However, whether this means EAs are not allocating their resources appropriately requires consideration of the marginal cost-effectiveness of: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Actually, it doesn’t require knowing all of those! If you find that among two of those options, one is more cost-effective than the other, but resources are going to the less effective one, you already know the overall allocation is suboptimal (even though the optimal allocation is probably some entirely different option).
That’s a main point of this essay, which I think is underappreciated throughout EA: we put more effort into reducing harms from dietary animal product consumption than can be justified on a consequentialist basis relative to how little we emphasize individual actions on climate change and policy/technological interventions for animal welfare.
We put more effort into reducing harms from dietary animal product consumption than can be justified on a consequentialist basis relative to how little we emphasize individual actions on climate change and policy/technological interventions for animal welfare
Based solely on Gabriel’s essay, how do we know this? There are some thoughtful qualitative suggestions why this may be the case, but I would find it more convincing if there were quantitative estimates which backed up these suggestions.
From a dollars to welfare sense, the truth is that if EAs literally just donated the premium from vegan catering to any number of EAA charities and just ate pounds of hamburger instead, that would help more lives than the animals the EAs contributed to eating.
So hamburgers for animal welfare.
The above is stilted, and not the answer (but a longer ruthless takedown is possible).
I’m reluctant to actually show the numbers here, because the status quo has good reasons and I have to construct an essay using “EA rhetoric” to seat this properly.
Actually, it doesn’t require knowing all of those! If you find that among two of those options, one is more cost-effective than the other, but resources are going to the less effective one, you already know the overall allocation is suboptimal (even though the optimal allocation is probably some entirely different option).
That’s a main point of this essay, which I think is underappreciated throughout EA: we put more effort into reducing harms from dietary animal product consumption than can be justified on a consequentialist basis relative to how little we emphasize individual actions on climate change and policy/technological interventions for animal welfare.
Based solely on Gabriel’s essay, how do we know this? There are some thoughtful qualitative suggestions why this may be the case, but I would find it more convincing if there were quantitative estimates which backed up these suggestions.
From a dollars to welfare sense, the truth is that if EAs literally just donated the premium from vegan catering to any number of EAA charities and just ate pounds of hamburger instead, that would help more lives than the animals the EAs contributed to eating.
So hamburgers for animal welfare.
The above is stilted, and not the answer (but a longer ruthless takedown is possible).
I’m reluctant to actually show the numbers here, because the status quo has good reasons and I have to construct an essay using “EA rhetoric” to seat this properly.