If you weigh desires/preferences by attention or their effects on attention (e.g. motivational salience), then the fact that intense suffering is so disruptive and would take priority over attention to other things in your life means it would matter a lot.

Recently I failed to complete a dental procedure because I kept flinching whenever the dentist hit a particularly sensitive spot. They needed me to stay still. I promise you I would have preferred to stay still, not least because what ended up happening was I had to have it redone and endured more pain overall. My forebrain understood this, my hindbrain is dumb.

(FWIW the dentist was very understanding, and apologetic that the anesthetic didn't do its job. I did not get the impression that my failure was unusual given that.)

When I talk about suffering disrupting enjoyment of non-hedonic goods I mean something like that flinch; a forced 'eliminate the pain!' response that likely made good sense back in the ancestral environment, but not a choice or preference in the usual sense of that term. This is particularly easy to see in cases like my flinch where the hindbrain's 'preference' is self-defeating, but I would make similar observations in some other cases, e.g. addiction.

If you don't weigh desires by attention or their effects on attention, I don't see how you can ground interpersonal utility comparisons at all

I don't quite see what you're driving at with this line of argument.

I can see how being able to firmly 'ground' things is a nice/helpful property for an theory of 'what is good?' to have. I like being able to quantify things too. But to imply that measuring good must be this way seems like a case of succumbing to the Streetlight Effect, or perhaps even the McNamara fallacy if you then downgrade other conceptions of good in the style of below quote.

Put another way, it seems like you prefer to weight by attention because it makes answers easier to find, but what if such answers are just difficult to find?

The fact that 'what is good?' has been debated for literally millenia with no resolution in sight suggests to me that it just is difficult to find, in the same way that after some amount of time you should acknowledge your keys just aren't under the streetlight. 

But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist.

To avoid the above pitfall, which I think all STEM types should keep in mind, when I suspect my numbers are failing to capture the (morally) important things my default response is to revert in the direction of Common sense (morality). I think STEM people who fail to check themselves this way often end up causing serious harm^[1]. In this case that would make me less inclined to trade human lives for aminal welfare, not more.

I'll probably leave this post at this point unless I see a pressing need for further clarification of my views. I do appreciate you taking the time to engage politely. 

1. ^{^}

   SBF is the obvious example here, but really I've seen this so often in EA. Big fan of Warren Buffet's quote here:

   It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.

(Just wanted to say that your story of earning to give has been an inspiration! Your episode with 80k encouraged me to originally enter quant trading.)

Given your clarification, I agree that your observation holds. I too would have loved to hear someone defend the view that "animals don't count at all". I think it's somewhat common among rationalists, although the only well-known EA-adjacent individuals I know who hold it are Jeff, Yud, and Zvi Mowshowitz. Holden Karnofsky seems to have believed it once, but later changed his mind.^[1]

As @JackM pointed out, Jeff didn't really justify his view in his comment thread. I've never read Zvi justify that view anywhere either. I've heard two main justifications for the view, either of which would be sufficient to prioritize global health:

Overwhelming Hierarchicalism

Solely by virtue of our shared species, helping humans may be lexicographically preferential to helping animals, or perhaps their preferences should be given an enormous multiplier.

I use the term "overwhelming" because depending on which animal welfare BOTEC is used, if we use constant moral weights relative to humans, you'd need a 100x to 1000x multiplier for the math to work out in favor of global health. (This comparison is coherent to me because I accept Michael St. Jules' argument that we should resolve the two envelopes problem by weighing in the units we know, but I acknowledge that this line of reasoning may not appeal to you if you don't endorse that resolution.)

I personally find overwhelming hierarchicalism (or any form of hierarchicalism) to be deeply dubious. I write more about it here, but I simply see it as a convenient way to avoid confronting ethical problems without having the backing of any sound theoretical justification. I put about as much weight on it as the idea that the interests of the Aryan race should be lexicographically preferred to the interests of non-Aryans. There's just no prior for why that would be the case.

Denial of animal consciousness

Yud and maybe some others seem to believe that animals are most likely not conscious. As before, they'd have to be really certain that animals aren't conscious to endorse global health here. Even if there's a 10% chance that chickens are conscious, given the outsize cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns if they are, I think they'd still merit a significant fraction of EA funding. (Probably still more than they're currently receiving.)

I think it's fair to start with a very strong prior that at least chickens and pigs are probably conscious. Pigs have brains with all of the same high-level substructures, which are affected the same way by drugs/painkillers/social interaction as humans' are, and act all of the same ways that humans act would when confronted with situations of suffering and terror. It would be really surprising a priori if what was going on was merely a simulacrum of suffering with no actual consciousness behind it. Indeed, the vast majority of people seem to agree that these animals are conscious and deserve at least some moral concern. I certainly remember being able to feel pain as a child, and I was probably less intelligent than an adult pig during some of that.

Apart from that purely intuitive prior, while I'm not a consciousness expert at all, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness says that "there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds". Rethink Priorities' and Luke Muehlhauser's work for Open Phil corroborate that. So Yud's view is also at odds with much of the scientific community and other EAs who have investigated this.

All of this is why I feel like Yud's Facebook post needed a very high burden of proof to be convincing to me. Instead, it seems like he just kept explaining what his model (a higher-order theory of consciousness) believes without actually justifying his model. He also didn't admit any moral uncertainty about his model. He asserted some deeply unorthodox and unintuitive ideas (like pigs not being conscious), admitted no uncertainty, and didn't make any attempt to justify them. So I didn't find anything about his Facebook post convincing.

Conclusion

To me, the strongest reason to believe that animals don't count at all is because smart and well-meaning people like Jeff, Yud, and Zvi believe it. I haven't read anything remotely convincing that justifies that view on the merits. That's why I didn't even mention these arguments in my follow-up post for Debate Week.

Trying to be charitable, I think the main reasons why nobody defended that view during Debate Week were:

• They didn't have the mental bandwidth to be willing to deal with an audience I suspect would be hostile. Overwhelming hierarchicalism is very much against the spirit of radical empathy in EA.
• They may have felt like most EAs don't share the basic intuitions underlying their views, so they'd be talking to a wall. The idea that pigs aren't conscious might seem very intuitive to Eliezer. To me, and I suspect to most people, it seems wild. I could be convinced, but I'd need to see way more justification than I've seen.

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   in 2017, Holden's personal reflections "indicate against the idea that e.g. chickens merit moral concern". In 2018, Holden stated that "there is presently no evidence base that could reasonably justify high confidence [that] nonhuman animals are not 'conscious' in a morally relevant way".

I'm surprised this is the argument you went for. FWIW I think the strongest argument might be that global health wins due to ripple effects and is better for the long-term future (but I still think this argument fails). 

On animals just "not counting" - I've been very frustrated with both Jeff Kauffman and Eliezer Yudkowsky on this.

Jeff because he doesn't seem to have provided any justification (from what I've seen) for the claim that animals don't have relevant experiences that make them moral patients. He simply asserts this as his view. It's not even an argument, let alone a strong one.

Eliezer has at least defended his view in a Facebook thread which unfortunately I don't think exists anymore as all links I can find go to some weird page in another language. I just remember two things that really didn't impress me:

1. I wish I remembered this better, but he made some sort of assertion that animals don't have relevant experiences because they do not have a sense of self. Firstly, there is some experimental evidence that animals have a sense of self. But also, I remember David Pearce replying that there are occasions when humans lose a sense of self temporarily but can still have intense negative experiences in that moment e.g. extreme debilitating fright. This was a very interesting point that Eliezer never even replied to which seemed a bit suspect. (Apologies if I'm misremembering anything here).
2. He didn't respond to the argument that, under uncertainty, we should give animals the benefit of the doubt so as to avoid potentially committing a grave moral catastrophe. This may not be relevant to the question of animal welfare vs global health, but it is relevant to, for example, the choice to go vegan. His dismissal of this argument also seemed a bit suspect to me.

I think there has been very little argument for animals not counting at the post level because, quite simply, the argument that (in expectation) they do count is just far stronger. See the new 80,000 Hours article on factory farming which does a nice job summarizing the key points.

<<I took the fact that the forum overwhelmingly voted for animal welfare over global health to mean that people generally favor animal-friendly moral theories.>>

I think "generally favor" is a touch too strong here -- one could discount them quite significantly and still vote for animal welfare on the margin because the funding is so imbalanced and AW is at a point where the funding is much more leveraged than ~paying for bednets.

I’ll leave this thread here, except to clarify that what you say I ‘seem to think’ is a far stronger claim than I intended to make or in fact believe.

I can try, but honestly I don't know where to start; I'm well-aware that I'm out of my depth philosophically, and this section just doesn't chime with my own experience at all. I sense a lot of inferential distance here. 

Trying anyway: That section felt closer to empirical claim that 'we' already do things a certain way than an argument for why we should do things that way, and I don't seem to be part of the 'we'. I can pull out some specific quotes that anti-resonate and try to explain why, with the caveat that these explanations are much closer to 'why I don't buy this' than 'why I think you're wrong'. 

***

The strengths of our reasons to reduce human suffering or satisfy human belief-like preferences, say, don’t typically seem to depend on our understanding of their empirical or descriptive nature. This is not how we actually do ethics.

I am most sympathetic to this if I read it as a cynical take on human morality, i.e. I suspect this is more true than I sometimes care to admit. I don't think you're aiming for that? Regardless, it's not how I try to do ethics. I at least try to have my mind change when relevant facts change.

An example issue is that memory is fallible; you say that I have directly experienced human suffering, but for anything I am not experiencing right this second all I can access is the memory of it. I have seen firsthand that memory often edits experiences after the fact to make them substantially more or less severe than they seemed at the time. So if strong evidence showed me that somthing I remember as very painful was actually painless, the 'strength of my reason' to reduce that suffering would fall^[1].

You use some other examples to illustrate how the empirical nature does not matter, such as discovering seratonin is not what we think it is. I agree with that specific case. I think the difference is that your example of an empirical discovery doesn't really say anything about the experience, while mine above does? 

Instead, we directly value our experiences, not our knowledge of what exactly generates them...how suffering feels to us and how bad it feels to us...do not change with our understanding of its nature

Knowing what is going on during an experience seems like a major contributor to how I relate to that experience, e.g. I care about how long it's going to last. Looking outward for whether others feel similarly, It Gets Better and the phrase 'light at the end of the tunnel' come to mind. 

You could try to fold this in and say that the pain of the dental drill is itself less bad because I know it'll only last a few seconds, or conversely that (incorrectly) believing a short-lived pain will last a long time makes the pain itself greater, but that type of modification seems very artificial to me and is not how I typically understand the words 'pain' and 'suffering'.

...But to use this as another example of how I might respond to new evidence: if you showed me that the brain does in fact respond less strongly to a painful stimulus when the person has been told it'll be short, that could make me much more comfortable describing it as less painful in the ordinary sense.

There are other knowledge-based factors that feel like they directly alter my 'scoring' of pain's importance as well, e.g. a sense of whether it's for worthwhile reasons.

And it could end up being the case — i.e. with nonzero probability — that chickens don’t matter at all, not even infinitesimally...And because of the possible division by 0 moral weight, the expected moral weights of humans and all other animals will be infinite or undefined. It seems such a view wouldn’t be useful for guiding action.

I'm with your footnote here; it seems entirely conceivable to me that my own suffering does not matter, so trying to build ratios with it as the base has the same infinity issue, as you say:

However, in principle, humans in general or each proposed type of wellbeing could not matter with nonzero probability, so we could get a similar problem normalizing by human welfare or moral weights.

Per my OP, I roughly think you have to work with differences not ratios.

***

Overall, I was left with a sense from below quote and the overall piece that you perceive your direct experience as a way to ground your values, a clear beacon telling you what matters, and then we just need to pick up a torch and shine a light into other areas and see how much more of what matters is out there. For me, everything is much more 'fog of war', very much including my own experiences, values and value. So - and this may be unfair - I feel like you're asking me 'why isn't this clear to you?' and I'm like 'I don't know what to tell you, it just doesn't look that simple from where I'm sitting'. 

Uncertainty about animal moral weights is about the nature of our experiences and to what extent other animals have capacities similar to those that ground our value, and so empirical uncertainty, not moral uncertainty.

1. ^{^}

   Though perhaps not quite to zero; it seems I would need to think about how much of the total suffering is the memory of suffering.