emre kaplan🔸

Karma: 1,816

emre kaplan🔸May 1, 2024, 11:34 PM
17 points
1 ∶ 0
on: AMA: Lewis Bollard, Program Director of Farm Animal Welfare at OpenPhil
Many grantee organisations report the lessons they learnt to their donors. Open Philanthropy must have accumulated a lot of information on the best practices for animal welfare organisations. As far as I understand, grant makers are wary of giving object level advice and micromanaging grantees. On the other hand, many organisations already spend a lot of time trying to learn about the best (and worst) practices in other organisations. Could Open Phil animal welfare team prepare an anonymised write up about what their grantees report as the reasons for their successes and failures?

emre kaplan🔸Apr 26, 2024, 7:56 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Venky1024’s comment on: What is veganism anyway?
I believe we’re in agreement that the official definition of veganism is vague as you also use words like “ambiguity” or “unclear” while describing it. In my comment I’m stating that vagueness of that definition isn’t that much of a problem.
I’m also curious why do you think animal tested ingredient consumption is first-order harm whereas crop deaths are a second-order harm. I can see how tractors crushing animals might be accidental instead of intentional. But when I compare pesticides to animal testing, both of them seem to be instances of intentionally exposing animals to harmful chemicals to improve product quality.

emre kaplan🔸Apr 25, 2024, 7:54 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What is veganism anyway?
I think vagueness isn’t that much of a problem. Many useful categories are vague. Even murder and rape are vague. People can say “we don’t know the exact point where harm to animals becomes unacceptable. But morality is very difficult. That’s to be expected. We know some actions(such as eating animal products) are definitely too bad, for that reason we can confidently claim they are non-vegan.”
I think bigger problems with the consistency of veganism are:
-Some obviously vegan actions harm more animals than some obviously non-vegan actions.
-Some vegans cause more animal killings than some non-vegans.
-Veganism itself optimises for minimising animal product consumption. It doesn’t optimise for minimising killings caused or minimising harm caused or minimising the suffering in the world.
I think what happens is that human brain finds it much easier to attribute moral emotions like disgust and shame to physical objects. So our emotional reactions track “can I sustainably disgust this physical object” rather than “is this action causing the least harm possible”. If something can be completely eliminated it gets tabooed. On the other hand it’s unstable to wear clothes but also feel disgusted when someone buys way too many clothes. So you can’t create a taboo over clothing or vehicle use. I wrote more about this topic here.

emre kaplan🔸Apr 11, 2024, 4:21 PM
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🔸Apr 9, 2024, 7:58 PM
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”.

emre kaplan🔸Apr 8, 2024, 1:18 PM
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🔸Apr 6, 2024, 4:17 PM
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🔸Mar 17, 2024, 10:36 AM
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🔸Mar 17, 2024, 10:29 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’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🔸Mar 13, 2024, 5:55 PM
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🔸Mar 7, 2024, 9:25 PM
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🔸Mar 7, 2024, 9:23 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Constance Li’s comment on: What posts are you thinking about writing?
Thank you for all your feedback Constance!

emre kaplan🔸Mar 4, 2024, 10:35 AM
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🔸Mar 4, 2024, 10:27 AM
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🔸Mar 4, 2024, 10:17 AM
3 points
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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🔸Mar 4, 2024, 10:11 AM
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🔸Mar 4, 2024, 10:04 AM
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🔸Mar 4, 2024, 9:57 AM
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🔸Mar 4, 2024, 9:46 AM
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🔸Mar 3, 2024, 12:59 PM
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.