Charities I Would Like to See

Micheal, I like your blog and enjoyed the post.

I agree there are no good charities for hedonistic utilitarians at the moment, because they are either not very aligned with hedonistic utilitarian goals or their cost-effectiveness is not tractable. (You can still donate if you have so much money that your alternative spending would be "bigger car/yacht", otherwise it doesn't make much sense.)

Your ideas are all interesting, but values spreading and promoting universal eudaimonia are non-starters. You get downvoted on an EA forum, and you are not going to find a more open-minded amicable target group than this.

Happy animals are problematic because their feedback is limited; you don't know when they are suffering unless you monitor them with unreasonable effort. Their minds are not optimized for high pleasure/low suffering. Perhaps with future technology this sort of thing will be trivial, but that is not certain and investing in the necessary research will give too much harmful knowledge to non-value-aligned people. Even if it were net good to fund such research, it will probably be done for other reasons anyway (commercial applications, publicly funded neurology etc.), so again it's something you should only fund if you have too much money.

I don't know enough about insect biology to judge humane insecticides; the idea is certainly not unrealistic. But remember real people would have to use it preferentially, so even if such a charity existed, there's no guarantee anyone would use it instead of laughing you out of the room.

Given the recent post on the marketability of EA (which went so far as to suggest excluding MIRI from the EA tent to make EA more marketable - or maybe that was a comment in response to the post; don't remember), a brief reaction from someone who is excited about Effective Altruism but has various reservations. (My main reservation, so you have a feel for where I'm coming from, is that my goal in life is not to maximize the world's utility, but, roughly speaking, to maximize my own utility and end-of-life satisfaction, and therefore I find it hard to get excited about theoretically utility maximizing causes rather than donating to things which I viscerally care about -- I know this will strike most people here as incredibly squishy, but I'd bet that much of the public outside the EA community probably has a similar reaction, though few would actually come out and say it)

• I like your idea about high-leverage values spreading.
• The ideas about Happy Animal Farm / Promoting Universal Eudaimonia seem nuts to me, so much so that I actually reread the post to see if this was a parody. If it gains widespread popularity among the EA movement, I will move from being intrigued about EA and excited to bring it up in conversation to never raising it in conversations with all but the most open-minded / rationalist people, or raising it in the tone of "yeah these guys are crazy but this one idea they have about applying data analysis to charity has some merit... Earning to Give is intriguing too...." I could be wrong, but I'd strongly suspect that most people who are not thoroughgoing utilitarians find it incredibly silly to argue that creating more beings who experience utility is a good cause, and this would quickly push EA away from being taken seriously in the mainstream.
• The humane insecticides idea doesn't seem AS silly as those two above, but it places EA in the same mental category as my most extreme caricature of PETA (and I'm someone who eats mostly vegan, and some Certified Humane, because I care about animal welfare). I don't think insects are a very popular cause.

Just my 2 cents.

Upvoted, because although I disagree with much of this on object level, I think the post is totally legit and I think we should encourage original thinking.

Perhaps we need to find a time and place to start a serious discussion of ethics. I think hedonistic utilitarianism is wrong already on the level of meta-ethics. It seems to assume the existence of universal morals which from my point of view is a non-sequitur. Basically all discussions of universal morals are games with meaningless words, maps of non-existing territories. The only sensible meta-ethics I know is equating ethics with preferences. It seems that there is such a thing as intelligent agents with preferences (although we have no satisfactory mathematical definition yet). Of course each agent has its own preferences and the space of possible preferences is quite big (orthogonality thesis). Hence ethical subjectivism. Human preferences don't seem to differ much from human to human once you take into account that much of the differences in instrumental goals are explained by different beliefs rather than different terminal goals (=preferences). Therefore it makes sense in certain situations to use approximate models of ethics that don't explicitly mention the reference human, like utilitarianism. On the other hand, there is no reason the precise ethics should have a simple description (complexity of value). It is a philosophical error to think ethics should be low complexity like physical law since ethics (=preferences) is a property of the agent and has quite a bit of complexity put in by evolution. In other words, ethics is in the same category as the shape of Africa rather than Einstein's equations. Taking simplified models which take only one value into account (e.g. pleasure) to the extreme is bound to lead to abhorrent conclusions as all other values as sacrificed.

Here is a paper that argues that the money saved by being vegan can be used to bring lots of mice happy lives (overcoming the "logic of the larder" that eating meat creates lives worth living).

I can see why it’s been downvoted, but marketing aside, I had some nerdy fun reading it. I think we need a forum (or does it exist already?) that clearly proclaims that everything posted there makes sense in the author’s personal morality, and they wouldn’t post it there if they thought these conclusions were shared widely. That way people could discuss unusual ideas (and signal their readiness to consider them ^^) without the risk of others mistaking them for mainstream opinions.

My brand of utilitarianism is more focused on reducing extreme suffering or preference frustration, not to the extend of complete negative utilitarianism but somewhat. Hence the risk of something going wrong and some of the tiny beings suddenly experiencing significant pain, for me, quickly outweighs the expected benefits.

Value-spreading and humane insecticides seem genuinely interesting to me, especially since the latter might be turned into a social enterprise through which I could ETG effectively at the same time. The success of the enterprise would hinge on demand, though, which is probably where the plan breaks down.

Rat happiness is HALF as good as human happiness? I'm not so sure about that.

I would be willing to support high leverage value spreading though. And I'd like to know what Pearce is up to these days. Many people are strangely skeptical or dismissive of universal eudaimonia scenarios, and it's an important idea to establish.