It was a bet worth taking and we likely learned a lot. We will keep fighting the good fights. I feel grateful to all the people who worked hard on this.
emre kaplan
Karma: 1,232
Deontological Constraints on Animal Products
Disclosure: I work at an animal advocacy organisation funded by ACE and EA Funds.
I finished reading this book. It’s almost entirely on animal advocacy. I think the book would benefit quite a lot if the authors focused on narrow and specific claims and provided all the evidence to make really strong cases for these claims. Instead many authors mention many issues without getting really deeper than pre-existing debates on the topic. I can’t say I have seen much new material, but I already work on animal advocacy so I keep reading about this topic all the time. Maybe it’s good to collect existing criticisms into a book format.
I think the strongest criticism in the book that gets repeated quite a lot is the problem of measurability bias in animal advocacy. I keep thinking about this too and I hope we find better ways to prioritise interventions in animal advocacy. Here’s Macaskill talking about measurability bias sometime ago:
“here’s one thing that I feel gets neglected: The value of concrete, short-run wins and symbolic actions. I think a lot about Henry Spira, the animal rights activist that Peter Singer wrote about in Ethics into Action. He led the first successful campaign to limit the use of animals in medical testing, and he was able to have that first win by focusing on science experiments at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which involved mutilating cats in order to test their sexual performance after the amputation. From a narrow EA perspective, the campaign didn’t make any sense: the benefit was something like a dozen cats. But, at least as Singer describes it, it was the first real win in the animal liberation movement, and thereby created a massive amount of momentum for the movement.
I worry that in current EA culture people feel like every activity has to be justified on the basis of marginal cost-effectiveness, and that that the fact that an action would constitute some definite and symbolic, even if very small, step towards progress — and be the sort of thing that could provide fuel for a further movement — isn’t ‘allowable’ as a reason for engaging in an activity. Whereas in activism in general these sorts of knock-on effects would often be regarded as the whole point of particular campaigns, and that actually seems to me (now) like a pretty reasonable position (even if particular instances of that position might often be misguided).”
Yet I think the authors in this book jump too quickly from “You can’t measure all the impacts” to “Support my favourite thing”.
I absolutely love this. The data visualisation is beautiful, the collection of cognitive and hedonic proxies is comprehensive and there is a source link for every cell where the response isn’t “unknown”.
I don’t want to get into debates around object-level criticisms this early but I keep being puzzled by this assertion:
”This resulted in a community and organizations inspired by his ideas—not -- governed by him. It’s a handful of organizations with distinct leaders and a handful of individuals with their own interpretations of his and other people’s work.”There was also a similar quote elsewhere:
”But Will is not the CEO of EA! He’s a philosopher who writes books about EA and has received a bunch of funding to do PR stuff.”I don’t think this conception of “people loosely connected together in various ways” really captures the correct level of accountability here. There is a legal entity named Effective Ventures, which is the umbrella organisation of CEA, 80000 Hours, GWWC etc. and Will is the president of Effective Ventures as well as CEA. The people in the community volunteer their time and credibility by referring these organisations(and their literature) to their social circles. Many also do donate money to these organisations.
I refuse to have a verdict on FTX related criticisms until the dust settles, and most of the non-FTX related criticisms seem unreasonable to me, but this argument of “no one is the leader of EA really” strikes me as quite odd.
I suspect CEA might even be the official copyright owner for “Effective Altruism” brand as I don’t see any organisation that has “Effective Altruism” in its name despite not being approved by CEA.Please inform me on this if I’m wrong. EA is much more centralised than “Socialism” or “Feminism”.Correction: No one owns “Effective Altruism” as a trademark. More detailed information here.
Disclosure: I am currently working at an organisation running cage-free campaigns.
I love this post! I really like the stepping stone model, it brings a lot of clarity to this debate. A few quick thoughts:
I think the following conclusion is too quick given the design of this study: “campaigning for farm animal welfare reforms and promoting animal welfare certified meat could in the long run result in a suboptimal state of continued animal suffering and exploitation.” I feel like a better statement would be “introduction of animal product options labelled as “higher welfare” could in the long run result in a suboptimal state of continued animal suffering and exploitation.”
People get really weird and unreliable when they talk about their consumption and morality. In the polls most people say over and over again that they wouldn’t buy cage-eggs and would be willing to pay higher prices for higher welfare products. But the sales data don’t reflect this at all, most people keep buying the cheapest option. It looks like people’s self-declared intentions on food and morality are not really helpful for predicting behaviour. But I think this stepping stone model can be used in designs that measure behaviour rather than self-declared intention
I believe that welfare campaigns(rather than certifications) mostly result in the removal of certain low welfare options rather than introduction of higher welfare options. For example, there haven’t been any welfare campaigns in Turkey until 2017. Nonetheless, as it is the case in most industries, animal product industry had product differentiation, and some products were “premium” even though there were no welfare campaigns at all. And the “standard” products were(and still are) advertised in a pretty positive way. For example this is the typical packaging of a cage-egg brand in Turkey:
For this reason a counterfactual analysis should also take it into account what would be the society’s perception of the industry without welfare campaigns.
The options on the supermarket shelves before welfare campaigns:
Eggs (these are cage eggs with the pictures of happy hens on the packaging) $2
Cage-free eggs $2,6
Organic eggs $3,5
Plant-based eggs $3,5
The options on the supermarket shelves after welfare campaigns:
Eggs (these are cage-free eggs with the pictures of happy hens on the packaging) $2,6
Organic eggs $3,5
Plant-based eggs $3,5
I weak downvoted this comment because of the following sentence:
“I hope you’re right, otherwise you might be doing a lot of harm.”
I agree that technically, a person who’s very successful at advocating for a low impact intervention might do harm. But I think we should assume that most contributions to public discourse about cost-effectiveness are beneficial even if they are false.
Accusing people of doing harm makes it more difficult to discuss the issue in a distanced and calm way. It also makes it more difficult to get people contribute to those discussions.
Epistemic adjectives such as “unfounded”, “weak”, “false”, “misleading” are still available, and these are less likely to provoke guilt and stifle discussion. Unless there are egregious violations of honesty, I don’t think people should be accused of doing harm for defending their beliefs on cause-prioritisation.
I’m grateful to Anima International and Andrew Skowron for their free to use investigation archive. The photographs are extremely powerful, and these resources empower so many activists around the world. Most animal activists I know in Turkey are using photos obtained by Animal International even when they are not aware of Anima International at all. It’s more difficult to document the impact of this kind work, but when some activists somewhere in the world succeed by using these images, Anima International is responsible for some part of that success because of their footage.
I don’t like it when people insist that their favourite interpretation of a vague sentence is the correct one and accuse others of misrepresenting when people complain about other interpretations.
There is a huge difference between these two sentences:
1: “x people are stupid”
2: “The people that we socially ascribe to the race X had lower scores in IQ tests on average the last 70 years”
A lot of people in this forum equivocate the first sentence with the much weaker second one. This is classic motte and bailey.
The sentence 1 is vague and it can be interpreted in a way similar to “copper is conductive”. That interpretation(race pseudoscience) would imply the following:
a. There is a scientifically valid category of the race x.
b. There is a causal relationship(or a law of nature) between the race x and intelligence.
c. Boo x people! (because stupid is a loaded word)
There is also another controversial inference from IQ test scores to intelligence but I’m setting this aside for now.
You can’t blame people for interpreting Bostrom’s original statement in that way. Powerful people advocated for pseudoscientific theories making exactly these claims in the past, and many are still making these claims. Bostrom doesn’t explicitly disavow these claims in his apology either.
Some people here seem to be very concerned about deception by omission. Some say that if Bostrom excluded the paragraph starting by “Are there any genetic contributors to differences between groups in cognitive abilities?” that would be deception. I don’t think that’s true. But more importantly, if we are going to be concerned about omissions, a more misleading omission is him not disavowing race pseudoscience in his apology. I think his apology is currently misleading people into thinking that “race pseudoscience” interpretation of his original statements is the correct interpretation, and he is merely apologising for the slur and using a loaded word like “stupid”. Because of this, his apology provides unwarranted and harmful credibility to a pseudoscientific theory.
I want to note that both Philosophy Tube’s and Sabine Hossenfelder’s sceptism against AI-risk stemmed from AGI’s reliance on extraordinary hardware capacities. They both believe it will be very difficult for an AGI to copy itself because there won’t be suitable hardware in the world. Therefore AGI will be physically bound, limited in number and easier to deal with. I think introductory resources should address this more often. For example, there isn’t a mention of this criticism in 80000 Hours’ problem profile on this topic.
Thank you for all your amazing work in connecting people to make the world a better place. I have some feedback on the following:
“We expect applications for the other conferences to open approximately 2 months before the event”
After the pandemic, visa admissions have slowed down quite significantly. “Priority Service” option for UK visas wasn’t available when I applied for a visa for the EAGx Oxford in 2021. A friend of mine has waited 6 weeks until he received his UK visa, which is not so uncommon. Similarly, earliest tourist visa appointment I can get from US embassy is for 2024. If applicants from countries with “weaker” passports were allowed to apply earlier, that would help with accessibility and inclusivity.
Offsetting is more expensive than it’s assumed
Hello everyone, my name is Emre. I am the co-founder and director of Kafessiz Türkiye, a farmed animal advocacy organisation in Turkey. Looking forward to learning from you all!
This is a huge public service and I really appreciate 80000 Hours publicly sharing this much of its thinking and progress. As a founder, I learnt a lot about how to run an organisation thanks to all those public documents of 80000 Hours. Thank you for setting a high bar for transparency in the community.
I appreciate the extent of thoughtful consideration that has been put into this post. I looked at the list of proposed reforms to consider which ones I should implement in my (much smaller) organisation.
I currently find it very difficult to weigh the benefits and costs of this entire list. I understand that a post shouldn’t be expected to do everything at once. But I would really appreciate it if someone explained which of these specific policies are standard practices in other contexts like universities/political parties/other NGOs.
I think the comment was edited after this reply and the sentence referred was deleted.
Moderate Versus Radical NGOs
I will respond with my interpretation of the report, so that the author might correct me to help me understand it better.
If you ask “If we have an option between preventing the birth of Sabs versus preventing the birth of an average chicken, how many chickens is Sabs worth?” then Sabs might be worth −10 chickens since chickens have net negative lives whereas you (hopefully) have a net positive life.
If you ask “Let’s compare a maximally happy Sabs and maximally happy chickens, how many chickens is Sabs worth?”, I don’t think these estimates respond to that either. It might be the case that chickens have a very large welfare range, but this is mostly because they have a potential for feeling excruciating pain even though their best lives are not that good.
I think you need to complement this research with “how much the badness of average experiences of animals compare with each other” to answer your question. This report by Rethink Priorities seems to be based on the range between the worst and the best experiences for each species.
Thank you for donating 50% of your income Henry. You could have gone on a holiday or bought something fancy for yourself but you have chosen to help others in need instead. It’s admirable.
I often think whether Benjamin Lay would be banned from the EA forum or EA events. It seems to me that the following exchange would have gotten him at least a warning within the context of vegetarianism:
“Benjamin gave no peace” to slave owners, the 19th-century radical Quaker Isaac Hopper recalled hearing as a child. “As sure as any character attempted to speak to the business of the meeting, he would start to his feet and cry out, ‘There’s another negro-master!’”
I can’t think of any EAs that take actions similar to the following:
”Benjamin Lay’s neighbors held slaves, despite Lay’s frequent censures and cajoling. One day, he persuaded the neighbors’ 6-year old son to his home and amused him there all day. As evening came, the boy’s parents became extremely concerned. Lay noticed them running around outside in a desperate search, and he innocently inquired about what they were doing. When the parents explained in panic that their son was missing, Lay replied: Your child is safe in my house, and you may now conceive of the sorrow you inflict upon the parents of the negroe girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from them by avarice. (Swarthmore College Bulletin)”