Agree with the first point, was going to go into that in more detail, but thought it would just make things more confusing to a general audience. So I just threw that under the bucket of “things covered by the arbitrarily shaving off 18 OOMs.” I talk more about this here https://benthams.substack.com/p/three-mistakes-in-three-mistakes?utm_source=publication-search
Even if you think conditional on preventing a catastrophe there’s a 99.9% chance we’d still go extinct later, before achieving some vast intergalactic future, that’s still only 3 OOMs.
Hey Vasco, always nice to hear from you!
I think most efforts to grow EA grow both Longtermist and non-Longtermist elements of EA. I do agree though that the Longtermist effects of animal welfare are much bigger than near-term benefits.
Yeah, it’s rough and there’s not a perfect method. You just need to use your best judgment. Taking into account moral uncertainty + interchangeability of money, I wouldn’t be that extreme, but I have some credence that something like that extreme of a tradeoff is right.
Don’t think we need one for those sorts of things, just like we don’t need a quantitative model suggesting, say, the odds of Vance being the next president are around 30%.
Oops, dumb, will fix.
I think we’ve talked elsewhere about why I don’t buy that soil nematodes etc make us totally clueless about which animal welfare interventions are good.