Relying on hoped-for compounding long-term benefits to make donation decisions is at least not a complete consensus (I certainly don’t).
My understanding of your position is:
Human welfare benefits compound, though we don’t know how much or for how long (and I am dubious, along with one of the commenters, about a compounding model for this).
Animal welfare benefits might compound if they’re caused by human value changes.
In the case of ACE’s recommendations, we have three charities which aim to structurally change human society. So we have short-term benefits which appear much larger than those from human-targeted charities, with possibly compounding and poorly researched long-term benefits, as compared to possibly compounding and poorly researched long-term benefits from human-targeted charities.
I would describe the paragraph of JPB’s that you quote as highly relevant; at the very least it’s useful even if not sufficient information to make a donation decision based on expected impact.
(For the record, I’ve yet to donate to animal welfare charities because I am a horrible speciesist, but I think the animal welfare wing of EA deserves to be much more prominent than it currently is.)
Relying on hoped-for compounding long-term benefits to make donation decisions is at least not a complete consensus (I certainly don’t).
My understanding of your position is:
Human welfare benefits compound, though we don’t know how much or for how long (and I am dubious, along with one of the commenters, about a compounding model for this).
Animal welfare benefits might compound if they’re caused by human value changes.
In the case of ACE’s recommendations, we have three charities which aim to structurally change human society. So we have short-term benefits which appear much larger than those from human-targeted charities, with possibly compounding and poorly researched long-term benefits, as compared to possibly compounding and poorly researched long-term benefits from human-targeted charities.
I would describe the paragraph of JPB’s that you quote as highly relevant; at the very least it’s useful even if not sufficient information to make a donation decision based on expected impact.
(For the record, I’ve yet to donate to animal welfare charities because I am a horrible speciesist, but I think the animal welfare wing of EA deserves to be much more prominent than it currently is.)