By supporting interventions which save lives more cost-effectively, organisations and people aligned with effective altruism, namely GiveWell and its supporters, often took the lead in acting upon the principle that all human experiences are equally valuable regardless of nationality. I am glad this happened. I believe it would also be good to see a similar dynamic around considering:
All experiences of similar intensity and valence equally valuable regardless of species.
Thinking at the margin, I would say scope-sensitive ethics imply prioritising animal welfare over global health and development. I think the scale of the welfare of farmed animals and wild terrestrial arthropods is 4.64 and 253 k times as large as that of humans, so accounting for them seems crucial a priori.
So I encourage organisations, especially the ones I discussed above aligned with effective altruism, to:
Increase their support of animal welfare interventions relative to those of GHD (at the margin).
What follows is more outside the scope of your post, but, to the extent there is disagreement with the above, I think it would be good if organisations explained more their prioritisation. For example, it is quite unclear how much of a role the cost-effectiveness of animal welfare interventions played in Open Philanthropy’s planned allocation to GiveWell’s recommendations for the next few years[1].
Going back to more within the scope of your post, have you considered a similar call related to the economics of digital (or LLM’s) welfare[2]?
I asked for further details, but got not reply. Open Philanthropy only discusses prioritisation related to animals in the following point:
we [Open Philanthropy] are a much larger portion of the funding available in many other areas where we work. Relative to the size of the opportunity space in farm animal welfare (to name one example), the amount of funding from other donors is quite low, and some of our highest-ROI opportunities would often go unfunded without our support.
I have no familiarity with the literature, but I noted economic considerations are not discussed in Moral Consideration for AI Systems by 2030, although I assume they are outside scope.
Thanks for doing this!
By supporting interventions which save lives more cost-effectively, organisations and people aligned with effective altruism, namely GiveWell and its supporters, often took the lead in acting upon the principle that all human experiences are equally valuable regardless of nationality. I am glad this happened. I believe it would also be good to see a similar dynamic around considering:
All experiences of similar intensity and valence equally valuable regardless of species.
The effects of human activities on animals.
I have argued that:
What follows is more outside the scope of your post, but, to the extent there is disagreement with the above, I think it would be good if organisations explained more their prioritisation. For example, it is quite unclear how much of a role the cost-effectiveness of animal welfare interventions played in Open Philanthropy’s planned allocation to GiveWell’s recommendations for the next few years[1].
Going back to more within the scope of your post, have you considered a similar call related to the economics of digital (or LLM’s) welfare[2]?
I asked for further details, but got not reply. Open Philanthropy only discusses prioritisation related to animals in the following point:
I have no familiarity with the literature, but I noted economic considerations are not discussed in Moral Consideration for AI Systems by 2030, although I assume they are outside scope.
Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, here is a popular post agreeing with you, published this week. And the response from OpenPhil.
Thanks for letting me know, tobytrem!