Iâm begging you to just get a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howardđ¸
Karma: 873
Keen to listen to/âwatch this if itâs released. Thanks for posting it
âSlowâ and âpainfulâ very different. âSlowâ yes, you could study how long it takes for freezing to kill them or stop their neurons firing, though this doesnât seem like very useful information. âPainfulâ is the key and the problem: I donât see any way toward quantifying how subjectively âpainfulâ something is for an insect and how much we should spend to avoid that pain, hence there will always be a stalemate when it comes to implementation.
A lot of the data assumes growth and survival as your main measures of welfare/âstress which is just doing the industryâs yield optimisation research for them rather than welfare research. It is analogous to setting up a chicken welfare institute that tries to make bigger and longer-living chickens. A proxy of welfare, in a way, but we donât need welfare research orgs to do this work.
The other concrete data in those papers are things like: the demonstrated preference of BSF maggots for honey over sugar water, data on the optimal grinding method to kill BSF maggots most quickly, and data on optimal densities to normalise breeding behaviours. The part that is betrayed by confidence intervals is the implementation. Without any way to define or measure the value of maggot suffering with any confidence, thereâs no way to know whether the costs of implementing any of these changes are justified. At least with vertebrates we have some intuitions about how much their suffering matters to fall back on.
What would change my mind on the usefulness of this work is if I was shown some research from an animal welfare organisation that produced some concrete information (i.e. not qualified by massive confidence intervals) about âwhat is good or badâ for an animal or âwhat conditions they might find torturousâ, beyond what we can already intuit.
So far have not seen anything like this, and I simply cannot imagine what sort of experiments or work you could do to get any useful information on this.
Inform what welfare requiremens ought to be put into law when farming insects
Assumes confidence intervals narrower than weâll ever obtain, I think.
Yes torturing insects is bad if we could just as easily not. Donât need a 20-page report to justify that.
The part where we try to quantify suffering is hampered by the massive confidence intervals that are inherent to any discussion of insect suffering, and which I donât see being narrowed by further pondering.
I agree that the field is full of uncertainty.
The breadth of the confidence intervals in any animal suffering research, particularly once it moves away from vertebrates, makes me feel like this work wonât ever lead to any actionable conclusions beyond âtorturing things is bad, avoid if possibleâ, which we sort of knew from the start.
I broadly donât buy that because conclusions seem strange, we shouldnât engage with them...
Sure but this is a post asking for money to set up a foundation to explore these conclusions, which, in the case of shrimp, insects, mites, and nematodes, are almost always either:
So uncertain as to be completely impractical (the confidence intervals in the Rethink Priority Welfare Estimates are so wide as to be almost meaningless, even if you agree with the underlying analysis)
Demanding of a complete upturn of human socioeconomic development goals (i.e. weâre not building factories or research institutes if weâre all Jains functionally paralysed by not wanting to step on ants)
I donât think we need a(nother) foundation to tell us that, all else being equal, not torturing insects is better than torturing them, or that taking spiders outside (as I do, too) is better than killing them. This we can mostly all agree on. But any attempt to go beyond that and seriously quantify this suffering and run calculations on it is an intellectual dead end and a resource and reputation sink.
Iâve never been able to understand how any serious consideration of insect welfare doesnât immediately lead to the unacceptable conclusion that any cause other than the welfare of demodex mites or nematodes is almost meaningless.
How do you envision useful, practical ideas emerging from further insect/âarthropod welfare work, rather than just a lot of absurd conclusions?
To me this sort of work seems to risk playing into the stereotype of the EA community as head-in-the-cloud philosophisers who care more about intellectualising than practical outcomes
It sounds like youâre saying that GiveWell in general is funding constrained because it canât give out all the grants it would like to. My question was specifically whether the top charities (AMF, Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller, New Incentives) are fully-funded.
This question is important to me because I am Australian and unable to tax deduct donations to GiveWell but can tax deduct donations to the top charities.
A terrifying thought. Whales are the worst perpetrators of this but people arenât willing to discuss the uncomfortable solution:
Thatâs a great link, cheers
The Open Phil report you link to says:
in April their median projection for funding raised in 2024 from sources other than Open Philanthropy was $421 million, compared to ~$117 million five years earlier.
...
Having that funding available allows GiveWell to cover many of its highest-ROI opportunities regardless of our support
This suggests that Open Phil is pulling back funding as GiveWell finds funding from non-Open Phil sources. I suspect that if GiveWell was getting fewer non-Open Phil donations Open Phil would pick up the slack again.
Donations to GiveWell are effectively indirect donations to Open Phil, which is fine if you like Open Phil.
If you didnât give to GiveWell, where would you give?
The Life You Can Save recommends several charities beyond the GiveWell five. I get the impression that GiveWellâs assessments are more thorough and stringent, but thatâs irrelevant if theyâre fully funded.
[Question] Is donaÂtion-matchÂing deÂcepÂtive?
[Question] Do the GiveWell charÂiÂties need money curÂrently?
This doesnât seem very useful. All well and good to declare that lots of animals might have âconscious experienceâ, but without a way to define âconscious experienceâ or having any way to compare the value of the âconscious experienceâ of different animals, where does it get us?
I worry that this is just abstract philosophical noise that distracts from productive efforts like developing alternative proteins, exposing and lobbying against the cruelty of factory farming, and eliminating the poverty and desperation that underlies a lot of the global indifference to animal suffering.
I think overall this post plays into a few common negative stereotypes of EA: Enthusiastic well-meaning people (sometimes with a grandiose LoTR reference username) proposing grand plans to solve an enormously complex problem without really acknowledging or understanding the nuance.
Suggesting that we simply develop an algorithm to identify âhigh quality contentâ and that a combination of crowds and experts will reliably be able to identify factual vs non-factual information seems to completely miss the point of the problem, which is that both of these things are extremely difficult and thatâs why we have a disinformation crisis.
Many good points:
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Use of expected value when error bars are enormously wide is stupid and deceptive
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EA has too many eggs in the one basket that is GiveWellâs research work
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GiveWell under-emphasises the risks of their interventions and overstates their certainty of their benefits
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EA is full of young aspiring heroes who think theyâre the main character in a story about saving the world
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Longtermism has no feedback mechanism and so is entirely speculative, not evidence-based
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Mob think is real (this forum still gives people with more karma more votes for some reason)
But then:
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His only suggestions for a better way to reallocate power/âwealth/âopportunity from rich to poor are: 1. acknowledging that itâs complex and 2. consulting with local communities (neither are new ideas, both are often already done)
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Ignores the very established, non-EA-affiliated body of development economists using RCTs; Duflo and Banerjee won the Nobel memorial economics prize for this and Dan Karlan who started Innovations for Poverty Action now runs USAID. EA might be cringe but these people arenât.
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Sounds very difficult when deadly drugs like fentanyl, midazolam and propofol can easily be injected through an intravenous line. You canât get an IV line on a baby in-utero, I think thatâs why injection into the heart is done in that case.
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The massive error bars around how animal well-being/âsuffering compares to that of humans means itâs an unreliable approach to reducing suffering.
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Global development is a prerequisite for a lot of animal welfare work. People struggling to survive donât have time to care about the wellbeing of their food.
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No we should not limit development of poor countries because weâre worried about them building up their factory farm industries.
Thereâs a lot of moral uncertainty when comparing animal and human welfare, so that utility calculus will almost always be a dead end. Meanwhile what we can be quite certain of is that limiting global development will be really harmful to the people in those developing countries. It would also look very hypocritical for rich countries to turn around and tell poor countries they shouldnât develop because of animal rights and therefore damaging to the relationship between developing countries and development economists.
Itâs a no from me.