I appreciated this post as culmination of over a year of research into invertebrate sentience done by a team at Rethink Priorities that I was a part of. Prior to doing this research, I was pretty skeptical that invertebrates were of moral concern and moreover I was skeptical that there even was a tractable way to figure it out. Now, we somehow managed to make a large amount of forward progress on figuring out this thorny issue and as a result I believe invertebrate welfare issues have a lot more forward momentum both within Rethink Priorities and elsewhere in the EA movement and while in the 2.5 years since this post was written this forward momentum hasn’t cashed out into anything that tangible, I think over the next 2.5 years we will finally see multiple non-profits and a larger amount of funds spent on invertebrate welfare issues, which could turn out to be many times more cost-effective than current work (or not—the cost-effectiveness is still being worked out).
I think this post demonstrated two key things for me: (a) thorny philosophical problems actually can be meaningfully addressed and lead to people changing their opinions and (b) a good theory of change often can be doing research to inform the direction within your own organization.
Disclaimer: I am co-CEO at Rethink Priorities and supervised some of this work, but I am writing this review in a personal capacity as a personal reflection. I did not share this review with anyone at RP, so it’s quite possible other people might disagree and I may be wrong here, so do not take this as an official RP position.
I appreciated this post as culmination of over a year of research into invertebrate sentience done by a team at Rethink Priorities that I was a part of. Prior to doing this research, I was pretty skeptical that invertebrates were of moral concern and moreover I was skeptical that there even was a tractable way to figure it out. Now, we somehow managed to make a large amount of forward progress on figuring out this thorny issue and as a result I believe invertebrate welfare issues have a lot more forward momentum both within Rethink Priorities and elsewhere in the EA movement and while in the 2.5 years since this post was written this forward momentum hasn’t cashed out into anything that tangible, I think over the next 2.5 years we will finally see multiple non-profits and a larger amount of funds spent on invertebrate welfare issues, which could turn out to be many times more cost-effective than current work (or not—the cost-effectiveness is still being worked out).
I think this post demonstrated two key things for me: (a) thorny philosophical problems actually can be meaningfully addressed and lead to people changing their opinions and (b) a good theory of change often can be doing research to inform the direction within your own organization.
Disclaimer: I am co-CEO at Rethink Priorities and supervised some of this work, but I am writing this review in a personal capacity as a personal reflection. I did not share this review with anyone at RP, so it’s quite possible other people might disagree and I may be wrong here, so do not take this as an official RP position.