I guess this comes back to the old net-negative-lives debate. If you apply the logic of the logger, having more bulls around is good. Otherwise it’s likely bad, even if a particular bull has a net positive live.
Hans Schönberg 🔸
Karma: 146
Maybe it’s worth citing the entire declaration here:
Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.
First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.
Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).
Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.
It is hard to imagine how one could be any more measured in making a claim, or in what sense it could possibly be considered premature.
As always, a truly insightful post. I would argue, however, that the psychological dimension deserves consideration as well. There is well-established evidence that nature has a profoundly positive impact on mental health. A growing number of people requiring psychiatric care, combined with a shrinking workforce due to mental health conditions, carries significant economic consequences. Furthermore, people are consistently willing to pay a premium for housing near thriving, healthy ecosystems. Once those ecosystems are lost, so too is that value.
… then offsetting with animal welfare interventions means more feed is required, resulting in fewer wild invertebrates
There are two main effects. Higher welfare standards generally mean fewer animals are raised, since they and their products become more expensive. But those that are raised require more feed. As far as I know there is no consensus on which effect dominates.
However, if the person thinks that wild invertebrates lives are net negative, they would prefer the animal welfare interventions offset, because not only would that help the farmed animals, but it would also reduce the bad utilities of wild invertebrates lives.
They may prefer this kind of intervention and consequently donate to the relevant charities, but the amount they are supposed to pay to offset should stay the same. Since offsetting is generally framed around conservative estimates, it makes no sense to pay less just because you believe in something.
Though this may seem contradictory, I think there is a large variation in difficulty of going vegan (taste preferences, opportunity cost of time, impact on health, etc), so it is most effective if the people for whom it is easier to go vegan are exposed to the arguments.
I totally agree. However, I’m not aware of a single charity that turns people who had no inclination of becoming vegan into vegans. That would be an almost impossible achievement, unless you paid them to do so and set up control mechanisms to make sure they stood true to their word.
Charities like Veganuary are targeted specifically at people who are already motivated to go vegan in the first place. So if someone turns vegan during the challenge it’s impossible to know whether the donor was counterfactual. For all we know the person could have become vegan two months earlier but chose to wait for the challenge. So we may want to use Shapley values. There is also a broader principle at play here: there is general consensus that the same outcome cannot be claimed multiple times for offsetting purposes. This is precisely how certificate trading works, whether for carbon or anything else. So, if we assign some weight to the person who invented the challenge, some weight to the staff who work for below market rates, some weight to every organisation who had previously influenced the person who eventually went vegan, and of course the main weight to that person themselves, little value is left for the donor.
Without access to the relevant data it is hard to say anything definitive, but it seems worth asking whether the cost per outcome would look quite different if conservative estimates were applied more rigorously.
For example, even if we get AI agents to not book tickets to bullfights, I don’t see it as a win from a consequentialist perspective (that’s not too controversial a take?).
Why would this be? Ending bullfights may be a small victory in the short term as there are relatively few animals are involved. But still a victory.
However I’d argue it would be a bigger win in value shifts. As long as people enjoy watching a bull tortured in an arena it’s hard to imagine that they will be very sympathetic to animal welfare ideas. Likewise if a system thinks it’s ok to book tickets for bullfights/ propose them without being asked it’s hard to imagine that they deeply care about animal welfare. I’m not an expert in AI by any measure so I’m very interested in pushback from you on this thesis.
Lastly many resources at the moment go into fighting bullfight. If systems start to cancel them and bullfights get eventually forbidden those resources are freed to work in other areas of interest.
Of course not. At this point it simply isn’t possible.Which is exactly what I argued:
Unless we possess solid data on wild animal welfare ranges and how feed production affects them, we have no way of knowing how to offset a non-vegan diet’s impact on wild populations, or what the true cost would be.
I would argue, however, that vegans have less impact on wild animals which is precisely why framing welfare campaigns as an “offset” for a non-vegan diet strikes me as misleading. I have broader reservations about the concept of offsetting animal suffering altogether, but if such offsetting is to be meaningful in any real sense, it should focus on projects that reduce the consumption of animal products in order to replicate these effects.
That’s exactly what I said. Uncertainty is a big issue here. But that doesn’t mean one is justified in not offsetting the impact one’s dietary choices have on wild animals, simply because a handful of people have put forward the hypothesis of net negative lives.
I still feel there must be a way to flip this somehow and find a way to assign and recognise impact and contributions that feels motivating and uplifiting to everybody
I feel it would be interesting, but not necessarily uplifting, to estimate how much the EA community spends on any given intervention. Let’s return to your Atlantic Shepherd example. Sea Shepherd is one of those classic charities that handles everything in-house from fundraising and awareness-raising to carrying out the actual anti-poaching interventions. The charities typically recommended by EAs, on the other hand, externalise a great deal of their costs.
Imagine we set up “Atlantic Shepherd” as an EA charity. Before it ever received funding, an organisation like Rethink Priorities would likely have helped make the case for ocean interventions. Grantmakers would have supported them in getting started. Animal Charity Evaluators would assess them. Several other charities would recommend them. The 80,000 Hours podcast would feature them. And then there are all the charities working on building the EA community itself, as well as those raising funds on Atlantic Shepherd’s behalf. All of these organisations have spent real resources advancing the cause, yet none of those costs ever appear when analysing Atlantic Shepherd’s cost-effectiveness. It would be entirely possible for the community to be spending twice as much per fish saved as Sea Shepherd does, while the cost-effectiveness analysis still shows Atlantic Shepherd coming out ahead by a wide margin.
But I think a lot of the offsetting is corporate campaigns to get higher welfare standards.
I agree that these campaigns are promising, and I am a donor to Sinergia Animal myself. However, mass animal production creates issues beyond farmed welfare, such as climate change and resource diversion from starving populations. While those can be offset, my main concern is wild animal suffering caused by feed production.
Every farmed animal impacts multiple wild animals through agriculture. Unless we possess solid data on wild animal welfare ranges and how feed production affects them, we have no way of knowing how to offset a non-vegan diet’s impact on wild populations, or what the true cost would be. Consequently, I believe, claiming we can offset a non-vegan diet by sponsoring welfare campaigns is highly misleading at this stage.
I guess you could align your proposals with European privacy laws, but it would never be truly private, especially in a small charity.
Your original claim was you prefer to donate to charities where you know that people take a low salary. The only way to know this is for this to be public.
It was not a claim but a statement of fact. I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do. It’s just that when I hear a story like Markus’s, or when I have dinner with the management of Sea Shepherd Global and learn that they all sleep on volunteers’ couches while on an official mission because they wouldn’t want to use any donor money on a hotel room it inspires me, and I want to give. When I hear that a COO of the Centre for Effective Altruism earns $227,461, I may understand it intellectually, but it just doesn’t inspire me at all.
There will always be some information about salaries available. When charities have to hire people in many countries, they are required to state how much they will pay and people are always free to share how much they earn if they wish to do so. Information about donations seems to be more worthy of protection to some people. The view that donating publicly is in some way “unpure” because the people doing it are acting in their own interest, i.e. to look good is surprisingly common. I have heard this many times when people were talking about celebrities and what they donated.
It might also be an issue for Christians. Matthew 6:1–4 says:
Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do…
I don’t hold these views, quite the contrary. I think one should talk about one’s own commitment in order to motivate others, and perhaps this simply isn’t an issue in EA charitys. I just wanted to mention it as something worth considering.
However as a donor, when evaluating charities, I do care how they use volunteers. Because in this framing the volunteers should get “part of the saved fish”. That leaves less “saved fish” for me.
You definitely have a point here and I might even get convinced. However, I see educating volunteers and building a movement as ends in themselves. So maybe there is just more value to distribute? (The saved fish + the movement that was built.)
I do share your feeling that more value is attributed to donors than they really deserve. I see this as a problem especially when people want to compensate. Some EAs think that going vegan is not that important because compensating is so cheap. But the only tractable way of compensating would be to get others to eat plant-based in which case I think it would be fair to attribute most of the saved animals to the people who actually ate fewer animal products or went vegan, and not to the person who donated to the charity that “convinced” them.
you as a donor can still say you only donate to charities where the founder or staff donate a significant fraction of that salary back to the charity with salary sacrifices.
For this to work, those donations would need to be made public which presumably creates considerable pressure on staff who feel compelled to give simply to avoid deterring donors. I can’t see such a system ever gaining traction in the European Union, given how seriously we take privacy, though it might function well in cultures with different norms around financial transparency.
That’s why we should model his foregone salary has an implicit donor to the fund and divide the fund impact by all the donations, including his foregone salary. I hope this is making sense!
It makes perfect sense mathematically. Whether it would be a wise marketing strategy is another question. Telling donors that overhead is only 5% because the fund manager forgoes a salary is a far more compelling pitch than saying overhead is 7.31% but the fund manager donates 2.31% of it back. (The numbers are purely illustrative, of course.)
This example differs from the original in two important ways. In the hen scenario, an AI was doing all the creative work so my argument was that donating to the volunteer-run charity would save the same number of hens while also generating joy for the volunteers. In this new case, both charities rely on volunteers. Yes, Atlantic Shepherd may have more of them, but a larger volunteer base can also dilute each individual’s sense of ownership over the organisation’s success, so the joy produced might well cancel out.
The second difference concerns effectiveness. In the hen example, I assumed we were dealing with a well-run organisation, where volunteers spreading the word to friends and family would be a genuine bonus. Atlantic Shepherd, by contrast, appears to use volunteer labour rather inefficiently. In that context, volunteers are arguably more likely to vent about incompetent management than to attract new donors.
Personally I tend to see donating and volunteering as fundamentally distinct activities. When it comes to donations, impact is essentially all that matters to me. With volunteering, things like interesting work, like-minded company, and good conversations matter just as much. Comparing the two across those dimensions feels like comparing apples and oranges.
From an organisational perspective, I think charities should use volunteers whenever it genuinely makes sense. Building a strong community is a worthwhile goal in its own right, particularly in fields like animal advocacy. At the same time, they owe their volunteers meaningful, well-structured work. Nobody enjoys feeling like their time is being wasted.
Well, I already assumed you weren’t poor when 1.5 million was 60% of your earnings. But there are people who made much more and gave far less. My point is that as a donor, it’s hard to see how effective an organisation really is. So the fact that you believe in it enough to work without getting paid just makes me feel more confident that my money is being put to good use.
Thanks for doing this!
The use of volunteers is a paradox I think about a lot. I volunteer for Sea Shepherd myself, I believe in the cause, and I wouldn’t want to be paid for it, because then it would feel like just another job. When we go to an event to raise funds or sell merchandise, we generally come away feeling that we raised the money, which is in a sense true: the money wouldn’t have been raised without us. So we feel that we saved the fish, and that’s not entirely wrong either. Surveys consistently show that being personally asked is the most common reason people cite for donating, so I doubt many of those donations would have happened without us. And yet the donors also, quite rightly, feel that it was thanks to them. But the fish only got saved once. It would be nearly impossible to determine who should get credit for how many fish saved. So from a marketing perspective, I think the smart move is to let everyone feel like the hero.
In your thought experiment, I would donate to the charity that uses volunteers to create their content. I save the 1,000 hens either way. By giving to the volunteer-run charity, I also give meaning to the volunteers’ work, and beyond that, volunteers who stay engaged will likely talk to friends and family, contributing to a broader shift in attitudes and hopefully bringing in additional donations.
But I also completely understand why you would give to the other charity.
I completely understand your point, but as a donor I have to say I’m considerably more likely to give when I feel that people in the organisation accept lower salaries because they genuinely believe in the cause. When I read, for example, that Marcus Abramovitch has donated 60% of his lifetime earnings and is now managing the Manifund Falcon fund without taking any salary, my immediate reaction was: this person is not in it for the money, and I trust him to make the most of my donation.
If you need to pay more to attract talent, that’s fine but I don’t think it’s particularly effective to pay more than necessary just to match market salaries.
That said, I do think a pledge should count as fulfilled if someone accepts a significantly below-market salary while working for a highly effective charity.
If I were using a login the AI would have had data on me that it could have used even in an incognito mode as people pointed out in this discussion. My test was done on purpose on a public computer without login in order to get a non customized answer. I now asked DeepSeek as well. Same story.
I asked Gemini, ChatGPT, and Mistral how they would distribute one million dollars. (Claude and Grok didn’t work without a login.) Not one allocated even a cent to animals. Ecosia would give most to its own reforestation projects, followed by rewilding projects. That’s not what effective altruists typically do. As long as this is the case, AIs could embrace other EA values and still make the world a living hell for animals. I hope that initiatives like the Falcon Fund can bring change to this issue.
You are right, it’s quite an overstatement to call anything obvious in ethics. However, for Quiverfull to be a good thing in utilitarian terms, we would need to think that it is more likely for non-human animals to be worse off without us than the opposite, and that’s a difficult position to defend. As far as I know, biomass has stayed the same. Populations by individuals might have decreased slightly, but not by orders of magnitude. And the animals that are living seem to be worse off. Animals in factory farming experience intense suffering and are denied almost anything that makes for a good life, and when we control “pests”, the preferred method seems to be poisoning, which makes for a slow and painful death. Also, I’ve never heard anyone, expert or layperson alike, claiming that humans are on average good for animals, but many think the opposite is true. That doesn’t mean that there are no such experts and the fact that many believe in it doesn’t make a view right, but we may want to consider this fact in an utilitarian calculation. Do you hold the view that humans are on average good for animals in utalitarian terms, or did you just want to point out that I made too far-reaching a claim?
I totally agree on the consequentialist part. Regarding value change, I find Oscar Horta’s line of reasoning quite compelling. Value changes might take some time to materialize into actual improvements, but when they do, the effects tend to be long-lasting. For example, we still struggle with certain ideas of Descartes more than 400 years after his death.
On the positive side, the only reason why cage-free campaigns can be successful is that people genuinely care. When it comes to AI, my personal opinion is that values are incredibly important. If these systems become even more powerful than they already are, I would certainly prefer them to think that bullfights are appalling, rather than deciding it is a good idea to book tickets for them without even being asked.