As has been pointed out, the page where we (80k) detail the definition of “social impact” in depth is explicit that we do consider animals to be a part of impartial social impact. It’s not just in a footnote. The body of the article mentions animals and non-human sentient beings several times, including in this paragraph:
>We mean that we strive to treat equal effects on different beings’ welfare as equally morally important, no matter who they are — including people who live far away or in the future. In addition, we think that the interests of many nonhuman animals, and even potentially sentient future digital beings, should be given significant weight, although we’re unsure of the exact amount. Thus, we don’t think social impact is limited to promoting the welfare of any particular group we happen to be partial to (such as people who are alive today, or human beings as a species).
Also note that in the core argument of our article on longtermism, we strove to make clear that we’re not just concerned with future humans, but all morally relevant beings:
We should care about how the lives of future individuals go.
The number of future individuals whose lives matter could be vast.
We have an opportunity to affect how the long-run future goes — whether there may be many flourishing individuals in the future, many suffering individuals in the future, or perhaps no one at all.
But there can be a trade off between succinctness and complete precision. Being succinct isn’t trivial — writing that is accessible and engaging can be much more effective than verbose academic prose. The page you linked to is a summary of our career planning course, so it’s necessarily even more succinct than usual and doesn’t delve into the details of each claim. Of course, we don’t want to mislead people about what we believe, so these kinds of decisions are always a balancing act, and we won’t always get it right.
Your post is a good reminder of how some ways of communicating these ideas can give the wrong impression, so we’re going to review whether and to what extent we should make changes to be clearer about this issue. The feedback is much appreciated!
Thanks for the response! It’s great to see that animals are mentioned in many other pages on the website. I understand the difficulty of tradeoffs between succintness and precision.
Hi — thanks for raising this issue.
As has been pointed out, the page where we (80k) detail the definition of “social impact” in depth is explicit that we do consider animals to be a part of impartial social impact. It’s not just in a footnote. The body of the article mentions animals and non-human sentient beings several times, including in this paragraph:
>We mean that we strive to treat equal effects on different beings’ welfare as equally morally important, no matter who they are — including people who live far away or in the future. In addition, we think that the interests of many nonhuman animals, and even potentially sentient future digital beings, should be given significant weight, although we’re unsure of the exact amount. Thus, we don’t think social impact is limited to promoting the welfare of any particular group we happen to be partial to (such as people who are alive today, or human beings as a species).
Also note that in the core argument of our article on longtermism, we strove to make clear that we’re not just concerned with future humans, but all morally relevant beings:
We should care about how the lives of future individuals go.
The number of future individuals whose lives matter could be vast.
We have an opportunity to affect how the long-run future goes — whether there may be many flourishing individuals in the future, many suffering individuals in the future, or perhaps no one at all.
But there can be a trade off between succinctness and complete precision. Being succinct isn’t trivial — writing that is accessible and engaging can be much more effective than verbose academic prose. The page you linked to is a summary of our career planning course, so it’s necessarily even more succinct than usual and doesn’t delve into the details of each claim. Of course, we don’t want to mislead people about what we believe, so these kinds of decisions are always a balancing act, and we won’t always get it right.
Your post is a good reminder of how some ways of communicating these ideas can give the wrong impression, so we’re going to review whether and to what extent we should make changes to be clearer about this issue. The feedback is much appreciated!
— Cody from 80k
Thanks for the response! It’s great to see that animals are mentioned in many other pages on the website. I understand the difficulty of tradeoffs between succintness and precision.