In case we’re prioritizing fates worse than death (section 3.2), some other potentially promising interventions off the top of my head could be:
Work against slavery and human trafficking
Work reducing violence that leads to long-term trauma/PTSD, including sexual violence
Rescuing factory farmed animals
Most interventions to improve conditions on factory farms will be too late to help animals alive today, because they usually only live <2 years. If they’re rescued, they can live a decade or two. It’s still not clear the difference between a very short horrible life and 10 years of decent life as a nonhuman animal beats 50 extra life years for a human (or saving a parent’s child) through AMF, though. EDIT: Inspired by Jakob’s comment below, the ex ante risk of death by malaria is low, and we’d need to discount by that. On the other side, if we have a rule for picking animals to save, e.g. the ones in the worst health (but still savable) on a farm, then we can keep the ex ante chance of being saved relatively high for some animals. There might be surer ways to save a specific human life, though.
Increasing access to medically assisted suicide
Humane slaughter for animals (but would need quick implementation to help animals alive today)
Increasing access to or better treatments for severe pain and mental health issues, e.g. cluster headaches, PTSD, severe depression
Closing Guantanamo Bay or getting people released from it (people there now are already being tortured or otherwise subject to horrible conditions)
Work to take in more refugees.
On the standard contractualist views, nonhuman animals don’t count in themselves, so the nonhuman animal interventions plausibly wouldn’t be very valuable. But then how old do humans have to be to count, too, or have large stakes? Children under 5 don’t typically have full understandings of death. Still, maybe we can explain it to them well enough for them to understand, though, and we should consider such hypotheticals in deciding their stakes. And losing a child is (typically) a large burden for a parent.
This is helpful, Michael. I was holding the standard EA interventions fixed, but I agree that, given contractualism, there’s a case to be made for other priorities. Minimally, we’d need to evaluate our opportunities in these and similar areas. It would be a bit surprising if EA had landed on the ideal portfolio for an aim it hasn’t had in mind: namely, minimizing relevant strength-weighted complaints.
In case we’re prioritizing fates worse than death (section 3.2), some other potentially promising interventions off the top of my head could be:
Work against slavery and human trafficking
Work reducing violence that leads to long-term trauma/PTSD, including sexual violence
Rescuing factory farmed animals
Most interventions to improve conditions on factory farms will be too late to help animals alive today, because they usually only live <2 years. If they’re rescued, they can live a decade or two. It’s still not clear the difference between a very short horrible life and 10 years of decent life as a nonhuman animal beats 50 extra life years for a human (or saving a parent’s child) through AMF, though. EDIT: Inspired by Jakob’s comment below, the ex ante risk of death by malaria is low, and we’d need to discount by that. On the other side, if we have a rule for picking animals to save, e.g. the ones in the worst health (but still savable) on a farm, then we can keep the ex ante chance of being saved relatively high for some animals. There might be surer ways to save a specific human life, though.
Increasing access to medically assisted suicide
Humane slaughter for animals (but would need quick implementation to help animals alive today)
Increasing access to or better treatments for severe pain and mental health issues, e.g. cluster headaches, PTSD, severe depression
Closing Guantanamo Bay or getting people released from it (people there now are already being tortured or otherwise subject to horrible conditions)
Work to take in more refugees.
On the standard contractualist views, nonhuman animals don’t count in themselves, so the nonhuman animal interventions plausibly wouldn’t be very valuable. But then how old do humans have to be to count, too, or have large stakes? Children under 5 don’t typically have full understandings of death. Still, maybe we can explain it to them well enough for them to understand, though, and we should consider such hypotheticals in deciding their stakes. And losing a child is (typically) a large burden for a parent.
This is helpful, Michael. I was holding the standard EA interventions fixed, but I agree that, given contractualism, there’s a case to be made for other priorities. Minimally, we’d need to evaluate our opportunities in these and similar areas. It would be a bit surprising if EA had landed on the ideal portfolio for an aim it hasn’t had in mind: namely, minimizing relevant strength-weighted complaints.