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: 3,009
These are all really great and underdiscussed points!
On earning to give (E2G), I think it depends on the cause area. For AI safety (AIS), Iāve had a personal experience where an org had so much funding interest that they didnāt consider it worthwhile to make a small effort to increase the chance of a $100k donation. While Iām glad AIS is getting the funding it deserves, that anecdote doesnāt exactly fill me with enthusiasm for E2G for AIS.
In contrast, in animal welfare, that amount would pay 2 full time direct workersā salaries for a full year, or take a million years of hensā experiences out of cages. There are other neglected causes (digital minds etc) where that donation would go similarly far. As an E2G-er, donating to these causes makes me feel much more like what Iām doing every day matters. Thatās important for staying value-aligned for the long term if you choose E2G.
Hey Vasco! Taking into account moral uncertainty over the neuron count exponent, your plot would still make the animal interventions you listed look far higher EV than GiveWell. The probability mass where the exponent is between 0 and 1, making the animal interventions look several OOMs better than GiveWell, would swamp the cases where the exponent is >1.
(Yes, this runs into the two envelopes problem, but I think there are good arguments for using human welfare as the unit of account.)
Furthermore, I personally donāt find neuron count exponents >1 as plausible as you do. If Iām interpreting this plot from your linked source post correctly, for broiler chickens, exponent 1 implies welfare range 1ā500 and exponent 2 implies welfare range 1ā100,000. I agree that these numbers would make GiveWell look better, but I donāt find those welfare ranges intuitively plausible.
I think the patterns you point which pressure towards ājust doing thingsā are all reasonable, but Iāll push back on your link on your āpoor epistemics of the animal welfare movementā claim.
The linked post by Elizabeth argues that EA vegan advocacy has bad epistemics. Magnus Vindingās comment on that post is the closest to my view. Briefly, I was confused by Elizabethās focus on a topic I consider pretty tangential and not load-bearing on any of the arguments for vegan advocacy (and even less so for AW at large). Is vegan advocacy really less truthseeking than the general publicās views on meat consumption? How do the human health effects trade off against animal effects? Seems like an isolated demand for rigor.
The epistemics of vegan advocacy also seem quite distinct from arguments for the importance of animal welfare, or prioritization between animal welfare charities, which seem to have convinced many EAs who are not vegan. So thereād be much more work to do to make the claim that EA AW at large has poor epistemics.
I came away from Elizabethās post agreeing that some vegan advocates should message better about health tradeoffs, but not seeing why that should update me on the load-bearing arguments for veganism (animal effects), or certainly on EA AWās epistemics at large.
I agree with your scenario. I still think itās plausible that if 2ā3 of most peopleās meat consumption was replaced, people would come around to the idea that they can reduce factory farming at no cost to their convenience. Hopefully this would lead to an erosion of peopleās defense mechanisms around animal welfare, helping animal welfare take off as a mass movement like historical successful ethical movements. But thatās totally speculative and not grounded in much other than desperation.
Also for the record, I hope you know I donāt consider you among āmost peopleā hereāI respect you as a person and the sincerity of your views on animal consciousness.
Thanks for the well-argued and insightful post!
On alt proteins, if we ever substantially beat price parity (say by 50%), itās just hard for me to see how we wouldnāt get mass consumer adoption. This comes from a model of most peopleās stated preferences as downstream of whatās most convenient and protects their egos most. Thatās the model I think best explains most peopleās historical responses to moral catastrophes. Under this model, people maintaining theyād stick to factory farmed meat over cultivated meat is hopefully a temporary cope which will go away once cultivated meat becomes much more convenient than factory farmed meat. So for me, that model is the main reason why I still think alt proteins are a good use of funds. (Probably the stronger argument against alt proteins is that it may be unclear whether reducing meat consumption is good when accounting for wild animal effects!)
On cage-free campaigns and shrimp stunning, my main caveat would be that since animal welfare interventions affect such a huge number of individuals, Iād still expect the magnitude of their direct welfare effects (ignoring indirect effects) to be huge relative to global health. Of course, that only underscores your point that the sign deserves more research, and I look forward to reading comments from others far more knowledgeable than I am on this.
Would Rethink Prioritiesā animal welfare research group look like a good investment under your views?
Hi Adrian!
Iād recommend donating to the American Meat Producers Association (AMPA), an organization of family farmers who have already implemented animal welfare improvements like Californiaās Prop 12 and are running ad campaigns against Save Our Bacon. Among EAs I know, their intervention is considered the best for this issue.
While I havenāt seen a formal cost-effectiveness analysis, Iāve heard estimates from EAs I know of AMPAās multiple ranging between 2x and >10x as valuable as the marginal animal welfare 501(c)3. This is partially because of the urgency around Save Our Bacon, and partially because the largest EA grantmakers are legally restricted in how much they can contribute. It is completely legal for foreign nationals to donate.
For these reasons, Iāve donated $10k to AMPA, and Iām convinced itās an especially worthy intervention for farmed animal welfare.
If youāre saying EA forum engagement may be net negative and are willing to engage on that here, Iād be curious to understand your perspective on that.
Speaking for myself, reading and engaging on this forum ~2y ago helped me substantially with my cause prioritization in my donations and my identification as an EA community member. Now that the forum isnāt as active as it was, Iāve been wanting to push myself to contribute more, as a public service with the hope that others will benefit the same way.
Whatās been informing your perspective?
Welcome Andrei! Iāve actually mused on this question a lot myself, and I agree itās under-discussed!
What immediately jumps to mind is that this postās argument requires SSA, a view of anthropics (the study of how one should reason about their own existence). Under SSA, you are randomly sampled from a āreference classā of beings. You rightly conclude that under SSA, being born a human is extremely unlikely, so your existence seems to be strong evidence against nonhuman sentience. (This would also imply the sum of artificial and/āor future sentience wonāt be much more than the sum of past sentience, also known as the doomsday argument.)
However, SSA is not the only view of anthropics. SIA is another view (heavily promoted by EA blogger Benthamās Bulldog) which says that worlds with more beings who could be you are more likely, in such a way which (by design) cancels this postās argument, as well as the doomsday argument and several others. Iāve personally always been more convinced by SIA.
But I donāt think itās even necessary to settle anthropics for this. As you wrote, thereās a post-birth filter where only a tiny % of people will have come up with this argument. Itās like if thereās a lottery where you get sent a letter only if you win, and then you get one and think āwow, the lottery must have been rigged in my favorā. But winning was guaranteed given youāve received that letter. In your last paragraph, it seems like you exempt your own birth from this: āI rolled a oneā. But thatās just what any lottery winner would say! Thatās why Iām personally still convinced by this filter.
If youād like to read some arguments, I argue here that the most cost-effective neartermist interventions are in animal welfare. If you lean longtermist, I argue here that under many EAsā risk aversion, marginal animal welfare donations still make more sense than marginal AI safety funding. If youāre a pure total utilitarian, I would still argue that direct efforts to improve the future for all sentient beings (future-oriented digital minds/āanimal welfare work) are plausibly higher EV even than x-risk reduction.
Does anyone know whether thereās a way to buy cultivated (lab-grown) meat now? Iāve always wanted to host a cultivated meat barbecue and invite my omnivorous friends, but I have not been able to find any cultivated meat thatās currently commercially available.
(Iām biased since Iāve mostly donated to animal welfare /ā digital minds. Iām also super busy now so itās possible I just havenāt thought your argument through sufficiently.)
If youāre a pure EV maximizer I agree with your implicit claim that itās probably best to prioritize AI safety and/āor helping steer AI for the benefit of neglected groups (animals and digital minds).
If like most people you have risk aversion, like wanting high confidence youāve made a positive difference, or wanting to make sure a greater % of EA community resources are devoted to interventions which maximally reduce near-term suffering, I think animal welfare presents by far the best value option, dwarfing global health and especially an option like becoming a doctor.
So I feel like perhaps the crux of your discussion with Bob should be whether heās a pure EV maximizer or if he has the types of risk aversion which make animal welfare look good. There are also options of working in AI safety and donating to animal welfareāno need to fully commit to one or the other! But I donāt think the Alice analogy goes through because becoming a teacher or doctor doesnāt really make sense under any optimizing view, whereas I think animal welfare makes sense under many such views.
Beautiful post. I especially enjoyed the personal images and wish more EA Forum posts did that.
Sentient Futures
Arthropoda remains my top pick out of those listed, but I chose Shrimp Welfare Project followed by the EA Animal Welfare Fund as my top two votes for strategic voting reasons.
I still think there are strong arguments for animal welfare dominating global health (at least on first-order effects), and that animal welfare is much more funding constrained and neglected than AI safety. (Invertebrates and wild animals still seem like the most impactful and neglected opportunities in animal welfare.) This year, Iām donating to Sentient Futures to try to improve coordination between advocates for neglected beings and the AI space.
Iād be doing less good with my life if I hadnāt heard of effective altruism
My donations to effective charities are by far the most impactful thing Iāve ever done in my life, and that could not have happened without EA.
Organisations using Rethink Prioritiesā mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.
The only argument I can think of against this would be optics. To be appealing to the public and a broad donor base, orgs might want to get off of the train to crazytown before this stop. (I assume this is why GiveWell ignores animal effects when assessing their interventionsā impact, even though those swamp the effects on humans.) Even then, it would make sense to share these analyses with the community, even if they wouldnāt be included in public-facing materials.
I think most views where nonhumans are moral patients imply these tiny animals could matter. Like most people, I find the implications of this incredibly unintuitive, but I donāt think thatās an actual argument against the view. I think our intuitions about interspecies tradeoffs, like our intuitions about partiality towards friends and family, can be explained by evolutionary pressures on social animals such as ourselves, so we shouldnāt accord them much weight.
Hi guys, thanks for doing this sprint! Iām planning on making most of my donations to AI for Animals this year, and would appreciate your thoughts on these followup questions:
You write that āWe also think some interventions that arenāt explicitly focused on animals (or on non-human beings) may be more promising for improving animal welfare in the longer-run future than any of the animal-focused projects we consideredā. Which interventions, and for which reasons?
Would your tentative opinion be more bullish on AI for Animalsā movement-building activities than on work like AnimalHarmBench? Is there anything you think AI for Animals should be doing differently from what theyāre currently doing?
Do you know of anyone working (or interested in working) on the movement strategy research questions you discuss?
Do you have any tentative thoughts on how animal/ādigital mind advocates should think about allocating resources between (a) influencing the ātransformedā post-shift world as discussed in your post and (b) ensuring AI is aligned to human values today?
Depopulation is Bad
Assuming utilitarian-ish ethics and that the average person lives a good life, this follows.
The question gets much more uncertain once you account for wild animal effects, but it seems likely to me that the average wild animal lives a bad life, and human activity reduces wild animal populations, which supports the same conclusion.
This year I donated to the Arthropoda Foundation!
Thanks Jack! I agree that AIS is still far more funding constrained than it would be in an ideal world, and I still think E2G for AIS is very impactful. I just think other cause areas, including AI s-risks, are more neglected.