Thanks for this post Michael, I think I agree with everything here! Though if anyone thinks we can “confidently dismiss the above longtermist argument for farmed animal welfare work, without needing to do this research” I’d be interested to hear why.
I won’t be pursuing those questions myself, as I’m busy with other projects
I just wanted to note that Sentience Institute is pursuing some of this sort of research, but (1) we definitely won’t be able to pursue all of these things any time soon, (2) not that much of our work focuses specifically on these cause prioritisation questions—we often focus on working out how to make concrete progress on the problems, assuming you agree that MCE is important. That said, I think a lot of research can achieve both goals. E.g. my colleague, Ali, is finishing up a piece of research that fits squarely in “4a. Between-subjects experiments… focused on the above questions” currently titled “The impact of perspective taking on attitudes and prosocial behaviours towards non-human outgroups.” And the more explicit cause prioritisation research would still fit neatly within our interests. SI is primarily funding constrained, so if any funders reading this are especially interested in this sort of research, they should feel free to reach out to us.
Contact the Sentience Institute and/or me to discuss ideas
Thanks for this note! Agreed. My email is jamie@sentienceinstitute.org if anyone does want to discuss these ideas or send me draft writeups for review.
if anyone thinks we can “confidently dismiss the above longtermist argument for farmed animal welfare work, without needing to do this research” I’d be interested to hear why.
I don’t personally think we can already confidently dismiss that longtermist argument for farmed animal welfare work.
(But that claim is vague. Here’s an attempt at operationalising it: I am not currently95%+ confident that, after 10 years of relevant cause prioritisation research, we’d think farmed animal welfare work should get less than 1% of the total longtermist portfolio of resources.)
But I think I’d 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 it’d 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 / 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.
It’s true that farmed animal welfare work wasn’t 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 it’s still relatively close to “randomly chosen” 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 wouldn’t be at all suspicious for neartermist priorities to also be longtermist priorities. But I haven’t 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 hasn’t 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 isn’t 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 don’t 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 we’re dealing with extremely complicated questions and haven’t been thinking about them for very long, so we should remain quite uncertain and open to a range of ideas.
Thanks for this post Michael, I think I agree with everything here! Though if anyone thinks we can “confidently dismiss the above longtermist argument for farmed animal welfare work, without needing to do this research” I’d be interested to hear why.
I just wanted to note that Sentience Institute is pursuing some of this sort of research, but (1) we definitely won’t be able to pursue all of these things any time soon, (2) not that much of our work focuses specifically on these cause prioritisation questions—we often focus on working out how to make concrete progress on the problems, assuming you agree that MCE is important. That said, I think a lot of research can achieve both goals. E.g. my colleague, Ali, is finishing up a piece of research that fits squarely in “4a. Between-subjects experiments… focused on the above questions” currently titled “The impact of perspective taking on attitudes and prosocial behaviours towards non-human outgroups.” And the more explicit cause prioritisation research would still fit neatly within our interests. SI is primarily funding constrained, so if any funders reading this are especially interested in this sort of research, they should feel free to reach out to us.
Thanks for this note! Agreed. My email is jamie@sentienceinstitute.org if anyone does want to discuss these ideas or send me draft writeups for review.
It’s good to hear that SI are already doing some of this research!
I also appreciate you clearly highlighting that there’s still room for others to contribute, and providing your email so people can get in touch.
I don’t personally think we can already confidently dismiss that longtermist argument for farmed animal welfare work.
(But that claim is vague. Here’s an attempt at operationalising it: I am not currently 95%+ confident that, after 10 years of relevant cause prioritisation research, we’d think farmed animal welfare work should get less than 1% of the total longtermist portfolio of resources.)
But I think I’d 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 it’d 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 / 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.
It’s true that farmed animal welfare work wasn’t 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 it’s still relatively close to “randomly chosen” 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 wouldn’t be at all suspicious for neartermist priorities to also be longtermist priorities. But I haven’t 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 hasn’t 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 isn’t 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 don’t 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 we’re dealing with extremely complicated questions and haven’t been thinking about them for very long, so we should remain quite uncertain and open to a range of ideas.