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
Stop Overreacting re: FTX / SBF
>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
Evolution, Pain, Suffering, and Ed Yong
>it has assumed with insufficient reason that all abolitionist thinking and approaches are ineffective.
I appreciate this post, but this statement is, IMHO, simply not true. Many of us were “abolitionists” at one point. Many of us have decades of experience and have studied what has and hasn’t moved the needle over the years. See, for example, “The End of Veganism” chapter here.
Once again, researchers fail to distinguish between “pain” and “suffering.”
https://www.mattball.org/2022/10/ed-yong-on-insects.html
Open Phil is pretty much the only place I’ve seen that’s done a good job of honestly exploring this distinction:
I appreciate this article. Thanks!
This doesn’t add much, but thank you for sharing this. I honestly believe that the world would be much better (and many people on this forum much happier) if more people did this.
Really enjoyed this piece. It is somewhat painful to read, given that I believe most of my professional life did more harm than good.
I do think that partially rationalizing torturing billions of sentient beings every year for more corn in silos in case of a nuclear winter—that’s really a stretch.
Hi Michelle—thanks for writing this. It is exceedingly thoughtful, compelling, and thorough.
Our kid is 28* - so almost everything we went through was before EA (and before we met Jason Gaverick Matheny). We met at an animal rights group I was running, and we went on to found several animal-focused charities (including One Step for Animals).
One of the reasons I wrote Losing My Religions last year (and have made the eBook free) was to give people an opportunity to live that process and understand the various pressures biology, family, and society place on us. (I also write about a friend, an EA here on this board, who has recently gone through some of the things I experienced.)
Like your great post, I hope LMR provides people some help.
*Kid is finishing up a PhD in Econ based in part on 80,000 Hours recommendation (but mostly Gaverick).
Just requested our library system buy it!
I think we should just stop overreacting, period. This guy’s money doesn’t mean he is EA. No one person is EA.
If we spent as much time figuring out how to better be more effective as we do on self-loathing and self-over-analysis, we’d be further along.
IMHO. Of course, I could be wrong.
Title: Working with the Beef Industry for Chicken Welfare
Author: RobertY
Why it’s good: Correct focus on a source of immense, totally unnecessary suffering, with outside-the-box thinking to help mitigate the suffering. Thanks, Robert!
Against Longtermism: I welcome our robot overlords, and you should too!
Great post. I’d love to see an entire post on this:
Acknowledging good-faith intentions and attempts to help others
Maybe have it pinned to the top of every page. :-)
But if I don’t bury people with words, how will they know I’m smarter than them?
;-)
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.
I’m down with a lot of this, but I’m not sure about the EU. Given the history of war on the continent, I think the EU is a totally reasonable response. Hard to run the counter-factual.
In the fourth decade of animal advocacy, I honestly wonder what has hurt animals more than AR advocates pointing to polls.
Why would we ever, ever, ever look at opinion polls, when every day, everyone is casting an actual ballot at the grocery store and restaurant?
This reminds me of all the interviews where Beyond Meat’s Ethan Brown said, “People tell me they don’t want GMOs.” He is simply talking to the wrong people. Nearly everyone only cares about cheap meat. Full stop. Nothing else matters, no matter what they say.
I appreciate Lewis Bollard and all his focused work to reduce suffering.