Thanks for doing so here and on LW.
orthonormal
Karma: 114
Meta: you’ve framed this as if Elizabeth had failed to respond to your linked comment while writing this post, so I would like to point out for others that the linked comment was written two days ago, in response to Elizabeth noting in the comments of the current post that you had not replied to her questions months prior.
These are cached arguments that are irrelevant to this particular post and/or properly disclaimed within the post.
The asks from this post aren’t already in the water supply of this community; everyone reading EA Forum has, by contrast, already encountered the recommendation to take animal welfare more seriously.
I think the distinctions Richard highlights are essential for us to make in our public advocacy—in particular, polls show that there’s already a significant chunk of voters who seem persuadable by AI notkilleveryoneism, so it’s a good time to argue for that directly. I don’t think there’s anything gained by hiding under the banner of fearing moderate harms from abuse of today’s models, and there’s much to be lost if we get policy responses that protect us from those but not from the actual x-risk.
If someone uses the phrase “saving the world” on any level approaching consistent, run. Legitimate people who are working on legitimate problems do not rely on this drama. The more exciting the narrative and the more prominent a role the leader plays in it, the more skeptical you should be.
(Ah, you might say, but facts can’t be too good to be true: they are simply true or false. My answer to that would be the optimizer’s curse.)
I don’t think the problem stems from how important an organization thinks their work is. Emerson’s meme company had no pretense to be world-saving, and yet had toxic dynamics as well.
The problem is that high stakes are not a reason to suspend ethical injunctions or personal boundaries; those provide more protective value when applied to something with genuinely high stakes.
If the disparaging claim is in the piece, it makes no sense to me that you can’t specify which claim it is.
You saw the counterarguments section “The human health gains are small relative to the harms of animals”, but presumably missed that the next section was titled “The health costs don’t matter, no benefit justifies the horror of farming animals”, and made that exact counterargument rather than responding to Elizabeth’s preemptive response.
In which case you should absolutely not cause an extra pet cat to be created, given that if they are allowed to run free they will kill more small animals than they can eat.
I am not actually sure I know anyone who I believe missed in the incautious direction
There’s a certain rationalist-adjacent meditation retreat I can think of.
It sounds like you bore the brunt of some people’s overly paranoid risk assessments, and I’m sorry to hear that.
To be concrete about my model, sterilizing groceries was the right call in March 2020 but not by June 2020 (when we knew it very probably didn’t transmit through surfaces), and overall maximum-feasible alert was the right call in March 2020 but not by June 2020 (when we knew the IFR was low for healthy young people and that the hospitals were not going to be too overwhelmed).
“Be sure the act is effective” is not a good proxy for “take actions based on EV”. In March 2020, the officials were sure (based on a bad model) that COVID wasn’t airborne. We masked up all the same, not because we knew it would be effective but because the chance was large enough for the expected gain to outweigh the cost.
Re: COVID, the correct course of action (unless one was psychic) was to be extremely paranoid at the start (trying for total bubbling, sterilizing outside objects, etc) because the EV was very downside-skewed—but as more information came in, to stop worrying about surfaces, start being fine with spacious outdoor gatherings, get a good mask and be comfortable doing some things inside, etc.
That is, a good EA would have been faster than the experts on taking costly preventative acts and faster than the experts on relaxing those where warranted.
Some actual EAs seemed to do this well, and others missed in one direction or the other (there was a lot of rapid group house self-sorting in March/April 2020 over this, and then a slower process afterward).
I looked but didn’t find those recommendations until I’d already donated! Thank you for suggesting them for others.
I agree that EA thinking within a cause area is important, but the racist police brutality crisis in the USA is the particular motivating cause area I wrote this post about, and the Rohingya don’t enter into that.
One of my friends mentioned it, and it also came up in this post. They look extremely legit.
But I also could have gone with one of Chloe Cockburn’s recommendations, had I seen them before I donated.
It’s OK To Also Donate To Non-EA Causes
Choosing the Zero Point
You have to carefully consider what scale means when switching between one-time interventions and ongoing projects. Cost-effectiveness means the same thing in both, though. If there are opportunities to save a marginal DALY by spending under $1000, then that will be competitive with a public health initiative.
It’s not obvious to me that there are such opportunities, unfortunately. (Better suppression in the earliest days of COVID-19 would have been massively cost-effective, but it’s far beyond that point now.)
If someone has a good way to save a marginal DALY from COVID-19 for $1000 or less, though, I’d be very excited.
I downvoted you because you responded to a very legible and effortful post (after going to a lot of trouble testing EAs and finding them nutritionally deficient to the point where it might affect their work), a post making the author’s cruxes clear, and what kind of evidence would change her mind, with incredulity, accusations of bad faith, and a brazenly made-up number. I don’t find any of your later arguments to be of sufficient quality to reverse that judgment.
The obvious case where someone might be hard pressed to be healthy on a vegan diet is when someone has allergies to multiple things that are ingredients in many of the common vegan protein staples. This is common enough that I’ve met ex-vegans who had to compromise on their diet for this reason, as well as a vegan who seemed very clearly nutritionally deprived because of FODMAP and gluten allergies but was toughing it out regardless for ethical reasons, so I’d be quite surprised if you’ve never met someone with multiple allergies that severely constrict their vegan options for getting the full spectrum of known nutrition. (Supplementation can help but is often less effective than nutrients in their original context.)
“Some cultures don’t eat meat” does not in fact prove that nobody has nutritional deficiencies from not eating meat; some people in those cultures may be nutritionally deficient for that reason! That’s like saying that because bread was ubiquitous in Europe, no Europeans have issues with gluten.