Deputy Director of Wild Animal Initiative
Cameron_Meyer_Shorb
Karma: 219
[Question] How do you decide how much to donate in “user fees” for free services?
Hi Abraham! Thanks for pointing out that it would be helpful to clarify what is meant by the tradeoff values.
I differ on this point:
if you’re just saying, with little basis, that a pig has 1⁄100 human moral worth, I don’t know how to evaluate it. It isn’t an argument. It’s just an arbitrary discount to make your actions feel justified from a utilitarian standpoint.
I think we should give Jeff the benefit of the doubt here. I don’t think his estimates are arbitrary. I think they are honest reflections of the conclusions he has come to given his experience and his understanding of the evidence.
It would be nice to hear more about Jeff’s rationale. But in terms of community norms, I’d like to keep space open for people who want to present novel arguments without having to exhaustively justify every premise.
[Question] Is there a central place for EA orgs to share lessons learned about operations?
Professional development resources for fundraisers: a few links
Thanks for this post, Max!
tl;dr: Lemme know if you have ideas for approaches to animal-inclusive AI that would also rank among the most promising ways to reduce human extinction risk from AI. I think they probably don’t be exist, but it’d be wicked cool if they did.
Most EAs working on AI safety are primarily interested in reducing the risk of human extinction. I agree that this is of astronomical importance, especially when you consider all the wild animal suffering that would continue in our absence.
Many things that would move us toward animal-inclusive AI would also help move us away from extinction risks. But I suspect the majority of those things, while helpful, would not be among the most helpful ways to reduce extinction risk. In other words, we should be wary suspicious convergence; “what is best for one thing is usually not the best for something else.”
I’m working on plans to do more to support a rigorous search for approaches to animal-inclusive AI (or approaches to advancing wild animal welfare science broadly) that would also rank among the most promising ways to reduce human extinction risk from AI. In the meantime, I’d encourage anyone interested in the broader subject to consider this narrower subset, and to reach out to me if they’re excited to work on it more (cameronms@wildanimalinitiative.org).
To be clear, I also think animal-inclusive AI is worth pursuing for its own sake (i.e., working on animal-inclusive AI seems likely to be among the most impactful things you can do to make the world a better place in the set of scenarios where humans don’t go extinct), and I’d be excited to see work on most of the approaches discussed above. In those cases—especially when building coalitions with people who might have different priorities—I think it’s useful to be transparent about the fact that what we’re doing is important, but we don’t think it’s one of the most promising ways to avoid human extinction.
I think veganism doesn’t represent a very good tradeoff, and I think we should put our altruistic efforts elsewhere.
For the sake of this comment thread, let’s assume that veganism is a substantially worse tradeoff than other altruistic efforts.
Personally, I think that’s likely to be true. For people (like me) who place a high likelihood on the sentience of farmed animals, it’s worth considering how the costs and benefits of going vegan compare to the costs and benefits of donating to a nonprofit that is attempting to end animal farming through systematic/institutional change (meat alternatives, corporate campaigns, legislative campaigns, etc.). Seems like those nonprofits are probably a lot more efficient at doing good for animals than I am.
However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we shouldn’t both go vegan and donate to highly cost-effective charities. Let’s use this comment thread to discuss why that might be.
Another kind of reason to do both: There is epistemic value to going vegan.
It’s legitimately hard to understand the experiences and needs of individuals that are different from us. Most of the time, it’s even harder than it needs to be, because we approach them with unfounded prejudices.
Going vegan might be a psychologically necessary step to considering animals’ experiences and needs in at least a somewhat objective manner.
(I’m hoping to elaborate on this later, and apologies for the doc-dump, but the elegantly argued and eminently readable John & Sebo 2019 does a great job elaborating on this point: https://jeffsebodotnet.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/consequentialism-and-nonhuman-animals-penultimate.pdf .)
Thanks so much for writing this, Jeff! I think we talked about this the first night we met. Since then, I’ve always appreciated your thoughtful objections to veganism. The carelessness with which so many people approach the question really bothers me. It’s a real treat to talk with an objector who takes the idea seriously and has really thought through their positions.
Of course, on the facts of the matter, I strongly disagree! There are several different kinds of reasons why. I’ll post them in separate comments in the hopes of keeping the conversation focused on one idea at a time. (If that’s not kosher on the EA Forum, I hope someone will let me know, and I won’t do it in the future.)
Hopefully Wild Animal Initiative will have more answers for you soon! We recently assembled an Academic Advisory Panel in part to solicit feedback on our publications when they don’t go through a formal peer-review process.
We’re still growing the panel, so please let us know if you or anyone you know might be interested in joining. https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/advisory-panel
One kind of reason to do both: It’s not a true tradeoff.
It’s easy to spend a lot of money on top-of-the-line vegan cheeses and meats. But it’s also quite feasible to meet most people’s dietary requirements with vegan foods that cost just as much as, or even less than, animal-based foods. (Shout out to my boi rice-and-beans.)
In that case, we’re not trading off dollars for dollars. We’re trading off time, effort, and comfort for dollars.
At some point, if you spend enough time on something, it might cut into your earning potential. But many of us have jobs that only allow us to work a certain number of hours per week anyway, or minds that only allow us to be focused and productive for a certain number of hours per week. For these people, it’s possible to spend additional time and effort without cutting into earning potential.
So the question is not “Can I do more good than veganism with my money?” but rather “Can I do more good than veganism with my time?” Not a lot of other volunteer opportunities give you the chance to spare multiple individuals from torture every year, so I think it’s likely still a good use of time.
(Though this obviously intersects with the other question of “Just how morally valuable is it to spare animals from factory farming?”)
[T]his is the main place where I think I differ from most ethical vegans: I think humans matter much more than these animals.
I agree that this is the biggest difference between you and most ethical vegans!
Let’s use this comment thread to discuss differences in estimates of the likelihood that nonhuman animals (or non-me humans) are sentient (where “sentient” means “having morally relevant subjective experiences such as the ability to feel pain”).
[Observations from inside the charity pipeline]
As Mikaela said, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has a lot of leverage to strategically diversify the effective animal advocacy movement:
The EA Animal Welfare and ACE Recommended Charity Fund sometimes act as a pipeline, where a nascent project will seek support from the EA Animal Welfare Fund before growing into a more established charity that receives support from the ACE Recommended Charity Fund. One example of this pipeline is Wild Animal Initiative, which has received EA Animal Welfare Fund grants since 2017 (under the name Wild Animal Suffering Research), and became an ACE Top Charity in 2020.
I’m lucky enough to work for Wild Animal Initiative, and I can confirm that the EA AWF’s support was essential to establishing enough of a track record that ACE could evaluate us. Without that funding, ACE just wouldn’t have much to evaluate, and whatever we might have accomplished could not have been accomplished nearly as professionally.
As a former donor to the EA AWF, it’s really important to me that it keep playing this role as the beginning of the high-impact project pipeline. So we’re taking care to design a fundraising strategy that allows the EA AWF to dial down their funding for us as soon as possible. Over the next 2-5 years, we plan to grow a donor base rooted more and more in the broader wildlife advocacy movement. We’ll need the EA AWF’s support to get there, but once we get there, we’re looking forward to freeing up more funding for fledgling ventures.
In the time since Abraham wrote this comment, Animal Charity Evaluators recommended one of the orgs he started as a Top Charity! So ACE definitely counts now, and Abe needs to update his resume.
I also think Abe was right to count ACE as working in wild animal welfare before, because their early explorations directly contributed to the formation of the field. For example, the intern that carried out their 2016 survey on attitudes toward wild animal welfare is now a researcher at Wild Animal Initiative. (You can see some of Luke Hecht’s recent work here.)
Hi Michael and Abraham!
The answer depends on which type of longtermism we’re talking about.
As an organization, Wild Animal Initiative is committed to the position that animals matter equally regardless of when they exist.
That is, we exist to help as many wild animals as we can as much as we can. All else equal, it doesn’t matter to us whether that happens in our lifetimes or in the long-term future, because it feels the same to the animals in either case. We’re not in the business of warm fuzzies—despite the warmth and fuzziness of many of our clients.
In practice, because there are so many wild animals in the far future, that leads us to think about the far future a lot. It’s the main reason we’re laser-focused on supporting the growth of a self-sustaining academic field dedicated to improving wild animal welfare. As far as we can tell, that currently seems like the most reliable vehicle for institutionalizing an ethical and scientific framework capable of continuously serving wild animals’ interests.
Several of our staff also believe that our decisions should primarily work backward from what we think would be best ~1000+ years from now. But we haven’t committed to that as an organization.
This position has been called “strong longtermism.” It’s something we plan to consider further.
Even though it’s not our official position, strong longtermists might still choose to donate to WAI—because they believe we have the most promising theory of change, because they believe we’re the most funding-constrained of available longtermist projects, or for other reasons.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from anyone who has ideas on what we might do differently if we were to adopt a strong longtermist position.
Great points, Trammell! Thank you for this post.
Your example comparing the peaceful-psychology hypothesis and the violent-psychology hypothesis is effective, and it stands on its own. However, I don’t think it’s the best way to represent Steven Pinker’s argument, and I think representing that argument more accurately leads in some interesting new directions.
As I understand him, Pinker does not argue humans have a peaceful psychology. Rather, he acknowledges that there are many aspects of our psychology that predispose us to violence, and he attributes the historical decline in violence primarily to social developments, e.g., establishing trade networks, accumulating social norms, elevating women’s power in society, etc. These changes in society have built stronger and stronger defenses against our violent instincts, which have remained relatively unchanged over the course of human history.
Stating the hypothesis this way raises the question of how far we expect this trend to continue. We would be much more interested in saving a world (“World 1”) where society continues to grow increasingly less violent and more compassionate, and substantially less interested in saving a world (“World 2″) where that trend stops, or where it doesn’t go far enough fast enough to prevent huge new sources of suffering.
Moral circle expansion is a strategy to make our world more like the first one and less like the second one. Unlike the strategies discussed in this post, it doesn’t deal with affecting the likelihood of extinction scenarios. Rather, it tries to directly influence the speed and direction of the trends that determine the expected value of the long-term future (a.k.a. it tries to shift us to a world more worth saving). For what it’s worth, I think Sentience Institute is doing some really valuable research on this topic.
tl;dr: I don’t think “slow and steady” growth is a problem, only “slow and unsteady” growth.
speed of hiring—an organization can only spend money to hire and expand so quickly and maybe they are already saturated
Actually, I don’t think expansion speed alone should be considered a factor in room for more funding. If there are no mission constraints or relative timing constraints, should it matter to me when the organization spends my money? If not, why not donate now so they’ll have more to use once they are no longer saturated?
I was trying to define operational constraints more narrowly, to include only the kind of growth that actually threatens the effectiveness of the org. I’m not sure exactly what this would look like. Perhaps if an org currently has promising programs, but is growing in a way that I think will create problems for them, then I would worry they won’t be effective by the time they are no longer saturated.
My guess is that the EA AWF’s grantees almost always have room for more funding. In addition to the reasons I think effective orgs generally tend to have room for more funding, the EA AWF does an excellent job highlighting neglected orgs in neglected areas.
I think the grantees least likely to have room for more funding are individuals, teams of less than 4 people, and high-impact projects within lower-impact organizations. But these are also the cases where it tends to be easiest to cold-call the grantee and get the full answer in a quick call. For example, an independent researcher could tell you “I’m doing this alongside my PhD so I really can’t actually take on more projects” or “My last grant just ran out so I can keep working on this new project as long as I can pay for it.”
Note that my reasoning might be motivated by the fact that I work for an org that receives substantial support from the EA AWF (Wild Animal Initiative), and part of my job includes fundraising. Hopefully my perspective contributes more than my bias detracts!
Funding is also a major constraint in wild animal welfare.
At Wild Animal Initiative, our core objective is to establish a self-sustaining academic field dedicated to improving wild animal welfare. This welfare focus is a major paradigm shift from the naturalness focus that currently dominates conservation biology and related disciplines.
That means one major constraint is the availability of interested scientists. Many researchers need to be persuaded before they can develop relevant projects.
However, we’ve been finding that we consistently underestimate the number of scientists who don’t need any persuasion at all. Plenty of people pursue careers in wildlife sciences because they love wildlife the same way they love their pets: they just want animals to be happy. Then there are the people who pursued careers in wildlife sciences for other reasons, but devoted themselves to helping them after seeing wild animals suffer in their labs or in the wild. (One such researcher was so radicalized by her experiences studying flying snake biomechanics that she eventually became our executive director.)
Funding is the main thing keeping these scientists from researching the highest-priority wild animal welfare questions. Often, they have to put aside their welfare concerns to focus on projects that appeal to traditional conservation funders. Sometimes they manage to fund welfare research by appealing to funders’ other priorities. These compromises tend to lead to suboptimal projects (e.g., exploring high-cost ways to improve rare species’ welfare, rather than low-cost ways to improve common species’ welfare). And even the best welfare projects funded by traditional funders tend to have limited impact, because the conservation spin makes it harder for other scientists to recognize the work and contribute to a cohesive research agenda.
More funding would give these scientists the support they need to come out of the woodwork. Eventually, Wild Animal Initiative would like to start a research fund we can use to issue calls for proposals on key themes in wild animal welfare. We’re also really excited about the possibility of the EA Animal Welfare fund supporting academic wild animal welfare research. It’s a big enough space that we’re years away from funging each other, but it’s still worth noting that the EA AWF will be a better funder for many projects that WAI could be, including:
Small scoping projects
Projects that need funding quickly
Projects outside the natural sciences, especially policy and social science projects
In some cases, I am wary of us funging Open Phil or OWA or some other funder. E.g., potentially at times with some corporate chicken campaigns in a neglected region, or even with larger promising groups based in Europe or the US.
Because Lewis Bollard is both a manager of the EA AWF and a program officer at Open Philanthropy, does his involvement reduce the likelihood of funging with Open Phil?
Here are the main reasons I find it overwhelmingly likely that mammals and birds (and very likely that fish) have morally relevant subjective experiences:
Behavior. They respond to potentially-painful things in almost all the same ways humans do (except for verbally articulating their experiences in a language I understand).
Evolution. The best evolutionary rationale I can think of for why humans have subjective experiences is that that might be a good way of motivating us to avoid experiences that tend to be bad for our reproductive fitness. (Note that this evolutionary story doesn’t suggest a strong connection between sentience and intelligence. In fact, it might suggest that less intelligent species are more reliant on strong subjective experiences to learn and motivate their behavior.) That rationale would apply to almost all mobile creatures (but much less so for mostly immobile ones like mussels or plants).
Here are the main reasons I doubt that mammals, birds, or fish have morally relevant subjective experiences:
Inaccessibility. Subjective experiences are, by their nature, personal. So I can’t directly observe these experiences in others. This applies to other humans’ sentience.
Programmability. For any given behavior, I can imagine a computer program that responds to the same stimulus in the same way without having a morally relevant subjective experience. This applies to other adult humans’ sentience somewhat, but not quite as well, because we seem to have pretty similar machinery. It applies more so to babies, children, or other humans with brains that are more different than mine.
Radical uncertainty. I really don’t have a good idea of what sentience consists of, what anatomy is needed to support it, or why it evolved. This applies to other humans’ sentience.
In the end, while there are good reasons to be uncertain about the sentience of other species, these reasons are at least somewhat applicable to other humans, too. So my uncertainty about the sentience of other vertebrate species isn’t much more than an order of magnitude higher than my uncertainty about the sentience of other humans.