that live for six months. The parrot has more opportunity to learn and build on what it has learned and gets more value out of living for longer. A chicken wouldn't have as much value because it has stronger limits on what it can learn, be curious about, enjoy, and so on. But a parrot that lives 50 years vs two that live 25? I would lean towards two.
I disagree about how much children miss from adult lives, though it depends on how young we're calling children. Children are certainly very valuable, but I do think they miss out on a lot of adult experiences. The problems they solve are less intricate, the understanding of complex joys is significantly weaker (a child playing with toys vs. reading a 150k word book), and so on. But I don't know where I'd do the tradeoff precisely. I think part of the value of children, beyond being a good in-of-themselves, is that they will grow up to be adults which have richer more vibrant and varied experiences.
However, I don't think that matters much here. I don't believe that the longevity we manage to acquire is merely one long life vs. two half-lives. It is more of a "one ten century long human life vs. (tens of? (hundreds of?)) thousands of various animals living a couple years more". I think the human has a lot of space to continue learning, growing, and experiencing that many animals unfortunately saturate. (Of course their happiness+lack-of-suffering+other positive emotions matters significantly as well)
Then there's also the factor that paired with the fantastical technology that would allow life extension, many other ills of humanity will be pushed back. If a person isn't interchangeable at all (plausible), then ensuring that they survive means they'll experience all these wonders. Rather than letting many animals live for a few more years in happiness (a good thing!), you get X amount of people who are able to go on to live in a world closer to a utopia.
As I said previously, I find the animal welfare being far more neglected and more important than current human welfare to be probably true. However, I think comparing Animal Welfare vs. Global Health ignores that EA has areas of thought which indicate that Global Health isn't considering certain factors, like longevity meaning more people get to live in a better and better world where we may have solved aging. Most charities are operating under a 'everything continues as normal' paradigm, which gives EA an advantage here.
Part of what makes me uncertain and which would make Animal Welfare more of an obvious choice is that Global Health might already be putting a lot into longevity. I suspect they aren't, given general ignorance of cryo, but they're tackling many things that correlate with it, which would still tilt the calculation in the favor of Animal Welfare.
At a risk of getting off topic from the core question, which interventions do you think are most effective in ensuring we thrive in the future with better cooperative norms? I don't think it's clear that this would be EA global health interventions. I would think boosting innovation and improving institutions are more effective.
I reviewed the piece you linked and fwiw strongly disagreed that the case it made was as clear cut as the authors conclude (in particular IIRC they observe a limited historical upside from RCT-backed interventions, but didn't seem to account for the far smaller amount of money that had been put into them; they also gave a number of priors that I didn't necessarily strongly disagree with, but seemed like they could be an order of magnitude off in either direction, and the end result was quite sensitive to these).
That's not to say I think global health interventions are clearly better - just that I think the case is open (but also that, given the much smaller global investment in RCTs, there's probably more exploratory value in those).
I could imagine any of the following turning out to be the best safeguard of the long term (and others):
Health and development interventions
Economic growth work
Differential focus on interplanetary settlement
Preventing ecological collapse
AI safety work
e/acc (their principles taken seriously, not the memes)
AI capabilities work (because of e/acc)
Work on any subset of global catastrophes (including seemingly minor ones like Kessler syndrome, which in itself has the potential to destabilise civilisation)
My best guess is the last one, but I'm wary of any blanket dismissal of any subset of the above.
The 80,000 Hours team just published that "We now rank factory farming among the top problems in the world." I wonder if this is a coincidence or if this planned to coincide with the EA Forum's debate week? Combined with the current debate week's votes on where an extra $100 should be spent, these seem like nice data points to show to anyone that claims EA doesn't care about animals.
Farmed animals are neglected, so I do not think worldview diversidication would be at risk due to moving 100 M$ to animal welfare instead of global health and development. I calculated 99.9 % of the annual philanthropic spending is on humans.
I think it would be more appropriate to use something like human welfare spending for low-income countries rather than counting ~all charitable activity as in a broad "human" bucket. That is to maintain parity with the way you've sliced off a particularly effective part of the animal-welfare pie (farmed animal welfare). E.g., some quick Google work suggests animal shelters brought in 3.5B in 2023 in just the US (although a fair portion of of that may be government contracts).
Companion animal shelters may be the animal-welfare equivalent of opera for human-focused charities (spending lots on relatively few individuals who are relatively privileged in a sense). While deciding not to give to farmed-animal charities because of dog shelter spending doesn't make much sense, I would submit that not giving to bednets because of opera spending poses much the same problem.
I don't think that changes your underlying point much at all, though!
Thanks Jason, I would say that giving to animal shelters might be more like giving to the cancer society, or even world vision, rather than opera but that's as fairly minor point.
Thanks for the thoughtful write-up! A few things came to mind while reading:
Part of the post felt like a false equivalency - to my knowledge $100M spent on animal welfare would actually net virtually no funds to conservation, as opposed to other approaches. Indeed as CB pointed out, many of the ideas people are pursuing are anti-conservation (I admit I am biased against funding wild animal suffering programs) - they actually openly advocate for further manipulating ecosystems.
One particular section also caught my eye: "Zoonotic diseases, such as Ebola, SARS, and COVID-19, often emerge when ecosystems are disrupted, forcing animals and humans into closer contact. The loss of biodiversity weakens natural barriers that prevent the spread of these diseases. A diverse ecosystem can act as a buffer, reducing the chances of pathogens jumping from animals to humans." I am not sure how these two points flow from one another. I think it's perfectly possible to have biodiversity and still zoonotic diseases - as you correctly note zoonotic diseases primarily emerge from our interactions with wildlife, which feels independent of the biodiversity - the 2009 Swine flu epidemic is a good example of regular factory farming causing outbreaks of zoonotic disease. Many additional epidemics like SARS and Covid-19 appear to point to wet markets as their source - in other words its our eating of animals that is causing zoonotic disease - unrelated to the biodiversity of ecosystems.
One thing that I appreciate about this post is the difficulty noted in weighing diffuse benefits from specific ones. I have no doubt that conservation of land and biodiversity has positive impacts for animal and human lives (e.g. preserving floodplains for water/flood management). Diffuse benefits in better temperature management, improved likelihood to identify antibiotics, etc., are difficult to quantify but 'feel' right. However 'feel' right is also what EA would counter in avoiding ineffective charities. I think there is more to be done in trying to quantify potential benefits. I wonder if there are opportunities to more quantifiably learn from projects like the Gorongosa Restoration Project that you cite.
Let's examine the conceptual, ethical, and philosophical issues raised in your comment, exploring some lesser-discussed nuances that are critical to understanding the intersections between conservation, zoonotic diseases, wild animal suffering, and the broader implications for effective altruism (EA) frameworks.
The Ethical Tensions in Conservation and Wild Animal Suffering
At the core of your critique lies an unresolved tension between two approaches that might seem compatible on the surface—conservation and animal welfare—but actually embody divergent ethical and philosophical orientations. Conservation, traditionally, is motivated by a biocentric or ecocentric ethic. Its primary concern is the integrity, stability, and resilience of ecosystems and the intrinsic value of biodiversity. From this perspective, ecosystem manipulation—even if it aims to alleviate suffering—is problematic because it violates the underlying principles of respecting natural processes and ecological wholeness. This is a teleological view, in which ecosystems are seen to have an inherent "goodness" or purpose that ought to be preserved. Philosophers like Aldo Leopold, Holmes Rolston III, and Arne Naess have emphasized the intrinsic value of ecological systems, advocating for non-interference as a form of respect for the natural world’s autonomy and self-regulating capacities. On the other hand, the animal welfare approach, particularly as endorsed by wild animal suffering programs, is largely rooted in a utilitarian or consequentialist framework that prioritizes the reduction of suffering above all else. This ethical stance places the individual sentient being at the center of moral concern, regardless of its place in a larger ecological network. Hence, ecosystem manipulation, such as predator control or even more extreme interventions like habitat alteration to reduce suffering, could be justified if the net suffering of sentient beings is decreased. What is particularly fascinating here is how this debate reframes classical philosophical dilemmas, such as the "naturalistic fallacy." If nature is intrinsically good, as some conservationists argue, then human interventions that disrupt ecological processes—even if they alleviate suffering—are ethically wrong. But if the consequences (e.g., a reduction in suffering) are what matter most, the sanctity of natural processes becomes less significant.
Biodiversity, and Zoonotic Spillovers
Your comment regarding biodiversity and zoonotic disease touches on a conceptual gap in much of the discourse around ecosystem health. You’re right to assert that zoonotic diseases often emerge from human practices such as factory farming, and wet markets—activities that don't necessarily reduce biodiversity per se, but alter the ecological configurations that heighten disease spillover risks. While biodiversity does not immunize ecosystems against zoonotic outbreaks (i.e., you can have both high biodiversity and zoonotic diseases), the relationship is more nuanced than it appears at first glance. Here’s where the dilution effect theory plays an interesting role. The idea is that in ecosystems with high biodiversity, species that are less competent at harboring or transmitting pathogens (often called "dilution hosts") can buffer human populations from zoonotic diseases. Conversely, in ecosystems where biodiversity is diminished, the remaining species may disproportionately include "amplifying hosts"—species that efficiently carry and transmit pathogens. The loss of biodiversity can lead to a breakdown in these natural regulatory systems, potentially increasing pathogen transmission to humans.
The Challenge of Quantifying Diffuse Benefits
Effective altruism, with its utilitarian underpinnings, tends to prioritize interventions that yield quantifiable benefits—especially those that can be tied to human welfare, such as saving lives or alleviating poverty. This focus often leads to the neglect of long-term, diffuse ecological benefits that are harder to measure but are crucial for planetary health and resilience. Consider, for example, the ecosystem services provided by intact forests: flood regulation, carbon sequestration, water purification, and pollination. These services have diffuse, often non-market benefits that accrue over decades or centuries, and their loss would be catastrophic. However, from a near-term, anthropocentric perspective, funding interventions that directly prevent human suffering (e.g., malaria bed nets) seems to offer a more tangible return on investment. This mismatch between measurable, immediate human welfare and diffuse, long-term ecosystem health is a fundamental critique ecological economics offers against mainstream economic thinking. Conventional economics struggles to internalize the value of ecosystem services, leading to a systematic underinvestment in conservation. Projects like the Gorongosa Restoration Project you mentioned are exemplary because they showcase the co-benefits of conservation—improving human livelihoods while restoring ecosystems. But even such examples are difficult to scale or quantify with the precision demanded by EA methodologies, leading to a kind of ethical impasse between what feels right (conservation) and what seems right from a cost-effectiveness standpoint.
This brings us to a deeper philosophical issue: what kind of future are we valuing? If we are committed to a long-term view of human and non-human flourishing, we may need to embrace uncertainty and complexity rather than trying to reduce the world to predictable, quantifiable outcomes. The unpredictability and interconnectedness of ecosystems challenge the very premise that we can calculate the future benefits of conservation in a straightforward manner. This echoes the critiques of "epistemic humility" found in risk ethics, where the recognition of our limits in predicting complex systems forces a reconsideration of what it means to act ethically.
I was surprised to find that I felt slightly uncomfortable positioning myself on the 'animal welfare' side of the debate week scale. I guess I generally think of myself as more of a 'global health & development' person, and might have subconscious concerns about this as an implicit affiliational exercise (even though I very much like and respect a lot of AW folks, I guess I probably feel more "at home" with GHD)? Obviously those kinds of personal factors shouldn't influence our judgments about an objective question like the debate week question is asking. But I guess they inevitably do.
I don't know if this observation is even worth sharing, but there it is, fwiw. I guess I'd just like to encourage folks to be aware of their personal biases and try to bracket them as best they can. (I'd like to think of all EAs as ultimately "on the same side" even when we disagree about particular questions of cause prioritization, so I feel kind of bad that I evidently have separate mental categories of "GHD folks" and "AW folks" as though it were some kind of political/coalitional competition.)
I speculate that we may base on self-identification on a more general question like "How important do I think GH is vis-a-vis AW?" It seems clear to me that a voter who takes the specific voting question (SVQ) seriously will almost always vote to the right of their self-identification because the SVQ factors cost-effectiveness in so much more clearly. It seems unremarkable to me that you (and I) may have experienced ~cognitive dissonance because where we publicly stuck our pin doesn't line up that well with our own broader self-identification.
This is probably going to be downvoted to oblivion, but I feel it's worth stating anyway, if nothing else to express my frustration with and alienation from EA.
On a meta level, I somewhat worry that the degree to which the animal welfare choice is dominating the global health one kinda shows how seemingly out-of-touch many EAs have become from mainstream common sense morality views.
In particular, I'm reminded of that quote from the Analects of Confucius:
When the stables were burnt down, on returning from court Confucius said, "Was anyone hurt?" He did not ask about the horses.
You can counter with a lot of math that checks out and arguments that make logical sense, but the average person on the street is likely to view the idea that you could ever elevate the suffering of any number of chickens above that of even one human child to be abhorrent.
Maybe the EAs are still technically right and other people are just speciesist, but to me this does not bode well for the movement gaining traction or popular support.
What is the most effective and appropriate relationship with "mainstream common sense morality views" in your opinion? At one extreme, if we just parrot them, then we can just cut out the expensive meta middlemen and give directly to whatever mainstream opinion says we should.
I do think the skew would be meaningfully different but for the significant discrepancy in GW vs AW funding in both EA and more generally.
I'm confused about the theory of impact for "free vegan meals in the Bay Area" idea. A few recipients might work in AI, but I don't see the link between eating a vegan meal offered for free and making more animal-friendly AI development choices.
There is the meat eater problem where more animal lives would likely be lost by increasing the human population. It also seems much more cost effective per dollar to suffering spared to help animals and factory farming is spreading rapidly through Asia and Africa, making this a hingey time.
Comments on 2024-10-09
Jason @ 2024-10-08T13:58 (+11) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I am having a hard time following this. We aren't, to my knowledge, asking people whose loved ones are at significant risk of dying of malaria and TB for money. AFAIK, we're not asking them to prioritize animal welfare over their loved ones in non-finamcial ways either. Could you explain what specifically we're asking of this class of people?
nathanhb @ 2024-10-09T18:44 (+1)
Are we not discussing the situation with them? What about a Rawlsian veil of ignorance? A social contract? If these people were in the same room with you, a mother holding her dying child in her arms, and you were holding a community meeting about whether to save her child or save a cage with some chickens in it... wouldn't she be expected to have a right to at least argue in favor of her child's life?
The very fact that humans are able to be part of the discussion is in fact an important argument in favor of prioritizing the needs of humans.
nathanhb @ 2024-10-09T18:26 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
emre kaplan🔸 @ 2024-10-09T18:35 (+2)
I think this level of incommensurability is both contradictory with folk ethics(most people I speak with agree that preventing animal torture is more important than preventing mild human headache) and it's a pretty confident view that assigns a very low weight to the animals' interests. Do you think our reasoning in moral philosophy and understanding of animal biology is reliable enough to be that confident?
nathanhb @ 2024-10-09T18:26 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
JDBauman @ 2024-10-09T18:24 (+3) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Laura Duffy's analyses of this comes close to my view. On the margin, the question between global health charity and animal charity is something like GiveWell top charities *e.g. AMF) vs. ACE top charity (e.g. The Humane League), which is something like "Would you rather save 1 DALY or 40 years of hens from cages to cage-free.
I'm pretty split between the two and my donation habits reflect this; however, I don't think we know how to scale effective animal interventions past the current funding gaps in the low $10ms. For Global health, we do.
Edit: Learned that Laura has posted more on this since we last talked! Her posts seem to use RP's human:animal welfare moral weight comparisons, which place less compariative weight to human suffering than I do!
titotal @ 2024-10-09T13:21 (+5) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Can I ask how you arrived at the "millionths" number?
Mjreard @ 2024-10-09T18:17 (+1)
Not thinking very hard. I think it's more likely to be an overestimate of the necessary disparity than an underestimate.
There are about 500m humans in tractably dire straits, so if there were 500t animals in an equivalently bad situation, you might be very naĂŻvely indifferent between intervening on one vs the other at a million to one. 500t is probably an oom too high if we're not counting insects and several ooms too low if we are.
I think the delta for helping animals (life of intense suffering -> non-existence) is probably higher (they are in a worse situation), tractability is lower, but neglectedness is way higher such that careful interventions might create compounding benefits in the future in a way I don't think is very likely in global health given how established the field is.
Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2024-10-09T16:06 (+3) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I think of this question mostly in terms of the trajectory I think this nudges us towards. It feels like there's something of a hierarchy of needs for humanity as a whole, and getting out of the zone where we have extreme poverty feels like the right first step, in a way that makes me feel more optimistic about wise decision processes being able to rise to the top thereafter.
I'm not certain what current spending looks like; that might make me change my mind here. (I think it's definitely right to start ramping up spending on animal welfare at some point before poverty is entirely eliminated.)
JackM @ 2024-10-09T18:15 (+2)
Generally I think that those in richer countries are going to shape the future not those in poorer countries, so I'm not sure I agree with you about "wide decision processes" rising to the top if we end extreme poverty.
For example, if we create AI that causes an existential catastrophe, that is going to be the fault of people in richer countries.
Another example - I am concerned about risks of lock in which could enable mass suffering to persist for a very long time. E.g. we spread to the stars while factory farming is still widespread and so end up spreading factory farming too. Or we create digital sentience while we still don't really care about non-human sentience and so end up creating vast amounts of digital suffering. I can't see how ending poverty in lower income countries is going to reduce these risks which, if they happen, will be the fault of those in richer countries. Furthermore, ending factory farming seems important to widen the moral circle and reduce these risks.
Joseph_Chu @ 2024-10-09T17:27 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
It's fair to point out that the majority has been wrong historically many times. I'm not saying this should be our final decision procedure and to lock in those values. But we need some kind of decision procedure for things, and I find when I'm uncertain, that "asking the audience" or democracy seem like a good way to use the "wisdom of crowds" effect to get a relatively good prior.
I'm actually quite surprised by how quickly and how much that post has been upvoted. This definitely makes me update my priors positively about how receptive the forums are to contrarian viewpoints and civil debate. At least, I'm feeling less negativity than when I wrote that post.
Jason @ 2024-10-09T17:59 (+2)
One could also consider the general EA / EA-adjacent sentiment over time as a cross-check on the risk of current groupthink. Of course, later EAs could be responding to better evidence not available to earlier EAs. But I would also consider the possibility of changes in other factors (like perceived status, available funding for EAs, perceived lack of novel opportunities in a mature cause area that has strong interventions with near-limitless room for more funding) playing a major role.
rootpi @ 2024-10-09T17:57 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Animal welfare space needs considerably more rigorous research (which should be done, but will cost much less than $100m) before knowing if it includes better investments than the top ones in global health.
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T16:35 (+8) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
The issue with majority opinion is that 500 years ago, the majority would have thought that most of what we do today is crazy.
I mean, even when I was 17, my opinion was close to the majority opinion (in my country), and I certainly wouldn't trust it today, because it was simply uninformed.
The risk of alienating other people is a valid concern. I'd be glad to see research to determine the threshold which would allow to maximise for both reach and impactful donations. Beyond what percentage of donations going to animal welfare will the movement get less traction ? 1% ? 90% ? Will people just not care about the raw numbers and maybe more about something else ?
For the groupthink point, I'm not sure if anything can be done. I'd be glad to read from people who think more donations should go to GHD (they can do it with an anonymous account as well). But your initial post got 21 karma, which makes it in the top 5 comments of the page, so I think there is potential for civil discussion here.
Joseph_Chu @ 2024-10-09T17:27 (+1)
It's fair to point out that the majority has been wrong historically many times. I'm not saying this should be our final decision procedure and to lock in those values. But we need some kind of decision procedure for things, and I find when I'm uncertain, that "asking the audience" or democracy seem like a good way to use the "wisdom of crowds" effect to get a relatively good prior.
I'm actually quite surprised by how quickly and how much that post has been upvoted. This definitely makes me update my priors positively about how receptive the forums are to contrarian viewpoints and civil debate. At least, I'm feeling less negativity than when I wrote that post.
MichaelStJules @ 2024-10-09T15:26 (+4) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
What do you think of RP's work (mostly) against using neuron counts? From the summary:
(Also this more specific hypothesis.)
Joseph_Chu @ 2024-10-09T17:20 (+1)
I use neuron counts as a very rough proxy for the information processing complexity of a given organism. I do make some assumptions, like that more sophisticated information processing enables more complex emotional states, things like memory, which compounds suffering across time, and so on.
It makes sense to me that sentience is probably on some kind of continuum, rather than an arbitrary threshold. I place things like photo-diodes on the bottom of this continuum and highly sophisticated minds like humans near the top, but I'll admit I don't have accurate numbers for a "sentience rating".
I hold my views on neuron counts being an acceptable proxy mostly because of what I learned from studying Cognitive Science in undergrad and then doing a Master's Thesis on Neural Networks. This doesn't make me an expert, but it means I formed my own opinions and disagree with the RP post somewhat. I have not had the time to formulate substantive objections in a rebuttal however. Most of my posts on these forums are relatively low-effort.
Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-10-09T13:55 (+4) in response to Prioritising animal welfare over global health and development?
Hi Joey,
I have searched for "animal" in all the 16 reports of CE's global health and development recommendations, and I did not find any discussion that extending human lives would increase the consumption of animals. In contrast, decreasing the birth rate is highlighted as being a positive externality in terms of animal welfare in 3 of the 16 reports:
points due to averted consumption of animal products" (here).
A lifetime of consumption of these products leads to an considerable amount of suffering for animals raised in factory farms. Preventing unintended births therefore indirectly decreases demand for these products, thereby decreasing the number of animals raised for food. We have modeled these effects using CEĚ—s welfare points system in our CEA" (here).
I think CE's reports should mention the negative externalities on farmed animals due to extending human lives, considering CE's reports on family planning discuss the positive externalities on farmed animals due to decreasing fertility.
The last bullet above also illustrates your global health and development recommendations could be net harmful based on your own numbers. I think 100 welfare points (WPs) are roughly as good as averting 1 DALY (because 100 WPs is the maximum total welfare possible), so 377 WP/$ of positive externalities respect around 3.77 DALY/$. This is 379 (= 3.77/0.00994) times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities of 0.00994 DALY/$, i.e. the effects on animals are way larger than those on humans according to CE's report. This claims the effects on animals are positive due to decreasing population size, so it directly follows that saving lives (increasing population size) has negative effects on animals, and the negative effects on animals would be much larger than those on humans (trusting the numbers of the report).
Joey 🔸 @ 2024-10-09T17:14 (+6)
Hey Vasco,
Quick response below as I am limiting my time on the EA forum nowadays. I am far less convinced that life saving interventions are net population creating than I am that family planning decreases it. Written about 10 years ago, but still one of the better pieces on this IMO is David Roodman's report commissioned by GiveWell.
In addition, our welfare points are far less certain estimates when compared to our global health estimates. This matters a lot, e.g., I would regress weaker CEAs by over 1 order of magnitude even from the same organization using similar methods, and it could be 3+ orders of magnitude across different orgs and methods. AIM in general is pretty confident e.g. that our best animal charities are not 379x better than a top GiveWell charity even if a first pass CEA might suggest that.
I think for externalities you can get yourself pretty lost down a rabbit hole based on pretty speculative assumptions if you are not careful. We try to think of it a bit like the weight quantitative modeling described here and only include effects that we think are major (e.g. 10%+ effect after uncertainty adjustments on the total impact). We also try to take into account what effects we expect founders considering these ideas would most likely consider to be decision relevant for them.
In general I think we aim to be more modest about moral estimates (particularly when they are uncertain or hotly debated) and try to recommend the peak intervention across different cause areas without making a final verdict. I also think this call in our case does not reduce our impact as there are pretty natural caps to every cause area, e.g., I do not think the animal movement could effectively absorbed 10 new charities a year anyways.
I hope this is helpful!
Best,
Joey
david_reinstein @ 2024-10-09T17:11 (+2) in response to david_reinstein's Quick takes
Re "pivotal questions"...
Some thoughts on what The Unjournal (unjournal.org) can offer, cf existing EA-aligned research orgs (naturally, there are pros and cons)
... both in terms of defining and assessing the 'pivotal questions/claims', and in evaluating specific research findings that most inform these.
Non-EA-aligned expertise and engagement: We can offer mainstream (not-EA aligned) feedback and evaluation, consulting experts who might not normally come into this orbit. We can help engage non-EA academics in the priorities and considerations relevant to EAs and EA-adjacent orgs. This can leverage the tremendous academic/government infrastructure to increase the relevant research base. Our processes can provide 'outside the EA bubble' feedback and perhaps measure/build the credibility of EA-aligned work.
Depth and focus on specific research and research findings: Many EA ~research orgs focus on shallow research and comms. Some build models of value and cost-effectiveness targeted to EA priorities and 'axiology'. In contrast, Unjournal expert evaluations can dig deeply into the credibility of specific findings/claims that may be pivotal to these models.
Publicity, fostering public feedback and communication: The Unjournal is building systems for publishing and promoting our evaluations. We work to link these to the scholarly/bibliometric tools and measures people are familiar with. We hope this generates further feedback, public discussion, research, and application of this research.
Nayanika @ 2024-10-09T16:49 (+1) in response to Nayanika's Quick takes
I think that data ethics and drug ethics together or as separate social functions can save humanity at large.
Joseph_Chu @ 2024-10-09T12:57 (+5) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I don't know. Certainly just parroting them is wrong. I just think we should give some weight to majority opinion, as it represents an aggregate of many different human experiences that seem to have aligned together and found common ground.
Also, a lot of my worry is not so much that EAs might be wrong, so much as that if our views diverge too strongly from popular opinion, we run the risk of things like negative media coverage ("oh look, those EA cultists are misanthropic too"), and we also are less likely to have successful outreach to people outside of the EA filter bubble.
In particular, we already have a hard time with outreach in China, and this animal welfare emphasis is just going to further alienate them due to cultural differences, as you can probably tell from my Confucius quote. The Analects are taught in school in both China and Taiwan and are a significant influence in Asian societies.
It's also partly a concern that groupthink dynamics might be at play within EA. I noticed that there are many more comments from the animal welfare crowd, and I fear that many of the global health people might be too intellectually intimidated to voice their views at this point, which would be bad for the debate.
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T16:35 (+8)
The issue with majority opinion is that 500 years ago, the majority would have thought that most of what we do today is crazy.
I mean, even when I was 17, my opinion was close to the majority opinion (in my country), and I certainly wouldn't trust it today, because it was simply uninformed.
The risk of alienating other people is a valid concern. I'd be glad to see research to determine the threshold which would allow to maximise for both reach and impactful donations. Beyond what percentage of donations going to animal welfare will the movement get less traction ? 1% ? 90% ? Will people just not care about the raw numbers and maybe more about something else ?
For the groupthink point, I'm not sure if anything can be done. I'd be glad to read from people who think more donations should go to GHD (they can do it with an anonymous account as well). But your initial post got 21 karma, which makes it in the top 5 comments of the page, so I think there is potential for civil discussion here.
Derek Shiller @ 2024-10-08T17:56 (+13) in response to What do RP's tools tell us about giving $100m to AW or GHD?
This parameter is set to a normal distribution (which, unfortunately you can't control) and the normal distribution doesn't change much when you lower the lower bound. A normal distribution between 0.002 and 0.87 is about the same as a normal distribution between 0 and 0.87. (Incidentally, if the distribution were a lognormal distribution with the same range, then the average result would fall halfway between the bounds in terms of orders of magnitude. This would mean cutting the lower bound would have a significant effect. However, the effect would actually raise the effectiveness estimate because it would raise the uncertainty about the precise order of magnitude. The increase of scale outside the 90% confidence range represented by the distribution would more than make up for the lowering of the median.)
The welfare capacity is supposed to describe the range between the worst and best possible experiences of a species and the numbers we provide are intended to be used as a tool for comparing harms and benefits across species. Still, it is hard to draw direct action-relevant comparisons of the sort that you describe because there are many potential side effects that would need to be considered. You may want to prioritize humans in the same way that you prioritize your family over others, or citizens of the same country over others. The capacities values are not in tension with that. You may also prefer to help humans because of their capacity for art, friendship, etc.
To grasp the concept, I think a better example application would be: if you had to give a human or three chickens a headache for an hour (which they would otherwise spend unproductively) which choice would introduce less harm into the world? Estimating the chickens' range as half that of the human would suggest that it is less bad overall from the perspective of total suffering to give the headache to the human.
The numbers are indeed unintuitive for many people but they were not selected by intuition. We have a fairly complex and thought-out methodology. However, we would love to see alternative principled ways of arriving at less animal-friendly estimates of welfare capacities (or moral weights).
titotal @ 2024-10-09T16:26 (+2)
The upper end of the scale is already at " a chicken's suffering is worth 87% of a humans". I'm assuming that very few people are claiming that a chickens suffering is worth more than a humans. So wouldn't the lognormal distribution be skewed to account for this, meaning that the switch would substantially change the results?
OscarD🔸 @ 2024-10-09T15:52 (+5) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
There's not much to add beyond what everyone else has said. I think we would need to be exceedingly confident in particular views about sentience and moral patienthood and capacity for suffering for non-humans to think GHD was better. I very much wish I had written down more of my reasoning from years ago when I was mainly donating to GiveWell, I think I just hadn't thought it over much!
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T16:11 (+1)
Same here ! I've rarely seen resources making an inter-cause area comparison.
I also donated a lot to the AMF, but without thinking much about it.
Will Howard🔹 @ 2024-10-09T14:00 (+5) in response to What are the strongest arguments for the side you voted against in the AW vs GH debate?
Thanks Vasco, I did vote for animal welfare, so on net I agree with most of your points. On some specific things:
This seems right, and is why I support chicken corporate campaigns which tend to increase welfare. Some reasons this is not quite satisfactory:
But these are just concerns and not deal breakers.
I am sufficiently sceptical to put a low weight on the other 11 models (or at least withhold judgement until I've thought it through more). As I mentioned I'm writing a post I'm hoping to publish this week with at least one argument related to this.
The gist of that post will be: it's double counting to consider the 11 other models as separate lines of evidence, and similarly double counting to consider all the individual proxies (e.g. "anxiety-like behaviour" and "fear-like behaviour") as independent evidence within the models.
Many of the proxies (I claim most) collapse to the single factor of "does it behave as though it contains some kind of reinforcement learning system?". This itself may be predictive of sentience, because this is true of humans, but I consider this to be more like one factor, rather than many independent lines of evidence that are counted strongly under many different models.
Because of this (a lot of the proxies looking like side effects of some kind of reinforcement learning system), I would expect we will continue to see these proxies as we look at smaller and smaller animals, and this wouldn't be a big update. I would expect that if you look at a nematode worm for instance, it might show:
It might not show all of these (maybe a nematode is in fact too small, I don't know much about them), but hopefully you get the point that these look like manifestations of the same underlying thing such that observing more of them becomes weak evidence once you have seen a few.
Even if you didn't accept that they were all exactly side effects of "a reinforcement learning type system" (which seems reasonable), still I believe this idea of there being common explanatory factors for different proxies which are not necessarily sentience related should be factored in.
(RP's model does do some non-linear weighting of proxies at various points, but not exactly accounting for this thing... hopefully my longer post will address this).
On the side of neuron counts, I don't think this is particularly strong evidence either. But I see it as evidence on the side of a factor like "their brain looks structurally similar to a human's", vs the factor of "they behave somewhat similarly to a human" for which the proxies are evidence.
To me neither of these lines of evidence ("brain structural similarity" and "behavioural similarity") seems obviously deserving of more weight.
I definitely agree with this, I would only be concerned if we moved almost all funding to animal welfare.
Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-10-09T16:10 (+5)
Without more information, I would guess that funding work on improving rather than decreasing animal lives will at the margin incentivise people to follow the funding, and therefore skill up to work on improving rather than decreasing animal lives.
I am looking forward to the post. Thanks for sharing the gist and some details. You may want to share a draft with people from Rethink Priorities.
I find it hard to come up with other proxies.
North And @ 2024-10-09T11:58 (+3) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
>developing plant-based alternatives
This too can be useful, but less so.
My model here is there would be transition to lab grown meat, and moving this transition few years / months / days into the earlier time is the thing that matters most
And also in general, I have really cautious stance on population ethics with respect to animals. And i think most utilitarian approaches handle it by not handling it, just refusing to think about it. And that's really weird. Like, if i donate to animals welfare of chickens? I bet the beneficiaries is next generation of chickens from the one currently existing. I want to donate in such a way as to prevent their existence, not supply them with band aids. I think causing creation of 20% less tortured chicken instead is like insane goal for my donation.
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T16:07 (+1)
Very interesting.
From what I've seen, lab grown meat (or rather cellular meat) will face significant challenges before it can replace meat at a large scale (regulatory, technical, opposition from the industry). I think it's still worth investing into, but even it does work, it will take a long time before getting becoming large scale (unless a super AI solves that for us). Some other alternative proteins might be more promising - such as single cell protein.
While certainly worth donating to, I think other venues are necessary, such as improving the conditions of animals in the decades before alternatives replace everything (hopefully).
Moreover, alternative proteins can't solve everything by themselves. Maybe fish or something else will be super hard to replace. In that case, other venues that help heving people care more about the topic is important - this includes corporate campaigns that shift the overton window, legal campaigns, research into wild animal suffering (population ethics is a tricky one here)...
If cellular meat takes 30 years to take hold, reducing by half the suffering of millions of beings in the meantime is still pretty incredible.
Owen Cotton-Barratt @ 2024-10-09T16:06 (+3) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I think of this question mostly in terms of the trajectory I think this nudges us towards. It feels like there's something of a hierarchy of needs for humanity as a whole, and getting out of the zone where we have extreme poverty feels like the right first step, in a way that makes me feel more optimistic about wise decision processes being able to rise to the top thereafter.
I'm not certain what current spending looks like; that might make me change my mind here. (I think it's definitely right to start ramping up spending on animal welfare at some point before poverty is entirely eliminated.)
Jason @ 2024-10-09T15:44 (+4) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
[trigger warning: allusions to pending US electoral candidate who identified as a Nazi and posted anti-trans content...]
Could you say more about why you think the challenges "largely stem from insufficient communication"? I don't disagree that a better comms strategy would be helpful and probably a prudent use for some of the additional $100MM. But I'm struggling to see how it would be a game-changer for most of the challenges Henry describes.
E.g.,: companies and consumers resist things that cost them money, and they use the political system to seek relief from those things. And no communication strategy is going to convince agricultural industries that EA AW wouldn't be at least a near-existential threat to many of their business lines if it achieved its hopes and dreams. Moreover, changing hearts and minds on such an emotionally laden topic as food would be a massive undertaking -- to give a vaguely relevant data point, PepsiCo spent ~$2B on advertising in the US alone in 2022. And getting people to believe things they don't want to believe on a mass scale is hard even when those things are scientifically true (yes the vaccines work, no they will not improve your 5G reception).
Also, the upside of an affirmative comms strategy is limited when you have provided a determined opponent a bunch of open goals to score on. For instance, right now there's a major candidate for governor of a US state who made a bunch of disturbing comments on an adult entertainment discussion board (e.g., calling himself a Nazi). For a significant portion of the US population, some of the things that are said on this Forum register as more offensive than that (e.g., meat-eater problem, implications that a human life is morally worth less than giving a few thousand shrimps a more humane death).[1]
I don't see how throwing money at developing and executing a better comms plan helps much with those kinds of vulnerabilities. I wouldn't be interested in engaging any more with content about the Nazi-identifying governor; it just wouldn't be worth my time on the very very slim chance further information would update my vote. I expect many people would have a similar reaction when opponents successfully tied EA AW to the meat-eater problem.
I am reporting, not endorsing, this view! I'm using it as an example because I think it's easy for people in/adjacent to the EA bubble to not understand how certain positions may play in (e.g.) the deep South where I grew up.
Brad West @ 2024-10-09T16:04 (+4)
I guess I would revise my comment to be more modest in its proposition.
One part of what the OP is saying is that increased funding for animal welfare by EA would result in greater pushback against EA in general for putting resources toward something it considers strange or weird or otherwise contrary to their values.
I'm saying that the effect of this "EA is weird for prioritizing Animal Welfare" would probably be less than the effect of the better messaging, communication, and marketing, that the money would enable. So the net effect of more money in animal welfare (assuming prudent communications and marketing spend in the deployment) would be better public perception of EA rather than worse.
You're right that the underlying perceptions and views are unlikely to be adequately addressed even if all the $200 mil was going to marketing, but with a prudent portion of it going there, I would anticipate the net effect on public perception of EA to be positive rather than negative.
Richard Y Chappell🔸 @ 2024-10-09T14:12 (+4) in response to Seeking Ripple Effects
Right, I take this to be an implication of our best economic and demographic models (respectively).
I don't know what you mean by "a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions". Whether an intervention has a noticeable short-term effect on these targets? That would seem to address a different question.
I wouldn't expect to be able to identify the particular ripple that occurred in any given case, if that's what you mean. So I wouldn't take the failure to identify a particular ripple as evidence that there are no ripple effects. If there are good reasons to reject the standard models, I'd expect that to emerge in the debates over those macro models, not through micro evidence from RCTs or the like.
Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-10-09T16:01 (+2)
Do you think we can trust the predictions of such models over more than a few decades? It looks like increasing population increases longterm income per capita, but not even this is clear (the conclusion relies on extrapolating historical trends, but it is unclear these will hold over long timeframes).
Yes. I see it is a different question. No difference between the treatment and control group after a few decades could be explained by the benefits spilling over to people outside those groups. However, an increasing population or income gap between the treatment and control group would still be evidence for increasing effects, so a decreasing population or income gap is also evidence againt increasing effects.
Jeff Kaufman @ 2022-08-04T02:45 (+7) in response to Doing good is a privilege. This needs to change if we want to do good long-term.
My understanding is that several places that have tried blinding found that this decreased the diversity of their hiring. Something to be cautious about!
Joseph Lemien @ 2024-10-09T16:00 (+2)
I'm commenting on this a few years late, but for anyone reading this who wants to learn more, here is an excerpt from the book DEI Deconstructed, by Lily Zheng, along with a few references:
24. Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2003. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” National Bureau of Economic Research.
25. Behaghel, Luc, Bruno Crépon, and Thomas Le Barbanchon. 2015. “Unintended Effects of Anonymous Résumés.” American Economic Journal. Applied Economics 7 (3): 1–27.
26. White, Maia Jasper. 2020. “Eyes Wide Shut—The Case against Blind Auditions.” NewMusicBox (blog). September 10, 2020.
For anyone that wants to dig deeper, it appears that the Unintended Effects of Anonymous Résumés article is cited in several papers that could be useful to dig into, I haven't gotten around to reading them yet.
NickLaing @ 2024-10-09T15:56 (+2) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
Thanks so much for this excellent list Henry. Although I only agree with some as being make issues personally I think it's the best collection of well structured arguments of problems with a potential shift towards animal welfare that I've seen.
Things I really agree are big issues
Things I personally don't think are a big issue
AndrewRowan @ 2024-10-09T15:55 (+1) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
I agree with many of the points made in the above comment but do not plan to change my vote. When one looks at current expenditures on public health (in the many $trillions of dollars) versus on animal welfare (around $9 billion in revenues annually in the USA), the marginal increase in the utility of grants in the animal welfare space are likely to be greater than those in public health. Open Philanthropy's history project comments on the challenge of producing positive impact in the health space given the large amounts currently devoted annually to support biomedical research let alone the much larger amounts devoted to health treatment, disease surveillance, and prevention.
OscarD🔸 @ 2024-10-09T15:52 (+5) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
There's not much to add beyond what everyone else has said. I think we would need to be exceedingly confident in particular views about sentience and moral patienthood and capacity for suffering for non-humans to think GHD was better. I very much wish I had written down more of my reasoning from years ago when I was mainly donating to GiveWell, I think I just hadn't thought it over much!
Joseph Lemien @ 2024-10-09T15:52 (+2) in response to Doing good is a privilege. This needs to change if we want to do good long-term.
Sophia, I can't believe I didn't see this post until today. I've been interested in inclusion and accessibility-type topics for years, so I have no idea how I didn't see it when you first posted it. Things seem to have improved in some ways since August 2022, but there is still plenty of progress to be made.
Has anybody created a "Top Ten EA Jargon Words Explained"-type post? That seems like something that a person could create fairly easily, and I actually already have a comical version of it as a draft for an April Fool's post. I could easily create a post that could serve as a sort of reference page, so that people can easily link to it to explain jargon.
Brad West @ 2024-10-09T14:27 (+4) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
The challenges you've identified regarding the shift from global health to animal welfare—such as resistance, politicization, and cultural insensitivity—largely stem from insufficient communication, which can be significantly improved with more funding. By investing in effective messaging strategies, we can make animal welfare interventions more relatable and acceptable to the broader public, thereby increasing their popularity and impact. Moreover, the Effective Altruism community risks reputational damage by advocating for animal welfare without adequately investing in public communication; without a strong messaging system, we may alienate potential supporters and undermine our efforts. Therefore, allocating more resources to both animal welfare initiatives and their communication is crucial—not only to address these concerns but also to enhance the movement's credibility and ensure our interventions are both effective and well-received.
Jason @ 2024-10-09T15:44 (+4)
[trigger warning: allusions to pending US electoral candidate who identified as a Nazi and posted anti-trans content...]
Could you say more about why you think the challenges "largely stem from insufficient communication"? I don't disagree that a better comms strategy would be helpful and probably a prudent use for some of the additional $100MM. But I'm struggling to see how it would be a game-changer for most of the challenges Henry describes.
E.g.,: companies and consumers resist things that cost them money, and they use the political system to seek relief from those things. And no communication strategy is going to convince agricultural industries that EA AW wouldn't be at least a near-existential threat to many of their business lines if it achieved its hopes and dreams. Moreover, changing hearts and minds on such an emotionally laden topic as food would be a massive undertaking -- to give a vaguely relevant data point, PepsiCo spent ~$2B on advertising in the US alone in 2022. And getting people to believe things they don't want to believe on a mass scale is hard even when those things are scientifically true (yes the vaccines work, no they will not improve your 5G reception).
Also, the upside of an affirmative comms strategy is limited when you have provided a determined opponent a bunch of open goals to score on. For instance, right now there's a major candidate for governor of a US state who made a bunch of disturbing comments on an adult entertainment discussion board (e.g., calling himself a Nazi). For a significant portion of the US population, some of the things that are said on this Forum register as more offensive than that (e.g., meat-eater problem, implications that a human life is morally worth less than giving a few thousand shrimps a more humane death).[1]
I don't see how throwing money at developing and executing a better comms plan helps much with those kinds of vulnerabilities. I wouldn't be interested in engaging any more with content about the Nazi-identifying governor; it just wouldn't be worth my time on the very very slim chance further information would update my vote. I expect many people would have a similar reaction when opponents successfully tied EA AW to the meat-eater problem.
I am reporting, not endorsing, this view! I'm using it as an example because I think it's easy for people in/adjacent to the EA bubble to not understand how certain positions may play in (e.g.) the deep South where I grew up.
AndrewRowan @ 2024-10-09T15:39 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
The marginal effect of increased spending (say $1 billion) on animal welfare is likely to be far greater than the marginal impact of an extra $1 billion on global health. Granted that public health challenges in low and middle-income countries can at times be substantially lessened with relatively small inputs (e.g., niacin enrichment of corn meal), overall, the impact of relatively small amounts of strategically invested money can have a significant impact on the animal space. For example, I believe the support ($1-2 million) Open Philanthropy has provided to Compassion in World Farming to support Compassion's End the Cage Age" citizen's initiative in Europe is going to have substantial global ramifications for how farmed animals are raised and treated down the road. The EU has temporarily stepped back on its commitment to end caged animal farming. Still, the recent Strategic Dialogue on Agriculture in Europe has again emphasized the importance of ending farmed animal cages. I would also refer readers to the recent papers on the impact of the vulture decline in India. The bat decline in the USA (look for documents by Eyal Frank and colleagues), which concluded that the loss of those wild animals has led to substantial increases in all cause human mortality in India and infant mortality in the USA. Calculating the economic impact of biodiversity decline is a significant challenge, but Frank has provided two fascinating and valuable examples of how animal welfare, human welfare and planetary well-being are connected!
Benjamin M. @ 2024-10-09T12:46 (+7) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following:
1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments
2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)
3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high
I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.
MichaelStJules @ 2024-10-09T15:31 (+3)
I think animals could still matter a lot (or the interpersonal comparisons are undefined) on non-hedonic welfarist views:
Joseph_Chu @ 2024-10-07T23:36 (+8) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I weigh moral worth by degree of sentience based on neuron count as a rough proxy, which naturally tends to weigh helping an equal number of humans more than an equivalent number of any other currently known species.
MichaelStJules @ 2024-10-09T15:26 (+4)
What do you think of RP's work (mostly) against using neuron counts? From the summary:
(Also this more specific hypothesis.)
NickLaing @ 2024-10-09T14:55 (+4) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
Although I know many EAs will agree with you, I think second order concerns such as image and reference on the movement are valid considerations, although usually less important than first order.
david_reinstein @ 2024-10-09T15:14 (+4)
I think I was unclear. I agree "second order concerns such as image and reference on the movement are valid considerations" and I even think these are often more important. (Perhaps 'indirect' is a better word than 'second order').
But it's more about how I interpreted the question
I interpreted this this a normative 'axiology' question ... if society could shift it's resources towards this by $100m, would that improve welfare?
Rather than a 'would it be strategic for EAs to publicly shift their donations in this way'. But I now see that other interpretations of this question are valid.
justsaying @ 2024-10-09T15:13 (+18) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
This post is mostly about how animal welfare is less popular than global health but I don't really see the tie-in for how this (probably correct) claim translates to it being less effective. Taking the first argument at face value, that some people won't like being in some ways forced to pay more or change their habits, does not seem to translate to "it is not cost effective to do successfully force them (and one hopes eventually change their hearts and minds) anyway." This was precisely the case for a lot of social movements (abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights, worker's rights, the environmental movement, etc.) but all these movements were to various degrees successful.
It seems to me that in order for any of these popularity based arguments to hold water, you need a follow-on of "and therefore it is not cost effective to invest in them, and here is the evidence." However, I think we have a lot of evidence for cost-effectiveness in investing animal interventions. See cage-free egg campaigns for example. I similarly don't understand the relevance of other popularity-based concerns, such as being accused of being culturally insensitive. What is the implication for effectiveness if such accusations are made? Why does that matter?
Joanna Michalska @ 2024-10-09T15:10 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
There are more sentient beings affected by factory farming and the problem is more neglected.
Ben Millwood🔸 @ 2024-10-09T10:58 (+2) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Yeah, I didn't intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the "intensity of experience" ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more "total experience" than wild animals.
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T15:09 (+1)
Oh, as a proxy of that.
I don't think I agree since I am not convinced that neural count is the relevant metric but I understand better the use of this proxy.
Arepo @ 2024-10-09T06:40 (+2) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I reviewed the piece you linked and fwiw strongly disagreed that the case it made was as clear cut as the authors conclude (in particular IIRC they observe a limited historical upside from RCT-backed interventions, but didn't seem to account for the far smaller amount of money that had been put into them; they also gave a number of priors that I didn't necessarily strongly disagree with, but seemed like they could be an order of magnitude off in either direction, and the end result was quite sensitive to these).
That's not to say I think global health interventions are clearly better - just that I think the case is open (but also that, given the much smaller global investment in RCTs, there's probably more exploratory value in those).
I could imagine any of the following turning out to be the best safeguard of the long term (and others):
My best guess is the last one, but I'm wary of any blanket dismissal of any subset of the above.
JackM @ 2024-10-09T15:06 (+2)
What is the argument for Health and development interventions being best from a long-term perspective?
I think animal welfare work is underrated from a long-term perspective. There is a risk that we lock-in values that don't give adequate consideration to non-human sentience which could enable mass suffering to persist for a very long time. E.g. we spread to the stars while factory farming is still widespread and so end up spreading factory farming too. Or we create digital sentience while we still don't really care about non-human sentience and so end up creating vast amounts of digital suffering. I think working to end factory farming is one way to widen the moral circle and prevent these moral catastrophes from occurring.
Thomas To @ 2024-10-09T15:03 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Animal welfare is much more neglected than global human health
david_reinstein @ 2024-10-09T14:11 (+2) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
I agree with most of these points, but many of them don’t really argue against the forum question as posed. (Not that you were saying they do.).
The “should” in the question, in my mind, seems to rule out these second order image concerns, difficulty of garnering support, etc.
NickLaing @ 2024-10-09T14:55 (+4)
Although I know many EAs will agree with you, I think second order concerns such as image and reference on the movement are valid considerations, although usually less important than first order.
Amber Dawn @ 2024-10-09T14:52 (+3) in response to Palisade is hiring: Exec Assistant, Content Lead, Ops Lead, and Policy Lead
Hi! As well as these roles, there are some remote international roles listed on the Palisade Notion site - are these still open, and if so, how should one apply to them?
Mbamah @ 2024-10-09T14:51 (+1) in response to Exercise for 'Differences in Impact'
Malaria Consortium: 12,000 children protected, 24 lives saved.
New incentives: 1,200 children vaccinated, 2 lives saved
Hellen Keller : 109,000 children supplied with Vitamin A supplements, 40 lives saved
B.
With a $120,000 I will donate to Hellen Keller because of its high effectiveness.
MichaelStJules @ 2024-10-09T14:47 (+7) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
I think this is also true for some of the more moderate/less weird animal welfare reforms we ask for:
But this may be less true for plant-based advocacy, invertebrate welfare and wild animal welfare. Open Phil has stopped funding work in the last two.
MichaelStJules @ 2024-10-09T14:41 (+7) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
Plenty of work has been done outside the West, e.g. through the Open Wing Alliance. Several ACE recommendations work primarily outside the West. AFAIK, we aren't really being called culturally insensitive so far. So, this doesn't seem to be materializing, or at least not in a way that's seriously hindering us.
And costly welfare reforms will only go through where they are reasonably aligned with the values of the producers or consumers (possibly sometimes aligned only with end consumers in the West, not with the non-Western producers for imported products). I think EAA grantmakers and the EAA orgs they support are basically as sensitive to cultural values as they need to be. Outreach is usually carried out mostly by local advocates. Consideration of cultural values also affects organizational strategies, like what kind of outreach is done, e.g. less antagonistic in East Asia, if I recall correctly.
Brad West @ 2024-10-09T14:27 (+4) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
The challenges you've identified regarding the shift from global health to animal welfare—such as resistance, politicization, and cultural insensitivity—largely stem from insufficient communication, which can be significantly improved with more funding. By investing in effective messaging strategies, we can make animal welfare interventions more relatable and acceptable to the broader public, thereby increasing their popularity and impact. Moreover, the Effective Altruism community risks reputational damage by advocating for animal welfare without adequately investing in public communication; without a strong messaging system, we may alienate potential supporters and undermine our efforts. Therefore, allocating more resources to both animal welfare initiatives and their communication is crucial—not only to address these concerns but also to enhance the movement's credibility and ensure our interventions are both effective and well-received.
MichaelStJules @ 2024-10-09T14:26 (+2) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
This can also cut the other way if we're trying to ensure we have a positive impact (difference-making risk averse or difference-making ambiguity averse). We have no objective way to measure how much potential harm saving humans or improving their incomes does to nonhuman animals through the meat eater problem or wild animal effects.
MichaelStJules @ 2024-10-09T14:24 (+4) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
My understanding is that no one is seriously verifying how many deaths or disease cases GiveWell-recommended charities have prevented. Rather, studies of the effectiveness of the types of interventions these charities use are generalized, with adjustments for context. There's a risk that we're just missing something, say that the program isn't implemented as expected, or we've made the wrong adjustments for context. As far as I can tell, we're only tracking inputs, and then we're estimating the outputs. The cost-effectiveness analyses are effectively ex ante or prospective. (Maybe except for GiveDirectly, for which there have been RCTs.)
Animal welfare intervention cost-effectiveness analyses seem more ex post or retrospective. For corporate outreach, we track which companies have made commitments, and we track progress on those commitments, e.g. % of their eggs cage-free with EggTrack.
There is still the problem of assessing causal impact, of course, and there's been some formal (observational/non-RCT) research on this (Mendez & Peacock, 2022) and some more informal analyses, including fact-checking accomplishments and what the industry had otherwise planned.
We also do have analyses of the welfare effects of some major animal welfare reforms in terms of duration and intensity of suffering reduced through Welfare Footprint Project, and some other similar projects. But these are not specific to the work of specific non-profits, so not really ex post/retrospective.
Rockwell @ 2024-10-09T14:16 (+12) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
"There seems to be movement towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions."
What is this based on? I don't believe this tracks with e.g. distribution of EA-associated donations.
David_Moss @ 2024-10-09T14:13 (+19) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
A couple of survey results which may be interesting in light of this debate:
This is in line with the debate week results showing a strong preference for an additional $100mn going to AW, but the continued preference for a larger total percentage going to GHD seems worth noting.
Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-10-09T08:43 (+2) in response to Seeking Ripple Effects
Could you elaborate? Are you saying that increasing the economy or population size today will make the economy and population size larger for at least centuries? Would you consider a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions evidence against that?
Richard Y Chappell🔸 @ 2024-10-09T14:12 (+4)
Right, I take this to be an implication of our best economic and demographic models (respectively).
I don't know what you mean by "a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions". Whether an intervention has a noticeable short-term effect on these targets? That would seem to address a different question.
I wouldn't expect to be able to identify the particular ripple that occurred in any given case, if that's what you mean. So I wouldn't take the failure to identify a particular ripple as evidence that there are no ripple effects. If there are good reasons to reject the standard models, I'd expect that to emerge in the debates over those macro models, not through micro evidence from RCTs or the like.
david_reinstein @ 2024-10-09T14:11 (+2) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
I agree with most of these points, but many of them don’t really argue against the forum question as posed. (Not that you were saying they do.).
The “should” in the question, in my mind, seems to rule out these second order image concerns, difficulty of garnering support, etc.
David Mathers🔸 @ 2024-10-09T11:30 (+11) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
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.
Jason @ 2024-10-09T14:06 (+5)
I don't think Henry is suggesting that, though (although I see how one could read observation 7 that way and welcome his clarification). The post is about movement "towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions."
At most, I read his post as suggesting things like (1) we may need to leave some stuff on the table because poor optics doom an effort requiring public support to failure, and (2) partially withdrawing from GH may not be a good idea in part for optics reasons. While one could disagree with those kinds of conclusions as well, I think they are more subtle and sophisticated than "doing stuff just for the optics."
Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-10-08T21:54 (+4) in response to What are the strongest arguments for the side you voted against in the AW vs GH debate?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Will!
You could donate to organisations improving instead of decreasing the lives of animals. I estimated a past cost-effectiveness of Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) of 43.5 k times the marginal cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities.
I agree with the last sentence. Using Rethink Priorities' welfare range for chickens based on neurons, I would conclude corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 11.1 (= 1.51*10^3*0.00244/0.332) times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
Rethink Priorities' median welfare range for shrimps of 0.031 is 31 k (= 0.031/10^-6) times their welfare range based on neurons of 10^-6. For you to get to this super low welfare range, you would have to justify putting a very low weight in all the other 11 models considered by Rethink Priorities. In general, justifying a best guess so many orders of magnitude away from that coming out of the most in-depth research on the matter seems very hard.
Assuming in my cost-effectiveness analysis of HSI that disabling and excruciating pain are as intense as hurtful pain (setting B2 and B3 of tab "Types of pain" to 1), and maintaining the other assumptions, 1 day of e.g. "scalding and severe burning" would be neutralised by 1 day of fully healthy life. I think this massively underestimates the badness of severe suffering. Yet, even then, I conclude the past cost-effectiveness of HSI is 2.17 times the marginal cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities.
Farmed animals are neglected, so I do not think worldview diversidication would be at risk due to moving 100 M$ to animal welfare instead of global health and development. I calculated 99.9 % of the annual philanthropic spending is on humans.
In contrast, based on Rethink Priorities' median welfare ranges, the annual disability of farmed animals is much larger than that of humans.
I agree one should not put all resources into the best option, but we are very far from this (see 1st graph above).
Will Howard🔹 @ 2024-10-09T14:00 (+5)
Thanks Vasco, I did vote for animal welfare, so on net I agree with most of your points. On some specific things:
This seems right, and is why I support chicken corporate campaigns which tend to increase welfare. Some reasons this is not quite satisfactory:
But these are just concerns and not deal breakers.
I am sufficiently sceptical to put a low weight on the other 11 models (or at least withhold judgement until I've thought it through more). As I mentioned I'm writing a post I'm hoping to publish this week with at least one argument related to this.
The gist of that post will be: it's double counting to consider the 11 other models as separate lines of evidence, and similarly double counting to consider all the individual proxies (e.g. "anxiety-like behaviour" and "fear-like behaviour") as independent evidence within the models.
Many of the proxies (I claim most) collapse to the single factor of "does it behave as though it contains some kind of reinforcement learning system?". This itself may be predictive of sentience, because this is true of humans, but I consider this to be more like one factor, rather than many independent lines of evidence that are counted strongly under many different models.
Because of this (a lot of the proxies looking like side effects of some kind of reinforcement learning system), I would expect we will continue to see these proxies as we look at smaller and smaller animals, and this wouldn't be a big update. I would expect that if you look at a nematode worm for instance, it might show:
It might not show all of these (maybe a nematode is in fact too small, I don't know much about them), but hopefully you get the point that these look like manifestations of the same underlying thing such that observing more of them becomes weak evidence once you have seen a few.
Even if you didn't accept that they were all exactly side effects of "a reinforcement learning type system" (which seems reasonable), still I believe this idea of there being common explanatory factors for different proxies which are not necessarily sentience related should be factored in.
(RP's model does do some non-linear weighting of proxies at various points, but not exactly accounting for this thing... hopefully my longer post will address this).
On the side of neuron counts, I don't think this is particularly strong evidence either. But I see it as evidence on the side of a factor like "their brain looks structurally similar to a human's", vs the factor of "they behave somewhat similarly to a human" for which the proxies are evidence.
To me neither of these lines of evidence ("brain structural similarity" and "behavioural similarity") seems obviously deserving of more weight.
I definitely agree with this, I would only be concerned if we moved almost all funding to animal welfare.
Benjamin M. @ 2024-10-09T12:46 (+7) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following:
1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments
2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)
3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high
I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T14:00 (+5)
Interesting, I'd be curious to know why you think factory farmed animals have positive lives. If true, this would have huge implications.
Joey 🔸 @ 2023-05-15T10:25 (+47) in response to Prioritising animal welfare over global health and development?
Hey Vasco,
Love the post; I think it is super valuable to have these sorts of important conversations, directly thinking about cross-cause comparison. It’s worth noting that CE does consider cross-cause effects in all the interventions we consider/recommend, including possible animal effects and WAS effects. Despite this, CE does not come to the same conclusion as this post; here are a couple of notes on why:
Strength of evidence discounting: CEAs are not all equal when they are based on very different strengths of evidence, and I think we weight this factor a lot heavier. It's quite common for the impact of any given intervention to regress fairly heavily as more research/work is put into it. We have found this in CE’s, GW’s and other EAs’ research. This can be seen in even more depth in the GiveWell and EA forum writings on deworming and how to deal with speculative effects that possibly have very high upsides. For example, I would expect a five-hour CEA to be constantly off (almost always in a positive direction) compared to a 50-hour CEA. A calculation made at two different levels of rigor should not be directly compared. (This does not mean shorter-form CEAs are not worth doing, but I think we have to take their cons and likely regressions a lot more seriously than this post currently does.) This discounting should be even more heavily applied to flow-through effects, as the evidence for them is way lighter than the direct effects. We tend to use something akin to the weighted quantitative modeling used here.
Marginal funding and reliability in effects: Here’s a good example of how a CEA can regress really quickly; GiveWell typically does CEAs on marginal donations made, whereas many other CEAs - including the one you use from Saulius - do not consider marginal funding. I currently think that the marginal dollar to corporate campaigns is way less impactful when compared to the average dollar of spending pre-2018. This can affect a CEA quite drastically. Another example is the funding of numerous animal interventions through corporate campaigns, which have become the “hit” of the animal movement. However, these campaigns often are seen as cost-effectiveness without clear before hand knowledge of the impact an additional dollar of funding would have accomplished. It is a bit like measuring CE’s cost effectiveness by looking at the top charity we incubated and assuming future charities will be equal to that. Variance is a real pain, and it’s not even clear if other corporate campaigns will be equally cost-effective to cage-free. On the other hand, top GW charities have this built in; they are not estimating the average EV of AMF’s top three historical campaigns, they are estimating the impact of marginal average future funding.
Variable animal effects dependent on intervention: You touch on this, but I think there is an important point missed. The effects on animals vary quite a lot, depending on the intervention. Interventions that primarily affect mortality in Africa, for instance, end up looking like how you describe. But morbidity-focused interventions, mental health focused interventions, and family planning interventions are all significantly less affected by this consideration. Same goes for any intervention that operates in contexts where there is lower meat consumption (such as in India). I think if you remodeled this for an organization like Fortify Health (Iron fortification in India), it would result in rather different outcomes.
If you combine these factors and look at a marginal dollar to FH vs a marginal dollar to THL (both of them with similarly rigorous CEAs and flow-through effects that are discounted based on certainty), I think the outcomes would be different enough to change your endline conclusion.
The non-epistemic difference I have is to do with ecosystem limitations, and is more specific to CE itself vs. general EA organizations. When we launch a charity, we need 1) founders 2) ideas, and 3) funding. Each of these are fairly cause area limited (and I think limiting factors are often more important than total scale). For example, if we aimed to found 10 animal charities a year (vs 10 charities across all the cause areas we currently focus on) I do not think the weakest two would be anywhere near as impactful as the top two, and only a small minority of them would get long-term funding. In fact, with animal charities making up around a third of those we have launched, I think we already run close to those limitations. This means that even if we thought that animal charities were more impactful than human ones on average, the difference would have to be pretty large for us to think that adding a 9th or 10th animal charity into the animal ecosystem would be more impactful than adding the first or second human-focused charity. I expect a version of this consideration can apply to other actors too. In general, I believe that given the current ecosystem, more than ~three-five charities founded per year within a given area would start to result in cannibalization between charities.
Thanks again for the consideration of this; I do think people should do a lot more cross-cause thinking, and I expect there are some really neglected areas that have significant intercausal impact.
Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-10-09T13:55 (+4)
Hi Joey,
I have searched for "animal" in all the 16 reports of CE's global health and development recommendations, and I did not find any discussion that extending human lives would increase the consumption of animals. In contrast, decreasing the birth rate is highlighted as being a positive externality in terms of animal welfare in 3 of the 16 reports:
points due to averted consumption of animal products" (here).
A lifetime of consumption of these products leads to an considerable amount of suffering for animals raised in factory farms. Preventing unintended births therefore indirectly decreases demand for these products, thereby decreasing the number of animals raised for food. We have modeled these effects using CEĚ—s welfare points system in our CEA" (here).
I think CE's reports should mention the negative externalities on farmed animals due to extending human lives, considering CE's reports on family planning discuss the positive externalities on farmed animals due to decreasing fertility.
The last bullet above also illustrates your global health and development recommendations could be net harmful based on your own numbers. I think 100 welfare points (WPs) are roughly as good as averting 1 DALY (because 100 WPs is the maximum total welfare possible), so 377 WP/$ of positive externalities respect around 3.77 DALY/$. This is 379 (= 3.77/0.00994) times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities of 0.00994 DALY/$, i.e. the effects on animals are way larger than those on humans according to CE's report. This claims the effects on animals are positive due to decreasing population size, so it directly follows that saving lives (increasing population size) has negative effects on animals, and the negative effects on animals would be much larger than those on humans (trusting the numbers of the report).
Jason @ 2024-10-09T13:52 (+2) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
Pressuring people and entities to do things they would rather not do (like incurring business expenses to improve animal welfare) can be a powerful mechanism of action (MOA), both because of leverage and because certain objectives may be hard to accomplish otherwise.
But it has some important limitations as well, several of which relate to your points. The reliance on consumer, social, or political pressure limits the range of viable targets, likely requires pulling some punches to maintain the public support needed for the MOA to work, invites countermeasures by opponents who can appeal to (e.g.) a higher power like the legislature, and so on.
Thus, it doesn't generally play well with (e.g.) an attitude of truthseeking-and-damn-the-torpedoes or something that looks like an epistemic precommitment to not caring what outsiders think. Those stances may work with bednets and conducting certain types of research where little third-party support/cooperation is needed, but I'd note how those interventions are not nearly as leveraged.
taoburga @ 2024-10-09T13:48 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Mostly the meat-eater problem, also cost-effectiveness analyses. Also higher neglectedness on priors.
SusannaF @ 2024-10-09T13:47 (+2) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Industrialised animal farming is the single biggest cause of suffering, the most neglected / under-reported and under-funded and therefore deserves all the funding it can possibly source. Moreover, reducing animal agriculture would also reduce risks (zoonoses / pandemics); environmental harms and improve human health outcomes. It would be a win-win for multiple cause areas.
Connor Tabarrok @ 2024-10-09T13:44 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Animals ought not be fungible to humans!
Mjreard @ 2024-10-07T09:26 (+16) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
You'd have to value animals at ~millionths of humans for scale and neglectedness not to be dispositive. Only countervailing considerations are things around cooperativeness, positive feedback loops, and civilizational stability, all of which are speculative and even sign uncertain
titotal @ 2024-10-09T13:21 (+5)
Can I ask how you arrived at the "millionths" number?
Luke Moore 🔸 @ 2024-10-07T08:37 (+4) in response to Updates on the effective giving ecosystem (MCF 2024 memo)
Hey Squeezy! I'm really sorry, but we're not going to be able to do this right now as we don't have the data from these organisations or it would take too long to categorise it at this point. Here you can find out more information about Open Philanthropy and Manifund's allocations. Unfortunately we don't have the data on other organisations.
squeezy @ 2024-10-09T13:12 (+1)
No worries Luke! Thank you for your post and for these links.
squeezy @ 2024-10-09T13:04 (+4) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
The neglectedness and intensity of animal suffering would, in a triaging scenario, see me prioritizing it over many global health interventions. I am open to the idea that many animals do not indeed live lives not worth living; but personally I would rather avoid life than live as an industrially farmed chicken or fish.
I am sensitive to the idea that animal welfare work may not be able to productively absorb $100 million. At the same time, I would like to see more experimentation in the animal advocacy movement.
Jason @ 2024-10-09T04:22 (+5) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
What is the most effective and appropriate relationship with "mainstream common sense morality views" in your opinion? At one extreme, if we just parrot them, then we can just cut out the expensive meta middlemen and give directly to whatever mainstream opinion says we should.
I do think the skew would be meaningfully different but for the significant discrepancy in GW vs AW funding in both EA and more generally.
Joseph_Chu @ 2024-10-09T12:57 (+5)
I don't know. Certainly just parroting them is wrong. I just think we should give some weight to majority opinion, as it represents an aggregate of many different human experiences that seem to have aligned together and found common ground.
Also, a lot of my worry is not so much that EAs might be wrong, so much as that if our views diverge too strongly from popular opinion, we run the risk of things like negative media coverage ("oh look, those EA cultists are misanthropic too"), and we also are less likely to have successful outreach to people outside of the EA filter bubble.
In particular, we already have a hard time with outreach in China, and this animal welfare emphasis is just going to further alienate them due to cultural differences, as you can probably tell from my Confucius quote. The Analects are taught in school in both China and Taiwan and are a significant influence in Asian societies.
It's also partly a concern that groupthink dynamics might be at play within EA. I noticed that there are many more comments from the animal welfare crowd, and I fear that many of the global health people might be too intellectually intimidated to voice their views at this point, which would be bad for the debate.
SummaryBot @ 2024-10-09T12:49 (+1) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
Executive summary: The shift from global health to animal welfare interventions in effective altruism may backfire due to various challenges, including resistance to imposed changes, social dismissal, politicization, and difficulties in measuring outcomes.
Key points:
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SummaryBot @ 2024-10-09T12:47 (+1) in response to Video and transcript of presentation on Otherness and control in the age of AGI
Executive summary: The "Otherness and control in the age of AGI" essay series explores how deep atheism and moral anti-realism in AI risk discourse can lead to problematic "yang" impulses for control, and proposes incorporating more balanced "yin" and "green" perspectives while still acknowledging key truths about AI risk.
Key points:
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Benjamin M. @ 2024-10-09T12:46 (+7) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following:
1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments
2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)
3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high
I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.
SummaryBot @ 2024-10-09T12:46 (+1) in response to Subgame Purrrfection—Guest Writer Jaiveer Singh Explores Subgame-Perfect Nash Equilibrium
Executive summary: Subgame-perfect Nash Equilibrium in extensive-form games requires rational best responses at each decision point, but real-world behavior often deviates due to fairness considerations and social preferences.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Michele Campolo @ 2024-10-09T12:13 (+2) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Last time I checked, improving the lives of animals was much cheaper than improving human lives; and I don't think that arguments saying that humans have more moral weight are enough to compensate.
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T10:25 (+5) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Can you expand on why other animal interventions seem useless? For instance, developing plant-based alternatives, getting chickens out of cramped cages, stunning animals before slaughter...
I'm not sure to see how these interventions do not improve the lives of other beings?
North And @ 2024-10-09T11:58 (+3)
>developing plant-based alternatives
This too can be useful, but less so.
My model here is there would be transition to lab grown meat, and moving this transition few years / months / days into the earlier time is the thing that matters most
And also in general, I have really cautious stance on population ethics with respect to animals. And i think most utilitarian approaches handle it by not handling it, just refusing to think about it. And that's really weird. Like, if i donate to animals welfare of chickens? I bet the beneficiaries is next generation of chickens from the one currently existing. I want to donate in such a way as to prevent their existence, not supply them with band aids. I think causing creation of 20% less tortured chicken instead is like insane goal for my donation.
quila @ 2024-10-09T11:37 (+2) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
under neartermism, which is not my view but which may be the spirit of the question, animal welfare seems obviously better because non-human animals are extremely neglected by human civilization, either left to die in the wild or cut up in mechanized torture facilities.
under longtermism, it's basically a question of which could positively effect the values of the first agent superintelligence. probably neither would have a strong effect, but conditional on an effect being had, i'd guess it would route through the increased moral progress caused by animal welfare advocacy, somehow leading to a less human-centric forever-value.
(100% under neartermism, ~80% under longtermism in recognition of uncertainty)
Björn Lundgren @ 2024-10-09T11:33 (+1) in response to Is the Far Future Irrelevant for Moral Decision-Making?
Hi all,
Thanks to all for taking the time to discuss our paper. I don’t have time to read and comment on everything I’ve seen discussed in the forum, but I thought it would be worthwhile to comment on a few misunderstanding (some of which others have already pointed to):
Speaking for both me and Karolina, we’d be super happy if a longtermist would take the time to respond to our paper.
titotal @ 2024-10-09T11:31 (+6) in response to titotal's Quick takes
I would advise being careful with RP's Cross-cause effectiveness tool as it currently stands, especially with regards to the chicken campaign. There appears to be a very clear conversion error which I've detailed in the edit to my comment here. I was also unable to replicate their default values from their source data, but I may be missing something.
David Mathers🔸 @ 2024-10-09T11:30 (+11) in response to Ways I see the global health -> animal welfare shift backfiring
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.
Jason @ 2024-10-08T13:58 (+11) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I am having a hard time following this. We aren't, to my knowledge, asking people whose loved ones are at significant risk of dying of malaria and TB for money. AFAIK, we're not asking them to prioritize animal welfare over their loved ones in non-finamcial ways either. Could you explain what specifically we're asking of this class of people?
OllieBase @ 2024-10-09T11:12 (+6)
On top of Jason's point, this argument presupposes that animals are food and therefore not worthy of much if any moral concern, but there are many reasons to think animals are worthy of moral concern.
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T08:45 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I'm not sure this metric is relevant : biomass weight is massively dominated by the largest mammals just for the reason that they are big.
Going by this metric, it would mean that having one super obese 400kg individual, or one small cow, counts the same as having 100 human babies (not to talk about elephants).
I think number of individuals is much more relevant here. And there just happens to be a lot of smaller individuals.
Ben Millwood🔸 @ 2024-10-09T10:58 (+2)
Yeah, I didn't intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the "intensity of experience" ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more "total experience" than wild animals.
North And @ 2024-10-09T08:52 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I support lab grown meat research / production, other interventions seem useless. I support "global health" more broadly and strongly, you have less ways to burn money in ways i find useless
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T10:25 (+5)
Can you expand on why other animal interventions seem useless? For instance, developing plant-based alternatives, getting chickens out of cramped cages, stunning animals before slaughter...
I'm not sure to see how these interventions do not improve the lives of other beings?
Patrick Gruban 🔸 @ 2024-10-09T10:19 (+6) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Reading RP's work in the last months and the posts for debate week has made me more inclined towards AW funding.
crunk004 @ 2024-10-08T16:59 (+3) in response to What does the systems perspective say about effective interventions?
This post asks a similar question! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pZT9FjRehCouvrRXz/seeking-ripple-effects
I personally think that we shouldn't weigh the ripple effects too highly in our decisions - if you care about reducing short term suffering and long term expanding the moral circle, I would be skeptical that a single intervention would better accomplish both of those objectives than two separate interventions tailored to each.
Jonas Hallgren @ 2024-10-09T10:12 (+2)
Thanks! That post adresses what I was pointing at a lot better than I did in mine.
I can see from your response that I didn't get across my point as well as I wanted to but I appreciate the answer none the less!
It was more a question of what leads to the better long-term consequences rather than combining them.
Toby Tremlett🔹 @ 2024-10-09T09:55 (+24) in response to tobytrem's Quick takes
Anyone know any Earn-To-Givers who might be interested in participating in an AMA during Giving Season? If a few are interested, it might be fun to experiment with an AMA panel, where Forum users ask questions, and any of the AMA co-authors can respond/ co-authors can disagree.
Why? Giving Season is, in my opinion, a really great time to highlight the earn-to-give work which is ongoing all year, but is generally under-celebrated by the EA community. + Earn-to-givers might have good insights on how to pick donation targets during the donation election, and Giving Season more generally.
Derek Shiller @ 2024-10-08T17:56 (+13) in response to What do RP's tools tell us about giving $100m to AW or GHD?
This parameter is set to a normal distribution (which, unfortunately you can't control) and the normal distribution doesn't change much when you lower the lower bound. A normal distribution between 0.002 and 0.87 is about the same as a normal distribution between 0 and 0.87. (Incidentally, if the distribution were a lognormal distribution with the same range, then the average result would fall halfway between the bounds in terms of orders of magnitude. This would mean cutting the lower bound would have a significant effect. However, the effect would actually raise the effectiveness estimate because it would raise the uncertainty about the precise order of magnitude. The increase of scale outside the 90% confidence range represented by the distribution would more than make up for the lowering of the median.)
The welfare capacity is supposed to describe the range between the worst and best possible experiences of a species and the numbers we provide are intended to be used as a tool for comparing harms and benefits across species. Still, it is hard to draw direct action-relevant comparisons of the sort that you describe because there are many potential side effects that would need to be considered. You may want to prioritize humans in the same way that you prioritize your family over others, or citizens of the same country over others. The capacities values are not in tension with that. You may also prefer to help humans because of their capacity for art, friendship, etc.
To grasp the concept, I think a better example application would be: if you had to give a human or three chickens a headache for an hour (which they would otherwise spend unproductively) which choice would introduce less harm into the world? Estimating the chickens' range as half that of the human would suggest that it is less bad overall from the perspective of total suffering to give the headache to the human.
The numbers are indeed unintuitive for many people but they were not selected by intuition. We have a fairly complex and thought-out methodology. However, we would love to see alternative principled ways of arriving at less animal-friendly estimates of welfare capacities (or moral weights).
titotal @ 2024-10-09T09:52 (+3)
Thanks for clarifying! I think these numbers are the crux of the whole debate, so it's worth digging into them.
I am understanding correctly that none of these factors are included in the global health and development effectiveness evaluation?
I'm not sure how this is different to my hypothetical, except in degree?
But the thing we are actually debating here is "should we prevent african children from dying of malaria, or prevent a lot of chickens from being confined to painful cages", which is an action. If you are using a weight of ~0.44 to make that decision, then shouldn't you similarly use it to make the "free 3 chickens or a human" decision?
Hayley Clatterbuck @ 2024-10-08T18:25 (+9) in response to What do RP's tools tell us about giving $100m to AW or GHD?
Our estimate uses Saulius's years/$ estimates. To convert to DALYs/$, we weighted by the amount of pain experienced by chickens per year. The details can be found in Laura Dufffy's report here. The key bit:
titotal @ 2024-10-09T09:43 (+7)
Thanks for clarifying! However, I'm still having trouble replicating the default values. I apologise for drilling down so much on this, but this calculation appears to be the crux of the whole debate. My third point is extremely important, as I seem to be getting two order of magnitude lower results? edit: also added a fourth point which is a very clear error.
First, The google doc states that the life-years affected per dollar is 12 to 120, but Sallius report says it's range is 12 to 160. Why the difference? Is this just a typo in the google doc?
Second, the default values in the tool are given as 160 to 3600. Why is this range higher (on a percentage basis) than the life years affected? Is this due to uncertainty somehow?
Finally and most importantly, the report here seems to state that each hen is in the laying phase for approximately 1 year (40-60 weeks), and that switching from cage to cage-free averts roughly 2000 hours of hurtful pain and 250 hours of disabling pain (and that excruciating pain is largely negligible). If I take the maximum DALY conversion of 10 for disabling and 0.25 for hurtful (and convert hours to years), I get an adjusted result of (250*10 + 0.25*2000)/(365*24) = 0.34 DALYs per chicken affected per year. If I multiply this by sallius estimate, I get a lower value than the straight "life years affected", but the default values are actually around 13 time higher. Have I made a mistake here? I couldn't find the exact calculations
Edit: Also, there is clearly a bug in the website: If I set everything else to 1, and put in "exactly 120 suffering-years per dollar", the result it gives me is 120 DALYs per thousand dollars. It seems like the site is forgetting to do the one dollar to a thousand dollar conversion, and thus underestimating the impact of the chicken charity by a factor of a thousand.
NickLaing @ 2024-10-09T09:39 (+4) in response to What would you do differently if you changed your mind?
With my temperament and personality im a "direct work" kind of guy. As much as I might like to think otherwise, I don't think I'm likely any time soon to have the temperament or drive to work well in Meta or earn-to-give.
Given that, if my mind was changed here all it might mean is that I would give a small amount more to animal welfare orgs (given my very low salary by most people here's standards). I doubt given my stage of life (ancient), emotional biases and competitive advantage it is likely to make sense for me to do direct work for animal welfare orgs even if I believed it was quite a lot more cost effective, although if my mind was changed a lot this wouldnt be out of the question.
Nathan Young @ 2024-10-08T09:04 (+3) in response to What would you do differently if you changed your mind?
The question of capacity seems unrelated to the crux to me. I'm pretty confident that if it were known that there was 100mn to spend then people would spin up orgs. I guess there is a question whether all those would be more effective on the margin than global health, but I dunno, it seems to be missing the bit that I care about most.
NickLaing @ 2024-10-09T09:33 (+2)
I think capacity is critically important.
The ability to "spin up orgs" is no joke, potentially even more so in the animal welfare space, where most orgs will be advocacy and policy based orgs and experience and connections are super important to actually be useful there.
North And @ 2024-10-09T08:52 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I support lab grown meat research / production, other interventions seem useless. I support "global health" more broadly and strongly, you have less ways to burn money in ways i find useless
Ben Millwood🔸 @ 2024-10-09T01:09 (+4) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
This is surely true by number but I'm not sure it would be true on all reasonable weightings? See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)#/media/File:Terrestrial_biomass.jpg
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T08:45 (+1)
I'm not sure this metric is relevant : biomass weight is massively dominated by the largest mammals just for the reason that they are big.
Going by this metric, it would mean that having one super obese 400kg individual, or one small cow, counts the same as having 100 human babies (not to talk about elephants).
I think number of individuals is much more relevant here. And there just happens to be a lot of smaller individuals.
Richard Y Chappell🔸 @ 2024-10-08T15:20 (+4) in response to Seeking Ripple Effects
Economic growth and population size both seem to have persisting effects. If you limit attention to just what can be "accurately measured" (by some narrow conception that rules out the above), your final judgment will be badly distorted by measurability bias.
Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-10-09T08:43 (+2)
Could you elaborate? Are you saying that increasing the economy or population size today will make the economy and population size larger for at least centuries? Would you consider a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions evidence against that?
Ben Millwood🔸 @ 2024-10-09T00:55 (+6) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
The argument of the link is that moral progress has sometimes meant correctly regarding some previous moral concern as unnecessary or based on false belief. I think the relevance here is to resist the idea that moral concern for animals must be correct by a "more moral concern is always better" heuristic.
(I think it's a useful argument to have in mind, but I think we have much better reasons to be morally concerned about animals.)
CB🔸 @ 2024-10-09T08:37 (+3)
Okay, I see. In that case, I tend to agree with your (Ben's) position on that topic.
Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-10-08T14:21 (+2) in response to List of ways in which cost-effectiveness estimates can be misleading
Great to go through this post again. Thanks, Saulius!
Here is a model of the cost-effectiveness of restricted donations.
North And @ 2024-10-09T08:33 (+3)
"if you donate some bread to hungry civilians in this warzone, then this military group will divert all the excess recourses above subsistence to further its political / military goals". Guess now you have no way to increase their wellbeing! Just buy more troops for this military organization!
That's some top tier untrustworthy move. If some charity did that with my donation I would mentally blacklist it for eternity
Johannes Pichler 🔹 @ 2024-10-09T07:51 (+1) in response to Lives not worth living?
Great and thought provoking post, thank you very much Moritz!
I especially liked the Evolutionary Perspectives on Happiness and Dissatisfaction part.
Nathan Young @ 2024-10-08T08:55 (+3) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Would you like to expand on this a bit?
Cameron Holmes @ 2024-10-09T07:33 (+3)
I'm completely sold on the arguments in general EV terms (the vast suffering, tractability, importance, neglect - even within EA), up to the limits of how confident I can be about anything this complex. That's basically the fringe possibilities - weird second, third-order impacts from the messiness of life that mean I couldn't be >98% on something like this.
The deontological point was that maybe there is a good reason I should only care or vastly weight humans over animals through some moral obligation. I don't currently believe that but I'm hedging for it, because I could be convinced.
I realise now I'm basically saying I 90% agree that rolling a D20 for 3+ is a good idea, when it would be fair to also interpret it that I 100% agree it's a good idea ex ante.
(Also my first comment was terrible, sorry I just wanted to get on the board on priors before reading the debate)
Tristan D @ 2024-10-09T07:29 (+1) in response to Actually possible: thoughts on Utopia
Great piece. I really connected with the part about the vastness of the possibility of conscious experience.
It sounds a little bit like you're saying that utopia would be recognisable to modern day humans. If you are saying that, i'm not sure I would agree. Can a great ape have a revelatory experience that a human can have when taking in a piece of art? There exists art that can create the relevant experience, but I highly doubt if you showed every piece of art to any great ape that it would have such an experience. Therefore how can we expect the experiences available in utopia to be recognisable to a modern day human?
Miguel Lima MedĂn 🔸 @ 2024-10-09T07:24 (+2) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
Many individuals and organizations are already concerned with global health and actively working to improve it. However, animal welfare requires a significant initial effort to elevate this pressing ethical issue in the public's priorities.
Ben Millwood🔸 @ 2024-10-09T01:24 (+2) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
I don't think whether animals or humans are interchangeable (within each group) is the right question. If a human dies and another human is born, the latter does not replace the former in terms of their unique characteristics as an individual, their relationships, etc. But they both have lives worth living, and I don't think it's obviously the case that one long life is better than two half-long lives -- sure, there are some advantages to longer lives in terms of accumulation of knowledge, memories, relationships etc, but I think these effects are relatively minor among reasons why a life is good or rich or well-lived (e.g. I think children have rich and valuable lives -- although they miss some things about the adult experience, it's not so much to make them dramatically different).
MinusGix @ 2024-10-09T07:05 (+1)
If a human dies and we have a lot of humans very very similar to them, I think it is plausible that we've lost less. Still a negative, but not as much of one. (Which is one answer that I favor to the repugnant conclusion, you can't just add new people indefinitely). I also think this makes more sense for societies that can freely copy minds.
For animals my logic was much the same, but that there's less variation/uniqueness that is lost because (for example) chicken minds have less axes on which they vary notably.
Here's another argument:
I think the "one long life vs two half-long lives" is a good example, but that it matters how long they live. Better to have a parrot that lives for a year rather than two parrots that live for six months. The parrot has more opportunity to learn and build on what it has learned and gets more value out of living for longer. A chicken wouldn't have as much value because it has stronger limits on what it can learn, be curious about, enjoy, and so on. But a parrot that lives 50 years vs two that live 25? I would lean towards two.
I disagree about how much children miss from adult lives, though it depends on how young we're calling children. Children are certainly very valuable, but I do think they miss out on a lot of adult experiences. The problems they solve are less intricate, the understanding of complex joys is significantly weaker (a child playing with toys vs. reading a 150k word book), and so on. But I don't know where I'd do the tradeoff precisely. I think part of the value of children, beyond being a good in-of-themselves, is that they will grow up to be adults which have richer more vibrant and varied experiences.
However, I don't think that matters much here. I don't believe that the longevity we manage to acquire is merely one long life vs. two half-lives. It is more of a "one ten century long human life vs. (tens of? (hundreds of?)) thousands of various animals living a couple years more". I think the human has a lot of space to continue learning, growing, and experiencing that many animals unfortunately saturate. (Of course their happiness+lack-of-suffering+other positive emotions matters significantly as well)
Then there's also the factor that paired with the fantastical technology that would allow life extension, many other ills of humanity will be pushed back. If a person isn't interchangeable at all (plausible), then ensuring that they survive means they'll experience all these wonders. Rather than letting many animals live for a few more years in happiness (a good thing!), you get X amount of people who are able to go on to live in a world closer to a utopia.
As I said previously, I find the animal welfare being far more neglected and more important than current human welfare to be probably true. However, I think comparing Animal Welfare vs. Global Health ignores that EA has areas of thought which indicate that Global Health isn't considering certain factors, like longevity meaning more people get to live in a better and better world where we may have solved aging. Most charities are operating under a 'everything continues as normal' paradigm, which gives EA an advantage here.
Part of what makes me uncertain and which would make Animal Welfare more of an obvious choice is that Global Health might already be putting a lot into longevity. I suspect they aren't, given general ignorance of cryo, but they're tackling many things that correlate with it, which would still tilt the calculation in the favor of Animal Welfare.
JackM @ 2024-10-08T20:16 (+5) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
At a risk of getting off topic from the core question, which interventions do you think are most effective in ensuring we thrive in the future with better cooperative norms? I don't think it's clear that this would be EA global health interventions. I would think boosting innovation and improving institutions are more effective.
Also boosting economic growth would probably be better than so-called randomista interventions from a long-term perspective.
Arepo @ 2024-10-09T06:40 (+2)
I reviewed the piece you linked and fwiw strongly disagreed that the case it made was as clear cut as the authors conclude (in particular IIRC they observe a limited historical upside from RCT-backed interventions, but didn't seem to account for the far smaller amount of money that had been put into them; they also gave a number of priors that I didn't necessarily strongly disagree with, but seemed like they could be an order of magnitude off in either direction, and the end result was quite sensitive to these).
That's not to say I think global health interventions are clearly better - just that I think the case is open (but also that, given the much smaller global investment in RCTs, there's probably more exploratory value in those).
I could imagine any of the following turning out to be the best safeguard of the long term (and others):
My best guess is the last one, but I'm wary of any blanket dismissal of any subset of the above.
Joseph Lemien @ 2024-10-08T22:43 (+15) in response to Joseph Lemien's Quick takes
The 80,000 Hours team just published that "We now rank factory farming among the top problems in the world." I wonder if this is a coincidence or if this planned to coincide with the EA Forum's debate week? Combined with the current debate week's votes on where an extra $100 should be spent, these seem like nice data points to show to anyone that claims EA doesn't care about animals.
Will Howard🔹 @ 2024-10-09T05:55 (+1)
As far as I'm aware it's a coincidence, but I'm v happy about this :)
Jason @ 2024-10-08T23:24 (+7) in response to What are the strongest arguments for the side you voted against in the AW vs GH debate?
I think it would be more appropriate to use something like human welfare spending for low-income countries rather than counting ~all charitable activity as in a broad "human" bucket. That is to maintain parity with the way you've sliced off a particularly effective part of the animal-welfare pie (farmed animal welfare). E.g., some quick Google work suggests animal shelters brought in 3.5B in 2023 in just the US (although a fair portion of of that may be government contracts).
Companion animal shelters may be the animal-welfare equivalent of opera for human-focused charities (spending lots on relatively few individuals who are relatively privileged in a sense). While deciding not to give to farmed-animal charities because of dog shelter spending doesn't make much sense, I would submit that not giving to bednets because of opera spending poses much the same problem.
I don't think that changes your underlying point much at all, though!
NickLaing @ 2024-10-09T05:17 (+5)
Thanks Jason, I would say that giving to animal shelters might be more like giving to the cancer society, or even world vision, rather than opera but that's as fairly minor point.
barryl 🔸 @ 2024-10-08T22:03 (+3) in response to The $100 Million Dilemma: Human Lives vs. Endangered Species—Which Should We Save?
Thanks for the thoughtful write-up! A few things came to mind while reading:
Part of the post felt like a false equivalency - to my knowledge $100M spent on animal welfare would actually net virtually no funds to conservation, as opposed to other approaches. Indeed as CB pointed out, many of the ideas people are pursuing are anti-conservation (I admit I am biased against funding wild animal suffering programs) - they actually openly advocate for further manipulating ecosystems.
One particular section also caught my eye: "Zoonotic diseases, such as Ebola, SARS, and COVID-19, often emerge when ecosystems are disrupted, forcing animals and humans into closer contact. The loss of biodiversity weakens natural barriers that prevent the spread of these diseases. A diverse ecosystem can act as a buffer, reducing the chances of pathogens jumping from animals to humans." I am not sure how these two points flow from one another. I think it's perfectly possible to have biodiversity and still zoonotic diseases - as you correctly note zoonotic diseases primarily emerge from our interactions with wildlife, which feels independent of the biodiversity - the 2009 Swine flu epidemic is a good example of regular factory farming causing outbreaks of zoonotic disease. Many additional epidemics like SARS and Covid-19 appear to point to wet markets as their source - in other words its our eating of animals that is causing zoonotic disease - unrelated to the biodiversity of ecosystems.
One thing that I appreciate about this post is the difficulty noted in weighing diffuse benefits from specific ones. I have no doubt that conservation of land and biodiversity has positive impacts for animal and human lives (e.g. preserving floodplains for water/flood management). Diffuse benefits in better temperature management, improved likelihood to identify antibiotics, etc., are difficult to quantify but 'feel' right. However 'feel' right is also what EA would counter in avoiding ineffective charities. I think there is more to be done in trying to quantify potential benefits. I wonder if there are opportunities to more quantifiably learn from projects like the Gorongosa Restoration Project that you cite.
Vee @ 2024-10-09T04:56 (0)
Let's examine the conceptual, ethical, and philosophical issues raised in your comment, exploring some lesser-discussed nuances that are critical to understanding the intersections between conservation, zoonotic diseases, wild animal suffering, and the broader implications for effective altruism (EA) frameworks.
The Ethical Tensions in Conservation and Wild Animal Suffering
At the core of your critique lies an unresolved tension between two approaches that might seem compatible on the surface—conservation and animal welfare—but actually embody divergent ethical and philosophical orientations. Conservation, traditionally, is motivated by a biocentric or ecocentric ethic. Its primary concern is the integrity, stability, and resilience of ecosystems and the intrinsic value of biodiversity. From this perspective, ecosystem manipulation—even if it aims to alleviate suffering—is problematic because it violates the underlying principles of respecting natural processes and ecological wholeness. This is a teleological view, in which ecosystems are seen to have an inherent "goodness" or purpose that ought to be preserved. Philosophers like Aldo Leopold, Holmes Rolston III, and Arne Naess have emphasized the intrinsic value of ecological systems, advocating for non-interference as a form of respect for the natural world’s autonomy and self-regulating capacities. On the other hand, the animal welfare approach, particularly as endorsed by wild animal suffering programs, is largely rooted in a utilitarian or consequentialist framework that prioritizes the reduction of suffering above all else. This ethical stance places the individual sentient being at the center of moral concern, regardless of its place in a larger ecological network. Hence, ecosystem manipulation, such as predator control or even more extreme interventions like habitat alteration to reduce suffering, could be justified if the net suffering of sentient beings is decreased. What is particularly fascinating here is how this debate reframes classical philosophical dilemmas, such as the "naturalistic fallacy." If nature is intrinsically good, as some conservationists argue, then human interventions that disrupt ecological processes—even if they alleviate suffering—are ethically wrong. But if the consequences (e.g., a reduction in suffering) are what matter most, the sanctity of natural processes becomes less significant.
Biodiversity, and Zoonotic Spillovers
Your comment regarding biodiversity and zoonotic disease touches on a conceptual gap in much of the discourse around ecosystem health. You’re right to assert that zoonotic diseases often emerge from human practices such as factory farming, and wet markets—activities that don't necessarily reduce biodiversity per se, but alter the ecological configurations that heighten disease spillover risks. While biodiversity does not immunize ecosystems against zoonotic outbreaks (i.e., you can have both high biodiversity and zoonotic diseases), the relationship is more nuanced than it appears at first glance. Here’s where the dilution effect theory plays an interesting role. The idea is that in ecosystems with high biodiversity, species that are less competent at harboring or transmitting pathogens (often called "dilution hosts") can buffer human populations from zoonotic diseases. Conversely, in ecosystems where biodiversity is diminished, the remaining species may disproportionately include "amplifying hosts"—species that efficiently carry and transmit pathogens. The loss of biodiversity can lead to a breakdown in these natural regulatory systems, potentially increasing pathogen transmission to humans.
The Challenge of Quantifying Diffuse Benefits
Effective altruism, with its utilitarian underpinnings, tends to prioritize interventions that yield quantifiable benefits—especially those that can be tied to human welfare, such as saving lives or alleviating poverty. This focus often leads to the neglect of long-term, diffuse ecological benefits that are harder to measure but are crucial for planetary health and resilience. Consider, for example, the ecosystem services provided by intact forests: flood regulation, carbon sequestration, water purification, and pollination. These services have diffuse, often non-market benefits that accrue over decades or centuries, and their loss would be catastrophic. However, from a near-term, anthropocentric perspective, funding interventions that directly prevent human suffering (e.g., malaria bed nets) seems to offer a more tangible return on investment. This mismatch between measurable, immediate human welfare and diffuse, long-term ecosystem health is a fundamental critique ecological economics offers against mainstream economic thinking. Conventional economics struggles to internalize the value of ecosystem services, leading to a systematic underinvestment in conservation. Projects like the Gorongosa Restoration Project you mentioned are exemplary because they showcase the co-benefits of conservation—improving human livelihoods while restoring ecosystems. But even such examples are difficult to scale or quantify with the precision demanded by EA methodologies, leading to a kind of ethical impasse between what feels right (conservation) and what seems right from a cost-effectiveness standpoint.
This brings us to a deeper philosophical issue: what kind of future are we valuing? If we are committed to a long-term view of human and non-human flourishing, we may need to embrace uncertainty and complexity rather than trying to reduce the world to predictable, quantifiable outcomes. The unpredictability and interconnectedness of ecosystems challenge the very premise that we can calculate the future benefits of conservation in a straightforward manner. This echoes the critiques of "epistemic humility" found in risk ethics, where the recognition of our limits in predicting complex systems forces a reconsideration of what it means to act ethically.
Richard Y Chappell🔸 @ 2024-10-08T19:34 (+22) in response to Richard Y Chappell's Quick takes
I was surprised to find that I felt slightly uncomfortable positioning myself on the 'animal welfare' side of the debate week scale. I guess I generally think of myself as more of a 'global health & development' person, and might have subconscious concerns about this as an implicit affiliational exercise (even though I very much like and respect a lot of AW folks, I guess I probably feel more "at home" with GHD)? Obviously those kinds of personal factors shouldn't influence our judgments about an objective question like the debate week question is asking. But I guess they inevitably do.
I don't know if this observation is even worth sharing, but there it is, fwiw. I guess I'd just like to encourage folks to be aware of their personal biases and try to bracket them as best they can. (I'd like to think of all EAs as ultimately "on the same side" even when we disagree about particular questions of cause prioritization, so I feel kind of bad that I evidently have separate mental categories of "GHD folks" and "AW folks" as though it were some kind of political/coalitional competition.)
Jason @ 2024-10-09T04:46 (+6)
I speculate that we may base on self-identification on a more general question like "How important do I think GH is vis-a-vis AW?" It seems clear to me that a voter who takes the specific voting question (SVQ) seriously will almost always vote to the right of their self-identification because the SVQ factors cost-effectiveness in so much more clearly. It seems unremarkable to me that you (and I) may have experienced ~cognitive dissonance because where we publicly stuck our pin doesn't line up that well with our own broader self-identification.
Joseph_Chu @ 2024-10-09T02:36 (+22) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
This is probably going to be downvoted to oblivion, but I feel it's worth stating anyway, if nothing else to express my frustration with and alienation from EA.
On a meta level, I somewhat worry that the degree to which the animal welfare choice is dominating the global health one kinda shows how seemingly out-of-touch many EAs have become from mainstream common sense morality views.
In particular, I'm reminded of that quote from the Analects of Confucius:
You can counter with a lot of math that checks out and arguments that make logical sense, but the average person on the street is likely to view the idea that you could ever elevate the suffering of any number of chickens above that of even one human child to be abhorrent.
Maybe the EAs are still technically right and other people are just speciesist, but to me this does not bode well for the movement gaining traction or popular support.
Just wanted to get that out of my system.
Jason @ 2024-10-09T04:22 (+5)
What is the most effective and appropriate relationship with "mainstream common sense morality views" in your opinion? At one extreme, if we just parrot them, then we can just cut out the expensive meta middlemen and give directly to whatever mainstream opinion says we should.
I do think the skew would be meaningfully different but for the significant discrepancy in GW vs AW funding in both EA and more generally.
Jason @ 2024-10-08T23:02 (+3) in response to Chris Leong's Quick takes
I'm confused about the theory of impact for "free vegan meals in the Bay Area" idea. A few recipients might work in AI, but I don't see the link between eating a vegan meal offered for free and making more animal-friendly AI development choices.
Chris Leong @ 2024-10-09T04:12 (+3)
Presumably you’d be doing outreach at the same time to influence values.
Constance Li @ 2024-10-09T04:07 (+6) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
There is the meat eater problem where more animal lives would likely be lost by increasing the human population. It also seems much more cost effective per dollar to suffering spared to help animals and factory farming is spreading rapidly through Asia and Africa, making this a hingey time.
Koussis @ 2024-10-09T02:52 (+1) in response to Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week