GWWC board member, software engineer in Boston, parent, musician. Switched from earning to give to direct work in pandemic mitigation. Married to Julia Wise. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise. Full list of EA posts: jefftk.com/ānews/āea
Jeff Kaufman šø
Karma: 16,398
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Your argument that you would effectively be forced into becoming an anti-animal advocate if you convincingly wrote up your viewsāsorry I donāt really buy it.
I would be primarily known as an anti-animal advocate if I wrote something like this, even if I didnāt want to be.
On whether I would need to put my time into continuing to defend the position, I agree that I strictly wouldnāt have to, but I think that given my temperament and interaction style I wouldnāt actually be able to avoid this. So I need to think of this as if I am allocating a larger amount of time than what it would take to write up the argument.
Ah, thank you for clarifying! That is a much stronger sense of ādoing a good jobā than I was going for. I was trying to point at something like, successfully writing up my views in a way that felt like a solid contribution to the discourse. Explaining what I thought, why I thought it, and why I didnāt find the standard counter arguments convincing. I think this would probably take me about two months of full-time work, so a pretty substantial opportunity cost.
I think I could do this well enough to become the main person people pointed at when they wanted to give an example of a ādonāt value animalsā EA (which would probably be negative for my other work), but even major success here would probably only result in convincing <5% of animal-focused EAs to change what they were working on. And much less than that for money, since most of the EA money is from OP, which funds animal work as part of an explicit process of worldview diversification.
Iād be interested to know how likely you think it is that you could do a āgood jobā.
I do think I could do a good job, yes. While Iāve been thinking about these problems off and on for over a decade Iāve never dedicated actual serious time here, and in the past when Iāve put that kind of time into work Iāve been proud of what Iāve been able to do.
You say you have a ābundle of intuitions and thoughtsā which doesnāt seem like much to me.
What I meant by that is that I donāt have my overall views organized into a form optimized for explaining to others. Iām not asking other people to assume that because Iāve inscrutably come to this conclusion Iām correct or that they should defer to me in any way. But Iād also be dishonest if I didnāt accurately report my views.
In your original comment you say āThis isnāt as deeply a considered view as Iād likeā. Were you saying you havenāt considered deeply enough or that the general community hasnāt?
Primarily the former. While if someone in the general community had put a lot of time into looking at this question from a perspective similar to my own and I felt like their work addressed my questions that would certainly help, given that no one has and Iām instead forming my own view I would prefer to have put more work into that view.
Jeff because he doesnāt seem to have provided any justification (from what Iāve seen) for the claim that animals donāt have relevant experiences that make them moral patients. He simply asserts this as his view. Itās not even an argument, let alone a strong one.
I agree I havenāt given an argument on this. At various times people have asked what my view is (ex: weāre taking here about something prompted by my completing a survey prompt) and Iāve given that.
Explaining why I have this view would be a big investment in time: I have a bundle of intuitions and thoughts that put me here, but converting that into a cleanly argued blog post would be a lot more work than I would normally do for fun and I donāt expect this to be fun.
This is especially the case because If I did a good job at this I might end up primarily known for being an anti-animal advocate, and since I think my views on animals are much less important than many of my other views, I wouldnāt see this as at all a good thing. I also expect that, again, conditional on doing a good job of this, I would need to spend a lot of time as a representative of this position: responding to the best counter arguments, evaluating new information as it comes up, people wanting me to participate in debates, animal advocates thinking that changing my mind is really very important for making progress toward their goals. These are similarly not where I want to put my time and energy, either for altruistic reasons personal enjoyment.
The normal thing to do would be to stop here: Iāve said what my view is, and explained why Iāve never put the effort into a careful case for that position. But Iām more committed to transparency than I am to the above, so Iām going to take about 10 minutes (I have 14 minutes before my kids wake up) to very quickly sketch the main things going into my view. Please read this keeping in mind that it is something I am sharing to be helpful, and Iām not claiming itās fully argued.
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The key question for me is whether, in a given system, thereās anyone inside to experience anything.
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I think extremely small collections of neurons (ex: nematodes) can receive pain, in the sense of updating on inputs to generate less of some output. But I draw a distinction between pain and suffering, where the latter requires experience. And I think itās very unlikely nematodes experience anything.
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I donāt think this basic pleasure or pain matters, and if you canāt make something extremely morally good by maximizing the number of happy neurons per cubic centimeter.
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Iām pretty sure that most adult humans do experience things, because I do and I can talk to other humans about this.
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I think it is pretty unlikely that very young children, in their first few months, have this kind of inner experience.
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I donāt find most things that people give as examples for animal consciousness to be very convincing, because you can often make quite a simple system that displays these features.
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While some of my views above could imply that some humans are more valuable come up morally than others, I think it would be extremely destructive to act that way. Lots and lots of bad history there. I treat all people as morally equal.
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The arguments for extending this to people as a class donāt seem to me to justify extending this to all creatures as a class.
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I also think there are things that matter beyond experienced joy and suffering (preference satisfaction, etc), and Iām even less convinced that animals have these.
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Eliezerās view is reasonably close to mine, in places where Iāve seen him argue it.
(Iām not going to be engaging with object level arguments on this issueāIām not trying to become an anti-animal advocate.)
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The survey question was, in Dutch:
Imagine the worst suffering a [dog, bird, fish (for example a salmon), shrimp, fly] can experience. Try to compare this suffering with the worst suffering a human can experience. How intense or severe do you think is the worst suffering of a [dog, bird, fish, shrimp, fly] for an hour compared to the worst suffering of a human for an hour?
The detailed results are here, including a histogram for birds:
Whether the answers to this question imply moral equivalence between humans and birds, though, depends on the assumption that the respondents are something close to hedonistic utilitarians, and I doubt they are? For example, if the survey had instead given questions specifically about moral weight (āhow many birds would you need to be saving from an hour of intense suffering before youād prioritize that over doing the same for a humanā, etc) youād have seen different answers.
ļNAO UpĀdates, Fall 2024
Thanks for the reminder! I used to do this before EA Giving Tuesday and should probably start doing it again.
An uninformed prior says all individuals have equal moral weight
Thatās one way of constructing an uninformed prior, but that seems quite a bit worse than starting from a place of equal moral weight among cells, or perhaps atoms or neurons. All of which would give less animal friendly results, though still more animal-friendly results than mainstream human morality.
(And of course this is just a prior, and our experience of the world can bring us quite a long way from whichever prior we think is most natural.)
Marginal animal welfare cost effectiveness seems to robustly beat global health interventions. ā¦ Using welfare ranges based roughly on Rethink Prioritiesā results
I donāt think this is as robust as it seems. One could easily have moral weights many orders of magnitude away from RPās. For example, if you value one human more than the population of one beehive thatās three orders of magnitude lower than what RP gives (more)
Roughly, pleasure and suffering matter to the extent that thereās an entity experiencing them. I think animals very likely donāt have that kind of experience. I also think some humans donāt, but I think the consequences of trying to draw distinctions among humans in this way would be pretty terrible and we shouldnāt go in that direction. More: The Argument From Marginal Cases.
I donāt think most animals are moral patients, and so see work on global health as much more valuable. This isnāt as deeply a considered view as Iād like (though I think thereās an unfortunate pattern where people who think animals are more likely to matter a lot are more likely to go into attempting to weigh the worth of animals) and people shouldnāt put as much weight on this as my other EA-related views.
More in this direction: Weighing Animal Worth, Why Iām Not Vegan.
ļPreĀdictĀing InĀfluenza AbunĀdance in WastewĀaĀter MeĀtageĀnomic SeĀquencĀing Data
Seconding this! I would also be very curious about what the multiplier is if you discount giving in future years, ideally as a chart of multiplier vs annual discount rate.
I didnāt respond because of the āwe wonāt be able to continue engaging in the discussion on this hereā. FarmKind can decide that they donāt want to prioritize this kind of community interaction, but it does make me a lot less interested in figuring out where we disagree and why.
It is also unclear how much FarmKind could change course based on feedback (other than giving up and shutting down)
There are lots of options helping animals (through raising money or otherwise) that donāt involve this kind of competition around the impact of donations. Itās common for startups to pivot if their first product doesnāt work out.
For what itās worth, my first interpretation of āno-kill meatā is that youāre harvesting meat from animals in ways that donāt kill them. Like amputation of parts that grow back.
But if we agree it is not tenable, then we need a (much?) narrower community norm than āno donation matchingā, such as āno donation matching without communication around counterfactualsā, or Open Phil /ā EAF needs to take significantly more flak than I think they did.
While I think a norm of āno donation matchingā is where we should be, I think the best weāre likely to get is āno donation matching without donors understanding the counterfactual impactā. So while Iāve tried to argue for the former Iāve limited my criticism of campaigns to ones that donāt meet the latter.
That article (Aporia: Youāre probably a eugenicist) seems to be the same article she has on her Substack (Dissentient: Youāre probably a eugenicist) and that you refer to above (EA Forum: Most people endorse some form of āeugenicsā), which was also initially titled the same.
Which is to say: donāt double-count, and donāt treat the non-linked āYouāre probably a eugenicistā as if it has worse content than the linked āMost people endorse some form of āeugenicsāā.