I develop software tools for the building energy efficiency industry. My background is in architectural and mechanical engineering (MS Penn State, PhD University of Maryland). I know quite a bit about indoor air quality and indoor infectious disease transfer, and closely follow all things related to climate change and the energy transition. I co-organize the local EA group in Denver, Colorado.
MatthewDahlhausen
Karma: 1,109
“Personally, my partner and I donate on average ~$10k USD every year (plus employer matching for the most part), which is only ~1% of my income”. I think this is where the disconnect comes from. At a ~$1 million/yr income, it seems you are prioritizing early retirement and a luxurious lifestyle over EA causes and giving. That’s normal preference expression for the ultra-wealthy. It’s just going to seem discordant for many in EA making $50-$150k/yr and giving 10%+ who place (relatively) higher priority on giving. There’s a difference between what you value and prioritize and most people in the movement. I’m not trying to make a normative statement; just pointing out a difference that is likely causing the outsider feeling. It’s a good thing you’re donating, and thinking about how to give effectively.
On the diamonds next to peoples names and holier-than-thou attitude: Having been in the movement a while, I often encounter the cult-like and holier-than-thou perception of EA. Even from from friends and family. The perception usually comes from a deep skepticism that people could be fundamentally motivated by altruism. It’s easier to assume that it’s either cult brainwashing that implies a loss of rational thinking and agency, a way to feel superior over others, or that is a all a virtue signaling facade for reputational benefit. Knowing many people in the movement—most do have an intrinsic altruistic motivation. That such a motivation could exist is alien, even threatening to many people. I’m not sure what to say about that beyond I hope skeptics can adjust their mental model of the world to include those who genuinely care about making it better.
If you are arguing for increasing agricultural land, there are many other ways to accomplish that. You could promote the use of biofuels. Suggest more people get horses as companion animals. Or many other methods. Hyper-focusing on eating cows is weird. At this point is seems like a way to self-rationalize that eating cows is not just ok but on net preferable.
P1: “This 90 year old is about to send a spam message to 100 million people. That will cause ~2000 years of annoyance and suffering. They have only ~4 years of expected mediocre life left, so it would be better to kill them so they can’t send the message.”
P2: “Why not just take away their phone?”
You’ve proposed a false dilemma.
Mild downvote here. The conclusions (“I recommend increasing the consumption of beef”) do not not follow from the premises (“soil animals have negative lives”), even if true. And the premises are highly uncertain and speculative.
There are perhaps other ways to improve or mitigate soil animal lives, and certainly many other ways to increase agricultural land that do not involve killing and eating cows.
Because of that, it feels like the post is intentionally contrarian for the sake of aggravating others, rather than an earnest attempt to improve the lives of soil animals. I appreciate the detail and raising issues many haven’t considered. I’d upvote it if it was framed as raising an issue noting the uncertainty and invitation for consideration, rather than a strong recommendation for something that doesn’t follow from the premises.
I understand you are trying to recast the Christian dominion interpretation, but it is worth mentioning that as an ideology it has long been overwhelming opposed or indifferent to animal welfare. Most popular dominion interpretations are in the mold of Rene Descartes, who thought animals automatons. The dominion framing is so severe that the most popular shocking vegan film is named after it.
Furthermore, the modern animal welfare movement is highly correlated with atheism, or at least skeptical approaches to understanding our relationship with non-human animals. It may be easier to push non-religious framings around animals rather than trying to re-interpret dominionism. I’m not sure how successful that will be depending on the culture where you live.
It seems like a fundamental problem is the lack of a moral realist foundation, as “human intentions toward sentient beings” and “what is moral” are different things. Can someone recommend some reading on whether alignment is even a coherent ask, either from a moral realist or moral anti-realist perspective?
The salient question for me is how much does reducing extinction risk change the long run experience of moral patients? One argument is that meaningfully reducing risk would require substantial coordination, and that coordination is likely to result in better worlds. I think it is as or more likely that reducing extinction risk can result in some worlds where most moral patients are used as means without regard to their suffering.
I think an AI aligned to roughly to the output of all current human coordination would be net-negative. I would shift to thinking addressing extinction risk is more important if factory farming stopped, humanity was taking serious steps to address wild animal suffering, all sustainable development goals were met within 5 years of the initial timeline, and global inequality was reduced to something like <0.25 GINI coefficient.
MatthewDahlhausen’s Quick takes
The USDA secretary released a strategy yesterday on lowering egg prices. Explained originally as a WSJ opinion (paywall). Summarized here without the paywall.
Five points to the strategy:
$500 million for a biosecurity program to limit transmission of avian flu
$400 million to farmers to recover after an outbreak
$100 million for vaccines
Look to ease regulations, especially overriding California Proposition 12 that banned the sale of eggs from caged hens.
Look to allow temporary imports of eggs
Key concerns:
Enacting a key-goal of the EATS act to override state humane treatment regulations without legislation
Imports from lower-welfare countries
All companies that have committed to going cage-free this year using the USDA response as an excuse to delayed or revoke their commitment.
I’m curious where the non-cage free eggs are going. From my naive position, it seems like the grocery stores and restaurant chains listed here should cover a majority of egg use, and are well above 40% cage-free in aggregate. Do non-chain restaurants explain the difference? Hotels? Food manufacturers? Schools and other public places with cafeterias?
“The important question is whether eating meat and donating is morally better than eating meat and not donating. The answer to that seems like a resounding ‘yes’”
Offsetting bad moral actions depends on 1) the action being off-settable, 2) the two actions are inseparable, and 3) presuming a rather extreme form of utilitarianism is morally correct.
In the case you provide, I think it fails on all three parts. The action isn’t off-settable. Most moral frameworks would look at the two actions separately. Donating to an animal welfare charity doesn’t first require you eat meat, and there is no forced decision to donate or not donate if you eat an animal. And if you accept moral offsetting is better in this case, you are upon to all sorts of the standard utilitarian critiques.
There are also separate justice concerns and whether you are benefiting the appropriate reference class (if you eat cow and donate to shrimp welfare in another country, is that appropriate offsetting?).
I think it’s fine to promote the endeavor (or at least its morally permissible). But saying it is morally better isn’t well-supported. It’s similar to the somewhat non-intuitive finding in moral philosophy that if choosing between A) not donating to charity, B) donating to an ineffective charity, and C) donating to an effective charity, choosing A over B may be morally permissible, but choosing B over C is not.
Do you agree with Susan Wolf’s claim in Moral Saints that we ought to consider non-moral values in deciding what we do, and those may be a valid reason to not given more to the worst off? I presume you’ve written about it before on your blog or in a paper.
A related question is: do you think the gap is greater between our actions and what we think we ought to do, or between what we think ought to do and what we ought to do in some realist meta-normative sense? Is the bigger issue that we lack moral knowledge, or that we don’t live up to moral standards?
It’s difficult to pinpoint a definition of conservatism. Modern politics tends to follow in the Burkean conservatism tradition. One of the animating forces is the belief that hierarchy is necessary for a just an prosperous society. It is to varying degrees a “might makes right” value system, summed up in this quote by Plato: ” …nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior.”
Another style is Christian conservatism with dominionism, that believe animals are biblically placed on earth for humans to do with as we please. Many still believe in Descartes Cartesian dualism that humans are distinct from animals in that animals do not have consciousness and even cannot “experience” pain.
These belief systems are unlikely to yield concern for animals, and are usually ambivalent to them. There may be some appeal to a “with great power comes great responsibility” mindset that animals are weak and need our protection.
Another angle is to realize many wear the label of conservative loosely, and can be persuaded to adopt or appreciate other value systems that are much more concerned with the well-being of animals.
I think it is more likely than not that failure to pass this bill as is was net harmful.
Ozone air cleaners are a significant source of indoor air pollution, producing indoor particulate levels just slightly less than second hand smoke. Particulates account for 85%+ of morbidity from indoor air pollution in residences. There is a serious harm in keeping these air cleaners on the market. All major health and air quality organizations oppose them. But there is no ban on their sale, so they remain available to uninformed customers. Killing this bill keeps a major harm on the market.
There are many pollution control technologies besides Far-UVC that can reduce infection risk, including UV technologies at longer wavelengths that do not produce ozone. Far-UVC is not a far superior technology, and it’s not clear to me that a setback in the Far-UVC industry meaningfully delays adoption of infection control technologies generally.
Scrubbers are likely going to be necessary on Far-UVC devices because of how much pollution they produce. As HVAC engineers, we have a duty of care that will likely prohibit using control technologies that worsen indoor air quality. There isn’t an easy solution to the problem beyond scrubbers; if you use ventilation or filtration to control it, you could have just gone with a ventilation or filtration solution from the start.
The majority of CA buildings are in a mild climate and energy recovery and or economizing is likely going to be a cheaper solution overall compared to room air cleaners in new facilities.
Overall, I’m discouraged at the broad EA obsession with Far-UVC instead of coordinating with leading organizations like ASHRAE to promote the uptake of infectious disease control standards and design generally. In this case, that obsession did cause clear harm, with unclear benefit.
You can buy whey made from precision fermentation (PerfectDay). That changes several elements of your post, particularly the claim that whey is necessarily not vegan.
“we are biologically programmed to not care when eating animal flesh” this isn’t obvious or intuitive to me. It seems like our attitudes toward eating animals are largely culturally conditioned. Regardless, even if it is “innate”, a personal insensitivity to animals is not a moral reason to treat them as interchangeable, expendable, or offsetable.
It seems your justifications for offsets are bit of fanatic consequentialism and a belief that animals do not deserve similar moral status as humans.
Two points in response. First, many vegans were similarly callous towards animals before they became vegan. Cognitive dissonance is incredibly powerful. It’s why many vegans first went vegan for health reasons, then were able to earnestly consider animal moral status, and then stayed vegan for the animals. Second, I think you should be horrified at how some animals are treated as if they were human. Pigs for example are similar enough in biology that they are used for organ transplants and to test painkiller efficacy. There don’t seem to be good reasons to think the experience of pain to a pig is all that different from that of a human infant.
A useful test when moral theorizing about animals is to swap “animals” with “humans” and see if your answer changes substantially. In this example, if the answer changes, the relevant difference for you isn’t about pure expected value consequentialism, it’s about some salient difference between the rights or moral status of animals vs. humans. Vegans tend to give significant, even equivalent, moral status to some animals used for food. If you give near-equal moral status to animals, “offsetting meat eating by donating to animal welfare orgs” is similar to “donating to global health charities to offset hiring a hitman to target a group of humans”. There are a series of rebuttals, counter-rebuttals, etc. to this line of reasoning. Not going to get into all of them. But suffice to say that in the animal welfare space, an animal welfarist carnivore is hesitantly trusted—it signals either a lack of commitment or discipline, a diet/health struggle, a discordant belief that animals deserve far less rights and moral status as humans, or (much rarer) a fanatic consequentialist ideology that thinks offsetting human killing is morally coherent and acceptable. A earnest carnivore that cares a lot about animal welfare is incredibly rare.
Maximization is not as simple as choosing the single action the produces the most benefit; actions are not necessary exclusive. If I go to the grocery store, I don’t only by beans because I think they have the highest nutritional value per dollar. I buy other things too, and need to be because beans alone are insufficient. One can donate to animal welfare charities and be vegan; those aren’t exclusive.
Can you elaborate on why you think we will never eradicate factory farming? You point to near-term trends that suggest it will get worse over the coming decades. What about on a century long time scale or longer? Factory farming has only been around for a few generations, and food habits have changed tremendously over that time.
I think it’s important to consider how some strategies may make future work difficult. For example, Martha Nussbaum highlights how much of the legal theory in the animal rights movement has relied on showing similarities between human and animal intelligence. Such a “like us” comparison limits consideration to a small subset of vertebrates. They are impotent at helping animals like chickens, were much legal work is happening now. Other legal theories are much more robust to expansion and consideration of other animals as the science improves to understand their needs and behavior.
Using your line of argument applied to the analogy you provided would suggest that efforts like developing a malaria vaccine are misguided, because malaria will always be with us, and we should just focus on reducing infection rates and treatment.
I know the FIRE community floats 25x your annual spend in savings as a target for retirement. At your income and “frugal even compared to those under poverty line”, it would take you less than year to hit that target. Taking what you say as true, it means you are prioritizing one less year of working far more than altruistically helping others. That is discordant with the median attitude in the community, who imagine themselves working effectively half a decade or more solely for the benefit of others. I don’t want to focus too much on the money. Its the relative self vs. others prioritization. That’s a tension that is always going to exist between the FIRE community and the EA community.
As for outreach, that’s been studied: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/r8XoHhKKzmQgxm2Lf/ea-survey-2024-how-people-get-involved-in-ea#The_effect_of_outreach Most people find EA on their own. Having been an organizer in several groups and given lots of EA presentations, I found active outreach to be unproductive. The D.C. group once held a 800+ person heavily-advertised Peter Singer-headlined event that resulted in just 1 new person coming to the next meetup who didn’t come back. My group now routinely gets new people passively who heard about it on a podcast, through 80k, or through the vegan community. The movement’s utilitarianism and universalism across time, place, and species doesn’t fit well with personal value systems based on justice/prioritarianism, self-interested libertarianism, or racial/cultural/religious tribalism. Altruism is (unfortunately) rare, and it’s easier for those people to find the EA community than for the EA community to find them.