extremely bad maintenance of farm animals...Is it not an egoistic act—to get everyone’s attention to a problem that hurts just 2-3% of the population?
Thus, this problem appears to be not even in the first of thousand of the most important. Bad feelings of fairly small percent of the population are not comparable to a ton of other hell that the world experiences.
I think people who work in animal welfare, directly value the suffering or experiences of the animal.
I never thought about it before, but I guess there is value to reducing the emotional toll on people, however reducing animal suffering is the main motivation.
I don’t know anyone who would really put a lot of weight or effort on reducing the human emotional cost of seeing animals suffer (it’s really sort of the opposite even).
So, the final question is—what is the actual priority of EA? People, or animals and nature? How can we can solve and prioritize any side of this kind of conflicts between men’s and wildlife interests and needs?
The short answer is that EA has multiple “cause areas” where it can do work. Many “cause areas” are being funded and worked on at the same time.
Cause areas are things like global poverty, helping with diseases, animal welfare, or improving technology and the future of civilization.
In theory, it’s not clear there’s really a conflict between any cause area, and in practice people are open and discuss new cause areas all the time.
If you are open to one cause area, you can work on that. If you have multiple, you can discuss which ones you want to work on, but this is a personal decision.
Long answer
The long answer is that this is a valid question and many people have tried to answer this.
There’s three answers below, that are “higher resolution” and are probably all approximately true at the same time:
Resources are allocated with thoughtful heuristics
People have spent a lot of time using numbers and “science” to try to answer this question.
Basically, if you tried to use reasoning and numbers, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that one issue or cause area (animals, humans, or something more esoteric but potentially highly valuable) takes all of the attention and money.
Few EAs, even those who value just one “cause area”, would find this outcome acceptable. Indeed, it’s unusual to see any such effort to argue for/against cause areas (well, besides, a single one). It probably doesn’t even make sense to try to convince others that they are “wrong”.
So, to allocate resources, the answer basically is to use heuristics to allocate a portion of funds to each cause area, generally to be slowly spent over many years. (This has implications, such as the value a marginal dollar must bring, that can be examined to feel if it’s “right”) .
This is more reasonable than it sounds, once you examine how basically any major decision is made, anywhere.
Also, the amount of money and projects can be overwhelming compared to the current activity in a space. This makes this heuristic process, with slow spending, tenable (as opposed to planning a giant project to use all the money in one go).
High quality institutional control
EA is currently driven by the donations of two people through one organization/institution.
This institution drives cause areas and attention, in direct and indirect ways.
This particular institution appears to be extremely high quality, so I think its involvement is probably a good thing, maybe overwhelmingly so. By “high quality”, I think this includes “virtue” in general, and literally every other way it’s good to foster a movement, including being open and explaining itself, admitting changes in direction, and accepting new opinions.
I think there is a large supply of “would be leaders”, “meta thought” that produce communities of much lower quality and effectiveness. Because I think operational details and culture is deceptively difficult, without this institution, I think EA would resemble these other communities.
EA is a social movement and depends on historical factors/initial conditions
Something that I think confuses even people who spend a lot of time engaging with EA material, is that EA is not really quite a method to find cause areas and interventions. It’s a social movement that has found several cause areas and interventions.
I think one key difference this perspective brings is that cause areas and new kinds of interventions are limited by the supply of high quality leadership, management and judgement, and somewhat less that they haven’t been “discovered” or “researched”, in the sense we could just write about it.
Another key difference is that the existing, found cause areas, are often influenced by historical reasons. So they aren’t an absolute guide to what’s should be done.
I think people who work in animal welfare, directly value the suffering or experiences of the animal.
I never thought about it before, but I guess there is value to reducing the emotional toll on people, however reducing animal suffering is the main motivation.
I don’t know anyone who would really put a lot of weight or effort on reducing the human emotional cost of seeing animals suffer (it’s really sort of the opposite even).
The short answer is that EA has multiple “cause areas” where it can do work. Many “cause areas” are being funded and worked on at the same time.
Cause areas are things like global poverty, helping with diseases, animal welfare, or improving technology and the future of civilization.
In theory, it’s not clear there’s really a conflict between any cause area, and in practice people are open and discuss new cause areas all the time.
If you are open to one cause area, you can work on that. If you have multiple, you can discuss which ones you want to work on, but this is a personal decision.
Long answer
The long answer is that this is a valid question and many people have tried to answer this.
There’s three answers below, that are “higher resolution” and are probably all approximately true at the same time:
Resources are allocated with thoughtful heuristics
People have spent a lot of time using numbers and “science” to try to answer this question.
Basically, if you tried to use reasoning and numbers, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that one issue or cause area (animals, humans, or something more esoteric but potentially highly valuable) takes all of the attention and money.
Few EAs, even those who value just one “cause area”, would find this outcome acceptable. Indeed, it’s unusual to see any such effort to argue for/against cause areas (well, besides, a single one). It probably doesn’t even make sense to try to convince others that they are “wrong”.
So, to allocate resources, the answer basically is to use heuristics to allocate a portion of funds to each cause area, generally to be slowly spent over many years. (This has implications, such as the value a marginal dollar must bring, that can be examined to feel if it’s “right”) .
This is more reasonable than it sounds, once you examine how basically any major decision is made, anywhere.
Also, the amount of money and projects can be overwhelming compared to the current activity in a space. This makes this heuristic process, with slow spending, tenable (as opposed to planning a giant project to use all the money in one go).
High quality institutional control
EA is currently driven by the donations of two people through one organization/institution.
This institution drives cause areas and attention, in direct and indirect ways.
This particular institution appears to be extremely high quality, so I think its involvement is probably a good thing, maybe overwhelmingly so. By “high quality”, I think this includes “virtue” in general, and literally every other way it’s good to foster a movement, including being open and explaining itself, admitting changes in direction, and accepting new opinions.
I think there is a large supply of “would be leaders”, “meta thought” that produce communities of much lower quality and effectiveness. Because I think operational details and culture is deceptively difficult, without this institution, I think EA would resemble these other communities.
EA is a social movement and depends on historical factors/initial conditions
Something that I think confuses even people who spend a lot of time engaging with EA material, is that EA is not really quite a method to find cause areas and interventions. It’s a social movement that has found several cause areas and interventions.
I think one key difference this perspective brings is that cause areas and new kinds of interventions are limited by the supply of high quality leadership, management and judgement, and somewhat less that they haven’t been “discovered” or “researched”, in the sense we could just write about it.
Another key difference is that the existing, found cause areas, are often influenced by historical reasons. So they aren’t an absolute guide to what’s should be done.