I wonder whether your reasons for keeping the calculations private should also make you want to keep the results private (although you only shared them in a qualitative way), as these follow from the same speculative inputs. I suggested sharing the calculations because I assume it would take little time, and could slightly update the views of a few people, and yours too if people comment on them.
I think people who have otherwise not looked into this might reasonably update a bit on the fact that someone (us) looked into this, but fundamentally, they shouldn’t update a lot or let this (or anything, really) change their minds without having looked into this themselves and satisfied their own worldview.
And to give more information on why I’d rather not publish our human-animal welfare comparisons—I try to regularly review this issue (e.g. there was a considerable revision after the RP moral weights were published, and a smaller one earlier this year), but to not touch this outside those regular revisions (I tend to let myself get sucked into spending too much time thinking about fundamental normative and epistemic issues in a way that is probably not very useful).
Publishing and inviting public suggestions/​comments/​criticisms would almost certainly cause me to spend too much time on this right now, in a way that would be detrimental to our other ongoing research (mainly effective giving) and our outreach/​donor advisory work with non-EA donors (mainly GHD, some AW). On this issue, I’d rather just wait and see what is published this year (and your work is certainly very relevant/​useful) and then re-evaluate at one go, maybe in early 2026.
Hi Joel,
I wonder whether your reasons for keeping the calculations private should also make you want to keep the results private (although you only shared them in a qualitative way), as these follow from the same speculative inputs. I suggested sharing the calculations because I assume it would take little time, and could slightly update the views of a few people, and yours too if people comment on them.
I think people who have otherwise not looked into this might reasonably update a bit on the fact that someone (us) looked into this, but fundamentally, they shouldn’t update a lot or let this (or anything, really) change their minds without having looked into this themselves and satisfied their own worldview.
And to give more information on why I’d rather not publish our human-animal welfare comparisons—I try to regularly review this issue (e.g. there was a considerable revision after the RP moral weights were published, and a smaller one earlier this year), but to not touch this outside those regular revisions (I tend to let myself get sucked into spending too much time thinking about fundamental normative and epistemic issues in a way that is probably not very useful).
Publishing and inviting public suggestions/​comments/​criticisms would almost certainly cause me to spend too much time on this right now, in a way that would be detrimental to our other ongoing research (mainly effective giving) and our outreach/​donor advisory work with non-EA donors (mainly GHD, some AW). On this issue, I’d rather just wait and see what is published this year (and your work is certainly very relevant/​useful) and then re-evaluate at one go, maybe in early 2026.
Thanks for clarifying, Joel! That makes a lot of sense.