Those considerations make sense. I don’t have much more to add for/against than what I said in the post.
On the comparison between different MCE strategies, I’m pretty uncertain which are best. The main reasons I currently favor farmed animal advocacy over your examples (global poverty, environmentalism, and companion animals) are that (1) farmed animal advocacy is far more neglected, (2) farmed animal advocacy is far more similar to potential far future dystopias, mainly just because it involves vast numbers of sentient beings who are largely ignored by most of society. I’m not relatively very worried about, for example, far future dystopias where dog-and-cat-like-beings (e.g. small, entertaining AIs kept around for companionship) are suffering in vast numbers. And environmentalism is typically advocating for non-sentient beings, which I think is quite different than MCE for sentient beings.
I think the better competitors to farmed animal advocacy are advocating broadly for antispeciesism/fundamental rights (e.g. Nonhuman Rights Project) and advocating specifically for digital sentience (e.g. a larger, more sophisticated version of People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners). There are good arguments against these, however, such as that it would be quite difficult for an eager EA to get much traction with a new digital sentience nonprofit. (We considered founding Sentience Institute with a focus on digital sentience. This was a big reason we didn’t.) Whereas given the current excitement in the farmed animal space (e.g. the coming release of “clean meat,” real meat grown without animal slaughter), the farmed animal space seems like a fantastic place for gaining traction.
I’m currently not very excited about “Start a petting zoo at Deepmind” (or similar direct outreach strategies) because it seems like it would produce a ton of backlash because it seems too adversarial and aggressive. There are additional considerations for/against (e.g. I worry that it’d be difficult to push a niche demographic like AI researchers very far away from the rest of society, at least the rest of their social circles; I also have the same traction concern I have with advocating for digital sentience), but this one just seems quite damning.
The upshot is that, even if there are some particularly high yield interventions in animal welfare from the far future perspective, this should be fairly far removed from typical EAA activity directed towards having the greatest near-term impact on animals. If this post heralds a pivot of Sentience Institute to directions pretty orthogonal to the principal component of effective animal advocacy, this would be welcome indeed.
I agree this is a valid argument, but given the other arguments (e.g. those above), I still think it’s usually right for EAAs to focus on farmed animal advocacy, including Sentience Institute at least for the next year or two.
(FYI for readers, Gregory and I also discussed these things before the post was published when he gave feedback on the draft. So our comments might seem a little rehearsed.)
The main reasons I currently favor farmed animal advocacy over your examples (global poverty, environmentalism, and companion animals) are that (1) farmed animal advocacy is far more neglected, (2) farmed animal advocacy is far more similar to potential far future dystopias, mainly just because it involves vast numbers of sentient beings who are largely ignored by most of society.
Wild animal advocacy is far more neglected than farmed animal advocacy, and it involves even larger numbers of sentient beings ignored by most of society. If the superiority of farmed animal advocacy over global poverty along these two dimensions is a sufficient reason for not working on global poverty, why isn’t the superiority of wild animal advocacy over farmed animal advocacy along those same dimensions not also a sufficient reason for not working on farmed animal advocacy?
I personally don’t think WAS is as similar to the most plausible far future dystopias, so I’ve been prioritizing it less even over just the past couple of years. I don’t expect far future dystopias to involve as much naturogenic (nature-caused) suffering, though of course it’s possible (e.g. if humans create large numbers of sentient beings in a simulation, but then let the simulation run on its own for a while, then the simulation could come to be viewed as naturogenic-ish and those attitudes could become more relevant).
I think if one wants something very neglected, digital sentience advocacy is basically across-the-board better than WAS advocacy.
That being said, I’m highly uncertain here and these reasons aren’t overwhelming (e.g. WAS advocacy pushes on more than just the “care about naturogenic suffering” lever), so I think WAS advocacy is still, in Gregory’s words, an important part of the ‘far future portfolio.’ And often one can work on it while working on other things, e.g. I think Animal Charity Evaluators’ WAS content (e.g. ]guest blog post by Oscar Horta](https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/why-the-situation-of-animals-in-the-wild-should-concern-us/)) has helped them be more well-rounded as an organization, and didn’t directly trade off with their farmed animal content.
But humanity/AI is likely to expand to other planets. Won’t those planets need to have complex ecosystems that could involve a lot of suffering? Or do you think it will all be done with some fancy tech that’ll be too different from today’s wildlife for it to be relevant? It’s true that those ecosystems would (mostly?) be non-naturogenic but I’m not that sure that people would care about them, it’d still be animals/diseases/hunger.etc. hurting animals. Maybe it’d be easier to engineer an ecosystem without predation and diseases but that is a non-trivial assumption and suffering could then arise in other ways.
Also, some humans want to spread life to other planets for its own sake and relatively few people need to want that to cause a lot of suffering if no one works on preventing it.
This could be less relevant if you think that most of the expected value comes from simulations that won’t involve ecosystems.
Yes, terraforming is a big way in which close-to-WAS scenarios could arise. I do think it’s smaller in expectation than digital environments that develop on their own and thus are close-to-WAS.
I don’t think terraforming would be done very differently than today’s wildlife, e.g. done without predation and diseases.
Ultimately I still think the digital, not-close-to-WAS scenarios seem much larger in expectation.
Those considerations make sense. I don’t have much more to add for/against than what I said in the post.
On the comparison between different MCE strategies, I’m pretty uncertain which are best. The main reasons I currently favor farmed animal advocacy over your examples (global poverty, environmentalism, and companion animals) are that (1) farmed animal advocacy is far more neglected, (2) farmed animal advocacy is far more similar to potential far future dystopias, mainly just because it involves vast numbers of sentient beings who are largely ignored by most of society. I’m not relatively very worried about, for example, far future dystopias where dog-and-cat-like-beings (e.g. small, entertaining AIs kept around for companionship) are suffering in vast numbers. And environmentalism is typically advocating for non-sentient beings, which I think is quite different than MCE for sentient beings.
I think the better competitors to farmed animal advocacy are advocating broadly for antispeciesism/fundamental rights (e.g. Nonhuman Rights Project) and advocating specifically for digital sentience (e.g. a larger, more sophisticated version of People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners). There are good arguments against these, however, such as that it would be quite difficult for an eager EA to get much traction with a new digital sentience nonprofit. (We considered founding Sentience Institute with a focus on digital sentience. This was a big reason we didn’t.) Whereas given the current excitement in the farmed animal space (e.g. the coming release of “clean meat,” real meat grown without animal slaughter), the farmed animal space seems like a fantastic place for gaining traction.
I’m currently not very excited about “Start a petting zoo at Deepmind” (or similar direct outreach strategies) because it seems like it would produce a ton of backlash because it seems too adversarial and aggressive. There are additional considerations for/against (e.g. I worry that it’d be difficult to push a niche demographic like AI researchers very far away from the rest of society, at least the rest of their social circles; I also have the same traction concern I have with advocating for digital sentience), but this one just seems quite damning.
I agree this is a valid argument, but given the other arguments (e.g. those above), I still think it’s usually right for EAAs to focus on farmed animal advocacy, including Sentience Institute at least for the next year or two.
(FYI for readers, Gregory and I also discussed these things before the post was published when he gave feedback on the draft. So our comments might seem a little rehearsed.)
Wild animal advocacy is far more neglected than farmed animal advocacy, and it involves even larger numbers of sentient beings ignored by most of society. If the superiority of farmed animal advocacy over global poverty along these two dimensions is a sufficient reason for not working on global poverty, why isn’t the superiority of wild animal advocacy over farmed animal advocacy along those same dimensions not also a sufficient reason for not working on farmed animal advocacy?
I personally don’t think WAS is as similar to the most plausible far future dystopias, so I’ve been prioritizing it less even over just the past couple of years. I don’t expect far future dystopias to involve as much naturogenic (nature-caused) suffering, though of course it’s possible (e.g. if humans create large numbers of sentient beings in a simulation, but then let the simulation run on its own for a while, then the simulation could come to be viewed as naturogenic-ish and those attitudes could become more relevant).
I think if one wants something very neglected, digital sentience advocacy is basically across-the-board better than WAS advocacy.
That being said, I’m highly uncertain here and these reasons aren’t overwhelming (e.g. WAS advocacy pushes on more than just the “care about naturogenic suffering” lever), so I think WAS advocacy is still, in Gregory’s words, an important part of the ‘far future portfolio.’ And often one can work on it while working on other things, e.g. I think Animal Charity Evaluators’ WAS content (e.g. ]guest blog post by Oscar Horta](https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/why-the-situation-of-animals-in-the-wild-should-concern-us/)) has helped them be more well-rounded as an organization, and didn’t directly trade off with their farmed animal content.
But humanity/AI is likely to expand to other planets. Won’t those planets need to have complex ecosystems that could involve a lot of suffering? Or do you think it will all be done with some fancy tech that’ll be too different from today’s wildlife for it to be relevant? It’s true that those ecosystems would (mostly?) be non-naturogenic but I’m not that sure that people would care about them, it’d still be animals/diseases/hunger.etc. hurting animals. Maybe it’d be easier to engineer an ecosystem without predation and diseases but that is a non-trivial assumption and suffering could then arise in other ways.
Also, some humans want to spread life to other planets for its own sake and relatively few people need to want that to cause a lot of suffering if no one works on preventing it.
This could be less relevant if you think that most of the expected value comes from simulations that won’t involve ecosystems.
Yes, terraforming is a big way in which close-to-WAS scenarios could arise. I do think it’s smaller in expectation than digital environments that develop on their own and thus are close-to-WAS.
I don’t think terraforming would be done very differently than today’s wildlife, e.g. done without predation and diseases.
Ultimately I still think the digital, not-close-to-WAS scenarios seem much larger in expectation.