Erich_Grunewald
i think you are moving the goalposts a bit when arguing against the view “that imagery is worthless”. peter (and you in the original post) wrote about symbolism specifically, and in this context symbolism in flags.
i also think there is probably a significant difference between the kind of plots, graphs and other visualisations you see in a research paper, which are aimed at explaining particular results and theories, and flags, which are more meant to associate with concepts, groups, movements and so on. it’s like the difference between a paragraph of prose and a slogan—one of fidelity, i suppose.
Adding to that, Lucia Coulter of the Lead Exposure Elimination Project had high praise for Charity Entrepreneurship when I interviewed her:
Charity Entrepreneurship has [...] made a big difference – their support from the incubation program to now has helped with pretty much every aspect of our work. [...] Firstly they provided a two-month full-time incubation program, which I went through (remotely) in the summer 2020. This was where I decided to work on lead exposure (which was an idea researched and recommended by Charity Entrepreneurship), where I paired up with my co-founder Jack, and from where we received our initial seed grant. During the program we learnt a huge amount of extremely relevant and practical material – for example, how to make a cost-effectiveness analysis, how to make a six-month plan, how to develop a monitoring and evaluation strategy, how to hire, and a lot more. Since then Charity Entrepreneurship has provided LEEP with weekly mentoring and wider support through the community of staff, previous incubatees, and advisors. I highly recommend checking out the Charity Entrepreneurship incubation program if anyone is interested!
(emphasis mine; source)
Thanks for sharing these!
Some background and thoughts on animal advocacy terminology
Interview with Lucia Coulter: Lead Exposure, Effective Altruism, Progress in Malawi
this post reminds me of scott alexander’s post on surviving versus thriving:
I propose that the best way for leftists to get themselves in a rightist frame of mind is to imagine there is a zombie apocalypse tomorrow. [...] It seems broadly plausible that there could be [a neurological switch] for something like “social stability”. If the brain finds itself in a stable environment where everything is abundant, it sort of lowers the mental threat level and concludes that everything will always be okay and its job is to enjoy itself and win signaling games. If it finds itself in an environment of scarcity, it will raise the mental threat level and set its job to “survive at any cost”.
i always thought there was something broadly true in this view, though there is a lot of variation it doesn’t explain.
When you have only one client, being an employee is generally a better deal than being a contractor (with the exception that sometimes they pay significantly more to compensate). See the recent ridesharing contractor debate as an example.
i think that depends hugely on the industry. in software, where i work, everyone i know who is a freelancer prefers to stay that way, even if they work for an extended period for just one customer, and german law (which puts up a number of rules about contractors working for a single customer) is seen as a nuisance by them (though it’s no doubt good for contractors who have less negotiating power).
just adding to this, there is the ea consulting network whose members are all, well, ea-aligned consultants, though i don’t know exactly what competencies most people have.
i don’t think it’s totally implausible, at least not if we believe that there is such a thing as basic needs, that people are significantly less happy if those aren’t met, and that a certain amount of money (obviously allowing for some variation) allows one to fulfill them. that said, i think it’s less plausible than a logarithmic relationship, but of course i say that having just read this post …
edit: having thought about it a bit more, i can’t really think of a basic need that has a sharp cutoff—e.g. you’re not either well-nourished or starving, but there are tons of points in between, and at any point money can provide marginal improvements—so now i do think it’s pretty implausible after all.
[Question] Are there any evaluations or impact assessments of circular economy or related initiatives?
those are both good questions. i tried to find base rates with a cursory search but came up empty-handed. maybe i just didn’t use the right search terms, though. but even if the numbers here are the same as the base rate, i would argue that’s still pretty bad, because the costs involved in animal testing are higher. i think it makes sense to judge animal-testing research more stringently than other research. though base rates would be useful to see e.g. how difficult it would be to improve methodologies and reduce the amount of unproductive research.
one thing i didn’t make clear in the post but which i now realise i should’ve is that an experiment not getting published due to lack of statistical significance (or more precisely rejection of the null hypothesis) doesn’t mean that research wasn’t valuable—it could have been rejected due to publication bias.
Animal Testing Is Exploitative and Largely Ineffective
nice, thanks for doing this!
If you’re not eating meat, you have to replace the protein and calories. At baseline, flour is 4,464 calories/dollar and 134g protein/dollar.
[...]
Perhaps the most important number is the cost to prevent an animal from being farmed. Initial estimates were as low as $0.10/life, but later came under scrutiny. One estimate puts the cost at $5.70 to save a chicken life, with pigs being around $150. Since that implies costs scales about linearly with meat-produced, I’m assuming $636 to save a cow’s life, but these numbers are all speculative. Note also that these are estimates for one particular intervention.
i’m a bit confused here. what does saving a life entail? does it mean, say, getting the proteins you would’ve gotten from a chicken from plant-based sources instead? if so, the numbers seem to suggest that plant-based diets are more expensive than meat-based diets, which seems pretty unlikely to me? legumes, nuts, peas and soy-based product are all pretty affordable.
edit: also, the average american’s calorie intake is significantly higher than the recommended amount. so one could argue that the same amount of calories don’t always need to be replaced. but of course reducing calorie intake is not feasible for everybody.
a really great book for learning practical bayesian statistics is richard mcelreath’s statistical rethinking. there is also a series of lectures on youtube.
Only seeing this now, but she does have sections in the book on thinking about species, habitat loss, eliminating predation and what she calls “creation ethics” among other things. I didn’t get the feeling reading the book that she would be against welfare reform, but leafing through the pages now I couldn’t find any passage that covers that topic explicitly. Thanks for the resources.
That’s interesting and I think that’s true to a certain extent, the bottomless pits of suffering and all that. Though Kantianism does make some pretty strong demands in its own way, for instance in the way that it really hammers home the idea of seeing things from others’ points of view (via the Formula of Humanity), or in the way that it considers some duties to be absolute (“perfect”).
I believe that Korsgaard also thinks we have duties to help others’ promote their own good if it’s at no great cost to ourselves, though these duties are not as strong as those not to violate other people’s autonomy. I think maybe these sorts of duties lead to something like Effective Altruism, though I haven’t really thought all of this through yet, or read much of the relevant literature, so what do I know.
Indeed, and a commenter there pointed out an interesting paper by Richard Yetter Chappell (pdf) which explores and argues against this claim by Korsgaard:
In utilitarianism, people and animals don’t really matter at all; they are just the place where the valuable things happen.
The title of the paper is “Value Receptacles”. I haven’t read it yet but I suspect it would be of interest to many here.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment! It is an excellent book – if you are at all interested in Kant’s moral philosophy, I highly recommend it. I will preface the remainder of this comment with the caveat that I am explaining someone else’s work, and that Professor Korsgaard may not agree with my interpretation. Also, any typos in the quoted passages are copying errors.
I haven’t read her work myself and probably should, but I was told by someone that basically condition 3 or even having goal-directed behaviour is not necessary. I would hope it wouldn’t be, because we could have a being who experiences good and bad and so has their own ends, but has no power to control what they experience and so would just be completely vulnerable and unable to pursue their own ends. Wouldn’t such a being still matter?
Here’s a passage from the book that expands on that thought but doesn’t counter your objection:
The small [objection] is that the definition that I have given of what an animal is is not the same as the definition a contemporary biologist would give. An “animal”, as I am using the term, is an organism that functions as an agent, where by agency I mean something like representation-governed locomotion. Animals are conscious organisms who seek out the things that are (functionally) good-for them and try to avoid the things that are bad. [...] The organisms we are concerned with when we think about whether we have duties to animals are sentient beings who perceive the world in valenced ways and act accordingly. This is the feature of organic life that I have argued places an organism in the morally interesting category of having a final good.
However, later on she gets to the argument from marginal cases (if something like intelligence or rationality is the ground for moral standing among humans, then what about infants, or folks with severe developmental impairments?), which I think is similar to your objection here. Korsgaard argues against it, because to her, there is such a thing as a type of creature, even if categories have fuzzy borders. And though your example beings may not be able to pursue their own functional goods, they are still the sorts of creatures who do.
A human infant is not a particular kind of creature, but a human creature at a particular life stage. I believe that it is not proper to assign moral standing, and the properties on which it is grounded, to life stages or to the subjects of those stages. Moral standing should be accorded to persons and animals considered as the subjects of their whole lives, at least in the case of animals with enough psychic unity over time to be regarded as the subjects of their whole life. Nor, except perhaps in the case of extremely simple life forms, should we think of the subject of a life merely as a collection of the subjects of the different temporal stages of the life. [F]or most animals having a self is not just a matter of being conscious at any given moment, but rather a matter of having a consciousness or a point of view that is functionally unified both at a particular time and from one moment to the next. That ongoing self is the thing that should have or lack moral standing, or be the proper unit of moral concern.
[...]
There is a third reason for rejecting the argument from marginal cases, and it is the most important. A creature is not just a collection of properties, but a functional unity, whose parts and systems work together in keeping him alive and healthy in the particular way that is characteristic to his kind. Even if it were correct to characterize a human being with cognitive defects as “lacking reason”, which usually it is not, this would not mean that it was appropriate to treat the human being as a non-rational animal. Rationality is not just a property that you might have or lack without any other difference, like blue eyes. To say that a creature is rational is not just to say that he has “reason” as one of his many properties, but to say something about the way he functions. [...] A rational being who lacks some of the properties that together make rational functioning possible is not non-rational, but rather defectively rational, and therefore unable to function well. [...] It is not as if you could simply subtract “rationality” from a human animal. A non-rational animal, after all, functions perfectly well without understanding the principles of reason, since he makes his choices in a different way.
[...]
The Argument from Marginal Cases ignores the functional unity of creatures. A creature who is constructed to function in part by reasoning but who is still developing or has been damaged is still a rational creature. So the Kantian need not grant and should not grant that infants, the insane, the demented, and so on, are non-rational beings. The point is not, of course, that we should treat infants and people with cognitive disabilities exactly the way we treat adult rational beings, because they too are rational beings. The way we treat any creature has to be responsive to the creature’s actual condition. But the creature’s condition itself is not given by a list of properties, but also by the way those properties work together.
Korsgaard is talking about rationality here because that, to her, is what sets humans apart from the other animals (though of course she thinks that is the reason why we are moral agents, but not why we have moral standing). But I think she would argue similarly about creatures that are defective in other ways, e.g. who has no power to control what they experience or to pursue goals.
I also wonder what she has in mind by “functional” in “functional good”. Do we need to decide what something’s function is, if any, to define their goods and bads, and how do we do that? In my view, animals define their own goods and bads through their valenced experiences and/or desires, not just that they happen to experience their goods and bads or that their experiences guide them towards their own functional goods.
If I understand you correctly, I think she would agree. Her distinction between “final goods” and “functional goods” comes, I think, from this 1983 paper of hers, though there she calls functional goods “instrumental” instead. The functional good is basically that which allows a thing to function well, e.g. a whetstone is good for the blade because it keeps it sharp and tar is good for the boat because it keeps it from taking in water. The final good is “the end or aim of all our strivings, or at any rate the crown of their success, the summum bonum, a state of affairs that is desirable or valuable or worth achieving for its own sake”. Where does the final good come from? Korsgaard basically argues, if I recall correctly, following Aristotle, that creatures have functions, and that, when we act to achieve some end, to attain whatever we value as good-for us, we take that end to be good in the final sense. I think this is pretty similar to what you were getting at?
It’s interesting that she brings up artwork and the environment, too, as potential ends in themselves.
Ah yes, I thought so too, especially since I had understood (mistakenly, apparently) from the book that she did not think of those things as ends in themselves. I actually wrote a dialogue in the old style about this very subject, concluding that inanimate objects are not ends in themselves.
givedirectly has been running an african covid-19 relief fund.