Hey Kuhan, I really liked this. Thanks for writing it. It led me to think a bit about how this applies to animal welfare.
What I really like about this, is how your thought experiment encourages altruists to think from the perspective of those they’re trying to help. That principle doesn’t just help humanize EV, it can also help with creating willingness to help individuals regardless of the cause of their suffering. An animal living in a fire zone probably doesn’t care if you’re helping them because humans are to blame or if nature is.
One of the difficulties in animal welfare (but maybe also in other cause areas I don’t understand as well) is how uncertain probabilities are in many interventions, not just of success but also of potential backlash or other negative outcomes.
The other challenge when I try to apply this for animal welfare is that thinking from the individual’s perspective doesn’t necessarily result in the highest EV intervention. A hen suffering in a cage now might prefer a really low chance of a sanctuary rescue over a corporate welfare campaign that likely affects more chickens because the latter will only affect future birds. (And this thought-experiment hen could be super kind and utilitarian, but at a certain point I expect excruciating pain will be the main decision-making factor.) You can make an honest and strong values argument about how we must be willing to weigh the welfare of current and future hens equally, but some of the rhetorical power is lost.
An animal example (which Claude helped me come up with) that I think could potentially work for animal grantmakers is to imagine you’ll be born as a salmon into aquaculture who knows where. A funder can either:
Fund a program that will definitely improve stunning at one facility, affecting 50,000 salmons
Fund R&D that has a 20% chance of getting stunning technology adopted across the whole industry, affecting many millions of salmons
I’d prefer not to be born as a salmon at all—and if I were, I might rather die before reaching the smolt phase—but if I knew I’d make it to slaughter age I would hope, depending on the details and the certainty of that 20%, the grantmaker would fund the R&D.
Hey Kuhan, I really liked this. Thanks for writing it. It led me to think a bit about how this applies to animal welfare.
What I really like about this, is how your thought experiment encourages altruists to think from the perspective of those they’re trying to help. That principle doesn’t just help humanize EV, it can also help with creating willingness to help individuals regardless of the cause of their suffering. An animal living in a fire zone probably doesn’t care if you’re helping them because humans are to blame or if nature is.
One of the difficulties in animal welfare (but maybe also in other cause areas I don’t understand as well) is how uncertain probabilities are in many interventions, not just of success but also of potential backlash or other negative outcomes.
The other challenge when I try to apply this for animal welfare is that thinking from the individual’s perspective doesn’t necessarily result in the highest EV intervention. A hen suffering in a cage now might prefer a really low chance of a sanctuary rescue over a corporate welfare campaign that likely affects more chickens because the latter will only affect future birds. (And this thought-experiment hen could be super kind and utilitarian, but at a certain point I expect excruciating pain will be the main decision-making factor.) You can make an honest and strong values argument about how we must be willing to weigh the welfare of current and future hens equally, but some of the rhetorical power is lost.
An animal example (which Claude helped me come up with) that I think could potentially work for animal grantmakers is to imagine you’ll be born as a salmon into aquaculture who knows where. A funder can either:
Fund a program that will definitely improve stunning at one facility, affecting 50,000 salmons
Fund R&D that has a 20% chance of getting stunning technology adopted across the whole industry, affecting many millions of salmons
I’d prefer not to be born as a salmon at all—and if I were, I might rather die before reaching the smolt phase—but if I knew I’d make it to slaughter age I would hope, depending on the details and the certainty of that 20%, the grantmaker would fund the R&D.