if anyone thinks we can āconfidently dismiss the above longtermist argument for farmed animal welfare work, without needing to do this researchā Iād be interested to hear why.
I donāt personally think we can already confidently dismiss that longtermist argument for farmed animal welfare work.
(But that claim is vague. Hereās an attempt at operationalising it: I am not currently95%+ confident that, after 10 years of relevant cause prioritisation research, weād think farmed animal welfare work should get less than 1% of the total longtermist portfolio of resources.)
But I think Iād see it as reasonable if someone else did feel more confident that we can dismiss that argument. Essentially, there are just so many things longtermists could prioritise, and I think itād be reasonable to think that:
the existing arguments for focusing on farmed animals are very weak
the arguments for focusing on other things are much stronger
those things are sufficiently strongly true that we may as well focus on other cause prioritisation questions or just more object-level work on current longtermist priorities, rather than on further investigating whether farmed animal work should be a top priority
To expand on /ā rephrase that a bit, I think it would be reasonable for someone to make roughly the following claims:
There are a staggeringly large number of things that theoretically could absorb a substantial fraction of longtermist resources. So our prior credence that something chosen entirely at random should absorb a substantial fraction of longtermist resources should be very low.
Itās true that farmed animal welfare work wasnāt just randomly chosen, but rather highlighted as a potential top priority by a substantial portion of effective altruists. And the basic importance, tractability, and neglectedness arguments seem reasonable. But that was all basically from a near-termist perspective, so itās still relatively close to ārandomly chosenā if we now adopt a longtermist perspective, unless we have some specific argument why it would be a top priority from a longtermist perspective.
That argument could perhaps just focus on the premise that things that are good for the near-term future are often good for the long-term future, perhaps combined with the idea that predicting anything else about what would be good for the long-term future would be extremely hard. This could suggest that it wouldnāt be at all suspicious for neartermist priorities to also be longtermist priorities. But I havenāt yet seen any proper attempt to outline and defend that premise.
We could instead use something like the four-premise argument given in this post. But each premise hasnāt received a very rigorous defence as of yet, and it seems that various counterpoints could be raised against each.
Also, it seems that that basic argument might offer similarly much support to the idea that we should prioritise work on wild animal welfare, artificial sentience, explicit moral advocacy that isnāt primarily focused on farmed animals, or something else like that.
Meanwhile, there are various other potential longtermist priorities that have received fairly rigorous defences and that seem to face less compelling counterpoints.
I think I basically believe those claims. But, as noted, I still donāt feel we should confidently dismiss the idea that work on farmed animals should get a nontrivial portion of longtermist resources. This is partly due to the plausibility of the argument given in this posts, and partly simply because I think weāre dealing with extremely complicated questions and havenāt been thinking about them for very long, so we should remain quite uncertain and open to a range of ideas.
I donāt personally think we can already confidently dismiss that longtermist argument for farmed animal welfare work.
(But that claim is vague. Hereās an attempt at operationalising it: I am not currently 95%+ confident that, after 10 years of relevant cause prioritisation research, weād think farmed animal welfare work should get less than 1% of the total longtermist portfolio of resources.)
But I think Iād see it as reasonable if someone else did feel more confident that we can dismiss that argument. Essentially, there are just so many things longtermists could prioritise, and I think itād be reasonable to think that:
the existing arguments for focusing on farmed animals are very weak
the arguments for focusing on other things are much stronger
those things are sufficiently strongly true that we may as well focus on other cause prioritisation questions or just more object-level work on current longtermist priorities, rather than on further investigating whether farmed animal work should be a top priority
To expand on /ā rephrase that a bit, I think it would be reasonable for someone to make roughly the following claims:
There are a staggeringly large number of things that theoretically could absorb a substantial fraction of longtermist resources. So our prior credence that something chosen entirely at random should absorb a substantial fraction of longtermist resources should be very low.
Itās true that farmed animal welfare work wasnāt just randomly chosen, but rather highlighted as a potential top priority by a substantial portion of effective altruists. And the basic importance, tractability, and neglectedness arguments seem reasonable. But that was all basically from a near-termist perspective, so itās still relatively close to ārandomly chosenā if we now adopt a longtermist perspective, unless we have some specific argument why it would be a top priority from a longtermist perspective.
That argument could perhaps just focus on the premise that things that are good for the near-term future are often good for the long-term future, perhaps combined with the idea that predicting anything else about what would be good for the long-term future would be extremely hard. This could suggest that it wouldnāt be at all suspicious for neartermist priorities to also be longtermist priorities. But I havenāt yet seen any proper attempt to outline and defend that premise.
We could instead use something like the four-premise argument given in this post. But each premise hasnāt received a very rigorous defence as of yet, and it seems that various counterpoints could be raised against each.
Also, it seems that that basic argument might offer similarly much support to the idea that we should prioritise work on wild animal welfare, artificial sentience, explicit moral advocacy that isnāt primarily focused on farmed animals, or something else like that.
Meanwhile, there are various other potential longtermist priorities that have received fairly rigorous defences and that seem to face less compelling counterpoints.
I think I basically believe those claims. But, as noted, I still donāt feel we should confidently dismiss the idea that work on farmed animals should get a nontrivial portion of longtermist resources. This is partly due to the plausibility of the argument given in this posts, and partly simply because I think weāre dealing with extremely complicated questions and havenāt been thinking about them for very long, so we should remain quite uncertain and open to a range of ideas.