Where’s the evidence that, e.g., everyone “act[s] as if a couple of beehives or shrimp farms are as important as a human city”?So someone wrote a speculative report about bee welfare ranges . . . if “everyone” accepted that “1 human is worth 14 bees”—or even anything close to that—the funding and staffing pictures in EA would look very, very different. How many EAs are working in bee welfare, and how much is being spent in that area?
As I understand the data, EA resources in GH&D are pretty overwhelmingly in life-saving interventions like AMF, suggesting that the bulk of EA does not agree with HLI at present. I’m not as well versed in farmed animal welfare, but I’m pretty sure no one in that field is fundraising for interventions costing anywhere remotely near hundreds of dollars to save a bee and claiming they are effective.
In the end, reasoning transparency by charity evaluators helps the donor better make an informed moral choice. Carefully reading analyses from various sources helps me (and other donors) make choices that are consistent with our own values. EA is well ahead of most charitable movements by explicitly acknowledging that trade-offs exist and at least attempting to reason about them. One can (and should) decline to donate where the charity’s treatment of tradeoffs isnt convincing. As I’ve stated elsewhere on this post, I’m sticking with GiveWell-style interventions at least for now.
Oh, I should definitely clarify: I find effective altruism the philosophy, as well as most effective altruists and their actions, to be very good and admirable. My gripe is with what I view as the “EA community”—primarily places like this forum, organizations such as the CEA, and participants in EA global. The more central to EA-the-community, the worse I like the the ideas.
In my view, what happens is that there are a lot of EA-ish people donating to GiveWell charities, and that’s amazing. And then the EA movement comes and goes “but actually, you should really give the money to [something ineffective that’s also sometimes in the personal interest of the person speaking]” and some people get duped. So forums like this one serve to take money that would go to malaria nets, and try as hard as they can to redirect it to less effective charities.
So, to your questions: how many people are working towards bee welfare? Not many. But on this forum, it’s a common topic of discussion (often with things like nematodes instead of bees). I haven’t been to EA global, but I know where I’d place my bets for what receives attention there. Though honestly, both HLI and the animal welfare stuff is probably small potatoes compared to AI risk and meta-EA, two areas in which these dynamics play an even bigger role (and in which there are even more broken thermometers and conflicts of interest).
Where’s the evidence that, e.g., everyone “act[s] as if a couple of beehives or shrimp farms are as important as a human city”?So someone wrote a speculative report about bee welfare ranges . . . if “everyone” accepted that “1 human is worth 14 bees”—or even anything close to that—the funding and staffing pictures in EA would look very, very different. How many EAs are working in bee welfare, and how much is being spent in that area?
As I understand the data, EA resources in GH&D are pretty overwhelmingly in life-saving interventions like AMF, suggesting that the bulk of EA does not agree with HLI at present. I’m not as well versed in farmed animal welfare, but I’m pretty sure no one in that field is fundraising for interventions costing anywhere remotely near hundreds of dollars to save a bee and claiming they are effective.
In the end, reasoning transparency by charity evaluators helps the donor better make an informed moral choice. Carefully reading analyses from various sources helps me (and other donors) make choices that are consistent with our own values. EA is well ahead of most charitable movements by explicitly acknowledging that trade-offs exist and at least attempting to reason about them. One can (and should) decline to donate where the charity’s treatment of tradeoffs isnt convincing. As I’ve stated elsewhere on this post, I’m sticking with GiveWell-style interventions at least for now.
Oh, I should definitely clarify: I find effective altruism the philosophy, as well as most effective altruists and their actions, to be very good and admirable. My gripe is with what I view as the “EA community”—primarily places like this forum, organizations such as the CEA, and participants in EA global. The more central to EA-the-community, the worse I like the the ideas.
In my view, what happens is that there are a lot of EA-ish people donating to GiveWell charities, and that’s amazing. And then the EA movement comes and goes “but actually, you should really give the money to [something ineffective that’s also sometimes in the personal interest of the person speaking]” and some people get duped. So forums like this one serve to take money that would go to malaria nets, and try as hard as they can to redirect it to less effective charities.
So, to your questions: how many people are working towards bee welfare? Not many. But on this forum, it’s a common topic of discussion (often with things like nematodes instead of bees). I haven’t been to EA global, but I know where I’d place my bets for what receives attention there. Though honestly, both HLI and the animal welfare stuff is probably small potatoes compared to AI risk and meta-EA, two areas in which these dynamics play an even bigger role (and in which there are even more broken thermometers and conflicts of interest).