Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howardđ¸
Karma: 1,344
I think it serves 2 purposes:
Most people want to feel like they are good, kind. Preventing harm to something much smaller/âweaker than themselves reinforces this. Even better if it requires very little effort.
Social signal. I personally immediately trust people more if they take their spiders outside rather than kill them. I think theyâre more likely to have good intentions in whatever else they do. I think many people feel the same way and are vaguely aware that carrying themselves like this sends a useful signal to others.
Youâre preaching to the choir here on the EA forum but I think most people outside this community will intuit the slippery slope that this takes you down:
0.1% x 5 million lives saved is the same EV as 0.0000001% chance of 5 trillion lives saved
Somewhere between those two this becomes a Pascalâs Mugging that we seem to generally agree is a bad reason to do something.
Whereâs the line?
Youâre skeptical that concerns for animal welfare track with socioeconomic development? The animal welfare movement has arisen and mainly operates in rich countries
Progress studies and longtermism sound good in theory and then in practice they donât seem to have produced anything beyond theory, which is not that helpful.
The randomista movement that produced the RCTs GiveWell based its recommendations on was a response to the longstanding failures of development economics to actually make an impact on development.
The meat-eater problem is an issue with people going from not being able to afford meat (dreadfully poor) to being able to (only slightly less poor).
Iâm talking about development beyond those very low levels
Global development is an animal welfare issue. The wealthier a country is the more free time and resources the population has to entertain the idea that animal torture is bad.
If you or I were living in a favela in Brazil struggling to get by we probably wouldnât have animal welfare on our radars as a political concern. Weâd have bigger problems. Give us a comfy middle-class life and maybe weâd have room to care.
Having a strong precedent for this in countries like the UK and trying to nudge foreign standards with welfare-based import controls both help, but development is critical.
Seems to be true. Had assumed that a few hundred k years would not be enough for this. Changed my mind
As a datapoint against âwhat we evolved to eat is what we should eatâ: our bodies also arenât evolved to eat cooked food. But cooking food (meat, milk at least) seems to be better for us than raw.
impact = rate of progress * value of progress
Is it better to work where progress is slower but potentially more valuable, or where progress is faster but not as valuable?
Very hard question and the answer will be very context-dependant and probably unknowable in advance.The world needs people doing both of these sorts of work.
The strongest arguments in those areas are by analogy. Analogising is much easier with fellow humans or even animals close to us than worms. âIf you were X, you probably wouldnât want to be discriminated againstâ or âthey probably suffer like me, we should avoid thatâ. This starts to break down around the level of shrimp and then is completely broken by the time you get microscopic.
Nematodes being morally significant is far more disruptive and absurd than any of these ideas. Accepting that the Old Testament can be ignored on yet another moral issue is pretty easy. Accepting that human welfare is a rounding error compared to microscopic worms is society-upending.
âIf in a few decades we do the thing that you donât think is possible, will you admit that it was possibleâ
Sure, would also admit I was wrong if researchers find an answer to âwhy is there something rather than nothingâ, which I also believe is unanswerable.
Even if you get a confident answer to these questions, which Iâm confident you wonât, the outcome would inevitably be so absurd (nematodes immediately becoming moral priority over everything else) that society would have to discard them anyway or else collapse
How are you going to decide whether a nematode experiences pain or pleasure, and if they do what is painful or pleasurable to a nematode?
I really donât think so. I cannot conceive of research that would clarify whether a nematode life is net positive or negative
If you find some unused ground, plant some seeds, grow flowers, cut the flowers, and make a beautiful bouquet, what did you âtake from othersâ?
Lots of wealth is not âzero-sumâ like you describe, but creates new value/âbeauty/âusefulness from thin air and sunlight.
Wealth creation is not inherently bad. In fact if it improves average quality of life around the world (which has happened overwhelmingly since the Industrial revolution) then itâs overwhelmingly good.
Saying crazy but philosophically valid things is fine as long as itâs useful. Many of our current morals would have looked crazy 300 years ago, so Iâm glad people spoke up.
Nematode welfare is not productive conversation. The conclusions are clearly not tenable, the uncertainties too broad, the key questions (is a nematode life net good or bad) unanswerable. What is the purpose?
The distinction is that discussions about civil rights, womenâs suffrage, gay marriage and trans rights are productive. You can say concrete things, present evidence, and make suggestions for concrete policies that would improve lives.
Nematode welfare is a dead end. We canât even decide whether nematodes lives are worth living, among various other wide uncertainties, and thereâs no way forward to getting any clarity so itâs just reputational damage without any benefit.
More important than isolated concrete examples are the general trends, the thousand little nudges. Canât measure this unfortunately.
Hereâs an example of a tweet with 5k likes mocking someone suggesting that the welfare of barnacles that are being scraped off sea turtles is worth considering. Likely some of these 5k people were nudged away from caring about animal welfare concerns when they saw this.
I also think of this recent meme on twitter: Itâs a misunderstanding of a research study that was done on conservative vs. progressive moral circles. Many disdainful memes being thrown around about âthe libsâ caring about rocks and trees more than about their own family members. A post on the moral importance of nematodes would nudge them further down that belief track I think.
I think it would have been reasonable to ask you to stop even if it was because of the content of the posts. I think the idea that we should focus on the welfare of nematodes is absurd, untenable, and itâs reputationally damaging because people will see your posts and be less likely to consider seriously other more reasonable animal welfare ideas.
Similarly, I think it would be reasonable to ask you to stop posting if you were arguing that we need to fund the whaling industry to save krill, or stop distributing malaria nets to save mosquitos.
These are unproductive discussions
Thanks for this. Itâs great to create maps like this of critiques and responses. Iâve not heard of several of these people and arguments before.
Thanks for posting this question. Often not much global health/âpoverty discussion on the forum.
Environment is an interesting example because you go from complete poverty (no environmental impact) to middle income (rampant growth, environment not a priority, think Brazil/âIndonesia and their rainforests, or manifest destiny USA and their forests) so impact worsens, then at high income concerns about environment become more of a priority so you get environmental protections.
Unless the goal is to prevent people rising out of poverty entirely (it shouldnât be) the best outcome comes from faster development