Philosophy, global priorities and animal welfare research. My current specific interests include: philosophy of mind, moral weights, person-affecting views, preference-based views and subjectivism, moral uncertainty, decision theory, deep uncertainty/cluelessness and backfire risks, s-risks, and indirect effects on wild animals.
I’ve also done economic modelling for some animal welfare issues.
Since this comment gets some attention every now and then, I’m leaving another comment here to point to this sequence where I flesh out this kind of view more.
Yes, or we don’t need to have any specific reason to believe they do better than random. I think this could be consistent with phenomenal conservatism.
The second one is more about the grounds for justification (having warranted beliefs). Maybe judgement calls don’t need to tend to be correct or for there to be the right kind of fit towards calibration for the resulting beliefs to be warranted. Maybe just the fact that something seems a certain way, e.g. even direct intuition about highly speculative things like the far future effects of interventions, can justify belief.
EDIT: This could be consistent with phenomenal conservatism.
FWIW, I don’t think P1 and P2 together logically imply the conclusion as stated. I think you’re probably leaving out some unstated premises (that might be uncontroversial, but should be checked).
For example, could anything other than evolutionary pressures (direct or indirect) work “against individuals unable to make the correct judgment calls regarding what actions do more good than harm (in expectation) considering how these impact the far future”?
Now you might say no, because our judgement calls are outputs of systems built up through evolution.
But I think an additional premise should capture that. It is not a tautology, but (possibly) an empirical fact.
Another: does making correct judgement calls enough to have warranted beliefs (in humans) about something require any (past) pressure against incorrect judgement calls (about those things in particular, or in domains from which there is enough generalization to the particular things)?
I think you’d say yes, but this is also an empirical claim, not a tautology.
Hmm, I might be misunderstanding you, so let me know if this doesn’t respond to what you have in mind.
I don’t think I’ve assumed any intervention is definitely positive in the long run. I have assumed they are each net positive in expectation for at least one set of targets (or types of effects) we can identify ahead of time (just humans, just farmed animals or just wild animal).
I guess I didn’t specify how far these sets of targets go into the future, so you could assume I’m ignoring far future moral patients, or we can extend the example to include them, with interventions positive in expectation for some sets of far future targets.
The example is just illustrative, so I didn’t want to complicate it with more than 3 sets of targets.
Coming back to this, on what timeline do you expect this kind of growth in wealth to happen, making animal welfare extremely cheap?
Or, with what probability would it not happen for at least another 15 years (and us not all dying for at least that long)? I’d guess 15 years is long enough for many animal welfare interventions to have significant impact, although on the shorter end. Some take several years to have any welfare impacts at all.
I’m imagining we could just discount welfare impacts by such probabilities. Animal welfare could still look quite cost-effective even after that, but it’ll depend on the probabilities.
My first impression is that these techniques are pretty obscure and technical, and charities would not think to use them or know how to by default. In fact, sharing them here might make it more likely that charities use them (an infohazard).
EDIT: But maybe if motivated and strategic enough, they would find them through online search.
Were they successful in getting evidence removed from web archives?
Didn’t they already address this specific vulnerability with the measures described on that page?
However, we remain concerned that in the case of a dispute, we would be accused of creating fake screen recordings/archives.
If there is a third-party service that is trusted by the community that could verify the accuracy of our screen recordings/archives prior to us showing reviews to charities, we’d be much more open to the idea of showing reviews to charities before releasing them. Please let us know if you’re aware of one.
https://web.archive.org/ seems good enough to me in most cases?
I think it doesn’t do so well for Google Spreadsheets or videos, though:
For example, this archive of ACE’s CEA of ALI only includes the first tab of the sheet. I tried seeing if I could archive the other tabs via their separate links, but it just redirects me here, where only the one tab is archived. Maybe there’s a way around this, or a better acrhiving service.
AFAIK, videos are not archived at all, either.
I’ve also used https://archive.ph/. There’s a browser plugin Archive Page for it, but I often get nginx errors when I try to archive pages with it. You can archive specific tabs by the tab links, e.g. here, but then it doesn’t let you scroll through the sheet, which means you won’t be able to access sheet cells you’d have to scroll to see. It also doesn’t show how cells are calculated.
You could just save the whole sheet and upload it somewhere with a timestamp, and save archives anyway. Maybe there are better options than web.archive.org and archive.ph.
I gave an answer here:
“I think what matters about urgency should be captured by a version of neglectedness that accounts for future resources that will otherwise be spent on the problem. If something is not urgent, we might not expect it to be neglected in the long run, as others will come to work on it. If urgent, there’s a risk few will work on it in time.”
(Excuse the formatting, on mobile.)
Do you think Sinergia and ACE almost certainly have no information you don’t that could lead to different conclusions or interpretations of claims, in ways more favourable to Sinergia and/or ACE? Do you think there’s no room for reasonable disagreement about whether the claims you call false are actually false?
E.g. see Abraham’s comment.
These results are super interesting! Thanks for writing and sharing! (I happened to have already read a bunch of the original papers you’re summarizing, and some of your work, too.)
By the way, I think you can capture common intuitions against fanaticism and dependence on unaffected things with a multi-step procedure:
Ignore anything unaffected between your options,[1] and keep only the remaining differences between options.
Use some method that’s not fanatical with respect to the remaining differences between options, e.g. the expected value of a bounded function of the differences.
However, this means violating stochastic dominance with respect to outcomes, and the approach might seem ad hoc. While these do count against the approach in my mind, I don’t think they rule it out decisively, because the approach seems to match other intuitions of mine so well otherwise. So, I give a decent amount of weight to something like this approach under normative uncertainty. I also give some weight to fanatical views, of course, too.
I discuss these ideas a bit in this post, but kind of scattered across the subsections of this section.
Either just pairwise, dealing with pairwise comparisons first, or across all of them together at the same time.
I agree that the numbers don’t necessarily match due to experiences not accounted for, although I’d guess they’re close enough as a best guess in practice, because WFP covered the most important causes of suffering for egg-laying hens and broilers. (For broilers, they have a separate page for slaughter reform, which is also included in the BCC, but I suppose doesn’t reflect transportation or other differences during slaughter due to breed.)
My point was to highlight how great welfare reforms are in utilitarian suffering-reduction terms, relative to preventing animals from being farmed, in response to the original post. We could instead estimate a lower bound on the value of welfare reforms relative to preventing existence, to say welfare reforms are at least X% as good for each animal as preventing that animal from being born and farmed at all. The fact that WFP aimed to be conservative wrt the differences between conventional and reformed helps with this lower bound interpretation.
Also, in case you’re not only concerned with suffering, these welfare reforms might increase pleasure or other things of positive value in a chicken’s life, while preventing existence actually decreases them. So the welfare reforms could be even better for chickens relative to preventing existence than in my original interpretation. Again, I’d think of it like a lower bound.
I think it’s highly subjective and intuition-based for most people. For a very basic moral claim X, you would just ask: “How likely does X seem to me?” And then the probability that occurs directly to you is what you go with.
You might consider arguments for or against, but ultimately just pick a number directly for many claims. For other claims, you might derive them from others, e.g. multiplying (conditional) probabilities for each premise in an argument to get the probability of the conclusion (or a lower bound on it).
I further motivate and describe views along the lines in this post in this sequence.
I further motivate and describe views along the lines in this post in this sequence.
The clearest evidence of discontent is the unprecedented fertility decline across developed nations. Humans are increasingly choosing not to reproduce at replacement rate when given modern conditions.
Why is this clear evidence of discontent? Aren’t there many other plausible explanations for the decline in fertility rates, like changes in values and life goals, like ideal family size, prioritization of careers and other interests?
Nearly no one wants to torture broiler chickens at massive and increasing scale. If we’re doing that, this suggests our interlocking coordination systems are already producing outcomes severely misaligned from individual human values and preferences.
I agree with the first sentence, but I’m not sure about the second. I think a primary reason is that it’s not usually a political priority, because it’s not actually important to the average voter. If it’s not that important, the outcomes are not severely misaligned from individual human values and preferences.
But it can be made a priority through political advocacy. The outcomes of ballot measures seem like pretty good evidence of what people prefer.
Either we restore human agency
I doubt we have ever really had more human agency in the past than now.
Either we restore human agency enough to avoid relying on distasteful and repugnant systems like the worst aspects of factory farming (...) Only the first path offers hope of addressing animal welfare systematically.
This seems wrong to me. While factory farming is increasing, it’s primarily because of increasing populations and incomes, and there are effective targeted ways to systematically reduce and mitigate factory farming that don’t require increasing human agency as a whole. Basically what the animal welfare side of EA does.
The decision calculus would be substantially different if we were near the end rather than the beginning of expansion through the universe, just as one should usually focus more on improving one’s own capacities earlier in life and on contributing to others’ development later on.
Possibly! But I’d like to see actual intervention proposals and estimates of their effects and cost-effectiveness. If the decision calculus is so obvious, you should be able to easily give a lower bound on the cost-effectiveness that drastically beats targeted animal welfare work (and being fair, should consider long-term effects of animal welfare work).
we focus intense moral concern on animals successfully bred to tolerate their conditions
What do you mean?
I don’t think factory farmed animals tolerate their conditions well at all, because they suffer a lot. I’d recommend Welfare Footprint Project’s research on egg-laying hens and meat chickens, and RP’s similar research on shrimp to get an idea of what factory farmed animals’ lives are often like. In particular, egg-laying hens live with chronic frustration and meat chickens often with disabling chronic pain. And they don’t have ways to effectively relieve these.
Starting my own discussion thread.
My biggest doubt for the value of extinction risk reduction is my (asymmetric) person-affecting intuitions: I don’t think it makes things better to ensure future people (or other moral patients) come to exist for their own sake or the sake of the value within their own lives. But if future people will exist, I want to make sure things go well for them. This is summarized by the slogan “Make people happy, not make happy people”.
If this holds, then extinction risk reduction saves the lives of people who would otherwise die in an extinction event, which is presumably good for them, but this is only billions of humans.[1] If we don’t go extinct, then the number of our descendant moral patients could be astronomical. It therefore seems better to prioritize our descendant moral patients conditional on our survival because there are far far more of them.
Aliens (including alien artificial intelligence) complicate the picture. We (our descendants, whether human, AI or otherwise) could
use the resources aliens would have otherwise for our purposes instead of theirs, i.e. replace them,
help them, or
harm them or be harmed by them, e.g. through conflict.
I’m interested in others’ takes on this.
And it’s not clear we want to save other animals, in case their lives are bad on average. It can also make a difference whether we’re talking about human extinction only or all animal extinction.