I started out as a animal advocate in 2001 at the age of 12. Nearly a decade later, I discovered effective altruism and decided to start down an earning to give career path as a physician. Currently, I own a health services business and donate my time and money to direct work in animal advocacy. You usually can find me at the Hive (formerly known as Impactful Animal Advocacy) slack community.
Constance Li
Karma: 1,166
It is a pretty uncomfortable problem and not one that I have been able to reconcile very well. One way around it is steering people to support global health/dev orgs that help people while not increasing meat consumption. An example is
FemaleFamily Empowerment Media, which improves openness and access to contraceptives in Nigeria. Another examples is the Beans is How Coalition, which aims to double worldwide bean consumption for the purpose of reducing hunger and increasing sustainability.
As economic growth in developing countries is generally correlated to increased meat consumption and the current trend in Africa (where Give Directly does cash transfers) is the rapid expansion of factory farming, how you factoring the welfare of these farmed animals into your decision-making?
Is there some sort of offset donation to animal/plant-based food charities you would consider making? Do you have a theory of change where economic growth in these regions will turn out to somehow benefit animals downstream?
Given that there are vastly more animals than humans in this world, and that effective farmed animal welfare interventions can have an enormous positive impact, have you considered directing more of your philanthropic efforts towards effective animal charities? You can see the support for the cost-effectiveness of these interventions in the recent post “Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare”?
AI for Animals Meetup SF
AI for Animals is Hiring a Program Lead
Hey if you want to learn more about the intersection of AI and animal welfare, I recommend you checking out the website https://www.aiforanimals.org/ and subscribing to the newsletter.
Glad you enjoyed it and sad you weren’t able to attend the retreat.
tbh, I was also quite tired after EAG and skipped out on some after conference events, which was quite suboptimal. Next year, I’m thinking about doing it before EAG and giving folks a 1-2 days of rest before EAG starts.
Hey Austin, thanks for reading this so thoroughly, making the suggestion to put it up on Manifund, and generously offering to contribute to retroactive funding. This seems like a great idea and I just made a grant request page. :)
AI, Animals, and Digital Minds 2024 - Retrospective
I really like your suggested post-EAG debate statement, Toby!
Other suggested debate topics:
1. Digital Minds will possess sentience or moral status
2. It is a moral obligation to develop protections for digital minds
Introducing Hive: A rebrand for Impactful Animal Advocacy
Hi Toby, thank you so much for writing a comprehensive review for this time sensitive opportunity.
For anyone interested in a different version of the suggested answers that Ben and Haven made that is more aimed at encouraging the adoption of on-farm monitoring systems in order to lay the groundwork for AI analysis for welfare metrics, please see this guide that I just wrote.
AI, Animals, and Digital Minds Conference 2024: Accepting applications and speaker proposals
Fish welfare would be a big factor in my model about the net utility of free malaria nets. However, it seems really hard to calculate because we don’t know the average net qualia of fish in these regions. If it is negative, then overfishing may be a positive thing for their welfare.
Yeah.. I think I agree. We have thought and re-thought enough about shrimps and it is now the time to ACT! Will change it in the post.
Thank you for your devotion to the maximum utils!
Had to google Naming What We Can first… love it!
You are absolutely right. I’ve adjusted the numbers in the post.
Thanks for catching that. I also saw there are a few (billion) more farmed shrimp to add in to those numbers. We have accordingly adjusted the post to convert estimates of [hours worked/human career] to [shrimps lost/year].
There is the meat eater problem where more animal lives would likely be lost by increasing the human population. It also seems much more cost effective per dollar to suffering spared to help animals and factory farming is spreading rapidly through Asia and Africa, making this a hingey time.