Great article! I have recently had success in reducing my intake of unhealthy snacks by setting a $20 fine (to be donated to an EA charity) for each time I ate one for a one-month period. This meant that I could easily get ‘back on the wagon’ by paying the fine, and continue to aim high. I imagine a similar system could be used to transition into veganism.
Slightly off-topic, but are you aware that there are brands of vegan ice cream?
I’m Daniel, a university student from Canberra studying artificial intelligence. I’m interested in going into FAI-related research.
I have not signed the GWWC pledge, and will very likely not while the pledge retains its current wording, but would sign if the proposed changes were made.
“Many think EA ideas argue for vegetarianism – but did anyone come to this conclusion who had previously been passionately carnivorous?”
I’m not sure what it means to be passionately carnivorous, but before I was exposed to EA ideas I ate animal products, enjoyed doing so, and did not anticipate stopping. I am now a vegan, and donate to non-human animal charities. My conversion to veganism was based partly on the moral arguments to do so, and partly on moral luck. I wouldn’t quite say that EA ideas argue for veganism (I think the “A” part suffices), but I would say that EA ideas give a strong argument for charities that promote reduction of animal product consumption.
This is plausibly just the typical mind fallacy, but I’ve always read these as more “being annoyed by fake moral sanctimony, and signalling opposition to it” than actually being pro-omnivory.
And if you are deontological in your thinking, the argument about moral uncertainty is pretty strong; a 10% chance (say) of committing murder sounds terrible. But for me personally, as I’ve become more consequentialist in my thinking (which EA has been a part of, though not the only part), it’s actually pushed me more and more pro-abortion.
I think this is missing the point of the post. I’m sure you are pretty consequentialist in your thinking, so am I. But are you certain that consequentialism is the correct moral theory? Such certainty seems implausible, there are lots of examples where consequentialism is in favour of things that seem crazy. If you do have some credence in moral theories that ban murder, and that include abortion as a case of murder, you are going to have to take that into account if you wish to act morally.
If your only point is that people with greater degrees of consequence should be more pro-abortion, then I would agree. However, I interpreted your comment as also saying or implying that you were, in fact, pro-abortion, which is of course different (and I apologise if you didn’t imply this).
I agree that the reasoning based on epsilon chance of a high multiplier is suspicious, for the reasons that you say. However, I think the pro-insect version is more likely to work out than the pro-human version. In the pro-insect version, you’re taking the moral value of humans as fixed, and taking the expectation of the moral value of insects, whereas in the pro-human version, you’re taking the moral value of insects as fixed, and taking the expectation of the moral value of humans. My uncertainty seems a lot closer to the first: I have a pretty good handle on what being a human is like, and how much I care about humans, but I’m not so sure about insects.
I agree that “I assign probability p that humans are 10^3 times as important as insects and probability q that humans are 10^10 times as important as insects” is logically equivalent to “I assign probability p that insects are 10^-3 times as important as humans and probability q that insects are 10^-10 times as important as humans”. However, when people turn these into the argument that “you should care about insects/humans much more than about humans/insects”, they’re implicitly doing an expected utility calculation.
In one version of the calculation, you’re saying that insect lives have utility 1, and human lives have utility 10^3 with probability p and 10^10 with probability q. When you take the expectation (for certain values of p and q), you end up with the human population being more important than the insect population.
In another version of the calculation, you’re saying that human lives have utility 1, and insect lives have utility 10^-3 with probability p and 10^-10 with probability q. Then, when you take the expectation (for values of p and q compatible with the pro-human conclusion above), you end up with the insect population being more important than the human population.
My point is that although both these probability assignments are compatible with the description “humans are 10^3 times as important with probability p and 10^10 times as important with probability q”, they are not equivalent distributions over utilities. Furthermore, I think my probability distribution looks more like the second than the first.
I plan on directing my entire donation budget this year to REG. I will make the donation by the end of October unless I am persuaded otherwise by then.
What was your final decision on this?
For example, it will consider some near-term challenges such as lethal autonomous weapons, and as well as some of the longer-term philosophical and practical issues surrounding the
You’ve missed the end of this sentence.
the sadistic conclusions removes any intuitive appeal immediately.
Note that some clever people disagree with this (http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/02/embracing-the-sadistic-conclusion/):
This is not the post I was planning to write. Originally, it was going to be a heroic post where I showed my devotion to philosophical principles by reluctantly but fearlessly biting the bullet on the sadistic conclusion. Except… it turns out to be nothing like that, because the sadistic conclusion is practically void of content and embracing it is trivial. [emphasis mine]
they both raised US$14.3/person contacted, while I raised US$14.0/person contacted
...but this number is sensitive to the number of people you contacted, because there’s diminishing marginal returns to contacting more people.
I think that this is a problem, but not necessarily as big a problem as you think it is. The two AMF fundraisers had very different numbers of people contacted (63 vs 149), and still had almost identical funding elicited per person contacted. My guess would be that the likelihood of someone donating is closely related to how well you know the person, and that that would be why additional people contacted would be less valuable. If this is right, and I just know fewer people than you do, then it could be that my marginal contactee was just as close to me as your marginal contactee is to you.
In particular, a better number would be to compare the amount you raised to the median amount raised by other fundraisers who also contacted their friends individually. Unfortunately I don’t have that number (yet).
Do you mean comparing my amount raised to the median amount raised by other fundraisers who contacted about as many people as I did? The problem with that is that it wouldn’t account for variation in how many people I’m close with. I’m not really sure how to get rid of this factor, except by giving many people the same instructions about what sort of person to contact, and seeing how well they do fundraising for REG and AMF.
Most of the money came from a few people who I would call semi-EAs – my impression was that they sort of knew about EA ideas, but that they weren’t part of the community
This is another aspect that could skew things. Many fundraisers don’t have access to a bunch of semi-EAs and it’s possible semi-EAs might go more for REG or other weird charities than others. It’s possible that you may have gotten more non-EAs to donate if the charity were AMF.
This is also an important factor. Actually, since the EA outreach pipeline tends to start by talking about effective global poverty/health interventions, my guess is that semi-EAs might also be more enthusiastic about AMF than REG, and that I just know atypical semi-EAs. In general, details about the friend group seem like they will impact how well fundraisers go.
If you do think your charity is much better, then it does offset a large decline in total money fundraised! And I agree that the drop-off is likely not that high.
Yeah, this is really the most important argument in favour of weird charity fundraisers. I see a lot of room for arguments (like yours) for something on the order of a 10% dropoff in money raised, but I think that this is good evidence against a >50% dropoff (which I think was a priori plausible).
One other metric that you could look at is proportion of people contacted who donate. This would be evidence of some kind of weirdness effect, but at the end of the day, $/person contacted is closer to what we care about. Still, I think it’s interesting to look at.
My proportion is 10/42=24%, Giles’ is 26/63=41%, and Peter’s is >33/149=22%. I don’t know that I would draw any conclusions from this, except that it makes the very similar $/person contacted numbers look much more coincidental.
[edit: rewording]
I wouldn’t expect my “running fundraisers for weird charities” post to be seen as weird by the standards of most EAs that I know, make me look like a jerk, or make any readers feel bad about themselves.
I think that the point about veganism doesn’t follow from the rest of your piece, and could well be true depending on the object-level details. In the case of weak convergence, no point will maximise both X and Y, but a set of points may well contain the maxima of both X and Y—in fact, if the set of points consists of the upper-right end of the ‘ellipse’, it could be that no other point does much better than anything in the set on X or Y. Therefore, even if the best intervention for X isn’t the best intervention for Y, it will be the case that the set of great interventions for X is almost the same as the set of great interventions for Y if X and Y are weakly correlated. Tying this back to veganism, it could well be that the set of vegan diets contain the best diet for animal suffering, the best diet for environmental impact, the best diet for tastiness, etc, and that vegan diets are better than all other diets on these metrics. Although on the object-level it seems unlikely that minimising animal suffering is correlated with tastiness in diets, it seems plausible enough that it is correlated with environmental impact.
You postulate that for people who aren’t EAs, this seems spammy. I would love it if that was the case! It would mean they were regularly exposed to such messages.
I don’t think that “spammy” just means “messages that the viewer often sees”. I can’t really put into words what I think it does mean, but if someone had a post like this about how the best Valentine’s Day gift was to donate to a fund that provided good architecture in cities, I would consider that spammy (unless it was really well-written, interesting, and not written by an organisation dedicated to promoting good architecture).
It was just accepted for publication to The Plain Dealer, the 16th largest newspaper in the US. They would be highly unlikely to accept anything their audience would find as spammy.
This is evidence, but my intuition is that it isn’t very strong. I know that some of the largest newspapers in Australia print things which I would think of as low-quality and bordering on spammy. I also find it plausible that the 16th largest newspaper in the US might occasionally have trouble getting content, and would have to accept unusually low quality content.
That being said, I also think it’s probable that different people have different criteria for what strikes them as spammy, and that there’s a significant proportion of people to whom this isn’t spammy.
Am interested.
According to Wikipedia, the national dietitians’ associations of the USA, Canada, and Australia claim that well-planned vegan diets are nutritionally adequate for everyone, while the German Society for Nutrition warns against it, especially for children, the elderly, and the pregnant. On balance, this is much more positive than I imagine their opinions would be on a carnivorous + supplementation diet.