I’m not sure the middle step does actually fail in the EA community. Do you have evidence that it does? Is there some survey evidence for significant numbers of EAs not believing animals are moral patients?
If there is a significant number of people that think they have strong arguments for animals not counting, they should definitely post these and potentially redirect a great deal of altruistic funding towards global health.
Anyway, another possible causal chain might be:
‘argument is weak but some people intuitively believe it in part because they want it to be true’ → ‘there is no strong post that can really be written’ → ‘nobody posts it’
Maybe you can ask Jeff Kauffman why he has never provided any actual argument for this (I do apologize if he has and I have just missed it!).
Ah, gotcha, I guess that works. No, I don’t have anything I would consider strong evidence, I just know it’s come up more than anything else in my few dozen conversations over the years. I suppose I assumed it was coming up for others as well.
they should definitely post these and potentially redirect a great deal of altruistic funding towards global health
FWIW this seems wrong, not least because as was correctly pointed out many times there just isn’t a lot of money in the AW space. I’m pretty sure GHD has far better places to fundraise from.
To the extent I have spoken to people (not Jeff, and not that much) about why they don’t engage more on this, I thought the two comments I linked to in my last comment had a lot of overlap with the responses.
FWIW this seems wrong, not least because as was correctly pointed out many times there just isn’t a lot of money in the AW space. I’m pretty sure GHD has far better places to fundraise from.
This is bizarre to me. This post suggests that between $30 and 40 million goes towards animal welfare each year (and it could be more now as that post was written four years ago). If animals are not moral patients, this money is as good as getting burned. If we actually were burning this amount of money every year, I’d imagine some people would make it their overwhelming mission to ensure we don’t (which would likely involve at least a few forum posts).
Assuming it costs $5,000 to save a human life, redirecting that money could save up to 8,000 human lives every year. Doesn’t seem too bad to me. I’m not claiming posts arguing against animal moral patienthood could lead to redirecting all the money, but the idea that no one is bothering to make the arguments because there’s just no point doesn’t stack up to me.
For the record, I have a few places I think EA is burning >$30m per year, not that AW is actually one of them. Most EAs I speak to seem to have similarly-sized bugbears? Though unsurprisingly they don’t agree about where the money is getting burned..
So from where I stand I don’t recognise your guess of how people respond to that situation. A few things I believe that might help explain the difference:
Most of the money is directed by people who don’t read or otherwise have a fairly low opinion of the forum.
Posting on the forum is ‘not for the faint of heart’.
On the occasion that I have dug into past forum prioritisation posts that were well-received, I generally find them seriously flawed or otherwise uncompelling. I have no particular reason to be sad about (1).
People are often aware that there’s an ‘other side’ that strongly disagrees with their disagreement and will push back hard, so they correctly choose not to waste our collective resources in a mud-slinging match.
I don’t expect to have capacity to engage further here, but if further discussion suggests that one of the above is a particularly surprising claim, I may consider writing it up in more detail in future.
Most EAs I speak to seem to have similarly-sized bugbears?
Maybe I don’t speak to enough EAs, which is possible. Obviously many EAs think our overall allocation isn’t optimal, but I wasn’t aware that many EAs think we are giving tens of millions of dollars to interventions/areas that do NO good in expectation (which is what I mean by “burning money”).
Maybe the burning money point is a bit of a red herring though if the amount you’re burning is relatively small and more good can be done by redirecting other funds, even if they are currently doing some good. I concede this point.
To be honest you might be right overall that people who don’t think our funding allocation is perfect tend not to write on the forum about it. Perhaps they are just focusing on doing the most good by acting within their preferred cause area. I’d love to see more discussion of where marginal funding should go though. And FWIW one example of a post that does cover this and was very well-received was Ariel’s on the topic of animal welfare vs global health.
As a small note, I don’ think the “believe it because they want it to be true” is really an argument either way. To state the obvious, animal welfare researchers need sentience to be true, otherwise all the work they are doing is worth a lot less.
So I don’t think the “want it to be true” argument stands really at all. Motivations are very strong on both sides, and from a “realpolitik” kind of perspective, there’s so much more riding on this from animal researchers than there is for people like Yud and Zvi.
On the other hand, the “very few people believe animals aren’t moral patients and haven’t made great arguments for it” point for me stands very strong.
Animal welfare researchers need sentience to be true, otherwise all the work they are doing is worth a lot less.
That is fair, but there are several additional reasons why most people would want it that animals are not moral patients:
They can continue to eat them guilt-free and animals are tasty.
People can give to global health uncertainty-free and get “fuzzies” from saving human lives with pretty high confidence (I think we naturally get more fuzzies by helping people of our own species).
We wouldn’t as a human species then be committing a grave moral atrocity which would be a massive relief.
There aren’t really similar arguments for wanting animals to be moral patients (other than “I work on animal welfare”) but I would be interested if I’m missing any relevant ones.
I’m not sure the middle step does actually fail in the EA community. Do you have evidence that it does? Is there some survey evidence for significant numbers of EAs not believing animals are moral patients?
If there is a significant number of people that think they have strong arguments for animals not counting, they should definitely post these and potentially redirect a great deal of altruistic funding towards global health.
Anyway, another possible causal chain might be:
‘argument is weak but some people intuitively believe it in part because they want it to be true’ → ‘there is no strong post that can really be written’ → ‘nobody posts it’
Maybe you can ask Jeff Kauffman why he has never provided any actual argument for this (I do apologize if he has and I have just missed it!).
Ah, gotcha, I guess that works. No, I don’t have anything I would consider strong evidence, I just know it’s come up more than anything else in my few dozen conversations over the years. I suppose I assumed it was coming up for others as well.
FWIW this seems wrong, not least because as was correctly pointed out many times there just isn’t a lot of money in the AW space. I’m pretty sure GHD has far better places to fundraise from.
To the extent I have spoken to people (not Jeff, and not that much) about why they don’t engage more on this, I thought the two comments I linked to in my last comment had a lot of overlap with the responses.
This is bizarre to me. This post suggests that between $30 and 40 million goes towards animal welfare each year (and it could be more now as that post was written four years ago). If animals are not moral patients, this money is as good as getting burned. If we actually were burning this amount of money every year, I’d imagine some people would make it their overwhelming mission to ensure we don’t (which would likely involve at least a few forum posts).
Assuming it costs $5,000 to save a human life, redirecting that money could save up to 8,000 human lives every year. Doesn’t seem too bad to me. I’m not claiming posts arguing against animal moral patienthood could lead to redirecting all the money, but the idea that no one is bothering to make the arguments because there’s just no point doesn’t stack up to me.
For the record, I have a few places I think EA is burning >$30m per year, not that AW is actually one of them. Most EAs I speak to seem to have similarly-sized bugbears? Though unsurprisingly they don’t agree about where the money is getting burned..
So from where I stand I don’t recognise your guess of how people respond to that situation. A few things I believe that might help explain the difference:
Most of the money is directed by people who don’t read or otherwise have a fairly low opinion of the forum.
Posting on the forum is ‘not for the faint of heart’.
On the occasion that I have dug into past forum prioritisation posts that were well-received, I generally find them seriously flawed or otherwise uncompelling. I have no particular reason to be sad about (1).
People are often aware that there’s an ‘other side’ that strongly disagrees with their disagreement and will push back hard, so they correctly choose not to waste our collective resources in a mud-slinging match.
I don’t expect to have capacity to engage further here, but if further discussion suggests that one of the above is a particularly surprising claim, I may consider writing it up in more detail in future.
Maybe I don’t speak to enough EAs, which is possible. Obviously many EAs think our overall allocation isn’t optimal, but I wasn’t aware that many EAs think we are giving tens of millions of dollars to interventions/areas that do NO good in expectation (which is what I mean by “burning money”).
Maybe the burning money point is a bit of a red herring though if the amount you’re burning is relatively small and more good can be done by redirecting other funds, even if they are currently doing some good. I concede this point.
To be honest you might be right overall that people who don’t think our funding allocation is perfect tend not to write on the forum about it. Perhaps they are just focusing on doing the most good by acting within their preferred cause area. I’d love to see more discussion of where marginal funding should go though. And FWIW one example of a post that does cover this and was very well-received was Ariel’s on the topic of animal welfare vs global health.
As a small note, I don’ think the “believe it because they want it to be true” is really an argument either way. To state the obvious, animal welfare researchers need sentience to be true, otherwise all the work they are doing is worth a lot less.
So I don’t think the “want it to be true” argument stands really at all. Motivations are very strong on both sides, and from a “realpolitik” kind of perspective, there’s so much more riding on this from animal researchers than there is for people like Yud and Zvi.
On the other hand, the “very few people believe animals aren’t moral patients and haven’t made great arguments for it” point for me stands very strong.
That is fair, but there are several additional reasons why most people would want it that animals are not moral patients:
They can continue to eat them guilt-free and animals are tasty.
People can give to global health uncertainty-free and get “fuzzies” from saving human lives with pretty high confidence (I think we naturally get more fuzzies by helping people of our own species).
We wouldn’t as a human species then be committing a grave moral atrocity which would be a massive relief.
There aren’t really similar arguments for wanting animals to be moral patients (other than “I work on animal welfare”) but I would be interested if I’m missing any relevant ones.