Upvoted as these are interested ideas, particularly the humane pesticide. On the other hand, the happy animal farm idea is too far outside the mainstream and would be too damaging to the reputation of EA for me to want it to get too much support from the EA movement at the current time.
I would suggest 1) the happy animal farm idea shouldn’t be explored too much until at least EA has established itself 2) if these ideas are explored, they should be framed more as philosophical discussion than as a solid policy proposal 3) if in the future, someone decides to pursue this, it shouldn’t be directly supported by mainstream EA organisations. Even AI safety research is enough to make people skeptical of EA.
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.
Upvoted as these are interested ideas, particularly the humane pesticide. On the other hand, the happy animal farm idea is too far outside the mainstream and would be too damaging to the reputation of EA for me to want it to get too much support from the EA movement at the current time.
I would suggest 1) the happy animal farm idea shouldn’t be explored too much until at least EA has established itself 2) if these ideas are explored, they should be framed more as philosophical discussion than as a solid policy proposal 3) if in the future, someone decides to pursue this, it shouldn’t be directly supported by mainstream EA organisations. Even AI safety research is enough to make people skeptical of EA.
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.