Jo_🔸

• Jo_🔸 2 Mar 2026 8:00 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Books I’d Like To See Written

  The first suggestion, “How to Care”, reminds me very much of Magnus Vinding’s upcoming book “Compassionate Purpose”. It should come out this spring, but you can find draft chapters here if you want to see whether that’s what you had in mind.

Trans­for­ma­tive AI is not a de­ci­sive ar­gu­ment for near-term an­i­mal welfare

• Jo_🔸 16 Feb 2026 18:11 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Con­sider ad­vo­cat­ing for fur­nished cages in­stead of cage-free aviaries?

  Thanks, Vasco, very helpful! I’ve asked myself this question a few times, and I hadn’t even considered the cost aspect while doing that. I also expect that there will be some informed considerations in the comments highlighting some counterarguments to this that I haven’t considered yet.

• Jo_🔸 15 Feb 2026 19:55 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: What is Love ft. Claude & VascoBot

  I fully agree with that caveat! If “love” depends on sentience (not to mention the moral weights we put on top of that), then it seems pretty underdefined (for what it’s worth, I still haven’t grasped Tomasik’s strange definition of sentience). I think I enjoy this quote mostly for the fuzzy feels it gives me, less so than for its action-guidance.

• Jo_🔸 15 Feb 2026 7:18 UTC

  18 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: What is Love ft. Claude & VascoBot

  “In my mind, unconditional love is closely tied with utilitarianism: When I realize that an organism feels happiness and suffering, at that point I realize that the organism matters and deserves care and kindness. In this sense, you could say the only “condition” of my love is sentience.”—Brian Tomasik

• Jo_🔸 7 Feb 2026 19:30 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Lay­ing Some Cause-Pri­ori­ti­za­tion Ground­work for Digi­tal Minds

  Nicely balanced, well-structured, and link-heavy, as such a post “should” be: well-done!^[1] I’m very unlikely to act in this area, but as it’s less mapped-out than some larger areas, I find this helpful, insofar as most intros to the area are theoretical and not focused on prioritizing potential interventions.

  1. ^

     My last post attempted to lay similar groundwork for AI x Animals, so I’m biased toward finding this impressive.

• Jo_🔸 7 Feb 2026 19:19 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An­i­mal welfare in 1800

  I’ve been thinking about this in vague terms for a while (and have used the analogy a few times in conversations), but it was an entirely different experience to read it an properly written way, with many details I hadn’t considered.

  Best intuition-pumping exercise I’ve seen in a while!

• Jo_🔸 3 Feb 2026 17:51 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Tristan Katz’s comment on: Pro­pose a de­bate topic—I’ll run one

  Have you read Visionary Pragmatism: A Third Way for Animal Advocacy ?

• Jo_🔸 24 Jan 2026 12:37 UTC

  11 points

  10 ∶ 3

  in reply to: Gregory Lewis🔸’s comment on: Reflec­tions on Far­mKind’s Jan­uary me­dia campaign

  I feel like your message implies that the central claim of Forget Veganuary (that focusing on veganism is unhelpful, and that donations are more promising) was not sincerely held by FarmKind /​ animal advocates. I strongly disagree.

  The view that diet change is not promising has been defended in animal advocacy since the early 90s, by a diversity of leading figures of the movement (Wayne Hsiung, Peter Singer, Yves Bonnardel, Nick Cooney).^[1] It simply had never been made into a public campaign. So I don’t resonate with the framing of the campaign as bait: on the contrary, it stated out loud a view that many advocates had. (Not saying that getting attention was not part of the campaign—though it’s part of most campaigns).

  1. ^

     To varying degrees, with caveats, etc.

• Jo_🔸 22 Jan 2026 19:16 UTC

  8 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: Does the An­i­mal-Rights Move­ment En­courage Wilder­ness Preser­va­tion?

  I like this article (maybe mostly because I like Tomasik), though I find it a bit dated, and the twelve years that have passed since then indicate that the thesis is somewhat off (to be fair, I think Tomasik would agree that his evidence is very anecdotal). While the popularity of wilderness preservation in the mainstream has grown since then, it seems that large fractions of the animal rights /​ welfare movement has been pretty distant from it. Anti-wilderness-preservation views have been endorsed by some of the main animal rights influencers: James Aspey, Die Militante Veganerin, Gary Yourofsky (to varying extents: I think Gary Yourofsky finds nature bloody and somewhat horrific, but I’m not sure that he’s explicitly anti-wilderness preservation, but the first two are clearer on it).

  Meanwhile, in animal welfare (at least the EA-leaning side of it), consideration for wild animal welfare is quite common. But that slice of animal welfare is a small world.

  One anecdotal observation is that among more “normal” ethical vegans, habitat destruction is commonly seen as much less important than factory farming.

  However, I think there is truth in the article: vegans are probably more likely to have concerns about “the environment”, and there are pro-habitat-preservation memes that end up being tied with animal rights. So I’m not saying that animal advocacy systematically make people less favourable to wilderness preservation.

• Jo_🔸 22 Jan 2026 5:54 UTC

  13 points

  3 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Cel­e­brat­ing wins — dis­cus­sion thread

  Thanks for flagging this concern! I’d share it if insect farming had existed as a substitute for the factory farming of other animals. However, in practice, insect farming tries (and mostly fails) to substitute for:

  • Soybean meal (which causes some suffering through crop clearing, pesticides, etc—but insects in farms are also fed crops)

  • Fishmeal (the impact on animal suffering of fishing is unclear)

  • Pet food (among the lowest expected-suffering-footprint animal product, since it mostly comes from byproducts of large animals)

  Though I understand that we don’t have the same views on insect suffering, I think that none of the three sources of food above cause much higher expected suffering than factory farm conditions for insects (again, I’d be much more uncertain if insect farming substituted for broiler chicken farming).

  My current view on insects is that in the face of some indications of nociception /​ sentience-adjacent traits, these animals suffering significantly doesn’t seem astronomically less likely than dogs or birds suffering. So to me, the pain of a trillion insects doesn’t seem less in expectation that that of ten billion chickens or 500 million cows, though I have no confidence in more precise comparisons (so I’m not saying “obviously insect farming is worse than chicken farming”).

• Jo_🔸 21 Jan 2026 15:11 UTC

  13 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Cel­e­brat­ing wins — dis­cus­sion thread

  Mieux Donner, France’s new effective giving initiative, has now received over 1 million euros (1.172 million dollars) in donations, since its inception in 2024.

• Jo_🔸 21 Jan 2026 15:08 UTC

  1 point

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: alene’s comment on: Cel­e­brat­ing wins — dis­cus­sion thread

  Thanks for the info! I’m surprised that I’m only learning about it here.

• Jo_🔸 21 Jan 2026 15:07 UTC

  7 points

  3 ∶ 2

  on: Cel­e­brat­ing wins — dis­cus­sion thread

  The world’s largest insect farming company has officially gone bankrupt !

• Jo_🔸 21 Jan 2026 9:06 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: 3. Why im­par­tial al­tru­ists should sus­pend judg­ment un­der unawareness

  I keep coming back to the “Case study” section here, I find it to be a very useful illustration of the central thesis of the sequence.

• Jo_🔸 10 Jan 2026 11:05 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Against Suffer­ing-Minimization

  Thank you so much for pushing back on my simplistic comment! I agree that my framing was misleading (I commented without even re-reading had said). Thanks for highlighting crucial considerations on counterintuitive conclusions in NU and CU.

  Your comment makes me realize that an objection based on utopian situations makes sense (and I’ve found it reasonable in the past as a crux against NU). I guess my frustration with the use of the World Destruction Argument against NU, in the ways EAs often bring it up, is that it criticizes the fact that NU recommends extinction in our world (which contains suffering), even though CU has a decent chance of recommending extinction in our world (as soon as we determine whether wild invertebrates are living net-negative lives or not!).^[1]

  1. ^

     Though again, if there are higher chances of astronomically good than astronomically bad futures, animal suffering is easily outweighed in CU, but not in NU (but CUs could change their mind on the empirical aspect and recommend extinction). But my impression is that this isn’t what people (among non-philosophers, which includes me) are objecting to? They mostly seem to find deliberate extinction repugnant (which is something I think many views can agree upon).

An­i­mals in AI-trans­formed fu­tures: can any­thing be done to­day?

An­i­mals in AI-trans­formed fu­tures: will progress be made on this is­sue?

• Jo_🔸 8 Jan 2026 5:04 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Clara Torres Latorre 🔸’s comment on: Against Suffer­ing-Minimization

  Nice comment! I answered one of your requests as a top-level comment.

• Jo_🔸 8 Jan 2026 5:03 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Against Suffer­ing-Minimization

  Clara said she would appreciate “Any negative utilitarian or person knowledgeable about negative utilitarianism commenting on why NU doesn’t necessarily recommend extinction.”

  Simon Knutsson’s paper “The World Destruction Argument” has an argument that I’d simplify as “The World Destruction Problem is a problem of consequentialism, not of NU”. One of the arguments (simplifying) being that classic utilitarians would recommend the extinction of all sentient life if they found out that it was resiliently net negative, or that it could be replaced by marginally happier sentient life through killing off every current sentient being painlessly.

  For other thoughts on why Negative Utilitarianism doesn’t recommend extinction, see this excerpt from a Center For Reducing Suffering article.