I discussed this with my wife, who thinks that the broad idea is reasonable, but that kittens are a better choice than puppies:
As puppies are not role models their unconditional love is less relevant than first appears.
Most EA causes involve helping agents who aren’t directly in contact with you.
If people learn their altruism from helping puppies, they will learn to expect gratitude, worse still, they will learn to expect gratitude even for relatively minor help!
Cats care about you only to the extent that they can receive food and/or pets. This is a much better model.
Training children that it is a good idea to keep psychopaths as pets as long as they are cute probably results in them voting actors into positions of authority later in life.
1. Make a survey of EAs preferences over puppies x kittens. I suppose it’s correlated with cause areas and donation strategies.
2. Dogs and cats are too mainstream and fail the neglectedness test. If you’re a true EA, you should consider smaller animals, such as mice, or farm animals like chickens or pigs—so teaching people to expand their moral circle.
(BTW, has anyone seriously considered measuring if meeting a farm animal pet decreases someone’s willingness to eat meat, etc? I bet it does not, but...)
3. If you’re hardcore, you’ll create an AI pet (smarter than Tamagochi, plz) to either as an approach to AI alignment, or at least to teach kids about the dangers of AGI.
I discussed this with my wife, who thinks that the broad idea is reasonable, but that kittens are a better choice than puppies:
As puppies are not role models their unconditional love is less relevant than first appears.
Most EA causes involve helping agents who aren’t directly in contact with you.
If people learn their altruism from helping puppies, they will learn to expect gratitude, worse still, they will learn to expect gratitude even for relatively minor help!
Cats care about you only to the extent that they can receive food and/or pets. This is a much better model.
They also have toebeans.
Training children that it is a good idea to keep psychopaths as pets as long as they are cute probably results in them voting actors into positions of authority later in life.
1. Make a survey of EAs preferences over puppies x kittens. I suppose it’s correlated with cause areas and donation strategies.
2. Dogs and cats are too mainstream and fail the neglectedness test. If you’re a true EA, you should consider smaller animals, such as mice, or farm animals like chickens or pigs—so teaching people to expand their moral circle.
(BTW, has anyone seriously considered measuring if meeting a farm animal pet decreases someone’s willingness to eat meat, etc? I bet it does not, but...)
3. If you’re hardcore, you’ll create an AI pet (smarter than Tamagochi, plz) to either as an approach to AI alignment, or at least to teach kids about the dangers of AGI.
Perhaps Dereke Bruce had the right of it here:
“In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.”