My criticism is—consider including more long-run impact stuff; less animals stuff.
I’m not sold on the relevance of Animal Factories and the Abuse of Power for the stated goal of spreading effective altruism to new audiences. Prima facie, talks about animal welfare will make people care about animals more than effectiveness, and will bore some people who don’t care about animals. I’d be willing to pay that price if I was fairly sure that animal charities were at least among the most effective but that seems like an unsupportable epistemic position.
On the other hand, there are good arguments for caring about longer-run impact, so I would favour giving risks/deep time/tech a bigger mention.
I agree with this assessment. My impression is that concern for animals is much more likely to mind-kill people than concern for either world poverty or the far-future. I find this very sad, because human-caused animal suffering is a very important, tractable and uncrowded cause. It might be worth doing further research on ways to spread concern for sentience in ways that raise, rather than lower, the sanity waterline.
Great work, Peter.
My criticism is—consider including more long-run impact stuff; less animals stuff.
I’m not sold on the relevance of Animal Factories and the Abuse of Power for the stated goal of spreading effective altruism to new audiences. Prima facie, talks about animal welfare will make people care about animals more than effectiveness, and will bore some people who don’t care about animals. I’d be willing to pay that price if I was fairly sure that animal charities were at least among the most effective but that seems like an unsupportable epistemic position.
On the other hand, there are good arguments for caring about longer-run impact, so I would favour giving risks/deep time/tech a bigger mention.
I agree with this assessment. My impression is that concern for animals is much more likely to mind-kill people than concern for either world poverty or the far-future. I find this very sad, because human-caused animal suffering is a very important, tractable and uncrowded cause. It might be worth doing further research on ways to spread concern for sentience in ways that raise, rather than lower, the sanity waterline.