I’m pretty skeptical of the whole “we will ignore the vastly more important subjects for the sake of PR, and instead only talk about the vastly less important subjects” approach. It’s possible that the most ethical thing we could do is fill the universe with small happy animals, and doing this could be the most important decision we ever make, vastly outweighing relatively trivial problems like malaria and factory farming. It’s also conceivable that filling the universe with happy animals is massively worse than something else we could do with the universe’s resources, and doing it would be a monumental error. I understand that it sounds weird, and we probably shouldn’t introduce EA with “I’m trying to improve the world in the most effective way possible, which is why I want to make a rat farm” (I definitely don’t say that to people—I talk about malaria and GiveWell and more mainstream topics). But that doesn’t mean no one should ever publicly discuss weird-but-important issues. I believe that reading Brian Tomasik’s (public) essays on wild animal suffering was more important for me than learning about GiveWell or Giving What We Can, and I wouldn’t have considered this critically important topic if Brian had been too concerned about PR to write about it.
I’m pretty skeptical of the whole “we will ignore the vastly more important subjects for the sake of PR, and instead only talk about the vastly less important subjects” approach. It’s possible that the most ethical thing we could do is fill the universe with small happy animals, and doing this could be the most important decision we ever make, vastly outweighing relatively trivial problems like malaria and factory farming. It’s also conceivable that filling the universe with happy animals is massively worse than something else we could do with the universe’s resources, and doing it would be a monumental error. I understand that it sounds weird, and we probably shouldn’t introduce EA with “I’m trying to improve the world in the most effective way possible, which is why I want to make a rat farm” (I definitely don’t say that to people—I talk about malaria and GiveWell and more mainstream topics). But that doesn’t mean no one should ever publicly discuss weird-but-important issues. I believe that reading Brian Tomasik’s (public) essays on wild animal suffering was more important for me than learning about GiveWell or Giving What We Can, and I wouldn’t have considered this critically important topic if Brian had been too concerned about PR to write about it.