I think I broadly agree with the premise. However, whether this means EAs are not allocating their resources appropriately requires consideration of the marginal cost-effectiveness of:
Policy/tech/campaigning related to climate
Policy/tech/campaigning related to animals
Individual consumption related to climate
Individual consumption related to animals
Everything else
Without discussing or knowing these, I don’t think we can make good suggestions about how people should change their behaviour.
It would be very surprising if any of 1-5 were equally cost-effective as another, so in practice we should expect to move resources from 4 of them towards the most cost-effective one.
You state:
“Should EAs reduce their emphasis on personal meat/dairy/egg consumption? Should they increase their emphasis on their personal carbon footprint?
I think the answer is probably a bit of both”
You’ve given some tentative and considered qualitative reasons for this, but not really justified it based on data. It could be the case that both our personal animal consumption and personal carbon footprint matters even less than EAs currently think, or that both matter more, or one matters more and the other less.
Given this, I think we absolutely do need to “quibble with the precise numbers”. If what Robi Rahman has written is even roughly accurate, then that implies the current emphasis on personal animal consumption rather than carbon footprint is justified:
2. From Robi Rahman: “A person choosing to eat 1kg less chicken results in 0.6 kg less expected chicken produced in the long run, which averts 20 days of chicken suffering. A comparable sacrifice would be to turn off your air conditioning for 3 days, which in expectation reduces future global warming by 10^(-14) °C and reduces suffering by zero.”
In expectation the reduced suffering from climate change due to this change in behaviour would not be zero, but if it was still extremely close to zero, then Robi’s point holds.
Of course, that doesn’t address how both of these personal consumption decisions compare to supporting either of the policy/tech/campaigning options. For that we’d need further data.
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.
I think I broadly agree with the premise. However, whether this means EAs are not allocating their resources appropriately requires consideration of the marginal cost-effectiveness of:
Policy/tech/campaigning related to climate
Policy/tech/campaigning related to animals
Individual consumption related to climate
Individual consumption related to animals
Everything else
Without discussing or knowing these, I don’t think we can make good suggestions about how people should change their behaviour.
It would be very surprising if any of 1-5 were equally cost-effective as another, so in practice we should expect to move resources from 4 of them towards the most cost-effective one.
You state:
You’ve given some tentative and considered qualitative reasons for this, but not really justified it based on data. It could be the case that both our personal animal consumption and personal carbon footprint matters even less than EAs currently think, or that both matter more, or one matters more and the other less.
Given this, I think we absolutely do need to “quibble with the precise numbers”. If what Robi Rahman has written is even roughly accurate, then that implies the current emphasis on personal animal consumption rather than carbon footprint is justified:
In expectation the reduced suffering from climate change due to this change in behaviour would not be zero, but if it was still extremely close to zero, then Robi’s point holds.
Of course, that doesn’t address how both of these personal consumption decisions compare to supporting either of the policy/tech/campaigning options. For that we’d need further data.
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.