Iām earning to give as a Quant Researcher at the Quantic group at Walleye Capital, a hedge fund. In my free time, I enjoy reading, discussing moral philosophy, and dancing bachata and salsa.
Iām also on LessWrong and have a Substack blog.
Ariel Simnegar šø
Karma: 2,801
Nice; looking forward to it!
Hey Josh, just drilling in on the claim that āany currently existing moral value comparison that results in the decision to donate significantly more money towards animal welfare than people must be under valuing the welfare of humansā. Do you agree that that basically implies that humans are worth infinitely more than animals? Because if e.g. we can spend a dollar to prevent one personās paper cut, or prevent one trillion dogs from being skinned and boiled alive, this would imply we should prevent the paper cut.
If youāre instead saying that you think any value system should assign at least the majority of the global philanthropic budget should go to humans rather than animals, I still think you should be in favor of allocating this marginal $100m to animals, given that this is the current split of spending on humans vs farmed animals:
I agree with CBās reply. It also may be worth mentioning the footnote from the debate question that the $100m can be spent over any amount of time we wish. So if we add (say) $10m per year over the next 10 years, it doesnāt seem like this marginal $100m would be substantially less cost-effective than what would otherwise be spent over the next 10 years.
What do you think about Bob Fischerās argument that even if one is not a hedonist, pleasure/āpain should still be a big enough part of welfare (say at least 10%) such that one shouldnāt discount Rethinkās moral weights by more than an order of magnitude or so?
Hey Uri, thanks for your transparent comment! The cost-effectiveness estimates of cage-free campaigns being orders of magnitude more cost-effective than GiveWell Top Charities have several bases:
The Welfare Footprint Projectās incredibly exhaustive deep dive into every aspect of an egg-laying henās life: āOverall, an average of at least 275 hours of disabling pain, 2,313 hours of hurtful pain and 4,645 hours of annoying pain are prevented for each hen kept in an aviary instead of CC during her laying life, and 1,410 hours of hurtful pain and 4,065 hours of annoying pain prevented for each hen kept in an aviary instead of a FC during her laying life.ā
Welfare range comparisons between humans and chickens. Rethink Prioritiesā Welfare Range Project focused on finding proxies for consciousness and welfare, and enumerating which proxies various animals share with humans. Their methodology found that chickens feel pain approximately 1ā3 as intensely as humans do. (Of course, different methodologies may give quite different answers.)
Doing the math with the suffering prevented by cage-free campaigns and Rethinkās welfare ranges will give a cost-effectiveness multiplier on the order of 1000x. But even if you assign chickens a welfare range like 0.001x that of humans, youāre still going to get a cost-effectiveness multiplier on the order of 10x.
Similarly, if you ignore Rethinkās research and instead derive a welfare range from neuron counts (to penalize chickens for their small brains), you still get cage-free campaigns outperforming GiveWell Top Charities by an order of magnitude.
All of this why I am quite confident that cage-free campaigns are indeed far more cost-effective than GiveWell-recommended charities.
Hey Nick, thanks for the thoughtful comment! Iām going to answer your question, but Iāll start with a bunch of caveats :)
On first-order effects on human wellbeing, I think economic growth is obviously incredibly good.
Even when including knock-on effects on farmed animals, wild animals, and the far future, Iād still bet on economic growth being good, with far higher uncertainty. I am very pro economic growth, but like you, I just think the marginal $100m from the debate question would be better spent on animal welfare.
$100m represents 0.02% of the USās annual philanthropic budget. If we were debating allocating trillions of dollars, I would categorically not go all-in on animal welfare, and would consider it a given that we should use much of that to alleviate global poverty and encourage economic growth.
It seems to me that there are two places where you find the argument alienating. Iāll address them one by one, and then Iāll answer your question.
Fairness
I agree that itās unfair that people from less fortunate countries have been left behind. But I feel like the argument that āitās not fair to those in poverty if we donate to alleviating factory farming, which those in developed countries primarily causeā, is similar to saying āitās not fair to those in poverty if we donate to alleviating climate change, which those in developed countries primarily causeā. We donāt have to go all-in on one cause and not support any other! These are all important problems which deserve some of our resources.
Making Tradeoffs
There was a time when I too thought it would be absurd to allocate money to animals when we could be helping the economically worst-off humans. But for a thought experiment, imagine that for every dollar of world GDP, thereās a person being tortured right now. I think that would in and of itself be sufficient to make economic growth a bad thingāsurely adding a dollar to world GDP canāt be worth causing an additional person to be tortured.
So there is some amount of suffering which, if we knew economic growth caused it, would be enough for economic growth to be a bad thing. If we agree on that, then the debate reduces to whether these animal effects could plausibly be enough for that. At first, my gut instinct was a āhell noā. But then I watched Dominion, a documentary I recommend to you, Nick, if youād like to learn more about the horrors of factory farming.
When I think about the fact that there are trillions of animals, perhaps thousands for each one of us humans, who are suffering horribly in factory farms right now because of us, I feel an enormous moral weight. And our economic growth has indeed contributed to that suffering. Itās contributed to many incredibly good things too, such that Iām not sure about its overall sign. But I now think the burden of this suffering is sufficiently weighty to potentially play a pivotal role in the net effect of economic growth.
So to answer your question, we donāt yet know enough, and it depends on the specifics. But I am willing to say that thereās some amount of animal suffering for which I would be willing to stall economic growth, if we knew all of the relevant details. And I donāt think itās obvious that current levels of animal suffering today are below that threshold.
To your first point, it seems that animal welfare interventions which fix population size, like humane slaughter, would be orders of magnitude better than global health interventions, even if the animals live net good lives. For another example, the Fish Welfare Initiativeās interventions to improve fish lives may increase the number of farmed fish due to increasing capacity for stocking density, so that charity could also seem exceptionally good by the logic of the larder.
So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.
Iāve run into a similar dilemma before, where Iām trying to convince non-EAs to direct some of their charity to AMF rather than their favorite local charity. I believe animal welfare charities are orders of magnitude more cost-effective than AMF, so itās probably higher EV to try to convince them to direct that charity to e.g. THL rather than AMF. But that request is much less likely to succeed, and could also alienate them (because animal welfare is āweirdā) from making more effective donations in the future. Curious about your thoughts about the best way to approach that.
Thanks for your justification! Hamish McDoodles also believed that neuron count weighting would make the best human welfare charities better than the best animal welfare charities. However, after doing a BOTEC of cage-free campaign cost-effectiveness using neuron counts as a proxy, he eventually ended up changing his mind:
ok, animal charities still come out an order of magnitude ahead of human charities given the cage-free campaigns analysis and neuron counts
So unless you have further disagreements with his analysis, using neuron count weighting would probably mean you should support allocating the 100M to animal welfare rather than global health.
I agree with that caveat! Though I suspect that the downstream effects of the population increase/ādecrease channel dominate, especially for animal welfare.
Tangentially, this conversation illustrates how (if person-affecting views are false), the sign of Family Empowerment Media (FEM) is the opposite of AMF and other life-saving charities. FEM prevents human lives and AMF saves lives, and they have the opposite downstream effects on human lived experience, farmed animal welfare, and so on.
Therefore, I would not suggest anyone split their donations between life-preventing charities like FEM and lifesaving charities like AMF, because their effects will offset each other. People who are sympathetic to FEM (as opposed to AMF) because of farmed animal effects should probably just donate to animal welfare charities which I would expect to help animals even more.
Your writings on this subject often emphasize an extremely high regard for the value of people making their own reproductive decisions, even when the weights are (as in this case) a humanās life and an enormous amount of farmed animal suffering.
When would the other stakes be sufficiently large for you to endorse preventing someone from making their own reproductive decision?
For example, letās say Hitlerās mother could have been forced to have an abortion, preventing Hitlerās birth. Would you say thatās a tradeoff worth making, with regret?
Or letās say we know Aliceās son Bob, were he to be born, will save 1 billion lives by preventing a nuclear war, and Alice currently intends to abort Bob. Would you say forcing Alice to carry Bob to term would be a tradeoff worth making, with regret about the forced birth?
The reason why I ask is because my intuition is that while reproductive autonomy is very important, it seems to me that there are always ways to up the stakes such that it can be the right thing to compromise on that principle, with regrets. I feel like thereās something Iām missing in my understanding of your view which has caused us historically to talk past each other.
Brian Tomasik has argued that if (a) wild animals have negative welfare on net, and (b) humans reduce wild animal populations, then that may swamp even the horrific scale of factory farming.
I personally think the meat eater problem is very serious, and the best way around it is to just donate to effective animal welfare charities! Those donations would be orders of magnitude more cost-effective than the best human-centered alternatives.
I think some critiques of GVF/āOP in this comments section could have been made more warmly and charitably.
The main funder of a movementās largest charitable foundation is spending hours seriously engaging with community membersā critiques of this strategic update. For most movements, no such conversation would occur at all.
Some critics in the comments are practicing rationalist discussion norms (high decoupling & reasoning transparency) and wish OPās communications were more like that too. However, it seems thereās a lot we donāt know about what caused GFV/āOP leadership to make this update. Dustin seems very concerned about GFV/āOPās attack surface and conserving the bandwidth of their non-monetary resources. Heās written at length about how he doesnāt endorse rationalist-level decoupling as a rule of discourse. Given all of this, itās understandable that from Dustinās perspective, he has good reasons for not being as legible as he could be. Dishonest outside actors could quote statements or frame actions far more uncharitably than anything weād see on the EA Forum.
Dustin is doing the best he can to balance between explaining his reasoning and adhering to legibility constraints we donāt know about in order to engage with the rest of the community. We should be grateful for that.
Thanks for the post, Vasco!
From reading your post, your main claim seems to be: The expected value of the long-term future is similar whether itās controlled by humans, unaligned AGI, or another Earth-originating intelligent species.
If thatās a correct understanding, Iād be interested in a more vigorous justification of that claim. Some counterarguments:
This claim seems to assume the falsity of the orthogonality thesis? (Which is fine, but Iād be interested in a justification of that premise.)
Letās suppose that if humanity goes extinct, it will be replaced by another intelligent species, and that intelligent species will have good values. (I think these are big assumptions.) Priors would suggest that it would take millions of years for this species to evolve. If so, thatās millions of years where weāre not moving to capture universe real estate at near-light-speed, which means thereās an astronomical amount of real estate which will be forever out of this speciesā light cone. It seems like just avoiding this delay of millions of years is sufficient for x-risk reduction to have astronomical value.
You also dispute that weāre living in a time of perils, though that doesnāt seem so cruxy, since your main claim above should be enough for your argument to go through either way. Still, your justification is that āI should be a priori very sceptical about claims that the expected value of the future will be significantly determined over the next few decadesā. Thereās a lot of literature (The Precipice, The Most Important Century, etc) which argues that we have enough evidence of this centuryās uniqueness to overcome this prior. Iād be curious about your take on that.
(Separately, I think you had more to write after the sentence āTheir conclusions seem to mostly follow from:ā in your postās final section?)
(The following is mostly copied from this thread due to a lack of time. I unfortunately canāt commit to much engagement on replies to this.)
The sign of the effect of MSI seems to rely crucially on a very high credence in the person-affecting view, where the interests of future people are not considered.
Since 2000, MSI has averted one maternal death by preventing on average 502 unintended pregnancies. Even if only ~20% of these unintended pregnancies would have counterfactually been carried to term (due to abortion, replacement, and other factors), that still means preventing one maternal death prevents the creation of ~100 human beings. In other words, MSIās intervention prevents ~100x as much human life experience as it creates by averting a maternal death. If one desires to maximize expected choice-worthiness under moral uncertainty, assuming the value of human experience is independent of the person-affecting view, one must be ~99% confident that the person-affecting view is true for MSI to be net positive.
However, many EAs, especially longtermists, argue that the person-affecting view is unlikely to be true. For example, Will MacAskill spends most of Chapter 8 of What We Owe The Future arguing that āall proposed defences of the intuition of neutrality [i.e. person-affecting view] suffer from devastating objectionsā. Toby Ord writes in The Precipice p. 263 that āAny plausible account of population ethics will involveā¦making sacrifices on behalf of merely possible people.ā
If thereās a significant probability that the person-affecting view may be false, then MSIās effect could in reality be up to 100x as negative as its effect on mothers is positive.
I worry about this line of reasoning because itās ends-justify-the-means thinking.
Letās say billions of people were being tortured right now, and some longtermists wrote about how this isnāt even a feather in the scales compared to the cosmic endowment. These longtermists would be accused of callously gambling billions of years on suffering on a theoretical idea. I can just imagine The Guardianās articles about how SBFās naive utilitarianism is alive and well in EA.
The difference between the scenario for animals and the scenario for humans is that the former is socially acceptable but the latter is not. There isnāt a difference in the actual badness.
Separately, to engage with the utilitarian merits of your argument, my main skepticism is an unwillingness to go all-in on ideas which remain theoretical when the stakes are billions of years of torture. (For example, letās say we ignore factory farming, and then thereās a still unknown consideration which prevents us or anyone else from accessing the cosmic endowment. That scares me.) Also, though Iām not a negative utilitarian, I think I take arguments for suffering-focused views more seriously than you might.
Iād like to give some context for why I disagree.
Yes, Richard Hanania is pretty racist. His views have historically been quite repugnant, and heās admitted that āI truly sucked back thenā. However, I think EA causes are more important than political differences. Itās valuable when Hanania exposes the moral atrocity of factory farming and defends EA to his right-wing audience. If weāre being scope-sensitive, I think we have a lot more in common with Hanania on the most important questions than we do on political issues.
I also think Hanania has excellent takes on most issues, and thatās because heās the most intellectually honest blogger Iāve encountered. I think Hanania likes EA because heās willing to admit that heās imperfect, unlike EAās critics who would rather feel good about themselves than actually help others.
More broadly, I think we could be doing more to attract people who donāt hold typical Bay Area beliefs. Just 3% of EAs identify as right wing. I think there are several reasons why, all else equal, it would be better to have more political diversity:
In this era of political polarization, It would be a travesty for EA issues to become partisan.
All else equal, political diversity is good for community epistemics. In that regard, it should be encouraged for much the same reason that cultural and racial diversity are encouraged.
If we want EA to be a global social movement, we need to show that one can be EA even if they hold beliefs on other issues we find repugnant. I live in Panama for my job. When I arrived here, I had a culture shock from how backwards many peopleās views are on racism and sexism. If we canāt be friends with the person next door with bad views, how are we going to make allies globally?
Historically, that number has been 30,000 to 400,000 cage-free chickens in exchange for a human life. (Using $5000 to save a life through the Against Malaria Foundation, compared to moving 9 to 120 years of hensā lives per dollar to a cage-free environment, and a lifespan of 1.5 years per hen.)
So we are currently within the margin of error for the ballpark you quoted. Perhaps, given that youāre partial to humans over animals due to our shared species, thatās not enough for you to allocate the marginal $100m to animals. But maybe that shifts your degree of certainty that we should allocate it all to humans?