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.
My substack: https://āāarielsimnegar.substack.com/āā
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.