Thanks for writing this up! Have you taken into account the effects of reductions in animal agriculture on wildlife populations? I didn’t see terms for such effects in your cause prioritization app.
I’m certainly aware of that consideration. I didn’t include it because it seemed too speculative and not worth the effort (I thought it was unlikely that I’d change my mind about anything based on the result). I don’t have a monopoly on cost-effectiveness calculations though, you can write your own, or even fork my code if you know a little C++.
What do you mean by “too speculative”? You mean the effects of agriculture on wildlife populations are speculative? The net value of wild animal experience is unclear? Why not quantify this uncertainty and include it in the model? And is this consideration that much more speculative than the many estimates re: the far future on which your model depends?
Also, “I thought it was unlikely that I’d change my mind” is a strange reason for not accounting for this consideration in the model. Don’t we build models in the first place because we don’t trust such intuitions?
I don’t actually remember what I meant by “too speculative”, that was probably not a helpful thing to say.
“I thought it was unlikely that I’d change my mind” is a strange reason for not accounting for this consideration in the model.
There are thousands of semi-plausible things I could try to model. It would not be worth the effort to try to model all of them. I have to do some pre-prioritization about which things to model, so I pick the things that seem the most important. Specifically, I think about the expected value of modeling something (how likely am I to change my mind and how much does it matter if I do?) and how long it will take to see if it seems worth it. Sometimes I do this explicitly and sometimes implicitly. I don’t really know how likely I am to change my mind, but I can make a rough guess. It wouldn’t make sense to try to model thousands of things on the off chance that any of them could change my mind.
If you would like to see how factory farming affects wild animal suffering, by all means create a cost-effectiveness estimate and share it.
Thanks for writing this up! Have you taken into account the effects of reductions in animal agriculture on wildlife populations? I didn’t see terms for such effects in your cause prioritization app.
I’m certainly aware of that consideration. I didn’t include it because it seemed too speculative and not worth the effort (I thought it was unlikely that I’d change my mind about anything based on the result). I don’t have a monopoly on cost-effectiveness calculations though, you can write your own, or even fork my code if you know a little C++.
What do you mean by “too speculative”? You mean the effects of agriculture on wildlife populations are speculative? The net value of wild animal experience is unclear? Why not quantify this uncertainty and include it in the model? And is this consideration that much more speculative than the many estimates re: the far future on which your model depends?
Also, “I thought it was unlikely that I’d change my mind” is a strange reason for not accounting for this consideration in the model. Don’t we build models in the first place because we don’t trust such intuitions?
I don’t actually remember what I meant by “too speculative”, that was probably not a helpful thing to say.
There are thousands of semi-plausible things I could try to model. It would not be worth the effort to try to model all of them. I have to do some pre-prioritization about which things to model, so I pick the things that seem the most important. Specifically, I think about the expected value of modeling something (how likely am I to change my mind and how much does it matter if I do?) and how long it will take to see if it seems worth it. Sometimes I do this explicitly and sometimes implicitly. I don’t really know how likely I am to change my mind, but I can make a rough guess. It wouldn’t make sense to try to model thousands of things on the off chance that any of them could change my mind.
If you would like to see how factory farming affects wild animal suffering, by all means create a cost-effectiveness estimate and share it.