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I appreciate the unusual nature of this piece, and glad you posted it here, even though it’s atypical. Yet we as EA participants know the value of weirdness and don’t automatically reject it, and I encourage others reading this piece to avoid the temptation to reject it because it’s atypical.

Coming down from the meta-level to the object-level, I get what you’re saying about the suffering of beings we haven’t yet learned about. I think it’s a quite important issue to think about. While I’m not so concerned about trees per se, I am concerned about the potential suffering of digital minds as we approach constructing an artificial intelligence, or the potential suffering of sentient aliens who we have not yet met.

As I am personally most engaged in the aspects of EA related to movement building through outreach to a broad audience, I do have some concerns about “allkind” from the perspective of its public impact. If I imagine anyone asking me “what do EAs care about” and I answer “improving the flourishing of allkind,” this might put people off. I don’t have any problems with the use of this word as internal EA jargon, just want to signal a potential problem with how it would look to outsiders.

Perhaps a more optimal term might be “sentience.” If I imagine saying that EA members care about “improving the flourishing of sentience,” it wouldn’t really put people off, and it conveys the same idea as “allkind”—i.e., if we discover trees have sentience, then we would care about them. Sentience also applies to both animals and future beings, as well as digital minds and aliens. Sentience is also more measurable and quantifiable than “allkind”—i.e., some beings might have more or less sentience and experience more or less suffering. This would be relevant to prioritizing and quantifying various efforts aimed at reducing suffering.

Hi! While writing a post on LinkedIn, I naturally wanted to write “allkind” and I really thought that by now, with all of the modification in languages due to differing views on gender, ethnicity, etc., such a word would exist and be in the dictionary for the English language. And to my surprise, not. However, I found it here. I’m going to use it anyway. It’s appropriate to convey the idea I want which is in the context of responsibility (in a number of contexts I mention in the post) for “allkind”. Whether what I’m referring to in “allkind” is sentient or not isn’t even an issue (as I read discussed in a comment made here 8 years ago). I’m not involved nor had much contact with the concept of effective altruism (I’ll look it up) and I really don’t care whether people are “taken aback” by the term “allkind”. As you discuss I think we need to think this way and perhaps we’d have less of the problems we have in society. Anyway, thanks for indirectly helping me to decide this IS the correct term to use.