Thanks, David. I felt like your comment misrepresented my post a bit.
You donât seem to expect them to devote massive amounts of time towards âreasoning transparencyâ justifying treating all human lives of approximately equal value though?
I do not ask GiveWell for âmassive amounts of timeâ in the context of effects on animals. As of now, I just ask for some time, as they have apparently nothing on their website about such effects.
I do not think they have to justify valuing 1 unit of welfare the same regardless of where and when it is experienced, as I see impartiality as a self-evident starting point. However, I would certainly agree with them valuing happier lives more, and therefore not value saving lives the same regardless of country.
own longer list of axiomatic assumptions (hedonic welfare characterised by valence symmetry and the approximate accuracy of a long list of assumptions about how to quantify it is the one true way to allocate resources)
Moral uncertainty would make conclusions even less robust. However, even under expected total hedonistic utilitarianism, which I strongly endorse, there is more than enough empirical uncertainty for it to be unclear whether saving lives globally, and in China, India and Nigeria is beneficial or harmful. So my conclusion would remain the same. It is also unclear to me whether other moral theories favour or disfavour animals (e.g. saving human lives increases the number of total lives killed nearterm among humans and farmed animals). I would say animals matter a lot on non-hedonic views. I also think one should be very wary of supporting interventions which can easily increase suffering a lot nearterm in the hope that integrating moral uncertainty makes it worthwhile.
Nitpick. I assumed the welfare per time of a practically maximally happy life is proportional to the welfare range. Valence symmetry is a sufficient condition for this, but it is not necessary. I think that assumption seems pretty agnostic, in that it is the simplest I can think of, and does not clearly favour animal or human welfare.
Most obviously, you appear to have imputed that the average Indian reliant on donations for lifesaving (typically in poverty) will grow up to consume shrimp (a relatively high-value foodstuff) roughly in proportion to the number of shrimp farms in India (which exports up to 95% of its shrimp production).
I relied on the shrimp supply (production plus net imports) per capita in 2022, which is what is relevant to assess the effects on animals. I acknowledged the people helped by GiveWell and AIM would cause less harm to animals than random people, but I do think this resolves the meat-eater problem.
The harms would be smaller for a random person helped by such GiveWellâs grants or Ambitious Impactâs organisations. I assume they have an income below that of a random person in the respective country, the supply per capita of meat excluding aquatic animals roughly increases with the logarithm of the real GDP per capita, and I guess so do the number of poultry birds, farmed aquatic animals excluding shrimp, and shrimp per capita. Yet, self-reported life satisfaction also roughly increases with the logarithm of the real GDP per capita. So I believe the harms to farmed animals per person increase roughly linearly with self-reported life satisfaction, at least across countries. As a result, it is unclear to me whether the harms to farmed animals as a fraction of the human benefits would be higher or lower for a random person than for a random person helped by such GiveWellâs grants or Ambitious Impactâs organisations.
That estimate thatâs probably off by at least one order of magnitude accounts for a large fraction of your estimated negative impact of saving an Indian childâs life
I did not follow. I estimate saving lives in India would be harmful nearterm even for no consumption at all of shrimp.
Using RPâs 5th and 95th percentile welfare range of shrimp of 0 and 1.15, and maintaining all the other inputs, the harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals as a fraction of the direct benefits of human life in 2022 would be:
Globally, 5.61 to 372.
In China, 12.3 and 841.
In India, 1.70 [> 1] and 131.
In Nigeria, 1.12 and 45.3.
Even if saving lives in India was beneficial according to my point estimates, one should keep in mind there is lots of uncertainty. I think one should pursue actions which are robustly beneficial, not ones which can easily cause lots of nearterm harm depending on alternative reasonable assumptions, like a larger welfare range, or different projections about the growth of animal consumption (I assumed no growth at all, which underestimates the harms to animals nearterm).
I do not ask GiveWell for âmassive amounts of timeâ in the context of effects on animals.
I revised this during the time in which you were replying to say âuse researcher and writer timeâ instead, precisely because I didnât want to give the appearance of misrepresenting your post. Though it would certainly take a massive amount of time for GiveWell to address every detailed contrarian argument that actually humans surviving is bad or that welfare ought to be weighted by country or nationality or potential economic output or religion or proximity to the donor or any other mechanism dreamed up by people who have totally different axiomatic beliefs. It seems rather pointless for an organization focused on quantifying how effective organizations are at preserving human life to spend time explaining the precise nature of their disagreements with people holding the contrary belief that it would be better for humans not to live. Clearly there is no agreement to be found there.[1]
I donât think animal welfare charities should feel obliged to quantify possible negative impacts on human welfare of their activity in the interests of supposed impartiality either.
I would say animals matter a lot on non-hedonic views
I agree it is possible to conclude that animal welfare should be prioritised over human welfare using other moral frameworks. I actually find deontological arguments for prioritising animal welfare more convincing than ones filled with arbitrary utility estimates. But the specific framing of the argument you want GiveWell to address is based on total welfarist hedonism with valence symmetry and multiple ancillary assumptions about the relative moral weight of animal lives they clearly donât agree with. Adding the expectation they engage with even more forms of argument that human life is bad would make the proposed standard of reasoning transparency more unreasonable to impose upon them, not less.
I donât think GiveWell should apportion any more time to the question âwhat if itâs better for humans to dieâ than the Shrimp Welfare Project should to âwhat if shrimps donât have welfare and all weâre doing is making human lives a little worseâ. Both are clearly and transparently incommensurate with their beliefs, and people that think that humans donât deserve to live given their dietary habits or that shrimps donât have meaningful welfare ranges can always find and advocate different causes.
I also think one should be very wary of supporting interventions which can easily increase suffering a lot nearterm in the hope that integrating moral uncertainty makes it worthwhile.
I think one should be wary of diverting funding which fairly unambiguously decreases well-established sources of nearterm suffering on the basis of a set of guesses about welfare impacts on aquatic animals with pretty dissimilar biology.[2]
I relied on the shrimp supply (production plus net imports) per capita in 2022
Nothing indicates that this supply statistic subtracts out exports. You linked to some total shrimp production stats, and an ambiguous source you caveated which suggests Indians consume half a kilo of shrimp per capita which would be the majority of their domestic product (despite the fact India is the worldâs largest shrimp exporter and exports nearly all their produce). Elsewhere, Iâve seen it suggested Indiaâs per capita consumption of shrimp is of the order of 100 grams (1.6% of overall seafood consumption). Thatâs less than a restaurant serving per person: itâs clearly not being transported to remote villages to be dished out to kids whose diet is so poor vitamin supplementation meaningfully increases their survival chances!
I suspect most recipients of GiveWell funding in India have never even seen a shrimp.
acknowledged the people helped by GiveWell and AIM would cause less harm to animals than random people, but I do think this resolves the meat-eater problem.
If the majority of people in India helped by GiveWell and AIM eat no aquaculture products whichis likely true, then by the estimates you posted above, it resolves the meat eater problem as presented in this post for those people (specifically the net benefit in human DALYs is greater than the net harms caused to chicken welfare from egg and occasional meat consumption).[3] I agree that you acknowledged that poor people consumed less, but only in the context of dismissing it as a relevant factor[4]
And yes, your estimates donât factor in future economic growth which could reasonably be expected to increase meat and shrimp consumption by a lot. But you also assume the Shrimp Welfare Projectâs India-centred campaigns have no impact on the aquaculture practises theyâre campaigning about despite heartily recommending them as effective![5]
I did not follow. I estimate saving lives in India would be harmful nearterm even for no consumption at all of shrimp
At the RP midpoint used in the table in your post, 3.05 of the 4.55 animal harms per year you estimate surviving Indians responsible will be responsible for are attributed to shrimp welfare ergo most[6] of the quantifiable harm is based on [apparently incorrect] assumptions about shrimp consumption. I agree that this still estimates saving lives as net harmful, though it becomes net positive for the average Indian to live (yay!) under your estimates as soon as the rest of aquaculture is omitted from the equation. Which is not insignificant when thereâs no scientific consensus about whether sea life experiences welfare at all, never mind how to quantify the impact of aquaculture.
if they were going to enormously expand the scope of their impact calculations to engage with people with fundamentally different starting axioms, it would probably be more productive to do additional calculations to engage with supporters of QALYs or âvalues of a statistical lifeâwith lower weighting for the poor...
to be fair there are other farmed animals like goats (which are considerably more likely to be consumed by poor non-vegetarians than farmed shrimp) left out of the calculations whose consumption animal welfare enthusiasts can reasonably attach negative weight to, although I donât think those animals are often factory farmedin India.
I found the argument that as meat consumption was broadly correlated with GDP per capita and life satisfaction is also broadly correlated with GDP per capita unconvincing given the relatively small impact of GDP on satisfaction. If the beneficiaries are typically consuming negligible amounts of animal produce you canât just write off the net benefit by assuming their lives canât be worth living!
there seem to be quite a few reasons to believe that shrimp stunning practices actually will change over time in India (itâs not obviously costly, the SWP isnât the only organization pushing it and seems to be getting at least some positive responses, and India is characterised by influential religions unusually receptive to arguments about invertebrate welfare)
(FWIW I also edited to removed the word âmajorityâ whilst you were drafting your response to try to avoid confusion, though I donât think itâs incorrect in the sense Iâve used it)
Nothing indicates that this supply statistic subtracts out exports.
Hannah McKay, the 1st author of RPâs analysis with the shrimp supply numbers, had clarified via email these refer to production plus net imports. My sense is that supply often refers to this.
You linked to some total shrimp production stats, and an ambiguous source you caveated
I only used the total shrimp production to estimate the fraction of shrimps which are farmed. The âambiguous sourceâ you refer to is RPâs analysis of data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, which Hannah caveated âmay be unreliableâ.
Elsewhere, Iâve seen it suggested Indiaâs per capita consumption of shrimp is of the order of 100 grams (1.6% of overall seafood consumption)
Nitpick. 100 g is the reported consumption of farmed shrimp, not all shrimp.
In the US, per capita shrimp consumption is around 1.9 kg/âyear while in India it is consumption of farmed shrimp is approximately 100 grams.
I estimate a farmed shrimp supply per capita in India in 2022 of 371 g (not quite âhalf a kiloâ), and the consumption will be lower due to waste. I think the sources still disagree significantly after adjusting for this, but it does not matter for my main point. Even no consumption of shrimp would lead to saving lives in India being harmful neaterm if I kept all my other parameters constant, and there would always be significant uncertainty even if my point estimate suggested the benefits to humans are larger than the harms to animals nearterm.
If the majority of people in India helped by GiveWell and AIM eat no aquaculture products whichis likely true, then by the estimates you posted above, it resolves the meat eater problem as presented in this post for those people (specifically the net benefit in human DALYs is greater than the net harms caused to chicken welfare from egg and occasional meat consumption).
The consumption of poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person helped in India in 2022 would have to be less than 19.3 % (= 1/â5.17) as large as that of a random person for extending human lives to increase welfare nearterm. In reality, consumption would have to be even lower than that to account for the lower welfare of the people helped, not to mention the possibility of them having negative lives (I estimated 6.37 % of people globally do). Even neglecting the uncertainty in other variable like the welfare ranges, without further research, it is hard for me to see how one can be confident that GiveWellâs grants to India, and the organisations AIM incubated there are beneficial.
But you also assume the Shrimp Welfare Projectâs India-centred campaigns have no impact on the aquaculture practises theyâre campaigning about despite heartily recommending them as effective!
I alluded to future improvements in the conditions of animals.
I wouldsay at least chickensâ lives can become positive over the next few decades in some animal-friendly countries. Relatedly, I would ideally determine the welfare burden per animal per year by country, although it is unclear to me whether I am over or underestimating it. Furthermore, I guess better worsening conditions now imply a longer time until reaching positive lives, and therefore a longer time until increased consumption of farmed animals being beneficial.
Even no consumption of shrimp would lead to saving lives in India being harmful neaterm if I kept all my other parameters constant, and there would always be significant uncertainty even if my point estimate suggested the benefits to humans are larger than the harms to animals nearterm.
Yes, but I donât see any reason to assume that the uncertainty skews in favour of humans dying rather than humans surviving. Particularly not when the assumptions you used to reach this conclusion were that that poor Indians receiving nutrition supplementation have access to the same ~11 farmed shrimp per year in their diet as rich Indians, and that the positives of 1 Indian human living for 1 year are no more than the negatives of four shrimp being farmed.
I think in an area of high uncertainty we should default to the idea that humans should survive (and maybe change their dietary preferences) and not to the idea that they should die
The consumption of poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person helped in India in 2022 would have to be less than 19.3 % (= 1/â5.17) as large as that of a random person for extending human lives to increase welfare nearterm
Sure. But since food choices are skewed heavily by budgets and aquaculture is a premium export market, and the supply chains to send 11 farmed shrimp per year to every man, woman and child in interior villages donât exist, I donât think the evidence points to the median GiveWell beneficiary consuming any of the ~13 farmed aquatic animals per year youâve attributed to them. The idea that GiveWell donations have a non-zero effect on the size of the aquaculture industry at the margin is even more dubious, given that the economics of farming in a region which exports nearly all of its aquaculture products are highly unlikely to factor in a few thousand GiveWell non-beneficiaries dying to their demand calculations and reduce production accordingly.
Others have suggested that proposing that people shouldnât be allowed to survive on the basis of things they might choose to eat in future. I think it would be worse to condemn them for things they are statistically unlikely to even get the opportunity to eat.
Either way, itâs a view youâre perfectly entitled to and have clearly done some research into, but I donât think itâs a glaring omission that an organization that considers it axiomatic that human lives are worth saving hasnât invested time in doing their own âso actually, under what set of assumptions can we conclude humans shouldnât be savedâ calculations.
Yes, but I donât see any reason to assume that the uncertainty skews in favour of humans dying rather than humans surviving.
Some reasons which push towards saving lives being more harmful nearterm:
The supply per capita of meat excluding aquatic animals, and shrimp are roughly proportional to the logarithm of real GDP per capita, and real GDP per capita has been increasing.
I guess I am underestimating the harms to animals due to using RPâs median welfare ranges, which were calculated assuming a probability of 0 of animals having capacities which are unknown to be present or not. In reality, the probability will be higher than 0, which implies larger welfare ranges, especially for less studied animals like shrimp.
I think in an area of high uncertainty we should default to the idea that humans should survive (and maybe change their dietary preferences) and not to the idea that they should die
I think the focus should be on pursuing robustly good actions, in particular, improving animal welfare, and learning more.
Particularly not when the assumptions you used to reach this conclusion were that that poor Indians receiving nutrition supplementation have access to the same ~11 farmed shrimp per year in their diet as rich Indians
Random Indians, not rich Indians. I would appreciate it if you could represent my post fairly.
I donât think the evidence points to the median GiveWell beneficiary consuming any of the ~13 farmed aquatic animals per year youâve attributed to them
I explicitly said in the post âThe harms would be smaller for a random person helped by such GiveWellâs grants or Ambitious Impactâs organisationsâ, and then argued why it is unclear this changes my conclusions.
Random Indians, not rich Indians. I would appreciate it if you could represent my post fairly.
âRandom Indiansâ is a group which includes poor Indians (i.e. recipients of anti-poverty measures, which have non-random targeting) and rich Indians (typically not recipients of GiveWell or AIM charitable interventions). The assumption you make by using a mean consumption figure is that poor Indians and rich Indians alike consume ~11 shrimp per year. Thatâs what the text you quoted said, and a perfectly fair representation of your post
I actually think itâs an unfair representation of my post to accuse me of misrepresenting you simply because I spelled out the logical implications of your choice of figure, especially when I have also presented multiple reasons why I believe zero would be more representative of the amount they were likely to consume, and even more representative of the marginal impact of a typical GiveWell/âAIM recipient surviving on Indian aquaculture production.
I explicitly said in the post âThe harms would be smaller for a random person helped by such GiveWellâs grants or Ambitious Impactâs organisationsâ, and then argued why it is unclear this changes my conclusions.
My argument is that the median survivor due to GiveWell/âAIM aid causes zero harm via aquaculture, and even the small minority of survivors who do consume shrimp are unlikely to have any impact upon numbers of shrimp culled in factory farms. Iâm aware your post above argues that meat consumption may be linearly related to welfare via the common factor that is GDP, but I donât think the relatively small diminution in self-reported welfare from lower incomes youâve considered here is anywhere near enough to doubt that the survival of Indians without access to aquaculture products might be net positive in the welfarist framework you presented!
I feel weâre going in circles here, so Iâll wish you a happy Christmas and am unlikely to continue the discussion.
Thanks, David. I felt like your comment misrepresented my post a bit.
I do not ask GiveWell for âmassive amounts of timeâ in the context of effects on animals. As of now, I just ask for some time, as they have apparently nothing on their website about such effects.
I do not think they have to justify valuing 1 unit of welfare the same regardless of where and when it is experienced, as I see impartiality as a self-evident starting point. However, I would certainly agree with them valuing happier lives more, and therefore not value saving lives the same regardless of country.
Moral uncertainty would make conclusions even less robust. However, even under expected total hedonistic utilitarianism, which I strongly endorse, there is more than enough empirical uncertainty for it to be unclear whether saving lives globally, and in China, India and Nigeria is beneficial or harmful. So my conclusion would remain the same. It is also unclear to me whether other moral theories favour or disfavour animals (e.g. saving human lives increases the number of total lives killed nearterm among humans and farmed animals). I would say animals matter a lot on non-hedonic views. I also think one should be very wary of supporting interventions which can easily increase suffering a lot nearterm in the hope that integrating moral uncertainty makes it worthwhile.
Nitpick. I assumed the welfare per time of a practically maximally happy life is proportional to the welfare range. Valence symmetry is a sufficient condition for this, but it is not necessary. I think that assumption seems pretty agnostic, in that it is the simplest I can think of, and does not clearly favour animal or human welfare.
I relied on the shrimp supply (production plus net imports) per capita in 2022, which is what is relevant to assess the effects on animals. I acknowledged the people helped by GiveWell and AIM would cause less harm to animals than random people, but I do think this resolves the meat-eater problem.
I did not follow. I estimate saving lives in India would be harmful nearterm even for no consumption at all of shrimp.
Even if saving lives in India was beneficial according to my point estimates, one should keep in mind there is lots of uncertainty. I think one should pursue actions which are robustly beneficial, not ones which can easily cause lots of nearterm harm depending on alternative reasonable assumptions, like a larger welfare range, or different projections about the growth of animal consumption (I assumed no growth at all, which underestimates the harms to animals nearterm).
I revised this during the time in which you were replying to say âuse researcher and writer timeâ instead, precisely because I didnât want to give the appearance of misrepresenting your post. Though it would certainly take a massive amount of time for GiveWell to address every detailed contrarian argument that actually humans surviving is bad or that welfare ought to be weighted by country or nationality or potential economic output or religion or proximity to the donor or any other mechanism dreamed up by people who have totally different axiomatic beliefs. It seems rather pointless for an organization focused on quantifying how effective organizations are at preserving human life to spend time explaining the precise nature of their disagreements with people holding the contrary belief that it would be better for humans not to live. Clearly there is no agreement to be found there.[1]
I donât think animal welfare charities should feel obliged to quantify possible negative impacts on human welfare of their activity in the interests of supposed impartiality either.
I agree it is possible to conclude that animal welfare should be prioritised over human welfare using other moral frameworks. I actually find deontological arguments for prioritising animal welfare more convincing than ones filled with arbitrary utility estimates. But the specific framing of the argument you want GiveWell to address is based on total welfarist hedonism with valence symmetry and multiple ancillary assumptions about the relative moral weight of animal lives they clearly donât agree with. Adding the expectation they engage with even more forms of argument that human life is bad would make the proposed standard of reasoning transparency more unreasonable to impose upon them, not less.
I donât think GiveWell should apportion any more time to the question âwhat if itâs better for humans to dieâ than the Shrimp Welfare Project should to âwhat if shrimps donât have welfare and all weâre doing is making human lives a little worseâ. Both are clearly and transparently incommensurate with their beliefs, and people that think that humans donât deserve to live given their dietary habits or that shrimps donât have meaningful welfare ranges can always find and advocate different causes.
I think one should be wary of diverting funding which fairly unambiguously decreases well-established sources of nearterm suffering on the basis of a set of guesses about welfare impacts on aquatic animals with pretty dissimilar biology.[2]
Nothing indicates that this supply statistic subtracts out exports. You linked to some total shrimp production stats, and an ambiguous source you caveated which suggests Indians consume half a kilo of shrimp per capita which would be the majority of their domestic product (despite the fact India is the worldâs largest shrimp exporter and exports nearly all their produce). Elsewhere, Iâve seen it suggested Indiaâs per capita consumption of shrimp is of the order of 100 grams (1.6% of overall seafood consumption). Thatâs less than a restaurant serving per person: itâs clearly not being transported to remote villages to be dished out to kids whose diet is so poor vitamin supplementation meaningfully increases their survival chances!
I suspect most recipients of GiveWell funding in India have never even seen a shrimp.
If the majority of people in India helped by GiveWell and AIM eat no aquaculture products which is likely true, then by the estimates you posted above, it resolves the meat eater problem as presented in this post for those people (specifically the net benefit in human DALYs is greater than the net harms caused to chicken welfare from egg and occasional meat consumption).[3] I agree that you acknowledged that poor people consumed less, but only in the context of dismissing it as a relevant factor[4]
And yes, your estimates donât factor in future economic growth which could reasonably be expected to increase meat and shrimp consumption by a lot. But you also assume the Shrimp Welfare Projectâs India-centred campaigns have no impact on the aquaculture practises theyâre campaigning about despite heartily recommending them as effective![5]
At the RP midpoint used in the table in your post, 3.05 of the 4.55 animal harms per year you estimate surviving Indians responsible will be responsible for are attributed to shrimp welfare ergo most[6] of the quantifiable harm is based on [apparently incorrect] assumptions about shrimp consumption. I agree that this still estimates saving lives as net harmful, though it becomes net positive for the average Indian to live (yay!) under your estimates as soon as the rest of aquaculture is omitted from the equation. Which is not insignificant when thereâs no scientific consensus about whether sea life experiences welfare at all, never mind how to quantify the impact of aquaculture.
if they were going to enormously expand the scope of their impact calculations to engage with people with fundamentally different starting axioms, it would probably be more productive to do additional calculations to engage with supporters of QALYs or âvalues of a statistical lifeâwith lower weighting for the poor...
bearing in mind that there isnât even scientific consensus on whether they experience welfare at all, never mind the welfare impact of aquaculture
to be fair there are other farmed animals like goats (which are considerably more likely to be consumed by poor non-vegetarians than farmed shrimp) left out of the calculations whose consumption animal welfare enthusiasts can reasonably attach negative weight to, although I donât think those animals are often factory farmedin India.
I found the argument that as meat consumption was broadly correlated with GDP per capita and life satisfaction is also broadly correlated with GDP per capita unconvincing given the relatively small impact of GDP on satisfaction. If the beneficiaries are typically consuming negligible amounts of animal produce you canât just write off the net benefit by assuming their lives canât be worth living!
there seem to be quite a few reasons to believe that shrimp stunning practices actually will change over time in India (itâs not obviously costly, the SWP isnât the only organization pushing it and seems to be getting at least some positive responses, and India is characterised by influential religions unusually receptive to arguments about invertebrate welfare)
(FWIW I also edited to removed the word âmajorityâ whilst you were drafting your response to try to avoid confusion, though I donât think itâs incorrect in the sense Iâve used it)
Hannah McKay, the 1st author of RPâs analysis with the shrimp supply numbers, had clarified via email these refer to production plus net imports. My sense is that supply often refers to this.
I only used the total shrimp production to estimate the fraction of shrimps which are farmed. The âambiguous sourceâ you refer to is RPâs analysis of data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, which Hannah caveated âmay be unreliableâ.
Nitpick. 100 g is the reported consumption of farmed shrimp, not all shrimp.
I estimate a farmed shrimp supply per capita in India in 2022 of 371 g (not quite âhalf a kiloâ), and the consumption will be lower due to waste. I think the sources still disagree significantly after adjusting for this, but it does not matter for my main point. Even no consumption of shrimp would lead to saving lives in India being harmful neaterm if I kept all my other parameters constant, and there would always be significant uncertainty even if my point estimate suggested the benefits to humans are larger than the harms to animals nearterm.
The consumption of poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person helped in India in 2022 would have to be less than 19.3 % (= 1/â5.17) as large as that of a random person for extending human lives to increase welfare nearterm. In reality, consumption would have to be even lower than that to account for the lower welfare of the people helped, not to mention the possibility of them having negative lives (I estimated 6.37 % of people globally do). Even neglecting the uncertainty in other variable like the welfare ranges, without further research, it is hard for me to see how one can be confident that GiveWellâs grants to India, and the organisations AIM incubated there are beneficial.
I alluded to future improvements in the conditions of animals.
Yes, but I donât see any reason to assume that the uncertainty skews in favour of humans dying rather than humans surviving. Particularly not when the assumptions you used to reach this conclusion were that that poor Indians receiving nutrition supplementation have access to the same ~11 farmed shrimp per year in their diet as rich Indians, and that the positives of 1 Indian human living for 1 year are no more than the negatives of four shrimp being farmed.
I think in an area of high uncertainty we should default to the idea that humans should survive (and maybe change their dietary preferences) and not to the idea that they should die
Sure. But since food choices are skewed heavily by budgets and aquaculture is a premium export market, and the supply chains to send 11 farmed shrimp per year to every man, woman and child in interior villages donât exist, I donât think the evidence points to the median GiveWell beneficiary consuming any of the ~13 farmed aquatic animals per year youâve attributed to them. The idea that GiveWell donations have a non-zero effect on the size of the aquaculture industry at the margin is even more dubious, given that the economics of farming in a region which exports nearly all of its aquaculture products are highly unlikely to factor in a few thousand GiveWell non-beneficiaries dying to their demand calculations and reduce production accordingly.
Others have suggested that proposing that people shouldnât be allowed to survive on the basis of things they might choose to eat in future. I think it would be worse to condemn them for things they are statistically unlikely to even get the opportunity to eat.
Either way, itâs a view youâre perfectly entitled to and have clearly done some research into, but I donât think itâs a glaring omission that an organization that considers it axiomatic that human lives are worth saving hasnât invested time in doing their own âso actually, under what set of assumptions can we conclude humans shouldnât be savedâ calculations.
Some reasons which push towards saving lives being more harmful nearterm:
The supply per capita of meat excluding aquatic animals, and shrimp are roughly proportional to the logarithm of real GDP per capita, and real GDP per capita has been increasing.
I guess I am underestimating the harms to animals due to using RPâs median welfare ranges, which were calculated assuming a probability of 0 of animals having capacities which are unknown to be present or not. In reality, the probability will be higher than 0, which implies larger welfare ranges, especially for less studied animals like shrimp.
I think the focus should be on pursuing robustly good actions, in particular, improving animal welfare, and learning more.
Random Indians, not rich Indians. I would appreciate it if you could represent my post fairly.
I explicitly said in the post âThe harms would be smaller for a random person helped by such GiveWellâs grants or Ambitious Impactâs organisationsâ, and then argued why it is unclear this changes my conclusions.
âRandom Indiansâ is a group which includes poor Indians (i.e. recipients of anti-poverty measures, which have non-random targeting) and rich Indians (typically not recipients of GiveWell or AIM charitable interventions). The assumption you make by using a mean consumption figure is that poor Indians and rich Indians alike consume ~11 shrimp per year. Thatâs what the text you quoted said, and a perfectly fair representation of your post
I actually think itâs an unfair representation of my post to accuse me of misrepresenting you simply because I spelled out the logical implications of your choice of figure, especially when I have also presented multiple reasons why I believe zero would be more representative of the amount they were likely to consume, and even more representative of the marginal impact of a typical GiveWell/âAIM recipient surviving on Indian aquaculture production.
My argument is that the median survivor due to GiveWell/âAIM aid causes zero harm via aquaculture, and even the small minority of survivors who do consume shrimp are unlikely to have any impact upon numbers of shrimp culled in factory farms. Iâm aware your post above argues that meat consumption may be linearly related to welfare via the common factor that is GDP, but I donât think the relatively small diminution in self-reported welfare from lower incomes youâve considered here is anywhere near enough to doubt that the survival of Indians without access to aquaculture products might be net positive in the welfarist framework you presented!
I feel weâre going in circles here, so Iâll wish you a happy Christmas and am unlikely to continue the discussion.