I noticed there doesn’t seem to be an option to nominate less than 5 people. Not sure if this is a feature but I wanted to just nominate a few people and was unable to.
MichaelDello
I think the value of higher quality and more information in terms of wild animal suffering will still be a net positive, meaning that funding research in WAS could be highly valuable. I say ‘could’ only because something else might still be more valuable. But if, on expected value, it seems like the best thing to do, the uncertainties shouldn’t put us off too much, if at all.
Happy to hear what they are Alex.
The final article had a title change and it was made clear numerous times that it was a personal analysis, not necessarily representing the views of Effective Altruism. In fact, we worked off the premise of voting to maximise wellbeing, not to further EA.
I posted it here and shared it with EAs because they are used to thinking about ways to maximise wellbeing, and I’ve never seen an analysis that looks at multiple parties and policies to try and select the ‘best’ party (many have agreed that this doesn’t seem to have been done before). I figured the title including ‘draft’ would make it clear that this is by no means a final piece, but perhaps I could have been clearer. I think not making an attempt to select the best party at all is also problematic.
Here is the final piece if you are interested, although the election is over now.
Regardless of whether or not moral realism is true, I feel like we should act as though it is (and I would argue many Effective Altruists already do to some extent). Consider the doctor who proclaims that they just don’t value people being healthy, and doesn’t see why they should. All the other doctors would rightly call them crazy and ignore them, because the medical system assumes that we value health. In the same way, the field of ethics came about to (I would argue) try and find the most right thing to do. If an ethicist comes out and says that the most right thing to is to kill whomever you like without justification (ignoring flow on effects of course) we should be able to say they are just crazy. One, because wellbeing is what we have decided to value, and two, because wellbeing is associated with positive brain states, and why value something if it has no link to conscious experience? What would the world be like if we accepted that these people just have different values and ‘who are we to say they are wrong’?
Imagine the Worst Possible World of Sam Harris, full of near-infinite suffering for a near-infinite number of mind states. This is bad, if the word bad means anything at all. If you think this is not bad, then we probably mean different things by ‘bad’. Any step to move away from this is therefore good. There are right and wrong ways to move from the Worst Possible World to the Best Possible World, and to an extent we can determine what these are.
I haven’t fully formed this idea yet, but I’m writing a submission to Essays in Philosophy about this with Robert Farquharson. An older version of our take on this is here: http://www.michaeldello.com/?p=741
Thanks for everyone’s feedback. The article has now been published and is a living document (we will edit daily based on feedback) until the election.
Hey Kieran, a few more sections have been added since I did this post, including animal welfare. Check out the Google Document for the latest version.
Please note that this is not a final recommendation, and is not intended to be read as such. Please don’t share this beyond EA circles yet unless there is someone who might be particularly suited to helping to make this more rigorous and/or useful.
(Draft & looking for feedback/review) How to vote like an EA in the Australian Federal election
Very true David, but then the same could be said of being vegan to a lesser extent.
This article was targeted more towards the vegan community in general, not just EAs (though I cross posted it here because I thought it might be useful). Most non-EAs wouldn’t think about donations that way, and probably wouldn’t donate the $20,000 if they didn’t get a pet.
If you don’t get your pets from a ‘no-kill shelter’, that might not be the case. In that situation, if you don’t get the pet, they might just be put down.
Very true—I wasn’t sure what the difference would be between non-by-product and by-product consumption. I suspect it’s somewhere between what I stated and no effect, so this estimate could be an upper bound.
It would be interesting to see a study on this, it certainly seems plausible—a survey asking for the number of family pets throughout childhood and their current dietary choices might be illuminating.
In any case, I would still argue that this should be done with a non-meat-eating pet over a meat-eating one.
“The biggest takeaway here is that animal charity research is a really good cause.”
I agree—if we’re highly certain we’ve found the best poverty interventions, or close to, and the best animal interventions might be ~250x as effective as the best poverty interventions, that should argue for increased animal charity research. But Peter is definitely right in that the higher robustness of existing human interventions (ignoring flow on effects like the poor meat eater problem) is a potentially valid reason to pick poverty interventions now over animal interventions now.
Sure, I think any way of reducing the population/proportion of meat eating pets would be, on the whole, a good thing.
I’d also predict a positive correlation between affluence and having a pet, which might mean that societies coming out of poverty results in more animal consumption than suggested by the ‘poor meat eater problem’.
The morality of having a meat-eating pet
I wanted to take part in the essay competition and categorise the space related risks and solutions to food (related to my PhD in space science) though unfortunately didn’t have time. Will this competition be recurring? If not, it’s something I’d like to write about anyway.
I’m interested in working on the animal welfare section. I’m intending to do my own research on this in the near future anyway. In particular I’m interested in trying to find evidence and arguments for the effectiveness of different approaches to animal activism.
The ACE article got removed? Do you have any idea why? I only skimmed the article but it looked like a reasonable article.
I haven’t read the articles yet, though I did study climate change as part of my undergraduate and externally, so I’ll have a crack at answering your technical question (Q3).
The point of mitigation is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (including carbon dioxide and methane) or to capture and store them (number of ways to do this, underground gas to liquid storage, growing trees etc.). CO2 actually has a much shorter residence time in the atmosphere, but it does then get stored in the ocean for up to centuries. Methane is also a big problem, because it has a larger impact on warming (around 20 times greater), but has a shorter residence time (around 8 years in the atmosphere). For this reason, some people propose that mitigation, at least in the short term, should focus on reducing methane gas, as it has a larger short term effect, and if we hypothetically cut methane to zero (not going to happen as there are still natural sources, but for arguments sake), we would see the impact of methane disappear quite quickly, compared to cutting carbon.
To answer the rest of your question, the fact that carbon is transferred from the atmosphere to the oceans, soil and organic matter over time means that there is some particular amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) that can be put in the atmosphere without warming, as the Earth as a whole can absorb it (assuming no man-made carbon capture). This point is called the equilibrium state. We have well and truly exceeded the equilibrium point through man-made emissions, which is why the planet is warming. If we could reduce emissions to the equilibrium emission rate and below that, the planet would, eventually, start to cool. Even if we expect we will only get below equilibrium in 100 years, any reduction in emissions now will mean the atmosphere will have warmed less by the time we get there.
I did earning to give for 18 months in a job that I thought I would really enjoy but after 12 months realised I didn’t. I’m now doing a PhD.
I think personal fit is pretty important, but at the end of the day it’s still just another thing to consider, and not the be all end all. I think its a pretty valid point that you will perform better in a role that you enjoy and thus advance further and have more impact, but if you’re really trying to maximise impact there are limits to that (e.g. Hurford’s example about surfing, unless surfing to give can be a thing).
So you should probably pick a job that you enjoy, but it’s unlikely that the career where you will have the greatest marginal impact is also the career that you most enjoy. If it is, you’re very lucky indeed. Otherwise, I would suggest finding some kind of balance.