Re. 5: I think more people are in this camp than you realise, maybe they’re just not well-represented on the forum and twitter. I’m a global development nowist because:
Affecting the future predictably is hard and most longtermist projects I’ve seen aren’t obviously going to have a positive impact. They might even be negative (eg. stalling AI might be bad).
Beyond freeing pigs and chooks from cages, animal welfare concern leads to absurd conclusions when you start thinking about wild animal suffering or try to quantify insect suffering.
Global development probably has positive long-term effects on human wellbeing (development begets development and accelerates technology by allowing more people able to take part in innovation)
Global development will probably have positive effects on animal welfare anyway and may even be necessary in a lot of cases (richer countries are generally the ones that adopt better animal welfare rules)
Global development is more broadly appealing than than fish rights and AI safety. Focus on longtermism and fringe animal welfare issues is part of what makes the EA label and community alienating to people.
2. Beyond freeing pigs and chooks from cages, animal welfare concern leads to absurd conclusions when you start thinking about wild animal suffering or try to quantify insect suffering.
Eh, I agree the conclusions might be counterintuitive and even weird, but disagree pretty strongly that they’re absurd.
Even granting that only freeing mammals from cages is good and worthy, I’m (subjectively, not super rigorously) quite confident that indeed getting chickens and/​or pigs out of cages is both more robustly good and ethically more important than any of the GiveWell charities.
4. Global development will probably have positive effects on animal welfare anyway and may even be necessary in a lot of cases (richer countries are generally the ones that adopt better animal welfare rules)
Not impossible, but seems very unlikely and would be suspicious if helping humans happened to also be the best way to help animals. I don’t think it comes very close, in fact, though I’m unsure what the sign is
5. Global development is more broadly appealing than than fish rights and AI safety. Focus on longtermism and fringe animal welfare issues is part of what makes the EA label and community alienating to people.
I agree with the first sentence, which is why I suspect that most of the ethical value from global dev runs through community building/​attracting newcomers and optics, and this effect is plausibly pretty big in magnitude. But I think we should have a very high bar for not doing something morally important because some people might think it’s weird or silly, even if some amount of activity optimized for broad appeal is warranted
Re. 5: I think more people are in this camp than you realise, maybe they’re just not well-represented on the forum and twitter. I’m a global development nowist because:
Affecting the future predictably is hard and most longtermist projects I’ve seen aren’t obviously going to have a positive impact. They might even be negative (eg. stalling AI might be bad).
Beyond freeing pigs and chooks from cages, animal welfare concern leads to absurd conclusions when you start thinking about wild animal suffering or try to quantify insect suffering.
Global development probably has positive long-term effects on human wellbeing (development begets development and accelerates technology by allowing more people able to take part in innovation)
Global development will probably have positive effects on animal welfare anyway and may even be necessary in a lot of cases (richer countries are generally the ones that adopt better animal welfare rules)
Global development is more broadly appealing than than fish rights and AI safety. Focus on longtermism and fringe animal welfare issues is part of what makes the EA label and community alienating to people.
Thanks for representing the global dev camp!
Eh, I agree the conclusions might be counterintuitive and even weird, but disagree pretty strongly that they’re absurd.
Even granting that only freeing mammals from cages is good and worthy, I’m (subjectively, not super rigorously) quite confident that indeed getting chickens and/​or pigs out of cages is both more robustly good and ethically more important than any of the GiveWell charities.
Not impossible, but seems very unlikely and would be suspicious if helping humans happened to also be the best way to help animals. I don’t think it comes very close, in fact, though I’m unsure what the sign is
I agree with the first sentence, which is why I suspect that most of the ethical value from global dev runs through community building/​attracting newcomers and optics, and this effect is plausibly pretty big in magnitude. But I think we should have a very high bar for not doing something morally important because some people might think it’s weird or silly, even if some amount of activity optimized for broad appeal is warranted