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.
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.
If factory farming seems like a bad thing, you should do something about the version happening to you first. The domestication of humans is particularly urgent precisely because, unlike selectively bred farm animals, humans are increasingly expressing their discontent with these conditions
Why do you believe discontent (or its expression) is increasing? On what time scale? And do you expect this trend to continue for long?
Plus, factory farming is also increasing, especially in developing countries and for farmed insects.
Your response to 2 in general seems totally insensitive to the relative numbers involved wrt farmed animals and humans, and our potential impacts on each group. Shouldn’t there be a point where you’d prioritize farmed animals?
FWIW, it seems a bit too buried in text. I think this would be something to say upfront, e.g. in the summary, if you’re critiquing an org, because readers will often just skim, like I did.
I would probably think of donating to FWI as supporting them to develop a more cost-effective program. Most of their budget is spent on R&D, IIRC.
Thanks, fixed!
Assume your utility function is unbounded from above. Pick outcomes such that . Let your lottery be with probability . Note that , so the probabilities sum to 1.
Then this lottery has infinite expected utility:
Now, consider any two other lotteries and with finite expected utility, such that . There’s no way to mix and probabilistically to be equivalent to , because
whenever . For , .
So Continuity is violated.
In practice, I think the effects of one’s actions decay to practically 0 after 100 years or so. In principle, I am open one’s actions having effects which are arbitrarily large, but not infinite, and continuity does not rule out arbitrarily large effects.
If you allow arbitrarily large values and prospects with infinitely many different possible outcomes, then you can construct St Petersburg-like prospects, which have infinite expected value but only take finite value in every outcome. These violate Continuity (if it’s meant to apply to all prospects, including ones with infinitely many possible outcomes). So from arbitrary large values, we violate Continuity.
We’ve also discussed this a bit before, and I don’t expect to change your mind now, but I think actually infinite effects are quite plausible (mostly through acausal influence in a possibly spatially infinite universe), and I think it’s unwarranted to assign them probability 0.
Reality forces us to compare outcomes, at least implicitly.
There are decision rules that are consistent with violations of Completeness. I’m guessing you want to treat incomparable prospects/lotteries as equivalent or that whenever you pick one prospect over another, the one you pick is at least as good as the latter, but this would force other constraints on how you compare prospects/lotteries that these decision rules for incomplete preferences don’t.
I just do not see how adding the same possibility to each of 2 lotteries can change my assessment of these.
You could read more about the relevant accounts of risk aversion and difference-making risk aversion, e.g. discussed here and here. Their motivations would explain why and how Independence is violated. To be clear, I’m not personally sold on them.
If your utility function can take arbitrarily large but finite values, then you can design a prospect/lottery with infinitely many possible outcomes and infinite expected value, like the St Petersburg paradox. Then you can treat such a prospect/lottery as if it has infinite actual value, and demonstrate violations of Continuity the same way you would with an outcome with infinite value. This is assuming Continuity applies to arbitrary prospects/lotteries, including with infinitely many possible outcomes, not just finitely many possible outcomes per prospect/lottery.
(Infinitary versions of Independence and the Sure-Thing Principle also rule out “unbounded” utility functions. See Russell & Isaacs, 2020.)
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.