Thank you so much for this research. Is there a more intuitive way to interpret SMD values? For example, how many standard deviations is an average vegetarian away from the average person in the general population?
emre kaplanšø
Karma: 1,505
What does EA AWF think about publishing annual impact reports reporting the outcomes of its previous grants? I understand how this might be much more difficult than publishing an impact report for a single organisation. But as it stands, donating to EA AWF requires a lot of trust in fund managers and EA movement as there is little data available on the impact of previous grants. I care a lot about the growth of this fund and Iād have much easier time recommending this fund to potential donors if they could learn more about its past impact.
Thank you for writing this. I really appreciate EAās focus on highlighting people doing the right thing out of good judgment. Normally people tend to focus on selflessness, courage and hard work instead of good judgment when they think of praiseworthy figures. These are also pretty important but itās nice to learn more about people succeeding in this overlooked requirement for doing good.
I thought about this question over the last few months while drafting our strategy and vision. A few thoughts and observations:
Some other EA organizations also seem to have adopted directional visions instead of static visions describing an ideal world. 80k had this in their 2014 business model:
āOur aim is to have the biggest possible social impact.āand they currently have this more detailed blog post about the meaning of social impact.
2022 CEA:
āCEAās overall aim is to do the most we can to solve pressing global problems ā like global poverty, factory farming, and existential risk ā and prepare to face the challenges of tomorrow.āWhat I primarily need from a vision statement is to succinctly and clearly communicate my goal to my team, supporters, and the general public. The problem with static vision statements is that they are unable to properly communicate what we are trying to do.
Making the ideal world come sooner or making it more likely to come is only one part of doing good. Another important part of doing good is affecting non-ideal worlds by making them less bad or making the worst futures less likely. It becomes more difficult to explain my focus on harm-mitigation with a static vision statement, because in many cases harm-mitigation doesnāt obviously make the ideal world come sooner. I think harm mitigation is worthwhile even if it has zero impact on when the ideal world comes.
On the other hand, one main distinction that both the general public and animal advocates are primarily interested in is whether the organization is against all animal farming or not. Directional vision statements make your position on this unclear. When you say āIām trying to do the most good for the animalsā, people(both mainstream public and animal advocates) keep asking you āI donāt get it, are you a vegan organisation or not?ā.
Pretty much all animal advocacy organizations I know of have static vision statements describing an ideal world. Iām still confused about what is the best way to proceed here.
I appreciate the correction. When I said āI generally feel much more comfortable standing behind Givewellās estimatesā that was for their main page recommendations. I currently wonāt prioritise reviewing these BOTECS in detail in the short term but as a future exercise I will look into the linked analyses and compare them to animal welfare ones.
Some other factors not mentioned here but I sometimes think about:
-PETA used to do welfare campaigns and proudly own up their work on welfare campaigns when they talk about their history. But they stopped doing welfare campaigns around 10 years ago and even published public statements against some of the initiatives. I keep wondering whether that has anything to do with EA entering into space, refusing to fund PETA, and PETA withdrawing from welfare work to differentiate itself from welfare campaigning organisations in response. That would reduce cost-effectiveness of welfare campaigns significantly.
-One part I often see missing from human-animal comparisons is that animal welfare work prevents very extreme types suffering that would be classified as torture in human contexts. If I were to choose between extending a human life for 50 years versus preventing a person from suffering for one full year in a wire coffin, I would choose the latter. Similarly choosing between preventing 20.000 years of non-stop chicken torture vs. saving a human life is a lot different from saving the lives of 20.000 chickens versus saving the life of a human being. I think $5000 is currently able to fund alleviating 40000 years of chicken suffering by about half.
-Animals suffer from acts of deliberate violence. If acts of violence are also axiologically bad in themselves than there are more reasons to prevent violence than prevent deaths due to neglect. I donāt endorse this position but I think it is aligned with folk ethics. People are willing to spend much more on preventing murders than preventing deaths due to natural causes.
-In animal welfare CEAs, itās often assumed that advocacy speeds up eventual progress by 10 years. I think thatās a bit short. Hereās one data point from France:
From 1997 to 2017, the number of hens in cages was reduced by 10 million hens in 20 years. In 2017, Open Philanthropy came in. After that, the number of hens in cages was reduced by 20 million hens in 7 years. If the rate of decline had remained constant, that reduction would have happened in 40 years instead.
-If weāre in the business of speculating about sociological side effects of interventions, many animal activists like arguing that violence against animals is breeding ground for all kinds of violence. Calling people ācockroachesā or āratsā is an important part of legitimising violence. I donāt like this type of arguments as they can be used to justify any type of intervention. But I think at the very least this should serve as an example to be wary of this kind of hardly falsifiable arguments.
This seems to be a representative publicly available estimate from 4 years ago by Lewis Bollard:
āThis is a major question for us, and one we continue to research. Our current very rough estimate is that our average $ spent on corporate campaigns and all supporting work (which is ~40% of our total animal grant-making) achieves the equivalent of ~7 animals spared a year of complete suffering. We use this a rough benchmark for BOTECs on new grants, and my best guess is this reflects roughly the range we should hope for the last pro-animal dollar. ā
I think several more up to date estimates will be available soon.
For advocacy evaluation, a concrete area for improvement is the following. Sauliusās analysis has a really nice section titled āWays this estimate could be misleadingā. Other advocates cite concerns similar to those when they argue against corporate welfare campaigns. They usually donāt have empirical evidence, but I donāt have super strong evidence to show them wrong either. Iām not very happy about that.
Unitarian views are actually pretty common in the field. Itās hard to have all three of these:
There is no moral hierarchy between humans, no matter what their mental capacities are.
Species-membership itself is merely genetics and itās morally irrelevant. What morally matters is other morally relevant capacities like sentience, consciousness, mental capacities etc.
There is some kind of moral hierarchy between humans and animals.
Disclaimer: Iām funded by EA for animal welfare work.
Some thoughts:
a. So much of the debate feels like a debate on identities and values. Iād really love to see people nitpicking into technical details of cost-effectiveness estimates instead.
b. I think itās worth reminding that animal welfare interventions are less cost-effective than they were when Simcikas conducted his analysis.
c. I generally feel much more comfortable standing behind Givewellās estimates but Givewell doesnāt analyse cost-effectiveness of advocacy work. My biggest misgivings about cost-effectiveness estimates are due to the difficulty of assessing advocacy work. I think we should make a lot more progress on this.
d. People seem to keep forgetting that uncertainty cuts both ways. If the moral worth of animals is too uncertain, that is also a reason against confidently dismissing them.
e. I donāt think we have made much progress on the question of āHow much important is cage to cage-free transition for a chicken in terms of human welfare?ā. I donāt think Rethink Priorities Welfare ranges answer that question. In general Iām confused about the approach of trying to find overall welfare capacities of different species rather than just focusing on comparing specific experiences of different individuals. In RPās report, hereās how the question of welfare comparison was addressed:
āI estimated the DALY equivalent of a year spent in each type of pain assessed by the Welfare Footprint Project by looking at the descriptions of and disability weights assigned to various conditions assessed by the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019 and comparing these to the descriptions of each type of pain tracked by the Welfare Footprint Project.ā
I think this is the core question on this issue and it merits a much longer and thorough analysis. I would love to see a team of biologists, animal behaviour experts and human health experts coming together to produce a more detailed report on this.
f. I think there should be more concrete examples for PR costs of animal welfare work. Animal welfare has been around for sometime and I donāt see that it has created notorious enemies for EA that try to drag down the movement. On the contrary it has even brought in new donors for some of the non-animal welfare parts of the movement(The Navigation Fund). EA-supported interventions on animal welfare are generally pretty moderate and popular. Cage-free referendums were always won by over 60% support(78% support in Massachusetts!). End The Cage Age petition got 1.4 million signatures in the EU. EA-supported NƤhtamatud Loomad got the NGO of the year award from Estonian president. Animal welfare work has its enemies, but they donāt seem to have affected EA that much.
g. On the contrary I found animal welfare quite useful for EA community building. Open Philanthropy donating an additional 5 million dollars to AMF doesnāt create new entry opportunities to EA. Whereas many of the EA organisers in Turkey got involved in the movement through the local EA supported animal advocacy organisation. Animal advocacy offers localised, effective and non-monetary ways to contribute. That is pretty useful in low trust or middle income countries.
But overall I think animal welfare spending should be evaluated primarily according to its impact on animals. If someone thinks that some positive or negative side-effect is significant enough they should concretely show it and provide an estimate for it.
h. I feel similarly about ripple effects. If someone is attempting to maximise that kind of outcome, they should choose an intervention that maximises ripple effects. Otherwise both animal advocacy work and global health work have loads of side effects on peopleās values, ideas, population growth, economic growth and itās an extremely ambitious effort to sum these all up and have a verdict on the overall direction of them. Iām also surprised that people think animal advocacyās effect is isolated on animals only. Itās a mass communications work that leaves an impact on millions of people. That is a whole load of ripples.
āI do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering.ā
I was responding to my interpretation of the sentence above. I agree that itās a common position to assign infinitely higher importance to saving a human life compared to preventing any amount of animal suffering. My understanding of the quote above was that you made an even stronger claim since the expression is āany amount of human sufferingā, which should include very low amounts of human suffering.
But I still think folk ethics on this issue is overconfident and doesnāt take moral uncertainty properly into account. I also think that kind of incommensurability claims face other more general theoretical problems. āSavingā a life is just another expression for extending it, since no intervention makes people immortal. That position would claim 0,0000000001% increase in the chance of prolonging a human life by one day is more important than preventing 1000000000 animals to be born into torture.
I think this level of incommensurability is both contradictory with folk ethics(most people I speak with agree that preventing animal torture is more important than preventing mild human headache) and itās a pretty confident view that assigns a very low weight to the animalsā interests. Do you think our reasoning in moral philosophy and understanding of animal biology is reliable enough to be that confident?
Hereās my understanding of the current state of evidence, keep in mind that I am not a researcher or grantmaker:
To my knowledge there is no scientifically rigorous experiment showing that some intervention has a statistically significant effect on the number of vegans.
Vegan education organisations also donāt tend to report the number of counterfactual vegans they create, to some extent because of measurement difficulties.
My guess is that most effective ways(having conversations about veganism with people who trust you) of spreading veganism canāt be funded to scale up.
Probably education initiatives produce small effects but we donāt have sufficiently powered studies to catch these effects. So we have very little data to compare vegan education initiatives to each other.
Brigitte GothiĆØre, SĆ©bastian Arsac and Marek VorÅ”ilka
ChatGPT seems to have taken it from the training data, without much change. I will replace the translation with this one.
Do you currently think non-human animals are replaceable in a way humans arenāt? Can a hedonist argue for that claim consistently?
What keeps you going when you are at your lowest?
In your previous writing on Animal Liberation, you state:
āWith the benefit of hindsight, I regret that I did allow the concept of a right to intrude into my work so unnecessarily at this point; it would have avoided misunderstanding if I had not made this concession to popular moral rhetoric.ā
What do you currently think about using rights and justice jargon when advocating for animals? John Stuart Mill is currently regarded as an early proponent of several movements for rights without much controversy. He often made use of the terms ārightā and ālibertyā in his writings. On the other hand the word ārightā is very loaded in animal advocacy world, with some insisting on a very specific, strictly deontological interpretation of the word. Should people who care about animal welfare dispense with the term ārightsā or should they push for a more generic understanding of the term(e.g. fundamental interests that should be protected by the state) and keep using it?
In your interviews, you tend to offer bullet-biting, pure utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. What do you think about the concept of moral uncertainty, and how does it affect your decision-making? Do you sometimes consider providing answers that give credence to other moral theories in your responses?
You are both an academic philosopher and a public advocate for several causes. How do you balance the requirements of these two roles? Academic philosophy requires one to follow the arguments to their conclusions, no matter how controversial they are. This must affect advocacy work to some extent. What are the rules of thumb you follow?
Lewis Bollard:
āI agree with Ellen that legislation /ā corporate standards are more promising. Iāve asked if the breeders would accept $ to select on welfare, & the answer was no b/āc itās inversely correlated w/ā productivity & they can only select on ~2 traits/āgeneration.ā