Iām a managing partner at AltX, an EA-aligned quantitative crypto hedge fund. I previously earned to give as a Quant Trading Analyst at DRW. In my free time, I enjoy reading, discussing moral philosophy, and dancing bachata and salsa.
Iām also on LessWrong and have a Substack blog.
I think thatās a great point! Theoretically, we should count all of those foundations and more, since theyāre all parts of āthe portfolio of everyoneās actionsā. (Though this would simply further cement the takeaway that global health is overfunded.)
Some reasons for focusing our optimization on āEAās portfolioā specifically:
Believing that non-EA-aligned actions have negligible effect compared to EA-aligned actions.
Since we wouldnāt have planned to donate to ineffective interventions/ācause areas anyway, itās unclear what effect including those in the portfolio would have on our decisionmaking, which is one reason why they may be safely ignorable.
Itās far more tractable to derive EAās portfolio than the portfolio of everyoneās actions, or even the portfolio of everyoneās charitable giving.
But I agree that these reasons arenāt necessarily decisive. I just think there are enough reasons to do so, and this assumption has enough simplifying power, that for me itās worth making.
Thanks for this research! Do you know whether any BOTECs have been done where an intervention can be said to create X vegan-years per dollar? Iāve been considering writing an essay pointing meat eaters to cost-effective charitable offsets for meat consumption. So far, I havenāt found any rigorous estimates online.
(I think farmed animal welfare interventions are likely even more cost-effective and have a higher probability of being net positive. But it seems really difficult to know how to trade off the moral value of chickens taken out of cages /ā shrimp stunned versus averting some number of years of meat consumption.)
I donāt think most people take as a given that maximizing expected value makes perfect sense for donations. In the theoretical limit, many people balk at conclusions like accepting a gamble with a 51% chance of doubling the universeās value and a 49% chance of destroying it. (Especially so at the implication of continuing to accept that gamble until the universe is almost surely destroyed.) In practice, people have all sorts of risk aversion, including difference-making risk aversion, avoiding worst case scenarios, and reducing ambiguity.
I argue here against the view that animal welfareās diminishing marginal returns would be sufficient for global health to win out against it at OP levels of funding, even if one is risk neutral.
So long as small orgs apply to large grantmakers like OP, so long as one is locally confident that OP is trying to maximize expected value, Iād actually expect that OPās full-time staff would generally be much better positioned to make these kinds of judgments than you or I. Under your value system, Iād echo Jeffās suggestion that you should ātop upā OPās grants.
Does portfolio theory apply better at the individual level than the community level?
I think the individual level applies if you have risk aversion on a personal level. For example, I care about having personally made a difference, which biases me towards certain individually less risky ideas.
is this āk-level 2ā aggregate portfolio a ābetterā aggregation of everyoneās information than the āk-level 1ā³ of whatever portfolio emerges from everyone individually optimising their own portfolios?
I think itās a tough situation because k=2 includes these unsavory implications Jeff and I discuss. But as I wrote, I think k=2 is just what happens when people think about everyoneās donations game-theoretically. If everyone else is thinking in k=2 mode but youāre thinking in k=1 mode, youāre going to get funged such that your value systemās expression in the portfolio could end up being much less than what is āfairā. Itās a bit like how the Nash equilibrium in the Prisonerās Dilemma is ādefect-defectā.
At some point what matters is specific projects...?
I agree with this. My post frames the discussion in terms of cause areas for simplicity and since the lessons generalize to more people, but I think your point is correct.
I just wanted to say I really liked this post and consider it a model example of reasoning transparency!
I think animal welfare as a cause area is important and neglected within EA. Invertebrates have been especially neglected since Open Phil pulled out of the space, so my top choices are the Arthropoda Foundation and Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP).
With high uncertainty, I weakly prefer Arthropoda over SWP on the margin. Time is running short to influence the trajectory of insect farming in its early stages. The quotes for Arthropodaās project costs and overhead seem very reasonable. Also, while SWPās operational costs are covered through 2026, Arthropodaās projects may not happen at all without marginal funding, so donations to Arthropoda feel more urgent to me since theyāre more existential. But all of this is held loosely and Iām very open to counterarguments.
Anecdotally, most people I know who Iāve asked do that!
I think these unsavory implications you enumerate are just a consequence of applying game theory to donations, rather than following specifically from my postās arguments.
For example, if Bob is all-in on avoiding funging and doesnāt care about norms like collaboration and transparency, his incentives are exactly as you describe: Give zero information about his value system, and make donations secretly after other funders have shown their hands.
I think youāre completely right that those are awful norms, and we shouldnāt go all-in on applying game theory to donations. This goes both for avoiding funging and for my postās argument about optimizing āEAās portfolioā.
However, just as we can learn important lessons from the concept of funging while discouraging the bad, I still think this post is valuable and includes some nontrivial practical recommendations.
Thanks for this; I agree that āintegrity vs impactā is a more precise cleavage point for this conversation than ācause-first vs member-firstā.
Would you sometimes advocate for prioritizing impact (e.g. SUM shipping resources towards interventions) over alignment within the EA community?
Unhelpfully, Iād say it depends on the tradeoffās details. I certainly wouldnāt advocate to go all-in on one to the exclusion of the other. But to give one example of the way I think, Iād currently prefer the marginal 1M be given to EA Fundsā Animal Welfare Fund than used to establish a foundation to investigate and recommend improvements to EAās epistemics.
It seems to me that I think the EA community has a lot more āalignment/āintegrityā than you do. This could arise from empirical disagreements, different definitions of āalignment/āintegrityā, and/āor different expectations we place on the community.
For example, the evidence Elizabeth presented of a lack of alignment/āintegrity in EA is that some veganism advocates on Facebook incorrectly claimed that veganism doesnāt have tradeoffs, and werenāt corrected by other community members. While Iād prefer people say true things to false things, especially when they affect peopleās health, this just doesnāt feel important enough to update upon. (Iāve also just personally never heard any vegan advocate say anything like this, so it feels like an isolated case.)
One thing that could change my mind is learning about many more cases to the point that itās clear that there are deep systemic issues with the communityās epistemics. If thereās a lot more evidence on this which I havenāt seen, Iād love to hear about it!
Thanks for the interesting conversation! Some scattered questions/āobservations:
Your conversation reminds me of the debate about whether EA should be cause-first or member-first.
My self-identification as EA is cause-first: So long as the EA community puts resources broadly into causes which maximize the impartial good, Iād call myself EA.
Elizabethās self-identification seems to me to be member-first, given that her self-identification seems more based upon community members acting with integrity towards each other than about whether or not EA is maximizing the impartial good.
This might explain the difference between my and Elizabethās attitudes about the importance of some EAs claiming that veganism doesnāt entail tradeoffs without being corrected. I think being honest about health tradeoffs is important, but Iām far more concerned with shutting up and multiplying by shipping resources towards the best interventions. However, putting on a member-first hat, I could understand why from Elizabethās perspective, this is so important. Do you think this is a fair characterization?
Iād love to understand more about the way Elizabeth reasons about the importance of raising awareness of veganismās health tradeoffs relative to vegan advocacy:
If Elizabeth is trying to maximize the impartial good, she should probably be far more concerned about an anti-veganism advocate on Facebook than about a veganism advocate who (incorrectly) denies veganismās health tradeoffs. Of course everyone should be transparent about health tradeoffs. However, if Elizabeth is being scope-sensitive about the dominance of farmed animal effects, I struggle to understand why so much attention is being placed on veganismās health tradeoffs relative to vegan advocacy.
By analogy, this feels like sounding an alarm because EAās kidney donation advocates havenāt sufficiently acknowledged its potential adverse health effects. Of course everyone should acknowledge that. But when also considering the person being helped, isnāt kidney donation clearly the moral imperative?
(I didnāt downvote your comment, by the way.)
I feel bad that my comment made you (and a few others, judging by your commentās agreevotes) feel bad.
As JackM points out, that snarky comment wasnāt addressing views which give very low moral weights to animals due to characteristics like mind complexity, brain size, and behavior, which can and should be incorporated into welfare ranges. Instead, it was specifically addressing overwhelming hierarchicalism, which is a view which assigns overwhelmingly lower moral weight based solely on species.
My statement was intended to draw a provocative analogy: Thereās no theoretical reason why oneās ethical system should lexicographically prefer one race/āgender/āspecies over another, based solely on that characteristic. In my experience, people who have this view on species say things like āwe have the right to exploit animals because weāre stronger than themā, or āexploiting animals is the natural orderā, which could have come straight out of Mein Kampf. Drawing a provocative analogy can (sometimes) force a person to grapple with the cognitive dissonance from holding such a position.
While hierarchicalism is common among the general public, highly engaged EAs generally donāt even argue for hierarchicalism because itās just such a dubious view. I wouldnāt write something like this about virtually any other argument for prioritizing global health, including ripple effects, neuron count weighting, denying that animals are conscious, or concerns about optics.
(Just wanted to say that your story of earning to give has been an inspiration! Your episode with 80k encouraged me to originally enter quant trading.)
Given your clarification, I agree that your observation holds. I too would have loved to hear someone defend the view that āanimals donāt count at allā. I think itās somewhat common among rationalists, although the only well-known EA-adjacent individuals I know who hold it are Jeff, Yud, and Zvi Mowshowitz. Holden Karnofsky seems to have believed it once, but later changed his mind.[1]
As @JackM pointed out, Jeff didnāt really justify his view in his comment thread. Iāve never read Zvi justify that view anywhere either. Iāve heard two main justifications for the view, either of which would be sufficient to prioritize global health:
Solely by virtue of our shared species, helping humans may be lexicographically preferential to helping animals, or perhaps their preferences should be given an enormous multiplier.
I use the term āoverwhelmingā because depending on which animal welfare BOTEC is used, if we use constant moral weights relative to humans, youād need a 100x to 1000x multiplier for the math to work out in favor of global health. (This comparison is coherent to me because I accept Michael St. Julesā argument that we should resolve the two envelopes problem by weighing in the units we know, but I acknowledge that this line of reasoning may not appeal to you if you donāt endorse that resolution.)
I personally find overwhelming hierarchicalism (or any form of hierarchicalism) to be deeply dubious. I write more about it here, but I simply see it as a convenient way to avoid confronting ethical problems without having the backing of any sound theoretical justification. I put about as much weight on it as the idea that the interests of the Aryan race should be lexicographically preferred to the interests of non-Aryans. Thereās just no prior for why that would be the case.
Yud and maybe some others seem to believe that animals are most likely not conscious. As before, theyād have to be really certain that animals arenāt conscious to endorse global health here. Even if thereās a 10% chance that chickens are conscious, given the outsize cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns if they are, I think theyād still merit a significant fraction of EA funding. (Probably still more than theyāre currently receiving.)
I think itās fair to start with a very strong prior that at least chickens and pigs are probably conscious. Pigs have brains with all of the same high-level substructures, which are affected the same way by drugs/āpainkillers/āsocial interaction as humansā are, and act all of the same ways that humans act would when confronted with situations of suffering and terror. It would be really surprising a priori if what was going on was merely a simulacrum of suffering with no actual consciousness behind it. Indeed, the vast majority of people seem to agree that these animals are conscious and deserve at least some moral concern. I certainly remember being able to feel pain as a child, and I was probably less intelligent than an adult pig during some of that.
Apart from that purely intuitive prior, while Iām not a consciousness expert at all, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness says that āthere is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birdsā. Rethink Prioritiesā and Luke Muehlhauserās work for Open Phil corroborate that. So Yudās view is also at odds with much of the scientific community and other EAs who have investigated this.
All of this is why I feel like Yudās Facebook post needed a very high burden of proof to be convincing to me. Instead, it seems like he just kept explaining what his model (a higher-order theory of consciousness) believes without actually justifying his model. He also didnāt admit any moral uncertainty about his model. He asserted some deeply unorthodox and unintuitive ideas (like pigs not being conscious), admitted no uncertainty, and didnāt make any attempt to justify them. So I didnāt find anything about his Facebook post convincing.
To me, the strongest reason to believe that animals donāt count at all is because smart and well-meaning people like Jeff, Yud, and Zvi believe it. I havenāt read anything remotely convincing that justifies that view on the merits. Thatās why I didnāt even mention these arguments in my follow-up post for Debate Week.
Trying to be charitable, I think the main reasons why nobody defended that view during Debate Week were:
They didnāt have the mental bandwidth to be willing to deal with an audience I suspect would be hostile. Overwhelming hierarchicalism is very much against the spirit of radical empathy in EA.
They may have felt like most EAs donāt share the basic intuitions underlying their views, so theyād be talking to a wall. The idea that pigs arenāt conscious might seem very intuitive to Eliezer. To me, and I suspect to most people, it seems wild. I could be convinced, but Iād need to see way more justification than Iāve seen.
in 2017, Holdenās personal reflections āindicate against the idea that e.g. chickens merit moral concernā. In 2018, Holden stated that āthere is presently no evidence base that could reasonably justify high confidence [that] nonhuman animals are not āconsciousā in a morally relevant wayā.
@AGB šø would you be willing to provide brief sketches of some of these stronger arguments for global health which werenāt covered during the Debate Week? Like Nathan, Iāve spent a ton of time discussing this issue with other EAs, and I havenāt heard any arguments Iād consider strong for prioritizing global health which werenāt mentioned during Debate Week.
As you wrote, thereās no view on this Iām confident in. But speaking from having had certain enduring experiences of suffering, like being very sick for weeks on end, or being bullied at school for years, at times life can just be enduringly awful. Yes, one can develop certain coping mechanisms to make the bad times easier to bear, but if the bad times are bad enough, I think they do just make life consistently far worse. Evidence from an earlier post of mine:
Extreme pain or discomfort reduces health-related quality of life by 41%.
Nerve damage results in a loss of health-related quality of life between 39% for diabetes-caused nerve damage and 85% for failed back surgery syndrome.
Suffering from cluster headaches is associated with greatly increased suicidality.
Patients suffering from chronic musculoskeletal pain would rather take a gamble with a ā chance of dying and a ā chance of being cured than continue living with their condition.
I also think that many coping mechanisms (e.g. āIām suffering for a cause! Or for my children!ā etc) are mostly possible because the suffering being has higher order brain function which allows those complex ideas to have similar mental sway to the feeling of suffering. So it feels plausible to me that a chicken would have a harder time ācopingā with suffering than a human in an equivalent situation.
To quantify my subjective and very uncertain feelings on the matter, Iād put a 40-80% probability that coping mechanisms donāt reduce chickensā suffering by more than 50% relative to the undiluted experience. But I think reasonable people can have all sorts of views on this, and would love to see further research.
Well written. I think the point on the badness of excruciating-level pain is really underemphasized, and would like to write a post about that at some point.
Iād love to try surveying the general population with thought experiments to find peopleās empirical tradeoffs of pain levels. My personal intuitions are definitely closer to your weights than Rethinkās. I think a survey would be really valuable since it would provide probability distributions of pain level conversions which could augment a cross-cause model.
As an aside, I donāt think someone writing an āactivistā comment disqualifies them from being truthseeking.
I used to find it absurd to think one could justify spending on animals when they could be spending on humans. Over years, I changed my mind, between discussing consciousness and moral weights with others, reading many relevant writings, and watching relevant documentaries. I wrote a post explaining why I changed my mind, and engaged extensively with hundreds of comments.
So far, nobody has posed an argument for prioritizing global health over animal welfare which Iāve found convincing. If the case for animal welfare is indeed correct, then marginal global health funding could be doing orders of magnitude more good if instead allocated to animal welfare. I donāt think it means I have bad epistemics, or that my writings arenāt worth engaging with, if my actions are following the logical conclusions of my changed beliefs.
If global health is indeed better at the margin than animal welfare, then I would love to know, because that would mean Iāve been causing enormous harm by allocating my time and donations to preventing us from reducing more suffering. I strive to remain as open-minded as I can to that possibility, but for reasons I and others have written extensively about, I currently think itās very likely indeed that animal welfare is better at the margin.
Hi! As you point out, the 1000x multiplier I quoted comes from Vascoās analysis, which also uses Sauliusās numbers and Rethinkās moral weights.
The cross cause calculator came out about two weeks before I published my initial post. By then, Iād been working on that post for about seven months. Though it would have been a good idea, given my urge to get the post published, I didnāt consider checking the cross cause calculatorās implied multiplier before posting.
Iāve just spent some time trying to figure out where the discrepancy between Vascoās multiplier and the cross cause calculatorās multiplier comes from:
They roughly agree on the GHD bar of ~20 DALYs per $1000.
Fixing a constant welfare range versus a probablistic range doesnāt seem to make a huge difference for the calculatorās result.
The main difference seems to be that the cross cause calculator assumes corporate campaigns avert between 160 and 3.6k chicken suffering-years per dollar. I donāt know the precise definition of that unit, and Vascoās analysis doesnāt place intermediate values in terms of that unit, so I donāt know exactly where the discrepancy breaks down from there. However, thereās probably at least an order of magnitude difference between Vascoās implied chicken suffering-years per dollar and the cross cause calculatorās.
My very tentative guess is that this may be coming from Vascoās very high weightings of excruciating and disabling-level pain, which some commenters found unintuitive, and could be driving that result. (I personally found these weightings quite intuitive after thinking about how Iād take time tradeoffs between these types of pains, but reasonable people may disagree.)
It could also be that Rethink is using a lower Saulius number to give a more precise marginal cost-effectiveness estimate, even if the historical cost-effectiveness was much higher. That would be consistent with Open Philās statement that they think the marginal cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns is much lower than the historical average.
I think this is a great find, and Iām very open to updating on what I personally think the animal welfare vs GHD multiplier is, depending on how that discrepancy breaks down. I do think itās worth noting that every one of these comparisons still found animal welfare orders of magnitude better than GHD, which is the headline result I think is most important for this debate. But your findings do illustrate that thereās still a ton of uncertainty in these numbers.
(@Vasco Grilošø Iād love to hear your perspective on all of this!)
Thanks for the comment!
Iāve always heard āpinpricks vs tortureā or the Omelas story interpreted as an example of the overwhelming badness of extreme suffering, rather than against scope sensitivity. Iāve heard it cited in favor of animal welfare! As one could see from the Dominion documentary, billions of animals live lives of extreme suffering. Omelas could be interpreted to argue that this suffering is even more important than is otherwise assumed.
I think itās hard to say what the simulation argument implies for this debate one way or the other, since there are many more (super speculative) considerations:
If consciousness is an illusion or a byproduct of certain kinds of computations which would arise in any substrate, then we should expect animals to be conscious even in the simulation.
Iāve heard some argue that the simulators would be interested in the life trajectories of particular individuals, which could imply that only a few select humans would be conscious, and nobody else. (In history, we tell the stories of world-changing individuals, neglecting those of every other individual. In video games, often only the player and maybe a select few NPCs are given rich behavior.)
The simulators might be interested in seeing what the pre-AGI world may have looked like, and will terminate the simulation once we get AGI. In that case, weād want to go all-in on suffering reduction, which would probably mean prioritizing animals.
I agree with you that many claim the moral value of animal experiences is incommensurate with that of human experiences, and that categorical responsibilities would generally also favor humans.
One reason to perhaps wait before offsetting your lifetime impact all at once could be to preserve your capitalās optionality. Cultivated meat could in the future become common and affordable, or your dietary preferences could otherwise change such that $10k was too much to spend.
Your moral views on offsetting could also change. For example, you might decide that the $10k would be better spent on longtermist causes, or that itād be strictly better to donate the $10k to the most cost-effective animal charity rather than offsetting.
Thatās awesome. That probably gets you 90% of the way there already, even if there were no offset!