I run the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH), a cause prioritization research and grantmaking organization.
Joel Tan
Karma: 1,488
Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH)
EA Meta Funding Landscape Report
Deep Report on Hypertension
Shallow Report on Hypertension
Value of Life: VSL Estimates vs Community Perspective Evaluations
Intermediate Report on Hypertension
Longlist of Causes + Cause Exploration Contest
Shallow Report on Nuclear War (Arsenal Limitation)
Shallow Report on Diabetes Mellitus Type 2
CEARCH’s Cause Exploration Contest: Awards
Shallow Report on Access to Mental Health Drugs
[Job] Researcher (CEARCH)
Shallow Report on Nuclear War (Abolishment)
Intermediate Report on Low Physical Activity
A useful post, Ozzie, and definitely food for thought.
I would just like to point out one fairly significant consideration in favour of small organizations that isn’t factored in here—ownership and motivation (i.e. the founder and other early-stage employeesslave awaywork far harder because we feel a sense that the organization is yours—you are the organization; you don’t work for it). This has been my own experience, and I imagine it’s much the same for you. I believe Joey Savoie talks about this fairly often, when asked why Charity Entrepreneurship doesn’t just hire people to implement effective global health & animal ideas in-house, rather than using these people to incubate new orgs
Hi Bob & team,
Really great work. Regardless of my specific disagreements, I do think calculating moral weights for animals is literally some of the highest value work the EA community can do, because without such weights we cant compare animal welfare causes to human-related global health/longtermism causes—and hence cannot identify and direct resources towards the most important problems. And I say this as someone who has always donated to human causes over animal ones, and who is not, in fact, vegan.
With respect to the post and the related discussion:
(1) Fundamentally, the quantitative proxy model seems conceptually sound to me.
(2) I do disagree with the idea that your results are robust to different theories of welfare. For example, I myself reject hedonism and accept a broader view of welfare (given that we care about a broad range of things beyond happiness, e.g. life/freedom/achievement/love/whatever). If (a) such broad welfarist views are correct, (b) you place a sufficiently high weight on the other elements of welfare (e.g. life per se, even if neutral valenced), and (c) you don’t believe animals can enjoy said elements of welfare (e.g. if most animals aren’t cognitively sophisticated enough to have preferences over continued existence), then an additional healthy year of human life would plausibly be worth a lot more than an equivalent animal year even after accounting for similar degrees of suffering and the relevant moral weights as calculated.
(3) I would like to say, for the record, that a lot of the criticism you’re getting (and I don’t exempt myself here) is probably subject to a lot of motivated reasoning. I am personally uncertain as to the degree to which I should discount my own conclusions over this reason.
(4) My main concern, as someone who does human-related cause prioritization research, is the meat eater argument and whether helping to save human lives is net negative from overall POV, given the adverse consequences for animal suffering. I am moderately optimistic that this is not so, and that saving human lives is net positive (as we want/need it to be) . Having very roughly run the numbers myself using RP’s unadjusted moral weights (i.e. not taking into account point 2 above) and inputting other relevant data (e.g. on per capita consumption rate of meat), my approximate sense is that in saving lives we’re basically buying 1 full week of healthy human life for around 6 days of chicken suffering or above 2 days of equivalent human suffering—which is worth it.
(1) I think Joey’s right, and I’ll phrase the issue in this way—a lot of EAs underrate the impact of habit-formation and overrate the extent to which most of your choices even require active willpower. Your choices change who you are as a person, so what was once hard becomes easy.
I’ve always given at least 10% to effective charities, and now it’s just something I do; it’s barely something I have to think about, let alone require some heroic exertion of will. And while I’m not vegan, I am successfully eating less meat even on a largel6 keto diet, and what surprised me is how much easier it is than I thought it would be.
(2) Let’s accept for the sake of argument that there is a lot of heterogeneity, such that for some people the impact of habit formation is weak and it is psychologically very difficult for them to consistently adhere to non-job avenues to impact (e.g. donating, being vegan, etc). Even so, how would one know in advance? Why not test it out, to see if you’re in the group for which habit formation impact is high and these sacrifices are easy, or if you are in the other group?
Surely it’s worth doing—the potential impact is significant, and if it’s too hard you can of course stop! But many people will be surprised, I think, at just how easy certain things are when they become part of your daily routine.