That means that even if you value helping an individual human much more than helping an animal, it still doesn’t mean that you should necessarily donate to human charities. You can save a significantly higher number of animals (see our leafleting calculator link below for an upper/lower bound) by donating to one of our top charities than the number of humans you could save by donating to the best human charities.
How relevant do you think this is? I think there may be good reasons to promote animal welfare, but this probably isn’t one of them. From the comments in response to my post I even had the impression that was a consensus around this.
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.)
How relevant do you think this is? I think there may be good reasons to promote animal welfare, but this probably isn’t one of them. From the comments in response to my post I even had the impression that was a consensus around this.
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.)