Eliezer’s perspective on animal consciousness is especially frustrating because of the real harm it’s caused to rationalists’ openness to caring about animal welfare.
Rationalists are much more likely than highly engaged EAs to either dismiss animal welfare outright, or just not think about it since AI x-risk is “obviously” more important. (For a case study, just look at how this author’s post on fish farming was received between the EA Forum and LessWrong.) Eliezer-style arguments about the “implausibility” of animal suffering abound. Discussions of the implications of AI outcomes on farmed or wild animals (i.e. almost all currently existing sentient beings) are few and far between.
Unlike Eliezer’s overconfidence in physicalism and FDT, Eliezer’s overconfidence in animals not mattering has serious real-world effects. Eliezer’s views have huge influence on rationalist culture, which has significant influence on those who could steer future TAI. If the alignment problem will be solved, it’ll be really important for those who steer future TAI to care about animals, and be motivated to use TAI to improve animal welfare.
I would very much prefer it if one didn’t appeal to the consequences of the belief about animal moral patienthood, and instead argue whether animals in fact are moral patients or not, or whether the question is well-posed.
For this reason, I have strong-downvoted your comment.
Thanks for describing your reasons. My criterion for moral patienthood is described by this Brian Tomasik quote:
When I realize that an organism feels happiness and suffering, at that point I realize that the organism matters and deserves care and kindness. In this sense, you could say the only “condition” of my love is sentience.
Many other criteria for moral patienthood which exclude animals have been proposed. These criteria always suffer from some combination of the following:
Arbitrariness. For example, “human DNA is the criterion for moral patienthood” is just as arbitrary as “European DNA is the criterion for moral patienthood”.
Exclusion of some humans. For example, “high intelligence is the criterion for moral patienthood” excludes people who have severe mental disabilities.
Exclusion of hypothetical beings. For example, “human DNA is the criterion for moral patienthood” would exclude superintelligent aliens and intelligent conscious AI. Also, if some people you know were unknowingly members of a species which looked/acted much like humans but had very different DNA, they would suddenly become morally valueless.
Collapsing to sociopathy or nihilism. For example, “animals don’t have moral patienthood because we have power over them” is just nihilism, and if a person used that justification to act the way we do towards farmed animals towards other humans, they’d be locked up.
The most parsimonious definition of moral patient I’ve seen proposed is just “a sentient being”. I don’t see any reason why I should add complexity to that definition in order to exclude nonhuman animals. The only motivation I can think of for doing this would be to compromise on my moral principles for the sake of the pleasure associated with eating meat, which is untenable to a mind wired the way mine is.
I think the objection comes from the seeming asymmetry between over-attributing and under-attributing consciousness. It’s fine to discuss our independent impressions about some topic, but when one’s view is a minority position and the consequences of false beliefs are high, isn’t there some obligation of epistemic humility?
Disagreed, animal moral patienthood competes with all the other possible interventions effective altruists could be doing, and does so symmetrically (the opportunity cost cuts in both directions!).
It’s frustrating to read comments like this because they make me feel like, if I happen agree with Eliezer about something, my own agency and ability to think critically is being questioned before I’ve even joined the object-level discussion.
Separately, this comment makes a bunch of mostly-implicit object-level assertions about animal welfare and its importance, and a bunch of mostly-explicit assertions about Eliezer’s opinions and influence on rationalists and EAs, as well as the effect of this influence on the impacts of TAI.
None of these claims are directly supported in the comment, which is fine if you don’t want to argue for them here, but the way the comment is written might lead readers who agree with the implicit claims about the animal welfare issues to accept the explict claims about Eliezer’s influence and opinions and their effects on TAI with a less critical eye than if these claims were otherwise more clearly separated.
For example, I don’t think it’s true that a few FB posts / comments have had a “huge influence” on rationalist culture. I also think that worrying about animal welfare specifically when thinking about TAI outcomes is less important than you claim. If we succeed in being able to steer TAI at all (unlikely, in my view), animals will do fine—so will everyone else. At a minimum, there will also be no more global poverty, no more malaria, and no more animal suffering. Even if the specific humans who develop TAI don’t care at all about animals themselves (not exactly likely), they are unlikely to completely ignore the concerns of everyone else who does care. But none of these disagreements have much or any bearing on whether I think animal suffering is real (I find this at least plausible) and whether that’s a moral horror (I think this is very likely, if the suffering is real).
If we succeed in being able to steer TAI at all (unlikely, in my view), animals will do fine—so will everyone else
I’m not personally convinced fwiw; this line of reasoning has some plausibility but feels extremely out-of-line with approximately every reasonable reference class TAI could be in.
I apologize for phrasing my comment in a way that made you feel like that. I certainly didn’t mean to insinuate that rationalists lack “agency and ability to think critically”—I actually think rationalists are better at this than almost any other group! I identify as a rationalist myself, have read much of the sequences, and have been influenced on many subjects by Eliezer’s writings.
I think your critique that my writing gave the impression that my claims were all self-evident is quite fair. Even I don’t believe that. Please allow me to enumerate my specific claims and their justifications:
Caring about animal welfare is important (99% confidence): Here’s the justification I wrote to niplav. Note that this confidence is greater than my confidence that animal suffering is real. This is because I think moral uncertainty means caring about animal welfare is still justified in most worlds where animals turn out not to suffer.
Rationalist culture is less animal-friendly than highly engaged EA culture (85% confidence): I think this claim is pretty evident, and it’s corroborated here by many disinterested parties.”
Eliezer’s views on animal welfare have had significant influence on views of animal welfare in rationalist culture” (75% confidence):
A fair critique is that sure, the sequences and HPMOR have had huge influence on rationalist culture, but the claim that Eliezer’s views in domains that have nothing do with rationality (like animal welfare) have had outsize influence on rationalist culture is much less clear.
My only pushback is the experience I’ve had engaging with rationalists and reading LessWrong, where I’ve just seen rationalists reflecting Eliezer’s views on many domains other than “rationality: A-Z” over and over again. This very much includes the view that animals lack consciousness. Sure, Eliezer isn’t the only influential EA/rationalist who believes this, and he didn’t originate that idea either. But I think that in the possible world where Eliezer was a staunch animal activist, rationalist discourse around animal welfare would look quite different.
Rationalist culture has significant influence on those who could steer future TAI (80% confidence):
NYT: “two of the world’s prominent A.I. labs — organizations that are tackling some of the tech industry’s most ambitious and potentially powerful projects — grew out of the Rationalist movement...Elon Musk — who also worried A.I. could destroy the world and met his partner, Grimes, because they shared an interest in a Rationalist thought experiment — founded OpenAI as a DeepMind competitor. Both labs hired from the Rationalist community.”
Sam Altman:”certainly [Eliezer] got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc”.
On whether aligned TAI would create a utopia for humans and animals, I think the arguments for pessimism—especially about the prospects for animals—are serious enough that having TAI steerers care about animals is very important.
Thank you. I don’t have any strong objections to these claims, and I do think pessimism is justified. Though my guess is that a lot of people at places like OpenAI and DeepMind do care about animal welfare pretty strongly already. Separately, I think that it would be much better in expectation (for both humans and animals) if Eliezer’s views on pretty much every other topic were more influential, rather than less, inside those places.
My negative reaction to your initial comment was mainly due to the way critiques (such as this post) of Eliezer are often framed, in which the claims “Eliezer’s views are overly influential” and “Eliezer’s views are incorrect / harmful” are combined into one big attack. I don’t object to people making these claims in principle (though I think they’re both wrong, in many cases), but when they are combined it requires more effort to separate and refute.
(Your comment wasn’t a particularly bad example of this pattern, but it was short and crisp and I didn’t have any other major objections to it, so I chose to express the way it made me feel on the expectation that it would be more likely to be heard and understood compared to making the point in more heated disagreements.)
animal consciousness is especially frustrating because of the real harm it’s caused to rationalists’ openness to caring about animal welfare.
I think you might be greatly overestimating Eliezer’s influence on this.
According to Wikipedia: “In a 2014 survey of 406 US philosophy professors, approximately 60% of ethicists and 45% of non-ethicist philosophers said it was at least somewhat “morally bad” to eat meat from mammals. A 2020 survey of 1812 published English-language philosophers found that 48% said it was permissible to eat animals in ordinary circumstances, while 45% said it was not.”
It really does not surprise me that people who give great importance to rationality value animals much less than the median EA, given that non-human animals probably lack most kinds of advanced meta-level thinking and might plausibly not be “aware of their own awareness”.
Even in EA, there are many great independent thinkers who are uncertain about whether animals should be members of the “moral community”
I think that sometimes in EA we risk forgetting how fringe veganism is, and I don’t think Yudkowsky’s arguments on the importance of animal suffering influence a lot of the views in the rationalist community on the subject. Especially considering people at leading AI labs that might steer TAI, they seem to be very independent thinkers and often critical of Yudkowsky’s arguments (otherwise they wouldn’t be working at leading AI labs in the first place)
For what it’s worth, both Holden and Jeff express considerable moral uncertainty regarding animals, while Eliezer does not. Continuing Holden’s quote:
My own reflections and reasoning about philosophy of mind have, so far, seemed to indicate against the idea that e.g. chickens merit moral concern. And my intuitions value humans astronomically more. However, I don’t think either my reflections or my intuitions are highly reliable, especially given that many thoughtful people disagree. And if chickens do indeed merit moral concern, the amount and extent of their mistreatment is staggering. With worldview diversification in mind, I don’t want us to pass up the potentially considerable opportunities to improve their welfare.
I think the uncertainty we have on this point warrants putting significant resources into farm animal welfare, as well as working to generally avoid language that implies that only humans are morally relevant.
I agree with you that it’s quite difficult to quantify how much Eliezer’s views on animals have influenced the rationalist community and those who could steer TAI. However, I think it’s significant—if Eliezer were a staunch animal activist, I think the discourse surrounding animal welfare in the rationalist community would be different. I elaborate upon why I think this in my reply to Max H.
Eliezer’s perspective on animal consciousness is especially frustrating because of the real harm it’s caused to rationalists’ openness to caring about animal welfare.
Rationalists are much more likely than highly engaged EAs to either dismiss animal welfare outright, or just not think about it since AI x-risk is “obviously” more important. (For a case study, just look at how this author’s post on fish farming was received between the EA Forum and LessWrong.) Eliezer-style arguments about the “implausibility” of animal suffering abound. Discussions of the implications of AI outcomes on farmed or wild animals (i.e. almost all currently existing sentient beings) are few and far between.
Unlike Eliezer’s overconfidence in physicalism and FDT, Eliezer’s overconfidence in animals not mattering has serious real-world effects. Eliezer’s views have huge influence on rationalist culture, which has significant influence on those who could steer future TAI. If the alignment problem will be solved, it’ll be really important for those who steer future TAI to care about animals, and be motivated to use TAI to improve animal welfare.
I would very much prefer it if one didn’t appeal to the consequences of the belief about animal moral patienthood, and instead argue whether animals in fact are moral patients or not, or whether the question is well-posed.
For this reason, I have strong-downvoted your comment.
Thanks for describing your reasons. My criterion for moral patienthood is described by this Brian Tomasik quote:
Many other criteria for moral patienthood which exclude animals have been proposed. These criteria always suffer from some combination of the following:
Arbitrariness. For example, “human DNA is the criterion for moral patienthood” is just as arbitrary as “European DNA is the criterion for moral patienthood”.
Exclusion of some humans. For example, “high intelligence is the criterion for moral patienthood” excludes people who have severe mental disabilities.
Exclusion of hypothetical beings. For example, “human DNA is the criterion for moral patienthood” would exclude superintelligent aliens and intelligent conscious AI. Also, if some people you know were unknowingly members of a species which looked/acted much like humans but had very different DNA, they would suddenly become morally valueless.
Collapsing to sociopathy or nihilism. For example, “animals don’t have moral patienthood because we have power over them” is just nihilism, and if a person used that justification to act the way we do towards farmed animals towards other humans, they’d be locked up.
The most parsimonious definition of moral patient I’ve seen proposed is just “a sentient being”. I don’t see any reason why I should add complexity to that definition in order to exclude nonhuman animals. The only motivation I can think of for doing this would be to compromise on my moral principles for the sake of the pleasure associated with eating meat, which is untenable to a mind wired the way mine is.
I think the objection comes from the seeming asymmetry between over-attributing and under-attributing consciousness. It’s fine to discuss our independent impressions about some topic, but when one’s view is a minority position and the consequences of false beliefs are high, isn’t there some obligation of epistemic humility?
Disagreed, animal moral patienthood competes with all the other possible interventions effective altruists could be doing, and does so symmetrically (the opportunity cost cuts in both directions!).
It’s frustrating to read comments like this because they make me feel like, if I happen agree with Eliezer about something, my own agency and ability to think critically is being questioned before I’ve even joined the object-level discussion.
Separately, this comment makes a bunch of mostly-implicit object-level assertions about animal welfare and its importance, and a bunch of mostly-explicit assertions about Eliezer’s opinions and influence on rationalists and EAs, as well as the effect of this influence on the impacts of TAI.
None of these claims are directly supported in the comment, which is fine if you don’t want to argue for them here, but the way the comment is written might lead readers who agree with the implicit claims about the animal welfare issues to accept the explict claims about Eliezer’s influence and opinions and their effects on TAI with a less critical eye than if these claims were otherwise more clearly separated.
For example, I don’t think it’s true that a few FB posts / comments have had a “huge influence” on rationalist culture. I also think that worrying about animal welfare specifically when thinking about TAI outcomes is less important than you claim. If we succeed in being able to steer TAI at all (unlikely, in my view), animals will do fine—so will everyone else. At a minimum, there will also be no more global poverty, no more malaria, and no more animal suffering. Even if the specific humans who develop TAI don’t care at all about animals themselves (not exactly likely), they are unlikely to completely ignore the concerns of everyone else who does care. But none of these disagreements have much or any bearing on whether I think animal suffering is real (I find this at least plausible) and whether that’s a moral horror (I think this is very likely, if the suffering is real).
I’m not personally convinced fwiw; this line of reasoning has some plausibility but feels extremely out-of-line with approximately every reasonable reference class TAI could be in.
I apologize for phrasing my comment in a way that made you feel like that. I certainly didn’t mean to insinuate that rationalists lack “agency and ability to think critically”—I actually think rationalists are better at this than almost any other group! I identify as a rationalist myself, have read much of the sequences, and have been influenced on many subjects by Eliezer’s writings.
I think your critique that my writing gave the impression that my claims were all self-evident is quite fair. Even I don’t believe that. Please allow me to enumerate my specific claims and their justifications:
Caring about animal welfare is important (99% confidence): Here’s the justification I wrote to niplav. Note that this confidence is greater than my confidence that animal suffering is real. This is because I think moral uncertainty means caring about animal welfare is still justified in most worlds where animals turn out not to suffer.
Rationalist culture is less animal-friendly than highly engaged EA culture (85% confidence): I think this claim is pretty evident, and it’s corroborated here by many disinterested parties.”
Eliezer’s views on animal welfare have had significant influence on views of animal welfare in rationalist culture” (75% confidence):
A fair critique is that sure, the sequences and HPMOR have had huge influence on rationalist culture, but the claim that Eliezer’s views in domains that have nothing do with rationality (like animal welfare) have had outsize influence on rationalist culture is much less clear.
My only pushback is the experience I’ve had engaging with rationalists and reading LessWrong, where I’ve just seen rationalists reflecting Eliezer’s views on many domains other than “rationality: A-Z” over and over again. This very much includes the view that animals lack consciousness. Sure, Eliezer isn’t the only influential EA/rationalist who believes this, and he didn’t originate that idea either. But I think that in the possible world where Eliezer was a staunch animal activist, rationalist discourse around animal welfare would look quite different.
Rationalist culture has significant influence on those who could steer future TAI (80% confidence):
NYT: “two of the world’s prominent A.I. labs — organizations that are tackling some of the tech industry’s most ambitious and potentially powerful projects — grew out of the Rationalist movement...Elon Musk — who also worried A.I. could destroy the world and met his partner, Grimes, because they shared an interest in a Rationalist thought experiment — founded OpenAI as a DeepMind competitor. Both labs hired from the Rationalist community.”
Sam Altman:”certainly [Eliezer] got many of us interested in AGI, helped deepmind get funded at a time when AGI was extremely outside the overton window, was critical in the decision to start openai, etc”.
On whether aligned TAI would create a utopia for humans and animals, I think the arguments for pessimism—especially about the prospects for animals—are serious enough that having TAI steerers care about animals is very important.
Thank you. I don’t have any strong objections to these claims, and I do think pessimism is justified. Though my guess is that a lot of people at places like OpenAI and DeepMind do care about animal welfare pretty strongly already. Separately, I think that it would be much better in expectation (for both humans and animals) if Eliezer’s views on pretty much every other topic were more influential, rather than less, inside those places.
My negative reaction to your initial comment was mainly due to the way critiques (such as this post) of Eliezer are often framed, in which the claims “Eliezer’s views are overly influential” and “Eliezer’s views are incorrect / harmful” are combined into one big attack. I don’t object to people making these claims in principle (though I think they’re both wrong, in many cases), but when they are combined it requires more effort to separate and refute.
(Your comment wasn’t a particularly bad example of this pattern, but it was short and crisp and I didn’t have any other major objections to it, so I chose to express the way it made me feel on the expectation that it would be more likely to be heard and understood compared to making the point in more heated disagreements.)
I think you might be greatly overestimating Eliezer’s influence on this.
According to Wikipedia: “In a 2014 survey of 406 US philosophy professors, approximately 60% of ethicists and 45% of non-ethicist philosophers said it was at least somewhat “morally bad” to eat meat from mammals. A 2020 survey of 1812 published English-language philosophers found that 48% said it was permissible to eat animals in ordinary circumstances, while 45% said it was not.”
It really does not surprise me that people who give great importance to rationality value animals much less than the median EA, given that non-human animals probably lack most kinds of advanced meta-level thinking and might plausibly not be “aware of their own awareness”.
Even in EA, there are many great independent thinkers who are uncertain about whether animals should be members of the “moral community”
I think that sometimes in EA we risk forgetting how fringe veganism is, and I don’t think Yudkowsky’s arguments on the importance of animal suffering influence a lot of the views in the rationalist community on the subject. Especially considering people at leading AI labs that might steer TAI, they seem to be very independent thinkers and often critical of Yudkowsky’s arguments (otherwise they wouldn’t be working at leading AI labs in the first place)
For what it’s worth, both Holden and Jeff express considerable moral uncertainty regarding animals, while Eliezer does not. Continuing Holden’s quote:
I agree with you that it’s quite difficult to quantify how much Eliezer’s views on animals have influenced the rationalist community and those who could steer TAI. However, I think it’s significant—if Eliezer were a staunch animal activist, I think the discourse surrounding animal welfare in the rationalist community would be different. I elaborate upon why I think this in my reply to Max H.