Someone should commission new moral weights work in the next year
The moral weights of animals seems like one of the most important inputs into cause prioritization. The difference between whether we use RP weights or neuron count is the difference between whether the present contains more happiness than suffering, and potentially whether humanity has been overall good or bad for wellbeing.
This also poses challenges to the future. Averting catastrophes is profoundly insufficient if the default trajectory for wellbeing is negative (and potentially worsening). Indeed, if the default trajectory is negative (and we have no good ways of changing it) we can imagine the universe giving a sigh of relief if we were filtered out of the cosmic pool of awareness.
Given the profound importance for cause prioritization—if the present is overall negative for wellbeing I think it implies we should focus much, much more on making the future and present go well than go long—we should have several independent well resourced attempts to answer the question of “how do we weigh the wellbeing of animals versus humans?”
The moral weights of animals seems like one of the most important inputs into cause prioritization. The difference between whether we use RP weights or neuron count is the difference between whether the present contains more happiness than suffering, and potentially whether humanity has been overall good or bad for wellbeing.
This also poses challenges to the future. Averting catastrophes is profoundly insufficient if the default trajectory for wellbeing is negative (and potentially worsening). Indeed, if the default trajectory is negative (and we have no good ways of changing it) we can imagine the universe giving a sigh of relief if we were filtered out of the cosmic pool of awareness.
Given the profound importance for cause prioritization—if the present is overall negative for wellbeing I think it implies we should focus much, much more on making the future and present go well than go long—we should have several independent well resourced attempts to answer the question of “how do we weigh the wellbeing of animals versus humans?”