I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in ā22 with a BS in Information Systems and minors in Economics/āSoftware Engineering.
I currently work as a Software Engineer at a mid-sized medical company and advise family members on their donations.
Iām interested in reducing suffering!
Nithin Ravišø
Karma: 180
What do you think about losses like these being a trigger for backsliding on other farmed animal work?
For instance, the Animal Ag Lobby saying something like, āLook people donāt care about animal welfare. Even progressive cities turned this down.ā Could this effect trigger something like the EATS act getting passed? I donāt have an informed opinion on this, but it seems like a significant backfire risk.
Iām also worried that 308 (Denverās fur ban) would have passed without 309 (Denverās slaughterhouse ban) being right next to it. The Denver Democrats anti-endorsed both measures which may not have happened if the measures were run separately (total guess on that one, but it passed in Boulder which has very similar demographics).
At the same time, perhaps there is very significant social change & radical flank effects from forcing the vote on abolitionist work! Looking for insight.
Hmm, I hadnāt considered farmed animals lives becoming net positive as a case against the meat eating problem! Thanks for pointing that out.
> the best animal welfare interventions will be much more cost-effective than the best global > health and development interventions.
Iām a bit confused by this point. It still seems like if we value this framework, we should still be considering flow-through effects in questions of cause prioritization and which GHD interventions to support. I think there are also reasonable edge cases where we may be able to influence GHD interventions to have better positive flow-through effects, if the donor is not onboard with AW.
How about modeling the flow through effects on animal welfare? This may negate any decrease in human welfare, but I havenāt seen a BOTEC of this that models the income increase on the meat eating problem. I suspect it would likely still be very positive for animal welfare.
How about both lens? I could see the āend factory farmingā framing and dreaming big be really good for some folks, particularly young people with lofty ambitions who are not yet in the movement. I think it was particularly helpful for me to have this framing when joining the movement!
We could also advocate for near-term suffering reduction as a lofty goal within itself, given the right context (i.e. within EA)!
Thanks Yanni! Iāve been on the path of nondual meditation for about a year now, and have slowly watched the benefits manifest.
Youāre so right, but Iām so far away from being at this level...
How did you build your capability for this?
This to me drills home how important it is to have a few additional great people ā imagine what we could an additional Carolina Galvani, Mahi Klosterhalfen or Ryan Xue.
Hopefully we get a few more James Ćzdenās too :)
Iāve been going through all of the debate posts after being out for the last week and Iāve also been an animal advocate for 7 years now. I donāt watch footage of violence to animals anymore because of longstanding trauma from it.
Since stopping watching graphic imagery/āvideo, no written post in the last few years has triggered such an emotional reaction in me. I had to stop halfway through to bawl my eyes out.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! After reading posts from the last week, I feel even more invigorated and motivated to continue this fight. <3
I tend to agree with Ariel Simnegarās āOpen Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfareā, however I still have some uncertainty in moral weights.
I am very convinced by the arguments presented in Ariel Simnegarās āOpen Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfareā. I still have uncertainty in moral weights so am not 100% agree
Thanks for making it easily accessible and centralized to batch my donations and report my income. Having a good platform made it super easy for me to report!
Congrats on gathering a broad coalition of support for LIC for the case!
I thought the same way about this, but something that changed my mind a bit was a friend asking me:
āIf a baby tried to steal your blood to survive would you kill them for it?ā
Now, this is a contrived example and you may have a extremely low moral weight for mosquitoes (I have pretty low moral weights for them too), but I wonder how your thoughts about the statement changes if it is instead:
I have no qualms about killing someone that stole my blood to survive.
Would be interested to hear your thoughts!
Tomasikās article on vegetarianism and wild animals was very humbling for me! For a long time I believed that veganism was the āright wayā and his article helped me see that I could be wrong even if I assign relatively high moral weights to other species.
Hmm, this response feels a bit weird particularly āif you really felt badā. I do actually feel bad about killing small insects whether or not it is net positive utility or morally consistent.
I totally agree that it is very unlikely that I am averting the most suffering from harms caused directly by me!
That being said, I do think there is some subjective value in how much moral patienthood I am mentally able to assign to other beings by not hurting them directly.
What do you believe is the moral value of environmental systems?
I think itās definitely possible that mosquitoes are moral patients and I try to avoid committing harms when I can! I feel some guilt about killing mosquitoes, ants, etcā¦ as I generally believe that we tend to undervalue super small beings and their potential sentience, but as of right now I have little evidence to back up that this view.
Based off the evidence that does exist, if I assume that mosquitoes fall somewhere between black soldier flies and silkworms in their welfare range then killing 100-1000 mosquitoes a year (assuming this causes suffering) could be the moral equivalent to killing a human. This is a pretty bold conclusion, but Iām not sure that itās any less true just because itās bold! -- lot of big assumptions here I know
From a purely consequentialist lens, I think killing a mosquito probably doesnāt matter if I can marginally improve my happiness and donate more, but I feel that this question is more about my values than truly being utility maximizing (similar to being vegan, but spending more money on food instead of donating the extra to animals).
Some related question this brings up: Are mosquitoes net negative? How much do we weight the suffering they cause to other animals? If we can justify killing them for being net negative does this justify misanthropy (I donāt think so, but I donāt have a good reason why)?
What does everyone else think?
I initially rejected this idea, but I think Iāve come around to this viewpoint a lot more. EA needs to have broad appeal to become a mainstream movement and we donāt always need to publicly state our distasteful utilitarian conclusions!
Wow, thatās not something I had completely considered. Do you have any thoughts on how to address this flow-through effect/āestimate itās impact?
Thanks for posting this! I tend to agree, itās not my comparative advantage to make grants as a mid-size donor; and itās unlikely that Iāll beat the impact/ārigor of a fund.
Iām not sure that these particular examples will necessarily solve the issue of groupthink/ācentralized decision-making as they still rely heavily on a few knowledgeable decision makers. For instance, I found that a lot of decisions in funding circles are deferred to the experts in the room. However, Iām hopeful that they can help. :)