Strategy Fellow — cFactual
Principal — Good Structures
I previously co-founded and served as Executive Director at Wild Animal Initiative, and served as the COO of Rethink Priorities from 2020 to 2024.
abrahamrowe
Karma: 3,434
Critiques of EA that I want to read
A robust earning to give ecosystem is better for EA
Rethink Priorities’ Leadership Statement on the FTX situation
Research summary: farmed cricket welfare
Should Longtermists Mostly Think About Animals?
Apply to join Rethink Priorities’ board of directors.
Insects raised for food and feed — global scale, practices, and policy
The scale of direct human impact on invertebrates
Silk production: global scale and animal welfare issues
Rethink Priorities’ Operations team is expanding — we’re hiring for several positions on our Core Ops and Special Projects teams
Research summary: farmed yellow mealworm welfare
Rethink Priorities is hiring fellows, research assistants, and researchers in several cause areas
Research summary: The evolution of nociception in arthropods
I downvoted this, and would feel strange not talking about why:
I think there are lots of good reasons, moral or otherwise, to not be vegan—maybe you can’t afford vegan food, or otherwise cannot access it. Maybe you’ve never heard of veganism. Maybe there are good reasons to think that the animal products you’re eating aren’t causing additional harm. Maybe you just like animal products a lot, and want to eat some, even though you know it is bad.
But I don’t think this argument is a particularly good one, and doesn’t engage with questions of animal ethics well:
1. “I think there’s a very large chance they don’t matter at all, and that there’s just no one inside to suffer”—this strikes me (for birds and mammals at least) as a statement in direct conflict with a large body of scientific evidence, and to some extent, consensus views among neuroscientists (e.g. the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#Cambridge_Declaration_on_Consciousness). Though to be fair, you are assuming they do feel pain in this post.
2. Your weights for animals lives seem fairly arbitrary. I agree that if those were good weights to use, maybe the moral trade-offs would be justified, but if you’re just saying, with little basis, that a pig has 1⁄100 human moral worth, I don’t know how to evaluate it. It isn’t an argument. It’s just an arbitrary discount to make your actions feel justified from a utilitarian standpoint.
I also think these moral worth statements need more clarification—do you mean that while I (a human) feel things on the scale of −1000 to 1000, a pig only feels things on the scale of −10 to 10? Or do you mean a pig is somehow worth less intrinsically, even though it feels similar amounts of pain as me? The first statement I am skeptical of because of a lack of evidence for it, and the second seems just unjustifiably biased against pigs for no particular reason.
I generally think factory farms are pretty bad, and maybe as bad as torture. Removing cows from the equation, eating animal products requires 6.125 beings to be tortured per year per American (by the numbers you shared). I personally don’t think that is a worthwhile thing to cause. Randomly assigning small moral weights to those animals to feel justified seems unscientific and odd.
I think it seems fairly clear that there is a strong case to be made, if you’re someone who has the means and access to vegan food and are a utilitarian of various sorts, to eat at least a mostly vegan diet. No one has to be perfectly moral all the time, and I think it’s probably okay (on average) to often not be perfectly moral. But presenting arbitrarily assigned discounts on lives until your actions are morally justified is a weak justification.
Global cochineal production: scale, welfare concerns, and potential interventions
Notes on how a recession might impact giving and EA
I think that I agree with many aspects of the spirit of this, but it is fairly unclear to me that if organizations just tried to pay market rates for people to the extent that is possible it would result in this—I don’t think funding is distributed across priorities according to the values of the movement as a whole (or even via some better conception of priorities where more engaged people were weighted more highly or something, etc.), and I think different areas in the movement have different philosophies around compensation, so it seems like there are other factors warping funding being ideally distributed. It seems really unclear to me if EA salaries currently are actually carrying signals about impact, as opposed to mostly telling us something about the funding overhang/relative ease of securing funding in various spaces (which I think is uncorrelated with impact to some extent). I guess to the extent that salaries seem correlated with impact (which I think is possibly happening but am uncertain), I’m not sure the reason is that it is the EA job market pricing in impact.
I’m pretty pro compensation going up in the EA space (at least to some extent across the board, and definitely in certain areas), but I think my biggest worry is that it might make it way harder to start new groups—the amount of seed funding a new organization needs to get going when the salary expectations are way higher (even in a well funded area) seems like a bigger barrier to overcome, even just psychologically, for entrepreneurial people who want to build something.
Though also I think a big thing happening here is that lots of longtermism/AI orgs. are competing with tech companies for talent, and other organizations are competing with non-EA businesses that pay less than tech companies, so the salary stratification is just naturally going to happen.
Hi,
(writing as the COO of Rethink Priorities).
Nonlinear is not, and has never been fiscally sponsored by Rethink Priorities. RP has never had a legal or financial connection to Nonlinear.
In the grant round you cite, it looks like the receiving charity is listed as Rethink Charity. RP was fiscally sponsored by RC until 2020, but is no longer legally connected to RC. RC is a separate legal entity with a separate board. RP and RC do not have a legal connection anymore, and have not since 2020.
FWIW, my experience (hiring mostly operations roles) is often the opposite—I find for non-senior roles that I usually reach the end of a hiring process, and am making a pretty arbitrary choice between multiple candidates who both seem quite good on the (relatively weak) evidence from the hiring round. But, I also think RP filters a lot less heavily on culture fit / value alignment for ops roles than CEA does, which might be the relevant factor making this difference.
I co-founded 2 of and have worked at another of the 6 organizations that have worked on wild animal welfare with an EA lens. I’ve been writing or thinking about these things since around 2014. Here are a handful of thoughts related to this:
I think almost none of the people working in the space professionally are full on negative utilitarians. Probably many are very focused on reducing suffering (myself included), but pretty much everyone really likes animals—that’s why they work on making their lives better!
In 2018, I helped organize the first wild animal welfare summit for the space. We unanimously agreed that this perspective was an unproductive one, and I don’t think any group working in the space today (Wild Animal Initiative, Animal Ethics, Rethink Priorities) holds a view that is this strong. So I think in general, the space has been moving away from anything like what you’re discussing.
Speaking from personal experience, I was much more sympathetic to this sort of view when I first got involved. Wild animal suffering is really overwhelming, especially if you care about animals. For me, it was extremely sad to learn how horrible lives are for many animals (especially those who die young). But, the research I’ve done and read has both made me a lot less sympathetic to a totalizing view of wild animals of this sort (e.g. I think many more wild animals than I previously thought live good lives), and less sympathetic to taking such a radical action. I think that this problem seems really hard at first, so it’s easy to point to an intervention that provides conclusive results. But, research has generally made me think that we are both wrong about how bad many (though definitely not most) animal lives are, and how tractable these problems are. I think there are much more promising avenues for reducing wild animal suffering available.
People on the internet talk about reducing populations as being the project of wild animal welfare. My impression is that most or all of those folks don’t actually work on wild animal welfare. And the groups working in the space aren’t really engaged in the online conversation, probably in part because of disagreement with this view.
I hope that there are no negative utilitarians who hold 0 doubts about their ethics. I guess if I were a full negative utilitarian, or something, I probably wouldn’t be 100% confident in that belief. And given that irreversibility of the intervention you describe, if I wasn’t 100% confident, I’d be really hesitant to do anything like that. Instead, improving welfare is acceptable under a variety of frameworks, including negative utilitarianism, so it seems like we’d probably be inclined to just improve animal’s lives.
Overall, I think this concern is pretty unwarranted, though understandable given the online discussion. Everyone I know who works on wild animal welfare cares about animals a lot, and the space has been burdened by these concerns despite them not really referring to views held by folks who lead the space.
Also, one note:
I think it’s pretty important to differentiate between people thinking animals would be better off dead (a view held by no one I know), and thinking that some animals who will live will have better lives if we reduce juvenile mortality via reduced fertility, and through the latter, that we would prevent a lot of very bad, extremely short lives. We already try to non-lethally reduce populations of many wild animals via fertility control (e.g. mosquitos, screwworms, horses, cats). These projects are mainstream (outside of EA), widely accepted as good, and for some of them, done for the explicit benefit of the animals who are impacted.