MichaelPlant

• MichaelPlant 4 Sep 2026 9:33 UTC

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Pop­u­la­tion ethics is a big deal, which is why I made this pop­u­la­tion ethics quiz

  Ah, this is great! Thanks so much for doing it. I want to honour this the only way philosophers know how, which is to quibble with some details in an effort to improve it. (I thought a lot about population ethics during my PhD, but I haven’t published anything evaluating the theories).

  • On your comment that the answers are contradictory or counterintutive or both, I want to add this is very much agreed on in the field. The famous result is Arrhenius (2000), which showed there are a number of assumptions we might want to make about population ethics, but they are mutually inconsistent—you can’t eat your cake and still have it.

  • Because population ethics is so vexing, it’s very tempting to consider it in light of theories of moral uncertainty. So, rather than thinking you are, or have to be, 100% certain in one view, you recognise that you have credence in multiple views, and then you’d appeal to a theory of moral uncertainty (there are a few options here, which complicates things) to determine what’s appropriate to do in light of your uncertainty. Implicitly, this quiz—along with standard philosophical discourse—assumes a ‘My Favourite Theory’ approach to moral uncertainty (act if you’re certain in theory you think is mostly likely correct). Accounting for (other positions in) moral uncertainty may slightly break the quiz, as there can be more than one justification for picking an answer. Admittedly, this would make the quiz much more fiddly and be harder to implement.

  • One example is Q4, where you give two identical populations, except there’s a new, miserable person in the second. I’m sympathetic to a person-affecting view (count only sure-to-exist lives) and if I were 100% confident in that I’d say they were exactly as good each other. However, when I account for moral uncertainty, as I give some weight to possible lives, the second population is worse as that miserable life breaks the tie. So, I gave the ‘wrong’ answer if I ignore moral uncertainty, but I gave what I think is the right answer after accounting for it. I’m not sure how your quiz interprets this, but it told me I had a lexical or critical view, which I wouldn’t agree with. Same issue for Q5 and Q10, which are about identical populations except for 1 additional life.

  • You phrase Q7 and Q8, which are related to the Repugnant Conclusion, as if they are structurally identically. But they are not. Q7 is a same people case, and asks if it’s better to have higher average welfare. Q8 is about going from the A population to the Z population (the classic Repugnant Conclusion challenge), but each step in Q8 you’re adding new people, whereas in Q7 you had the same people. So, wearing my person-affecting hat, I interpret Q7 and Q8 quite differently: I’m happy to have a higher total welfare for the same population (Q7), but I’m inclined not to go to step B in Q8, as that means creating new people (no value) and reducing the welfare of the existing people (negative value). You frame Q8 as “do it again” but I’d argue we’re doing something relevantly different between Q7 and Q8.

  • Q12 and Q13 are about transitivity. In Q12 you’re looking at 3 worlds where the first is better than the second, and second is better than the third. For Q13 you replace ‘better than’ with ‘exactly as good as’. You give two options in each case (“yes, always”, “no, not always”) but I wanted there to be a third option “it depends on the details”. Specifically, I’m wondering about whether we’ve got the same or different people across the three worlds.

  • Finally, I agree that accounting for population ethics, and population effects, can substantially influence the priorities in unexpected and arguably repugnant way. You pointed out life-saving and life-averting invertions are in tension. An extension of this is the more(/​less) you think the Earth is overpopulated, the less(/​more) valuable it is to save lives. Another is that if you think factory farming is bad because of the negative welfare it causes, that should reduce the value of saving lives to some (unknown and perhaps unknowable) extent. Many years ago, I wrote about these in my PhD thesis and subsequently published a paper on the meat eater problem. I confess I find this all weird to think about, which is part of the reason I’ve shifted onto other things since...

  Thanks again for creating it!

• MichaelPlant 19 Aug 2026 15:12 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: huw’s comment on: Madeleine_Foley’s Quick takes

  Thanks for mentioning our work in HLI here @huw. I/​we are not so active on the forum these days, so you beat us to it.

  But yes, @madeleine_foley, HLI really got started, now 7 years ago, because we thought that the standard economist approach of focusing on just health and wealth was not going a good job of capturing what people’s lives are like on the inside. We’ve been pioneering wellbeing cost-effectiveness analysis and a metric called WELLBYs (wellbeing years) to see what the priorities are if you ‘take happiness seriously’. (Oddly, we were the first team to do wellbeing ROI, but now quite a few others, including the UK and NZ Treasuries, use the same method, although not because of us). We concluded that mental health is a neglected priority, and have been recommended charities working on it for the last few years, and advocating for it more broadly. Huw’s organisation, Kaya Guides, is one we’re very excited about, and he’s right that global human happiness and mental health is an emergent part of the wider cause area of ‘global health and wellbeing’, and just wasn’t part of the conversation in effective altruism before.

• MichaelPlant 19 Aug 2026 14:57 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What would make us scale or stop? NOVAH’s pre-com­mit­ment be­fore see­ing the RCT results

  Just to say, and speaking from the Happier Lives Institute perspective, I really liked both of the thoughtful precommittment and the care you’ve taken to plan this RCT. We look forward with great interest to digging into this further!

• MichaelPlant 17 Mar 2026 11:35 UTC

  30 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: GHD dis­cus­sion here is slowly dying

  There’s actually quite a bit of GHD discussion that going on among people in EA orgs, but not on the forum. For instance, just yesterday, the Unjournal hosted a workshop on using wellbeing and how to do WELLBY vs DALY trade-offs, which had EG org staff and various academics in attendance (thanks to David Reinstein for making it happen!).

  Based on that, and other conversations, I am considering writing some things in the area, so maybe your wish will come true, Nick...

• MichaelPlant 11 Feb 2026 14:45 UTC

  13 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: EA Or­ga­ni­za­tion Up­dates thread: Fe­bru­ary 2026

  Some updates from the Happier Lives Institute.

  • We were invited to advise the UK Treasury on updating their Green Book guidelines on using wellbeing for policy appraisal at the end of last year.

  • We launched the Happier Lives Fund in December 2025. The HLF is for donors focused on improving lives that want to maximise their impact for mininum fuss. 90% is allocated among our Top and Promising Charities by our team, while 10% ‘powers the engine’ and funds the HLI’s research and operations. The fund has raised $116k so far.

  • We published our explanation of why some charities are 1,000 times more impactful than others. This was based on our in last year’s chapter in World Happiness Report, where we did a first global comparison of charity cost-effectiveness.

  • We published our charities update for Giving Season, with our reflections on 2025 at HLI. In short, we didn’t find any better charities than in 2024. We still recommend charities working on mental health, malnutnitrion and lead exposure.

  • We’ve overhauled our website (there are still ‘teething issues’).

  • I was a guest on Sam Harris’ podcast Making Sense in December 2025.

  • I’m flying off EAG San Francisco for this weekend; I’ll be giving a talk entitled Wellbeing: Effective Altruism’s missing metric.

Talk­ing through de­pres­sion: The cost-effec­tive­ness of psy­chother­apy in LMICs, re­vised and expanded

• MichaelPlant 25 Oct 2023 7:50 UTC

  20 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Chart­ing the precipice: The time of per­ils and pri­ori­tiz­ing x-risk

  Thanks for this. I think this is very valuable and really appreciate this being set out. I expect to come back to it a few times. One query and one request from further work—from someone, not necessarily you, as this is already a sterling effort!

  1. I’ve heard Thorstad’s TOP talk a couple of times, but it’s now a bit foggy and I can’t remember where his ends and yours starts. Is it that Thorstad argues (some version of) longtermism relies on the TOP thesis, but doesn’t investigate whether TOP is true, whereas you set about investigating if it is true?

  2. The request for further work: 18 is a lot of premises for a philosophical argument, and your analysis is very hedged. I recognise you don’t want to claim too much but, as a reader who has thought about this far less than you, I would really appreciate you telling me what you think. Specifically, it would be useful to know which of the premises are the most crucial, in the sense of being least plausible. Presumably, some of 18 premises we don’t need to worry about, and our attention can concentrate on a subset. Or, if you think all the premises are similarly plausible, that would be useful to know too!

• MichaelPlant 13 Oct 2023 9:27 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Causes and Uncer­tainty: Re­think­ing Value in Expectation

  Hello Bob and team. Looking forward to reading this. To check, are you planning to say anything explicitly about your approach to moral uncertainty? I can’t see anything directly mentioned in 5., which is where I guessed it would go.

  On that note Bob, you might recall that, a while back I mentioned to you some work I’m doing with a couple of other philosophers on developing an approach to moral uncertainty along these lines that will sometimes justify the practice of worldview diversification. That draft is nearly complete and your post series inspires me to try and get it over the line!

• MichaelPlant 6 Oct 2023 11:09 UTC

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Violence Be­fore Agriculture

  This report seems commendably thorough and thoughtful. Could you possibly spell out its implications for effect altruists though? I take it the conclusion is that humanity was most violent in the subsistence farming period, rather than before or after, but I’m not sure what to make of that. Presumably, it shows how violent people are changes quite radically in different contexts, so should I be reassured if, as seems likely, modern-type societies will continue? Returns to hunter-gathering and subsistence farming do not seem on the cards.

  Sorry if I’ve missed something. But I reckoned that, if it was obvious to me, some others would missed it too.

• MichaelPlant 5 Oct 2023 16:03 UTC

  102 points

  10 ∶ 3

  on: A re­sponse to Michael Plant’s re­view of What We Owe The Future

  Hello Jack, I’m honoured you’ve written a review of my review! Thanks also for giving me sight of this before you posted. I don’t think I can give a quick satisfactory reply to this, and I don’t plan to get into a long back and forth. So, I’ll make a few points to provide some more context on what I wrote. [I wrote the remarks below based on the original draft I was sent. I haven’t carefully reread the post above to check for differences, so there may be a mismatch if the post has been updated]

  First, the piece you’re referring to is a book review in an academic philosophy journal. I’m writing primarily for other philosophers who I can expect to have lots of background knowledge (which means I don’t need to provide it myself).

  Second, book reviews are, by design, very short. You’re even discouraged from referencing things outside the text you’re reviewing. The word limit was 1,500 words—I think my review may even be shorter than your review of my review! - so the aim is just to give a brief overview and make a few comments.

  Third, the thrust of my article is that MacAskill makes a disquietingly polemical, one-sided case for longtermism. My objective was to point this out and deliberately give the other side so that, once readers have read both they are, hopefully, left with a balanced view. I didn’t seek to, and couldn’t possibly hope to, given a balanced argument that refutes longtermism in a few pages. I merely explain why, in my opinion, the case for it in the book is unconvincing. Hence, I’d have lots of sympathy with your comments if I’d written a full-length article, or a whole book, challenging longtermism.

  Fourth, I’m not sure why you think I’ve misrepresented MacAskill (do you mean ‘misunderstood’?). In the part you quote, I am (I think?) making my own assessment, not stating MacAskill’s view at all. What’s more, I don’t believe MacAskill and I disagree about the importance of the intuition of neutrality for longtermism. I only observe that accepting that intuition would weaken the case—I do not claim there is no case for longtermism if you accept it. Specifically, you quote MacAskill saying:

  [if you endorse the intuition of neutrality] you wouldn’t regard the absence of future generations in itself as a moral loss.

  But the cause du jour of longtermism is preventing existential risks in order that many future happy generations exist. If one accepts the intuition of neutrality that would reduce/​remove the good of doing that. Hence, it does present a severe challenge to longtermism in practice—especially if you want to claim, as MacAskill does, that longtermism changes the priorities.

  Finally, on whether ‘many’ philosophers are sympathetic to person-affecting views. In my experience of floating around seminar rooms, it seems to be a view of the large minority of discussants (indeed, it seems far more popular than totalism). Further, it’s taken as a default, or starting position, which is why other philosophers have strenuously argued against it; there is little need to argue against views that no one holds! I don’t think we should assess philosophical truth ‘by the numbers’, ie polling people, rather than by arguments, particularly when those you poll aren’t familiar with the arguments. (If we took such an approach, utilitiarianism would be conclusively ‘proved’ false.). That said, off the top of my head, philosophers who have written sympathetically about person-affecting views include Bader, Narveson (two classic articles here and here), Roberts (especially here, but she’s written on it a few times), Frick (here and in his thesis), Heyd, Boonin, Temkin (here and probably elsewhere). There are not ‘many’ philosophers in the world, and population ethics is a small field, so this is a non-trivial number of authors! For an overview of the non-identity problem in particular, see the SEP.

• MichaelPlant 27 Sep 2023 15:29 UTC

  9 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ryancbriggs’s comment on: Net global welfare may be nega­tive and declining

  Yup, I’d be inclined to agree it’s easier to ground the idea life is getting better for humans on objective measures. The is author’s comparison is made in terms of happiness though:

  This work draws heavily on the Moral Weight Project from Rethink Priorities and relies on the same assumptions: utilitarianism, hedonism, valence symmetry, unitarianism, use of proxies for hedonic potential, and more

  I’m actually not sure how I’d think about the animal side of things on the capabilities approach. Presumably, factory farming looks pretty bad on that, so there are increasingly many animals with low/​negative capability lives, so unclear how this works out on a global level.

• MichaelPlant 27 Sep 2023 9:17 UTC

  15 points

  4 ∶ 9

  in reply to: MichaelPlant’s comment on: Net global welfare may be nega­tive and declining

  This is a minor comment but you say

  There’s compelling evidence that life has gotten better for humans recently

  I don’t think that is compelling evidence. Neither Pinker nor Karnosfky look at averages of self-reported happiness or life satisfaction, which would be the most relevant and comparable evidence, given your assumptions. According to the so-called Easterlin Paradox average subjective wellbeing has not been going up over the past few decades and won’t with further economic growth. There have been years of debates over this (I confess I got sucked in, once) but, either way, there is not a consensus among happiness researchers that there is compelling evidence life has gotten better (at least as far as happiness is concerned).

• MichaelPlant 27 Sep 2023 8:58 UTC

  47 points

  15 ∶ 5

  on: Net global welfare may be nega­tive and declining

  While I agree that net global welfare may be negative and declining, in light of the reasoning and evidence presented here, I think you could and should have claimed something like this: “net global welfare may be negative and declining, but it may also be positive and increasing, and really we have no idea which it is—any assessment of this type of is enormously speculative and uncertain”.

  As I read the post, the two expressions that popped into my head were “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with made-up numbers” and “if you saw how the sausage is made …”.

  The problem here is that all of the numbers for ‘animal welfare capacity’ and ‘welfare percentages’ are essentially—and unfortunately—made up. You cite Rethink Priorities for the former, and Charity Entrepreneurship for the latter, and express some scepticism, but then more or less take them at face value. You don’t explain how those people came up with numbers and whether they should be trusted. I don’t think I am disparaging the good folk at either organisation—and I am certainly not trying to! - because you asked them about this, I think they would freely say “look, we don’t really know how to do this. We have intuitions about this, of course, but we’re not sure if there’s any good evidenced-based way to come up with these numbers”;* indeed, that is, in effect, the conclusion Rethink Priorities stated in the write-up of their recent workshop (see my comment on that too). Hence, such numbers should not be taken with a mere pinch of salt, but with a bucketload.

  You don’t account for uncertainty here (you used point estimates), and I appreciate that is extra hassle, but I think the uncertainty here is the story. If you were to use upper and lower subjective bounds for e.g. “how unhappy are chickens compared to how happy humans are?”, they would be very large. They must be very large because, as noted, we don’t even know what factual, objective evidence we would use to narrow them down, so we have nothing to constrain the bounds of what’s plausible. But given how large they would be, we’d end up with the conclusion that we really don’t know whether global welfare is negative or positive.

  * People are often tempted to say that we could look at objective measures, like neuron counts, for interspecies comparison. But this merely kicks the can down the road. How do we know what the relationship is between neuron counts and levels of pleasure and pain? We don’t. We have intuitions, yes, but what evidence could we point to to settle the question? I do not know.

• MichaelPlant 19 Sep 2023 9:48 UTC

  41 points

  16 ∶ 1

  on: Re­la­tion­ship be­tween EA Com­mu­nity and AI safety

  Thanks for this and great diagrams! To think about what the relationship between EA and AI safety, it might help about what EA is for in general. I see a/​the purpose of EA is helping people figure out how they can do the most good—to learn about the different paths, the options, and the landscape. In that sense, EA is a bit like a university, or a market, or maybe even just a signpost: once you’ve learnt what you needed, or found what you want and where to go, you don’t necessarily stick around: maybe you need to ‘go out’ in the world to do what calls you.

  This explains your venn diagram: GHD and animal welfare are causes that exist prior to, and independent of EA. They, rather than EA, are where the action is if you prioritise those things. AI safety grew up inside EA.

  I imagine AI safety will naturally form it own ecosytem independent of EA: much like, if you care about global development, you don’t need to participate in the EA community, a time will come when, for AI safety, you won’t need to participate in EA either.

  This doesn’t mean that EA becomes irrelevant, much like a university doesn’t stop mattering when students graduate—or a market ceases to be useful when some people find what they want. There will be further cohorts who want to learn—and some people have to stick around to think about and highlight their options.

• MichaelPlant 14 Sep 2023 12:00 UTC

  8 points

  5 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the Meta Co­or­di­na­tion Fo­rum 2023

  I suppose you could think of it as a manner of degree, right? Submitting feedback, doing interviews etc. are a good start, but involve people having less of a say than either 1. being part of the conversation or 2. having decision-making power, eg through a vote. People like to feel their concerns are heard—not just in EA, but in general—and when eg. a company says “please send in this feedback form” I’m not sure many people feel as heard as if someone (important) from that company listens to you live and publicly responds.

Learn­ing from our mis­takes: how HLI plans to improve

• MichaelPlant 23 Aug 2023 10:59 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: “Di­men­sions of Pain” work­shop: Sum­mary and up­dated conclusions

  Thanks for this, which I read with interest! Can I see if I understood this correctly?

  1. You were interested in finding a way to assess the severity of pains in farmed animals so that you can compare severity to duration and determine the total badness. In jargon, you’re after a cardinal measure of pain intensity.

  2. And your conclusion was a negative one, specifically that there was no clear way to assess the severity of pain. As you note, for humans, we have self-reports, but for non-human animals, we don’t, so have to look for something else, such as how the animals behave. However, there is no obvious non-self-report method that would give us a quantitative measure of pain.

  3. (from 1 and 2) We are forced to rely on our priors, that is, our intuitions, to make comparisons.

  For what it’s worth, I agree with 1-3, but it does leave me with a feeling of hopelessness about animal welfare comparisons. Certainly, we have intuitions about how to do them, but we do not, as far I can see, have reason to think our intuitions are informed or reliable—what evidence would tell us we were wrong? So, I wonder if it would be true to say that making evidence-based (cardinal) animal welfare comparisons is not merely difficult (which implies they are possible) but actually not possible. I’m not sure what follows from this.

  What links here?

  • MichaelPlant's comment on Net global welfare may be nega­tive and declining by kyle_fish (27 Sep 2023 8:58 UTC; 47 points)

• MichaelPlant 7 Aug 2023 8:23 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: LondonGal’s comment on: About ‘sub­jec­tive’ wellbe­ing and cost-effec­tive­ness anal­y­sis in men­tal health

  Hey LondonGal, thank you for following up on this. I appreciate you clarifying your intentions about your post. Our team has read your comments and will take your feedback into consideration in our future work. I’ll hope you’ll forgive us for not responding in detail at this time. We are currently trying to focus on our current projects (and to avoid spending too much time on the EA forum, which we’ve done a lot of, particularly recently!). I expect that some (but probably not all) of the points you’ve raised in your original post will be addressed in some of our upcoming research. Thanks again for engaging with our work, and for sending the olive branch. It’s been received and we’ll look forward to future constructive interactions

• MichaelPlant 1 Aug 2023 17:34 UTC

  35 points

  5 ∶ 1

  on: About ‘sub­jec­tive’ wellbe­ing and cost-effec­tive­ness anal­y­sis in men­tal health

  Hello LondonGal (sorry, I don’t know your real name). I’m glad that, after your recent scepticism, you looked further into subjective wellbeing data and think it can be useful. You’ve written a lot and I won’t respond to it in detail.

  I think the most important points to make are (1) there is a lot more research that you suggest and (2) it didn’t just start around COVID.

  You are right that, if you search for “subjective wellbeing”, not much comes up (I get 706 results on PubMed). However, that’s because the trend among researchers to refer to “subjective wellbeing” rather than “subjective well-being”, ie with a hyphen, is very recent (as, AFAIK, is unrelated to COVID). Searching for “subjective well-being” yields, by comparison, 4,806 results.

  If I expand the search to other keywords, namely “happiness” OR “life satisfaction” OR “subjective wellbeing” OR “subjective well-being”, I get over 150,000 results on PubMed. This is displayed below. Note the results go back to 1838, but the research only really kicks off after 1980.

  

  I’m not an expert in academic databases, so I don’t know how comprehensive PubMed is of all research, but I’m guessing it’s a subset. FWIW, Ed Diener et al. in a 2018 article on subjective wellbeing states that there were “170,000 articles and books published on the topic in the past 15 years” although I haven’t looked into his numbers.

  You might be interested in this article in the recent World Happiness Report which looks at various trends related to happiness, including academic interest, and find the fraction of articles on the topic has been trending up since the 80s: note the steady linear increase on the logarithmic y-axis.

  

  Hence, as you suspected, many of the topics you raise here are reasonably quite well-trodden in the literature.

  If you’re interested in looking further at the pros and cons of the WELLBY, the easiest thing for me to point you to is HLI’s To WELLBY Or Not To WELLBY report and references therein. You may also find this reading list useful.

  In terms of the state of the literature, if you’ll forgive further laziness and self-promotion, I’d suggest my EAG London talk. The short answer is that ‘we’ (ie happiness researchers) know quite a bit about the nature and measurement of wellbeing and its causes and correlates, but relatively little about what the best ways are to increase it; work on WELLBY cost-effectiveness is barely older than COVID.

• MichaelPlant 19 Jul 2023 11:12 UTC

  10 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: The Hap­pier Lives In­sti­tute is fund­ing con­strained and needs you!

  Hello Linch. We’re reluctant to recommend organisations that we haven’t been able to vet ourselves but are planning to vet some new mental health and non-mental health organisations in time for Giving Season 2023. The details are in our Research Agenda. For mental health, we say

  We expect to examine Friendship Bench, Sangath, and CorStone unless we find something more promising.

  
  On how we chose StrongMinds, you’ve already found our selection process. Looking back at the document, I see that we don’t get into the details, but it wasn’t just procedural. We hadn’t done a deep dive analysis at the point—the point of the search process was to work out what we should look at in more depth—but our prior was that StrongMinds would come out at or close to the top anyway. To explain, it was delivering the intervention we thought would do most good per person (therapy for depression), doing this cheaply (via lay-delivered interpersonal group therapy) and it seems to be a well-run organisation. I thought Friendship Bench might beat it (Friendship Bench had a volunteer model and so plausibly much lower costs but also lower efficacy) but they didn’t offer us their data at the time, something they’ve since done. I don’t think I knew about Sangath or Corstone back then.

  I think I would advise donors to wait until the end of this year. However, my money would be on Friendship Bench being the best MH org that isn’t StrongMinds and I wouldn’t rule out it being more cost-effective.