I’m a Senior Researcher for Rethink Priorities, a Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, a Director of the Animal Welfare Economics Working Group, the Treasurer for the Insect Welfare Research Society, and the President of the Arthropoda Foundation. I work on a wide range of theoretical and applied issues related to animal welfare. You can reach me here.
Bob Fischer
Karma: 4,418
Great questions, Vaipan. To your first question, the short answer is “Yes.” We can’t say much about our efforts in that direction, but we’re certainly keen to have broad influence! To your second question, we’ve received positive reviews of our work from several people at OP and have had lots of productive discussions about the place of risk aversion in resource allocation. However, we can’t comment on OP’s internal decision-making.
AMA: Rethink Priorities’ Worldview Investigation Team
Hi Arturo. I’m not sure what you have in mind here, but it sounds like you may be missing one of the two ways of thinking about the moral parliament in this tool. First, as you seem to be suggesting, we could think of a group of people in an organization as a moral parliament. Then, our tool helps them decide how to allocate resources. Second, we could think of any single individual as composing a moral parliament, where each worldview to which you assign some credence is represented by some number of delegates (and more delegates = higher credence). Interpreted in this second way, a moral parliament isn’t a literal moral parliament but, rather, a way of modeling moral uncertainty. Does that help?
Taking Uncertainty Seriously (or, Why Tools Matter)
Thanks for your feedback, Stan. The tool does indeed capture the diminishing marginal cost-effectiveness of projects; you’re right that it leads to more diversification. By default this setting is on, but you can change how steeply cost-effectiveness diminishes or erase them altogether (see this part of the intro video, and this of the longer features video).
Second, I should just mention that the Moral Parliament Tool is especially valuable for groups because of the methods we offer at the end for reaching an allocation decision. One of our aims is to make it clear that the work isn’t done once you know the distribution of views in your group: you still need to pick a method for moving from that distribution to an allocation, with significant variation in the outcomes depending on the method you select. We hope that flagging this can help teams deliberate about their collective decision-making practices.
Thanks, Vasco! If you’re completely certain about the relevant questions, then you’re right that this tool won’t inform your personal allocations. Of course, it’s an open question whether that level of confidence is warranted—granting, of course, that this depends partly on your metaethical views, as it’s much more reasonable to be highly confident about your own values than about objective moral norms, if any there are. Still, we hope that a tool like this can be useful for folks like you when they’re coordinating with others. And independently of all that, the tool can serve people with even low levels of uncertainty, as they may uncover various surprising implications of their views.
Rethink Priorities’ Moral Parliament Tool
Rethink Priorities’ Portfolio Builder Tool
An Introduction to the CRAFT Sequence
Rethink Priorities’ Digital Consciousness Project Announcement
Great question, Caroline! We think there’s quite a lot of room right now. We could easily grant out ~$100K per year for the next couple of years; and as the field grows, we would expect to be able to grant out two or three times that annually. However, even relatively small amounts can be useful. Funding a master’s student in the US, for instance, often costs less than $35K per year and some studies can cost roughly the same amount. So, every little bit helps!
Just to clarify: the problem is that we don’t know what is and isn’t torture. Is freezing insects the humane way to kill them—or is it a slow and painful way for them to die? The default view among entomologists is the former, but there are lots of physiological considerations that point in the other direction. I think you’re assuming that we know a lot more than we do about how to improve the lives of insects on farms given the options available.
Hi Henry. I think you’re running together the Moral Weight Project, where your criticism about wide confidence intervals is fair, and the kind of empirical work that welfare scientists do, where that criticism isn’t fair.
Here’s a concrete example of what welfare science can do. We might have thought that the most humane way to kill insects is by grinding them, as that’s likely to lead to instaneous death. However, we now know that grinding often does not kill instantaneously. So, insofar as insects matter, it’s important to specify the exact conditions where grinding does and doesn’t leave animals mangled but still alive. Likewise, it’s important that advocates don’t start pushing for practices that are intuitively better for animals but aren’t actually better. Welfare science can prevent people from making mistaken recommendations. It can also help identify the best recommendations.
Granted, many worthwhile causes are funding-constrained. However, our view is both that it’s especially hard to fund empirical research and that it’s especially important to fund it, as it’s essential to improving industry practices. Understandably, others may have different priorities, but after thinking long and hard about the various strategic considerations, this is where we land.
Good question, Michael. Yes, we’re open to funding research on other arthropods. For now, the best way to ensure that there’s a stable field of insect of welfare science seems to be to back work on farmed insect welfare. But as that changes, funding priorities will change too.
Help Fund Insect Welfare Science
Good question, Keyvan. This was pragmatic: our main goal was to make a point about welfare ranges, not p(sentience), so we wanted to discuss things that way in the key takeaways. But knowing people would want a single number per species to play with in models, we figured we should give people placeholders that are already adjusted.
Thanks for your discussion of the Moral Weight Project’s methodology, Carl. (And to everyone else for the useful back-and-forth!) We have some thoughts about this important issue and we’re keen to write more about it. Perhaps 2024 will provide the opportunity!
For now, we’ll just make one brief point, which is that it’s important to separate two questions. The first concerns the relevance of the two envelopes problem to the Moral Weight Project. The second concerns alternative ways of generating moral weights. We considered the two envelopes problem at some length when we were working on the Moral Weight Project and concluded that our approach was still worth developing. We’d be glad to revisit this and appreciate the challenge to the methodology.
However, even if it turns out that the methodology has issues, it’s an open question how best to proceed. We grant the possibility that, as you suggest, more neurons = more compute = the possibility of more intense pleasures and pains. But it’s also possible that more neurons = more intelligence = less biological need for intense pleasures and pains, as other cognitive abilities can provide the relevant fitness benefits, effectively muting the intensities of those states. Or perhaps there’s some very low threshold of cognitive complexity for sentience after which point all variation in behavior is due to non-hedonic capacities. Or perhaps cardinal interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible. And so on. In short, while it’s true that there are hypotheses on which elephants have massively more intense pains than fruit flies, there are also hypotheses on which the opposite is true and on which equality is (more or less) true. Once we account for all these hypotheses, it may still work out that elephants and fruit flies differ by a few orders of magnitude in expectation, but perhaps not by five or six. Presumably, we should all want some approach, whatever it is, that avoids being mugged by whatever low-probability hypothesis posits the largest difference between humans and other animals.
That said, you’ve raised some significant concerns about methods that aggregate over different relative scales of value. So, we’ll be sure to think more about the degree to which this is a problem for the work we’ve done—and, if it is, how much it would change the bottom line.
Nope, not assuming neartermism. The report has the details. Short version: across a range of decision theories, chickens look really good.
That said, I totally agree that from a purely conceptual perspective, we should “be more open-minded about how we should think of the different ‘buckets’ in a Worldview-Diversified portfolio, and cautious of completely dismissing common-sense priorities (even as we give significant weight and support to a range of theoretically well-supported counterintuitive cause areas).”
Excellent question, Ian! At a high level, I’d say that moral uncertainty has made me much more inclined to care about having an overlapping consensus of reasons for any important decision. Equivalently, I want a diverse set of considerations to point in the same direction before I’m inclined to make a big change. That’s how I got into animal work in the first place. It’s good for the animals, good for human health, good for long-term food security, good for the environment, etc. There are probably lots of other impacts too, but that’s the first one that comes to mind!