I’m a research fellow at Open Philanthropy. Prior to that I was a senior research manager at Rethink Priorities. And prior to that I earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin.
Jason Schukraft
One of the authors of the charter cities report here. I’ll just add a few remarks to clarify how we intended the quoted passage. I’ll highlight three disagreements with the interpretation offered in the original post.
We should care if neocolonialism is real, if it’s bad, and if it’s induced by Charter Cities. If so, that should impact the cost-effectiveness estimate, not just factor in as a side-comment about PR-risk.
(1) We absolutely care whether neocolonialism is bad (or, if neocolonialism is inherently bad, we care about whether charter cities would instantiate neocolonialism). However, we only had ~100 research hours to devote to this topic, so we bracketed that concern for the time being. These sort of prioritization decisions are difficult but necessary in order to produce research outputs in a timely manner.
We should cite and engage with specific arguments, not imagine and then be haunted by some imagined spectre of Leftism. The authors mention the “neocolonialist critique” three times, never bothering to actually explain what it is, who advocates for it, how harmful it is, or how it could be avoided.
(2) The neocolonial critique of charter cities is well-known in the relevant circles, though it comes in many varieties. (See, among others, van de Sand 2019 and citations therein.) We probably should have included a footnote with examples. The fact that we didn’t engage with the critique more extensively (or really, at all) is some indication of how seriously we take the argument. We could have been more explicit about that.
The question of PR-risk is a purely logistical question that should be bracketed from discussions of cost-effectiveness. In the case that an intervention is found to have high cost-effectiveness and high PR-risk, we should think strategically about how to fund it, perhaps by privately recommending the intervention to individual donors as opposed to foundations.
(3) I’m not entirely sure why PR-risk needs to be excluded from cost effectiveness analysis (it’s just another downside), though I’m not opposed in practice to doing this. I agree that there are ways to mitigate PR risk. At no point in the report did we claim that PR risks ought to disqualify charter cities (or any other intervention) from funding.
As the parent of two young children, I was really pleased to see this post on the EA Forum.
I’ll echo the bit about the importance of having support networks. Parenting is really hard in unexpected ways, and having other parents with whom to share your strange hardships is really comforting. (I have so many potty training horror stories that only other parents could possibly appreciate.)
That said, I also think it’s really important to cultivate a support network of non-parent friends. It’s pretty easy (at least for me, especially when I was a stay-home-dad for 18 months) to let your kids become your whole identity. It’s sometimes a relief to talk about anything but my kids, just to remind myself that I’m an independent human with his own thoughts and interests.
In addition to being full of misinformation and pseudo-science, many parenting books also give the false impression that once you reach certain milestones, parenting magically becomes super easy. I remember being convinced that as soon as my kids could sleep through the night, my job was pretty much done. In reality, parenting is a marathon, not a sprint. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night anymore, but the sheer willpower that a 3-year-old can display when he doesn’t want to get dressed for the day is draining in its own unique way.
Contra Michelle’s experience, I did change a bit as a person, sometimes in surprising ways. (For instance, before I had kids I would watch sports for hours on the weekend, and my subjective well-being rose and fell with the fortunes of my favorite teams. For whatever reason, I’ve now completely lost interest in sports, and for the life of me, can’t remember why I spent all those hours glued to the TV.)
One last thing, in case it’s not obvious: parenting can be incredibly rewarding. Earlier this year my 5-year-old daughter donated, of her own volition and without pressure from me, a portion of her allowance to Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative. The pride I felt is pretty close to indescribable. (Obviously I helped her pick the charity, based on her goal to “help kids who aren’t as lucky as I am.”)
Hi David,
Thanks for your comment. I am also concerned about groupthink within homogenous communities. I hope this contest is one small push against groupthink at Open Phil. By default, I do, unfortunately, expect most of the submissions to come from people who share the same basic worldview as Open Phil staff. And for submissions that come from people with radically different worldviews, there is the danger that we fail to recognize an excellent point because we are less familiar with the stylistic and epistemic conventions within which it is embedded.
For these sorts of reasons, we did explicitly consider including non-Open Phil judges for the contest. Ultimately, we decided that didn’t make sense for this use case. We are, after all, hoping that submissions update our thinking, and it’s harder for an outside judge to represent our point of view.
But this contest is not the only way we are stress-testing our thinking. For example, I’m involved in another project in which we are engaging directly with smart people who disagree with us about AI risk. We hope that as a result of that adversarial collaboration, we can generate a consensus of cruxes so that we have a better handle on how new developments ought to change our credences. I hope to be able to share more details on that project over the summer.
If you want to chat more about groupthink concerns, shoot me a DM. I believe it’s a somewhat underappreciated worry within EA.
I’d like to see the experimental sequences feature rolled out to all users.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your questions. I’ll let Marcus and Peter answer the first two, but I feel qualified to answer the third.
Certainly, the large number of invertebrate animals is an important factor in why we think invertebrate welfare is an area that deserves attention. But I would advise against relying too heavily on numbers alone when assessing the value of promoting invertebrate welfare. There are at least two important considerations worth bearing in mind:
(1) First, among sentient animals, there may be significant differences in capacity for welfare or moral status. If these differences are large enough, they might matter more than the differences in the numbers of different types of animals.
(2) Second, at some point, Pascal’s Mugging will rear its ugly head. There may be some point below which we are rationally required to ignore probabilities. It’s not clear to me where that point lies. (And it’s also not clear that this is the best way to address Pascal’s Mugging.) There are about 440 quintillion nematodes alive at any given time, which sounds like a pretty good reason to work on nematode welfare, even if one’s credence in their sentience is really low. But nematodes are nothing compared to bacteria. There are something like 5 million trillion trillion bacteria alive at any given time. At some point, it seems as if expected value calculations cease to be appropriately action-guiding, but, again, it’s very uncertain where to draw the line.
I’d like the Forum to support superscript and subscript.
Hey Edo,
I definitely receive valuable feedback on my work by posting it on the Forum, and the feedback is often most valuable when it comes from people outside my current network. For me, the best example of this dynamic was when Gavin Taylor left extensive comments on our series of posts about features relevant to invertebrate sentience (here, here, and here) back in June 2019. I had never interacted with Gavin before, but because of his comments, we set up a meeting, and he has become an invaluable collaborator across many different projects. My work is much improved due to his insights. I’m not sure Gavin and I would ever have met (much less collaborated) if not for his comments on the Forum.
I do think we have been able to acquire talent that would not have been otherwise counterfactually acquired by other organizations.
As an additional data point, I can report that I think it’s very unlikely that I would currently be employed by an EA organization if Rethink Priorities didn’t exist. I applied to Rethink Priorities more or less on a whim, and the extent of my involvement with the EA community in 2018 (when I was hired) was that I was subscribed to the EA newsletter (where I heard about the job) and I donated to GiveWell top charities. At the time, I had completely different career plans.
Hi Denis,
Lots of really good questions here. I’ll do my best to answer.
-
Thinking vs reading: I think it depends on the context. Sometimes it makes sense to lean toward thinking more and sometimes it makes sense to lean toward reading more. (I wouldn’t advise focusing exclusively on one or the other.) Unjustified anchoring is certainly a worry, but I think reinventing the wheel is also a worry. One could waste two weeks groping toward a solution to a problem that could have been solved in afternoon just by reading the right review article.
-
Self-consciousness: Yep, I am intimately familiar with hopelessly inchoate thoughts and notes. (I’m not sure I’ve ever completed a project without passing through that stage.) For me at least, the best way to overcome this state is to talk to lots of people. One piece of advice I have for young researchers is to come to terms with sharing your work with people you respect before it’s polished. I’m very grateful to have a large network of collaborators willing to listen to and read my confused ramblings. Feedback at an early stage of a project is often much more valuable than feedback at a later stage.
-
Is there something interesting here?: Yep, this also happens to me. Unfortunately, I don’t have any particular insight. Oftentimes the only way to know whether an idea is interesting is to put in the hard exploratory work. Of course, one shouldn’t be afraid to abandon an idea if it looks increasingly unpromising.
-
*Survival vs. exploratory mindset: Insofar as I understand the terms, an exploratory mindset is an absolute must. Not sure how to cultivate it, though.
-
Optimal hours of work per day: I work between 4 and 8 hours a day. I don’t find any difference in my productivity within that range, though I imagine if I pushed myself to work more than 8, I would pretty quickly hit diminishing returns.
-
Learning a new field: I can’t emphasize enough the value of just talking to existing experts. For me at least, it’s by far the most efficient way to get up-to-speed quickly. For that reason, I really value having a large network of diverse people I can contact with questions. I put a fair amount of effort into cultivating such a network.
-
Hard problems: I’m fortunate that my work is almost always intrinsically interesting. So even if I don’t make progress on a problem, I continue to be motivated to work on it because the work itself is so very pleasant. That said, as I’ve emphasized above, when I’m stuck, I find it most helpful to talk to lots of people about the problem.
-
Emotional motivators: When I reflect on my life as a whole, I’m happy that I’m in a career that aims to improve the world. But in terms of what gets me out of bed in the morning and excited to work, it’s almost never the impact I might have. It’s the intrinsically interesting nature of my work. I almost certainly would not be successful if I did not find my research to be so fascinating.
-
Typing speed: No idea what my typing speed is, but it doesn’t feel particularly fast, and that doesn’t seem to handicap me. I’ve always considered myself a slow thinker, though.
-
Obvious questions: Yeah, I think there is a general skill of “noticing the obvious.” I don’t think I’m great at it, but one thing I do pretty often is reflect on the sorts of things that appear obvious now that weren’t obvious to smart people ~200 years ago.
-
Tiredness, focus, etc.: Regular exercise certainly helps. Haven’t tried anything else. Mostly I’ve just acclimated to getting work done even though I’m tired. (Not sure I would recommend that “solution,” though!)
-
Meta: I’d like to see others answer questions 1, 3, 6, 7, and 10.
-
My research would not be at the same level of quality if I were operating independently. The ability to easily draw on the knowledge, experience, skills, and general expertise of my colleagues at RP greatly improves my work. I can always count on getting high-quality feedback from at least half a dozen people, and if I get stuck in the middle of the project, I can normally count on someone to help me out. There is some loss of independence working at RP versus being funded directly, but I think the research guidance I receive more than makes up for the loss of independence. And RP’s research agenda is mostly set collectively, anyway. So, in short, I expect that in most cases researchers at organizations like RP are going to be much more productive than independent researchers. (“Synergy” is the buzzword that comes to mind.)
I’ve generally become much more chill about coexisting with invertebrates in and around my house. Mostly I just find them fascinating now rather than scary or repugnant, especially arthropods (the phylum that insects and spiders belong to). That said, I did recently kill a scorpion that had stung my daughter, so I guess there are limits to my tolerance.
Hi Oscar,
Thanks for your comment. For what it’s worth, I am not myself very sympathetic to the hierarchical view that holds that there are differences in moral status among creatures with moral standing. However, I think there are enough thoughtful people who do endorse such a view that it would be epistemically inappropriate to completely dismiss the position. These questions are tough, and I’ve tried to reflect our deep collective uncertainty about these matters in the post.
(I should perhaps also flag that even if there are differences in moral status, there is no a priori guarantee that humans have the highest moral status. I’m currently working on a piece about the subjective experience of time, and if there are differences in characteristic temporal experience across species, humans certainly don’t come out on top of that metric. But perhaps that’s irrelevant to moral status.)
Regarding the usefulness of capacity for welfare, naturally I disagree. Take fish, for instance. Fish are a tremendously diverse group of animals, and this diversity is reflected in human exploitation of fish. (By my count, humans exploit five times as many taxonomic families of fish as they do birds.) There is prima facie good reason to think that capacity for welfare differs substantially among different families of fish. The harms we inflict on fish, through aquaculture and commercial fishing, are severe, plausibly among the worst conditions the fish could experience. If capacity for welfare differs among fish, and we are inflicting severe harm on all exploited fish, then those differences in capacity for welfare would give us reason to prioritize some types of fish over others. The fish with the greater capacity for welfare are suffering more, so easing their suffering is more urgent.
Happy to talk more if you’d like.
A few months ago I compiled a bibliography of academic publications about comparative moral status. It’s not exhaustive and I don’t plan to update it, but it might be a good place for folks to start if they’re interested in the topic.
The person who replaces me has all my same skills but in addition has many connections to policymakers, more management experience, and stronger quantitative abilities than I do.
Despite the skepticism about charter cities that Dave and I express in the report, I would be comfortable recommending @effective_jobs retweet openings at Charter Cities Institute. There are plenty of folks in the EA community who would be a good fit for CCI, and it seems to me that an aggregator like @effective_jobs should lean toward casting a wider rather than narrower net.
Hi Roger,
There are different possible scenarios in which invertebrates turn out to be sentient. It might be the case, for instance, that panpsychism is true. So if one comes to believe that invertebrates are sentient because panpsychism is true, one should also come to believe that robots and plants are sentient. Or it could be that some form of information integration theory is true, and invertebrates instantiate enough integration for sentience. In that case, the probability that you assign to the sentience of plants and robots will depend on your assessment of their relevant level of integration.
For what it’s worth, here’s how I think about the issue: sentience, like other biological properties, has an evolutionary function. I take it as a datum that mammals are sentient. If we can discern the role that sentience is playing in mammals, and it appears there is analogous behavior in other taxa, then, in the absence of defeaters, we are licensed to infer that individuals of those taxa are sentient. In the past few years I’ve updated toward thinking that arthropods and (coleoid) cephalopods are sentient, but the majority of these updates have been based on learning new empirical information about these animals. (Basically, arthropods and cephalopods engage in way more complex behaviors than I realized.) When we constructed our invertebrate sentience table, we also looked at plants, prokaryotes, protists, and, in an early version of the table, robots and AIs of various sorts. The individuals in these categories did not engage in the sort of behaviors that I take to be evidence of sentience, so I don’t feel licensed to infer that they are sentient.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the comment. You’re right that realized welfare is ultimately what matters. My hope is that thinking about capacity for welfare will sometimes help inform our estimates of realized welfare, though this certainly won’t be true in every case. As an example of an instance where thinking about capacity for welfare does matter, consider honey bees. At any given time, there are more than a trillion managed honey bees under human control. Varroa destructor mites are a common problem in commercial hives. When a mite attaches to an adult bee, it slowly drains the bee’s blood and fat. (It might be comparable to a tick the size of a baseball latching on to a human.) How does this affect the bee’s welfare? If bees have a capacity for welfare roughly similar to vertebrates, it seems like in the long-run we can do a lot more good by focusing on honey bee welfare.
I believe that interspecies comparisons of welfare are extraordinarily difficult, but I think you are still too pessimistic about the prospect of making such comparisons. It’s true that on many views welfare will be constituted (in whole or in part) by subjective (i.e., private) states for which we don’t have direct evidence. But we can still use inference to the best explanation to justifiably infer the existence of such states. We only have access to our own subjective experiences, but we infer the existence of such states in other humans all the time. (Humans can give self-reports, but of course we can’t independently verify such reports.) I think we can do the same with varying degrees of confidence for nonhuman animals.
For a discussion of possible cross-species measures of animal welfare, see this paper by Heather Browning.
Happy to really get in the weeds of this issue if you want to talk more.
The term ‘moral weight’ is occasionally used in philosophy (David DeGrazia uses it from time to time, for instance) but not super often. There are a number of closely related but conceptually distinct issues that often get lumped together under the heading moral weight:
Capacity for welfare, which is how well or poorly a given animal’s life can go
Average realized welfare, which is how well or poorly the life of a typical member of a given species actually goes
Moral status, which is how much the welfare of a given animal matters morally
Differences in any of those three things might generate differences in how we prioritize interventions that target different species.
Rethink Priorities is going to release a report on this subject in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned for more details!
If I hadn’t been hired by RP, I probably would have ended up working for a random tech company in Austin, where I live, or maybe I would have ended up doing admissions counseling remotely (which is lucrative but soul-sucking work). If I left RP now I would try to work for a different EA research org.
I agree that bivalves are probably the least likely to be sentient of the animals that are easily available to eat. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend eating them because there may be issues with the way they are collected. (I haven’t looked into this at all.) I don’t eat them because I don’t find it particularly hard not to eat meat, and it’s easier to explain my dietary restrictions to people if there aren’t too many exceptions.
The research I did for my honey bee report has affected the way I feel about almonds. It hasn’t really reduced my almond consumption, but I now feel slightly guilty about eating almonds. Modern almond farming is pretty bad for bees, and bees are super cool and smart. From a bee welfare perspective, I’m pretty confident eating commercially farmed almonds is worse than eating wildflower honey. (Note that most honey is not wildflower honey.)