emre kaplan

• emre kaplan 11 Apr 2024 16:21 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Julia_Wise’s comment on: Deon­tolog­i­cal Con­straints on An­i­mal Products

  Thank you. Particularly the section with “It’s typically legal for children of any age to work for their parents’ business.” is new to me. I will replace the examples.

• emre kaplan 9 Apr 2024 19:58 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Deon­tolog­i­cal Con­straints on An­i­mal Products

  My understanding is that there are often minimum age limits for minor employment with a blanket ban below a certain age. When I use the expression “child labour”, I don’t mean 17 years olds. But you’re right that my phrasing isn’t precise there. I also agree people won’t mind children selling lemonades on their own. But in my conversations there was a general agreement that you shouldn’t make your 10 years old child work full-time and you absolutely shouldn’t employ any kid of that age as an employer.

  Even less controversially, since there is agreement that early children’s rights legislation was way below the acceptable standard, it serves as an example for “getting someone to do something less bad but still forbidden”.

Deon­tolog­i­cal Con­straints on An­i­mal Products

• emre kaplan 8 Apr 2024 13:18 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: GraceAdams’s comment on: Con­sid­er­ing pledg­ing but haven’t? Help us un­der­stand!

  If taking a salary cut is considered as honest fulfilment of the GWWC pledge, I’m willing to take the pledge.

• emre kaplan 6 Apr 2024 16:17 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Con­sid­er­ing pledg­ing but haven’t? Help us un­der­stand!

  I work in an EA-funded non-profit. It seems inefficient to donate my income instead of taking a salary cut.

• emre kaplan 17 Mar 2024 10:36 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno’s comment on: Un­flat­ter­ing as­pects of Effec­tive Altruism

  Thanks, many websites seem to report this without the qualifier “per quarter”, which confused me.

• emre kaplan 17 Mar 2024 10:29 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Un­flat­ter­ing as­pects of Effec­tive Altruism

  Where does the “$200/​user/​year” figure come from? They report $68.44 average revenue per user for the US and Canada in their 2023 Q4 report.

• emre kaplan 13 Mar 2024 17:55 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: #182 – Com­par­ing the welfare of hu­mans, chick­ens, pigs, oc­to­puses, bees, and more (Bob Fischer on the 80,000 Hours Pod­cast)

  This was super informative for me, thank you.

  I’m confused by this section in this interview:
  

  “Well, the simplest toy example is just going to be, imagine that you have some assessment that says, I think chickens are in a really bad state in factory farms, and I think that if we move layer hens from battery cages into a cage-free environment, we make them 40% better off. And I think that after doing this whole project — whatever the details, we’re just going to make up the toy numbers — I think that chickens have one-tenth of the welfare range of humans.

  So now we’ve got 40% change in the welfare for these chickens and we’ve got 10% of the welfare range, so we can multiply these through and say how much welfare you’d be getting in a human equivalent for that benefit to one individual. Then you multiply the number of individuals and you can figure out how much benefit in human units we would be getting.”

  It doesn’t seem to me that this follows. Let’s assume the “typical” welfare range for chickens is −10 to 10. Let’s also assume that for humans it’s −100 to 100. This is how I interpret “chickens have 10% of the welfare range of the humans”. Let’s also assume moving from cage to cage-free eliminates 50% of the suffering. We still don’t know whether that’s a move from −10 to −5 or −6 to −3. We also don’t know how to place QALYs within this welfare range. When we save a human, should we assume their welfare to be 100 throughout their life?

  This also makes it even more crucial to provide a tight technical definition for welfare range so that scientists can place certain experiences within that range.

• emre kaplan 7 Mar 2024 21:25 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ian Turner’s comment on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Yeah, I think so.

• emre kaplan 7 Mar 2024 21:23 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Constance Li’s comment on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Thank you for all your feedback Constance!

• emre kaplan 4 Mar 2024 10:35 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: emre kaplan’s comment on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Assume that an agent A is doing something morally wrong, eg. fighting in a violent unjust war. You don’t have power to stop the war altogether, but you can get the relevant state sign an agreement against chemical weapons and at least prevent the most horrific forms of killings. What could be deontological restrictions on negotiating with wrongdoers? My preliminary conclusion: It’s good to negotiate for outcomes that are ex-ante Pareto superior even if they don’t cease the constraint violations.

• emre kaplan 4 Mar 2024 10:27 UTC

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: emre kaplan’s comment on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  What might be the deontological constraints violated by animal product consumption and how serious are they. There is a meme among animal advocates that all animal product consumption is murder. For that reason, it’s morally forbidden to ask people to reduce their animal product consumption since it’s akin to asking them to reduce the murder they commit.

  There are also some instances of doing harm where asking for reduction is totally permissible according to common sense morality, such as asking people to reduce their carbon emissions or their consumption of products made by slaves. I want to look more into whether murder comparison is really apt.

• emre kaplan 4 Mar 2024 10:17 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: emre kaplan’s comment on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Short thoughts on whether spreading the concept of veganism could be in tension with the principle “love the sinner, hate the sin”. Veganism might implicitly create the category of non-vegans, and might make the activists see the world in terms of “sinners vs. innocents”.

• emre kaplan 4 Mar 2024 10:11 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: emre kaplan’s comment on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Thoughts on the idea that “Working for institutional change is far more effective than working for individual change in animal advocacy”. How strong is the evidence behind that statement, in which contexts it might be wrong?

• emre kaplan 4 Mar 2024 10:04 UTC

  10 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: emre kaplan’s comment on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Thoughts on how to resolve the tensions between being maximally honest vs running a coalition that unites different stakeholders that have different positions on the topic. Being maximally honest requires saying the things you believe as much as possible. Running a coalition requires acting inside the common ground, and not illegitimately seizing the platform to promote your specific position on the matter.

• emre kaplan 4 Mar 2024 9:57 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: emre kaplan’s comment on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Empirical research I would like to see in animal advocacy. Primarily to 1. have more robust estimates of impact in animal advocacy 2. Most research in animal advocacy is understandably driven by donor needs. I would like to list some questions that would be more decision-relevant for the animal advocacy organisations(when to campaign, how to campaign, which targets to select etc.).

• emre kaplan 4 Mar 2024 9:46 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Thanks for this, I had a couple of things listed out. This looks like a nice way to prioritise them. I will list some ideas here.

• emre kaplan 3 Mar 2024 12:59 UTC

  12 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: weeatquince’s comment on: This is why we can’t have nice laws

  I can’t speak for Lewis but as an animal advocate running an organisation, my bigger concern is that politicisation is irreversible and destroys option value.

• emre kaplan 28 Feb 2024 18:19 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Offset­ting is more ex­pen­sive than it’s assumed

  Thanks for this comment, it felt awkward to include all veto-players in Shapley value calculation while writing the post, now I’m able to see why. For offsetting we’re interested in making every single individual weakly better off in expectation compared to the counterfactual where you don’t exist/​don’t move your body etc. so that no one can complain about your existence. So instances of doing harm can only be offset by doing good. Meanwhile, Shapley doesn’t distinguish between doing/​allowing, therefore it assigns credit to everyone who could have prevented an outcome even if they haven’t done any good.

Offset­ting is more ex­pen­sive than it’s assumed