I agree that it’s important to ask the meta questions about which pieces of information even have high moral value to begin with. OP gives as an example, the moral welfare of shrimps. But who cares? EA puts so little money and effort into this already on the assumption that they probably are valuable. Even if you demonstrated that they weren’t or forced an update in that direction, the overall amount of funding shifted would be fairly small.
You might worry that all the important questions are already so heavily scrutinized as to bear little low-hanging fruit, but I don’t think that’s true. EAs are easily nerd sniped, and there isn’t any kind of “efficient market” for prioritizing high impact questions. There’s also a bit of intimidation here where it feels a bit wrong to challenge someone like MacAskill or Bostrom on really critical philosophical questions. But that’s precisely where we should be focusing more attention.
I agree that it’s important to ask the meta questions about which pieces of information even have high moral value to begin with. OP gives as an example, the moral welfare of shrimps. But who cares? EA puts so little money and effort into this already on the assumption that they probably are valuable. Even if you demonstrated that they weren’t or forced an update in that direction, the overall amount of funding shifted would be fairly small.
You might worry that all the important questions are already so heavily scrutinized as to bear little low-hanging fruit, but I don’t think that’s true. EAs are easily nerd sniped, and there isn’t any kind of “efficient market” for prioritizing high impact questions. There’s also a bit of intimidation here where it feels a bit wrong to challenge someone like MacAskill or Bostrom on really critical philosophical questions. But that’s precisely where we should be focusing more attention.