Thanks so much for this excellent list Henry. Although I personally agree with only some of these as being major issues, I think it’s the best collection of well structured arguments of problems with a potential shift towards animal welfare that I’ve seen.
Things I agree are major issues
approximations are too approximate
slippery slope argument moving towards pascal’s mugging type scenarios
the weirdest stuff can put people off the more moderate stuff, I’ve seen this already while introducing people to EA. It’s a tricky issue to manage though as I think we need to be researching and working on the weird regardless if the impact is enough.
Things I personally don’t think are a big issue
Resistance, as many critically important stuff transformative movements in our time and before met huge resistance. Even things like giving free HIV drugs in Africa
outcomes harder to measure. Often animal welfare has great success feedback loops, better than global health. Think shrimp stunners or battery farmed hens where you know pretty fast if you’re winning or not. I agree the benefits are hard to measure with wide error bars, but as a global health guy I’m actually quite envious of animal welfare work feedback loops.
from a Ugandan perspective at least I don’t think there’s much risk of being called “culturally insensitive”, that’s more of a Western liberal framework I think. People here just laugh at me or give me weird looks when taking about animal welfare. I haven’t yet met someone who really cares, but I’m also not going to be accused of being culturally insensitive as that just isn’t a framework people here really have.
from a Ugandan perspective at least I don’t think there’s much risk of being called “culturally insensitive”, that’s more of a Western liberal framework I think.
Historically, it would be fair to characterize the main EA funder as a “Western liberal” in at least some ways, and probably a significant number of other (and potential future) donors as well.
Thanks so much for this excellent list Henry. Although I personally agree with only some of these as being major issues, I think it’s the best collection of well structured arguments of problems with a potential shift towards animal welfare that I’ve seen.
Things I agree are major issues
approximations are too approximate
slippery slope argument moving towards pascal’s mugging type scenarios
the weirdest stuff can put people off the more moderate stuff, I’ve seen this already while introducing people to EA. It’s a tricky issue to manage though as I think we need to be researching and working on the weird regardless if the impact is enough.
Things I personally don’t think are a big issue
Resistance, as many critically important stuff transformative movements in our time and before met huge resistance. Even things like giving free HIV drugs in Africa
outcomes harder to measure. Often animal welfare has great success feedback loops, better than global health. Think shrimp stunners or battery farmed hens where you know pretty fast if you’re winning or not. I agree the benefits are hard to measure with wide error bars, but as a global health guy I’m actually quite envious of animal welfare work feedback loops.
from a Ugandan perspective at least I don’t think there’s much risk of being called “culturally insensitive”, that’s more of a Western liberal framework I think. People here just laugh at me or give me weird looks when taking about animal welfare. I haven’t yet met someone who really cares, but I’m also not going to be accused of being culturally insensitive as that just isn’t a framework people here really have.
Historically, it would be fair to characterize the main EA funder as a “Western liberal” in at least some ways, and probably a significant number of other (and potential future) donors as well.