The most important thing to note here is that, if you dig through the various long reports, the tradeoff is:
With $7800 you can save the life of a child, or
If you grant HLI’s assumptions regarding costs (and I’m a bit skeptical even there), you can give a multi-week group therapy to 60 people for that same cost (I think 12 sessions of 90 min).
Which is better? Well, right off the bat, if you think mothers would value their children at 60x what they value the therapy sessions, you’ve already lost.
Of course, the child’s life also matters, not just the mother’s happiness. But HLI has a range of “assumptions” regarding how good a life is, and in many of these assumptions the life of the child is indeed fairly value-less compared to benefits in the welfare of the mother (because life is suffering and death is OK, basically).
All this is obfuscated under various levels of analysis. Moreover, in HLI’s median assumption, not only is the therapy more effective, it is 5x more effective. They are saying: the number of group therapies that equal the averted death of a child is not 60, but rather, 12.
To me that’s broken-thermometer level.
I know the EA community is full of broken thermometers, and it’s actually one of the reasons I do not like the community. One of my main criticisms of EA is, indeed, “you’re taking absurd numbers (generated by authors motivated to push their own charities/goals) at face value”. This also happens with animal welfare: there’s this long report and 10-part forum series evaluating animals’ welfare ranges, and it concludes that 1 human has the welfare range of (checks notes) 14 bees. Then others take that at face value and act as if a couple of beehives or shrimp farms are as important as a human city.
I am skeptical of any argument that would significantly incentivize organizations to keep their analyses close to the chest.
This is not the first time I’ve had this argument made to me when I criticize an EA charity. It seems almost like the default fallback. I think EA has the opposite problem, however: nobody ever dares to say the emperor has no clothes, and everyone goes around pretending 1 human is worth 14 bees and a group therapy session increases welfare by more than the death of your child decreases it.
I think that it is possible to buy that humans only have 14 times as painful maximum pains/pleasurable maximal pleasure than bees, and still think 14 bees=1 human is silly. You just have to reject hedonism about well-being. I have strong feelings about saving humans over animals, but I have no intuition whatsoever that if my parents’ dog burns her paw it hurts less than when I burn my hand. The whole idea that animals have less intense sensations than us seems to me less like a commonsense claim, and more like something people committed to both hedonism and antispeciesism made up to reconcile their intuitive repugnant at results like 10 pigs or whatever=1 human. (Bees are kind of a special case because lots of people are confident they aren’t conscious at all.)
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).
I disagree with you on several points.
The most important thing to note here is that, if you dig through the various long reports, the tradeoff is:
With $7800 you can save the life of a child, or
If you grant HLI’s assumptions regarding costs (and I’m a bit skeptical even there), you can give a multi-week group therapy to 60 people for that same cost (I think 12 sessions of 90 min).
Which is better? Well, right off the bat, if you think mothers would value their children at 60x what they value the therapy sessions, you’ve already lost.
Of course, the child’s life also matters, not just the mother’s happiness. But HLI has a range of “assumptions” regarding how good a life is, and in many of these assumptions the life of the child is indeed fairly value-less compared to benefits in the welfare of the mother (because life is suffering and death is OK, basically).
All this is obfuscated under various levels of analysis. Moreover, in HLI’s median assumption, not only is the therapy more effective, it is 5x more effective. They are saying: the number of group therapies that equal the averted death of a child is not 60, but rather, 12.
To me that’s broken-thermometer level.
I know the EA community is full of broken thermometers, and it’s actually one of the reasons I do not like the community. One of my main criticisms of EA is, indeed, “you’re taking absurd numbers (generated by authors motivated to push their own charities/goals) at face value”. This also happens with animal welfare: there’s this long report and 10-part forum series evaluating animals’ welfare ranges, and it concludes that 1 human has the welfare range of (checks notes) 14 bees. Then others take that at face value and act as if a couple of beehives or shrimp farms are as important as a human city.
This is not the first time I’ve had this argument made to me when I criticize an EA charity. It seems almost like the default fallback. I think EA has the opposite problem, however: nobody ever dares to say the emperor has no clothes, and everyone goes around pretending 1 human is worth 14 bees and a group therapy session increases welfare by more than the death of your child decreases it.
I think that it is possible to buy that humans only have 14 times as painful maximum pains/pleasurable maximal pleasure than bees, and still think 14 bees=1 human is silly. You just have to reject hedonism about well-being. I have strong feelings about saving humans over animals, but I have no intuition whatsoever that if my parents’ dog burns her paw it hurts less than when I burn my hand. The whole idea that animals have less intense sensations than us seems to me less like a commonsense claim, and more like something people committed to both hedonism and antispeciesism made up to reconcile their intuitive repugnant at results like 10 pigs or whatever=1 human. (Bees are kind of a special case because lots of people are confident they aren’t conscious at all.)
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).