Thanks for the post, Aaron. It’s a good lecture and a very interesting subject.
I wonder if there’s a more general problem of “tipping points” here. And though I think there’s no real necessary conflict between individual & collective action for EAs, there’s a relevant issue when it comes to analyzing how neglected a cause area is – i.e., deciding if an additional contribution increases the probability of effective change.
I should remark that I’m not sure that the “expected badness amount of buying one chicken” is roughly equivalent to one-chicken death marginally, because markets take a while to adjust to someone’s shift in preferences. So if you forgo eating chicken only for today, the market still expects you might do it tomorrow; but if you become a vegetarian, the industry will eventually realize a drop in demand. Thus there’s a number n > 1 of chickens, a tipping point, below which your consumption makes no difference for the amount of chicken killed. Similarly, a realistic instance of Drops of Water could be framed as a matter of achieving the (unknown) threshold below which people would dehydrate and die – it’d not make any difference to contribute to the pool below that threshold.
Thanks for the post, Aaron. It’s a good lecture and a very interesting subject.
I wonder if there’s a more general problem of “tipping points” here. And though I think there’s no real necessary conflict between individual & collective action for EAs, there’s a relevant issue when it comes to analyzing how neglected a cause area is – i.e., deciding if an additional contribution increases the probability of effective change.
I should remark that I’m not sure that the “expected badness amount of buying one chicken” is roughly equivalent to one-chicken death marginally, because markets take a while to adjust to someone’s shift in preferences. So if you forgo eating chicken only for today, the market still expects you might do it tomorrow; but if you become a vegetarian, the industry will eventually realize a drop in demand. Thus there’s a number n > 1 of chickens, a tipping point, below which your consumption makes no difference for the amount of chicken killed. Similarly, a realistic instance of Drops of Water could be framed as a matter of achieving the (unknown) threshold below which people would dehydrate and die – it’d not make any difference to contribute to the pool below that threshold.