Matt is the author, co-author, secondary-author, ghost-author, and non-author of articles, speeches, book chapters, and even entire books! The most recent is his blockbuster* The Accidental Activist (which Amazon claims is by his wife Anne Green. So it goes.). Currently, he is President of One Step for Animals; previously, he was shitcanned from more nonprofits than there is room to list here. (Although there’s still time for more!) Before Matt’s unfortunate encounter with activism, he was an aerospace engineer who wanted to work for NASA (to impress Carl Sagan).
His hobbies include photography, almost dying, and XXXXXX (Hey! This is a family-friendly website! -ed). He lives in Tucson with Anne, along with no dogs, no cats, and no African tortoises, although he cares for all of these via friends and family.
*JK
MattBall
I appreciate this article. Thanks!
Usually when I see a comment this long, it is someone trying to show off / hijack a thread. But this comment is actually very useful. Thanks Adam!
But if I don’t bury people with words, how will they know I’m smarter than them?
;-)
Hi Alene,
Thanks, as always, for your thoughtful concern for the most abused species.
I think that effective efforts to expose factory farms now will have the most long-term impact. As noted below, just having PB/CM won’t cause most people to switch. We need to give them reasons to do so. That’s why I think One Step for Animals and Legal Impact for Chickens are the most important small groups. (HSUS is doing great work, but as has been said, they have more money than god.)
The hardest part of this, IMO, is that it seems like many, if not most, sources are biased. Even if not to an explicit ideology, then to the writer’s personality. (And then there is the need for academics et al to constantly find something “new” to say.)
Thanks for this post.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but I don’t know how you can feel sure about weighing a chicken’s suffering vs a person.
But I definitely disagree with the initial conclusion, and I think it is because you don’t fear extreme suffering enough. If everyone behind the veil of ignorance knew what the worst suffering was, they would fear it more than they would value time at the beach.
Re: longtermism, I find the argument in Pinker’s latest book to be pretty compelling:
The optimal rate at which the discount the future is a problem that we face not just as individuals but as societies, as we decide how much public wealth we should spend benefit our older selves and future generations. Discount it we must. It’s not only that a current sacrifice would be in vain if an asteroid sends us the way of the dinosaurs. It’s also that our ignorance of what the future will bring, including advances in technology, grows exponentially the farther out we plan. It would have made little sense for our ancestors a century ago to have scrimped for our benefit—say, diverting money from schools and roads to a stockpile of iron lungs to prepare for a polio epidemic—given that we’re six times richer and have solved some of their problems while facing new ones they could not have dreamed of.
Thanks for these thoughts.
Having worked on both the demand and supply side for three decades, and being friends with many people across the board, this is my niche:
https://www.onestepforanimals.org/about.html
Leave it to EAs to spend endless words rationalizing something they want / rationalizing away something that is “inconvenient.”
Thanks for this, Kenny. I’ve always thought Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance can do a lot of heavy lifting.
https://www.mattball.org/2017/03/a-theory-of-ethics.html
Michael, this is kinda what I’m looking for. What does “limited aggregation” mean / do in your case.
Thanks Kenny!
I think it is the main bias in EAs—we so easily add up things in our minds (e.g., summing happiness across individuals) that we don’t stop to realize that there is no “cosmic” place where all that happiness is occurring. There are just individual minds.
Totally agree. Yes, the production was good, but Sgt. Pepper’s took it to the next level but also with brilliant songs.
Regarding engineering, you might find this interesting:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OVLIQU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1I didn’t think I would, but it was fascinating (I listened to the audio version)
Thanks for this. I think we underestimate how much good GMOs can do in the future.
>In theory, any harm can be outweighed by something that benefits a large enough number of persons, even if it benefits them in a minor way.
Holden, do you know of any discussion that doesn’t rest on that assumption? It is where I get off the train:
https://www.mattball.org/2021/09/why-i-am-not-utilitarian-repost-from.html
This is a super interesting article, but...
I worry that FRI’s work leans on the intuition that suffering is real and we can speak coherently about it, to a degree greater than its metaphysics formally allow.
To me, it reads like it was written by someone who has never really encountered suffering.
http://www.mattball.org/2014/11/excerpts-from-letter-to-young-matt.html
Thanks for the link, Halstead. A very good article, but it doesn’t totally cure my unease with aggregating across individuals. But I don’t expect to ever find anything that is fully in line with intuitions, as I think intuitions are contradictory. :-)
Thanks so very much for this Michael. I think it would be great if you had the Summary on a page by itself, with links to the three parts. Then it wouldn’t be so intimidating.
This is great. I haven’t done a deep dive into the lit, but from what little I do know, this seems like a great course of action!
Thanks Mr Mather. As noted here http://www.mattball.org/2017/01/the-difficulty-of-evaluating-impact-of.html it is tough. But at least the message should minimize the number of people switching from red meat to chickens. You might also like: http://www.onestepforanimals.org/blog/experiment-evaluate-repeat http://www.onestepforanimals.org/blog/good-news-believe-it-or-not :-)
Two thoughts:
https://www.mattball.org/2021/05/why-honey-is-vegan-or-talking-about.html
https://www.mattball.org/2020/12/repeat-kinda-against-ea-utilitarianism.html
Thanks!