People frequently do things like taking Rethink’s moral weights project (which kinda skips over a lot of hard philosophical problems about measurement and what we can learn from animal behavior, and goes all-in on a simple perspective of total hedonic utilitarianism which I think is useful but not ultimately correct), and just treat the numbers as if they are unvarnished truth
Can you point to specific cases of that happening? I haven’t seen this happen before. My sense is that most people who quote Rethinks moral weights project are familiar with the limitations.
The animal welfare side of things feels less truthseeking, more activist, than other parts of EA
Rethink’s weights unhedged in the wild: the most recent time I remember seeing this was when somebody pointed me towards this website: https://foodimpacts.org/, which uses Rethink’s numbers to set the moral importance of different animals. They only link to where they got the weights in a tiny footnote on a secondary page about methods, and they don’t mention any other ways that people try to calculate reference weights, or anything about what it means to “assume hedonism” or etc. Instead, we’re told these weights are authoritative and scientific because they’re “based on the most elaborate research to date”.
IMO it would be cool to be able to swap between Rethink, versus squared neuron count or something, versus everything-is-100%. As is, they do let you edit the numbers yourself, and also give a checkbox that makes everything equal 100%. Which (perhaps unintentionally) is a pretty extreme framing of the discussion!! “Are shrimp 3% as important as a human life (30 shrimp = 1 person)! Or 100%? Or maybe you want to edit the numbers to something in-between?”
I think the foodimpacts calculator is a cool idea, and I don’t begrudge anyone an attempt to make estimates using a bunch of made-up numbers (see the ACX post on this subject) -- indeed, I wish the calculator went more out on a limb by trying to include the human health impacts of various foods (despite the difficulties / uncertainties they mention on the “methods” page). But this is the kind of thing that I was talking about re: the weights.
Animal welfare feeling more activist & less truth-seeking:
But I think that post is probably accurate in the specific claims that it makes, and indeed vegan EA activism is part of overall animal welfare EA activism, so perhaps I could rest my case there.
I also think that the broader animal welfare space has a much milder version of a similar ailment. I am pretty “rationalist” and think that rationalist virtues (as expounded in Yudkowsky’s Sequences, or Slate Star Codex blog posts, or Secular Solstice celebrations, or just sites like OurWorldInData) are important. I think that global health places like Givewell do a pretty great job embodying these virtues, that longtermist stuff does a medium-good job (they’re trying! but it’s harder since the whole space is just more speculative), and animal welfare does a worse job (but still better than almost all mainstream institutions, eg way better than either US political party). Mostly I think this is just because a lot of people get into animal EA without ever first reading rationalist blogs (which is fine, not everybody has to be just like me); instead they sometimes find EA via Peter Singer’s more activist-y “Animal Liberation”, or via the yet-more-activist mainstream vegan movement or climate movements. And in stuff like climate protest movements (greta thurnberg, just stop oil, sunrise, etc), being maximally truthseeking and evenhanded just isn’t a top priority like it is in EA! Of course the people that come to EA from those movements are often coming specifically because they recognize that, and they prefer EA’s more rigorous / rationalist vibe. (Kinda like how when Californians move to Texas, they actually make Texas more republican and not more democrat, because California is very blue but Californians-who-choose-to-move-to-Texas are red.) But I still think that (unlike the CA/TX example?) the long-time overlap with those other activist movements makes animal welfare less rationalist and thereby less truthseeking than I like.
(Just to further caveat… Not scoring 100⁄100 on truthseekingness isn’t the end of the world. I love the idea of Charter Cities and support that movement, despite that some charter city advocates are pretty hype-y and use exaggerated rhetoric, and a few, like Balajis, regularly misrepresent things and feel like outright hustlers at times. As I said, I’d support animal welfare over GHD despite truthseeky concerns if that was my only beef; my bigger worries are some philosophical disagreements and concern about the relative lack of long-term / ripple effects.)
<<My sense is that most people who quote Rethinks moral weights project is familiar with the limitations.>>
Do you think that the people doing the quoting also fairly put the average Forum reader on notice of the limitations? That’s a different thing than being aware of the limitations themselves. I’d have to go back and do a bunch of reading of past posts to have a firm sense on this.
Can you point to specific cases of that happening? I haven’t seen this happen before. My sense is that most people who quote Rethinks moral weights project are familiar with the limitations.
Can you say more on this?
Rethink’s weights unhedged in the wild: the most recent time I remember seeing this was when somebody pointed me towards this website: https://foodimpacts.org/, which uses Rethink’s numbers to set the moral importance of different animals. They only link to where they got the weights in a tiny footnote on a secondary page about methods, and they don’t mention any other ways that people try to calculate reference weights, or anything about what it means to “assume hedonism” or etc. Instead, we’re told these weights are authoritative and scientific because they’re “based on the most elaborate research to date”.
IMO it would be cool to be able to swap between Rethink, versus squared neuron count or something, versus everything-is-100%. As is, they do let you edit the numbers yourself, and also give a checkbox that makes everything equal 100%. Which (perhaps unintentionally) is a pretty extreme framing of the discussion!! “Are shrimp 3% as important as a human life (30 shrimp = 1 person)! Or 100%? Or maybe you want to edit the numbers to something in-between?”
I think the foodimpacts calculator is a cool idea, and I don’t begrudge anyone an attempt to make estimates using a bunch of made-up numbers (see the ACX post on this subject) -- indeed, I wish the calculator went more out on a limb by trying to include the human health impacts of various foods (despite the difficulties / uncertainties they mention on the “methods” page). But this is the kind of thing that I was talking about re: the weights.
Animal welfare feeling more activist & less truth-seeking:
This post is specifically about vegan EA activists, and makes much stronger accusations of non-truthseeking-ness than I am making here against the broader animal welfare movement in general: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qF4yhMMuavCFrLqfz/ea-vegan-advocacy-is-not-truthseeking-and-it-s-everyone-s
But I think that post is probably accurate in the specific claims that it makes, and indeed vegan EA activism is part of overall animal welfare EA activism, so perhaps I could rest my case there.
I also think that the broader animal welfare space has a much milder version of a similar ailment. I am pretty “rationalist” and think that rationalist virtues (as expounded in Yudkowsky’s Sequences, or Slate Star Codex blog posts, or Secular Solstice celebrations, or just sites like OurWorldInData) are important. I think that global health places like Givewell do a pretty great job embodying these virtues, that longtermist stuff does a medium-good job (they’re trying! but it’s harder since the whole space is just more speculative), and animal welfare does a worse job (but still better than almost all mainstream institutions, eg way better than either US political party). Mostly I think this is just because a lot of people get into animal EA without ever first reading rationalist blogs (which is fine, not everybody has to be just like me); instead they sometimes find EA via Peter Singer’s more activist-y “Animal Liberation”, or via the yet-more-activist mainstream vegan movement or climate movements. And in stuff like climate protest movements (greta thurnberg, just stop oil, sunrise, etc), being maximally truthseeking and evenhanded just isn’t a top priority like it is in EA! Of course the people that come to EA from those movements are often coming specifically because they recognize that, and they prefer EA’s more rigorous / rationalist vibe. (Kinda like how when Californians move to Texas, they actually make Texas more republican and not more democrat, because California is very blue but Californians-who-choose-to-move-to-Texas are red.) But I still think that (unlike the CA/TX example?) the long-time overlap with those other activist movements makes animal welfare less rationalist and thereby less truthseeking than I like.
(Just to further caveat… Not scoring 100⁄100 on truthseekingness isn’t the end of the world. I love the idea of Charter Cities and support that movement, despite that some charter city advocates are pretty hype-y and use exaggerated rhetoric, and a few, like Balajis, regularly misrepresent things and feel like outright hustlers at times. As I said, I’d support animal welfare over GHD despite truthseeky concerns if that was my only beef; my bigger worries are some philosophical disagreements and concern about the relative lack of long-term / ripple effects.)
<<My sense is that most people who quote Rethinks moral weights project is familiar with the limitations.>>
Do you think that the people doing the quoting also fairly put the average Forum reader on notice of the limitations? That’s a different thing than being aware of the limitations themselves. I’d have to go back and do a bunch of reading of past posts to have a firm sense on this.