I do community building with Effective Altruism at Georgia Tech. My primary focus areas are animal welfare and artificial intelligence.
Pete Rowlett
Karma: 296
I think this sentence has a mistake:
“Hey, I quite like this post that summarizes my organization’s work is cool, check it out”
Could be either:
“Hey, I quite like this post that summarizes my organization’s work, check it out”
“Hey, this post that summarizes my organization’s work is cool, check it out”
Your first point seems like a legitimate question to me. I’ve not read much about those animals, but I would assume there are many of them, perhaps far more than there are insects. I would be curious to read about indicators of their sentience. The author, however, described evidence of several indicators of insect sentience (“responding to anesthetic, nursing their wounds, making tradeoffs between pain and reward, cognitively modeling both risks and reward in decision-making, responding in novel ways to novel experiences, self-medicating”), but doesn’t seem to think the animals you listed are conscious. I would guess they are missing some of these indicators.
Your second point is less interesting. A couple of your claims seem false, or at least incompatible. For example, the conclusion that every other moral pursuit of humanity is relatively meaningless if insects are given consideration also requires that helping insects be tractable, which you don’t seem to think. If we cannot and could never help insects, the greatest moral pursuits must be other (likely more normal) things, which I suppose would make them relatively meaningful. If we do say that helping insects is tractable and conclude that other pursuits are relatively meaningless, we can still acknowledge that on an absolute scale those other pursuits are incredibly meaningful, and that many of those pursuits are instrumentally useful for our goal of helping insects.
You also make the claim that “the average person can intuit that there’s no reasonable alternative to just politely ignoring the suffering of the quintillions of insects, worms and mites on the planet.” Again, I think one ought to be skeptical of their intuitions, especially surrounding issues that they have very little knowledge of. A nascent field of research has sprung up around these issues, and I suspect that more insights and paths forward will emerge as we learn more. There are, however, things we can do already. Brian Tomasic has written “How to Kill Bugs Humanely,” which almost everyone can apply in day-to-day life. A quick search of Wild Animal Initiative’s research library revealed “Improving pest management for wild insect welfare,” which says that “Agricultural pest insect management practices may be a particularly tractable avenue for improving the expected welfare of a large number of insects.”
If I wanted to write something to disagree with the post, I’d have explored other avenues such as these:
The alleged indicators of sentience cited in the research aren’t good at indicating sentience—here are some better ones, and here’s why I think they’re better
Some insects do show evidence of indicators cited in the research, but many don’t
Insects generally fail to show evidence of the indicators that I think are best
The insects that are most likely to be sentient (based on some set of indicators) are also the hardest to help (or something else arguing intractability)
The methodology in the research coming up with moral weights/welfare capacities is weak (This would be a critique that I’d be particularly interested in from someone trained in research methods, and I think it’s an easier target)
Extreme suffering matters so much more than moderate suffering that the likely aggregation of far more instances of moderate suffering is insufficiently significant to make intervening worthwhile
Altruists should be risk-averse, and insect work is risky in relevant ways (https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/how-can-risk-aversion-affect-your-cause-prioritization/)
Sentience isn’t the trait we should be focused on; the metaethical foundations are weak
I think the early questions are particularly interesting and underexplored, but there are many other options too! I downvoted your comment because I think it doesn’t effectively engage with the substance of the disagreement, not because I disagree. I would be excited to see more comments from people whose views don’t overlap with mine, which currently lean towards supporting work on issues affecting small non-human animals, provided that they engage with the core disagreements in a meaningful way.
I am optimistic about this sort of idea, but I agree that it’s important to pay close attention to perverse incentives. For what it’s worth, the paper referenced in the post says the following regarding increased quantity concerns in the imagined animal well-being units (AWBUs) market:
“As can be seen from Table 2, a producer has three options to increase the number of AWBUs produced—it can add more animals, increase well-being, or avoid discount factors. The incentive for all farms to improve animal well being is straightforward. The higher the price of AWBUs, the greater the incentive to improve animal care. It seems unlikely, however, that a farm would face much pressure to add more animals simply to increase the number of AWBUs produced unless there was a corresponding change in demand for meat, milk, or eggs. Moreover, a producer only faces positive incentives to add more animals if conditions on the farm are such that NAWBS were to able to established at a high level. And isn’t this exactly what animal advocates desire? Indeed, if it became more profitable to produce animals on farms by providing conditions that delivered high levels of animal well-being (which would increase production on such farms), there would likely be a corresponding decrease in the level of production on farms with low levels of animal well being. Thus, the anticipated effects of a market for AWBUs are:
The average level of animal well-being across all farms, as defined by the average NAWBS, will increase;
There will be a slight increase in the number of animals produced;
There will be a redistribution of where animas were produced; more animals will begin to be produced on farms with higher NAWBS; and
Each of the above affects will be accentuated as the price of AWBUs rises.”
There are a few typos in that section that I left in (“such that NAWBS were to able to established,” “animas,” and “affects,” presumably intended to be “such that NAWBS were able to be established,” “animals,” and “effects.” I’m not sure why there are so many small errors, in addition to at least one other earlier in the paper.
The claims seem plausible to me, but far from obviously true. A lot seems to be resting on “Indeed, if it became more profitable to produce animals on farms by providing conditions that delivered high levels of animal well-being (which would increase production on such farms), there would likely be a corresponding decrease in the level of production on farms with low levels of animal well being.” I think it’s possible that some producers of cheap products cannot easily upgrade facilities to get paid for the credits (which would likely increase high-welfare production less than or equal to the corresponding decrease in low-welfare production), and they may not decrease production 1:1 even if their low-welfare products lose value in the market (I think empirical studies on elasticity in these markets generally indicate this). They may continue to produce, for example, if marginal revenue covers variable costs and some, but not all, fixed costs.
How positive the credits system ends up being depends on the actual changes in the number of animals being produced at different welfare levels. If even low-cost producers respond by implementing relatively cheap but highly welfare-improving measures, things will go swimmingly. If there ends up being more separation between producers, things could get messy. I think a lot may depend on the specific market—how similar production is across borders, supply elasticities, and what the lowest-cost changes available are.
Thanks Aaron! I’ll keep that in mind.
Thank you so much for this write-up and all the work the SWP team does! Very useful as a potential donor to see both the strategy and the absorbency plans. I’m also looking forward to the results of the University of Stirling study.
I’m curious about the margins on the products in your store. If they’re low, I’ll purchase them more rarely (for myself and people who I know will wear and enjoy them, mostly in the personal fun/fuzzies bucket) and donate more directly. If they’re very high, I’ll be more inclined to buy them for other people as a gamble that they might look into it more themselves or inspire someone else who saw the item. If certain items are particularly profitable, that would be great to know too! I’ll try to factor in shipping costs, since those are on the buyer—maybe it’s best to buy a bunch of small/light stickers or a bunch of t-shirts and distribute them myself.
There are a few possible sources of funding that I’m aware of. These first two are managed funds that accept applications:
Effective Altruism Funds Long-Term Future Fund (Application)
Founders Pledge Global Catastrophic Risks Fund (Application)Manifund may be a good fit since your request is small and urgent. You can list your project there, and anyone can fund it.
It doesn’t sound like you’re doing anything related to antimicrobial resistance, but if you are, there’s the AMR Funding Circle.
Do you already know what sort of power system you need and where to purchase it? If so, I might explain specific plans and expected costs in your forum post. That information will be helpful for your grant applications and for anyone trying to identify sources of support. If not, and you need help, I might reach out to someone at High Impact Engineers. There may be more support in the EA Anywhere Slack (perhaps cause-biosecurity).
I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you have any more questions!
I think the website is already quite good. It includes almost everything that somebody new to the community might find useful without overcrowding. If I had to come up with a couple comments:
“For the first couple of weeks, I’ll be testing how the current site performs against these goals, then move on to the redesign, which I’ll user-test against the same goals.” For the testing methodology, it sounds like you’re planning to gather metrics on this version, switch to V2, and gather metrics again. I think A/B testing might be a better option if it’s not too inconvenient, since that might get you more similarity between the groups on which you gather data.
You could add a section on stories of people in effective altruism in video or text form. Learning about how other people got involved, their pasts, and their motivations, might inspire people to join in-person groups and EAVP more than reading or listening to podcasts. Ideally the people would be diverse (country of origin, gender, race, primary cause area, type of contribution, etc.).
Hope that helps!
Hello Altar! As far as I know, there is no Seattle area EA-focused charity evaluator. Generally speaking, EA organizations do not engage in such work for a couple reasons.
1. EAs focus on impartial altruism, meaning that they try to give equal priority to everyone’s interests, regardless of their location.
2. The difference in impact between the least and most cost-effective organizations in Seattle is small relative to the difference in impact between the least and most cost-effective organizations globally. This means that getting local-only donors to switch between local charities is significantly less valuable than getting people to switch from local to international charities. It would have to be vastly easier to get local-only donors to switch for that work to end up being cost-effective. More info here.There have been some smaller efforts to do local priorities research from local or national groups. Effective Altruism Israel ran their “Maximum Impact” program (details here and here). This post discusses in more detail how local research is useful and links to a few other efforts in Singapore, Brazil, and the Philippines.
Sometimes local efforts from wealthier countries can identify globally cost-effective charities, particularly in cause areas besides global health, but I think another key reason they are created is to develop members’ evaluation skills, which can later be applied on a broader scale. Local prioritization efforts in low income countries may also have success in identifying top global health organizations.
I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you have any more questions!
Thanks Nathan!
These are interesting ideas. It seems like there’s still a lack of clarity about the magnitude of the effects of each issue on the nonhuman animal side, and therefore their relative cost-effectiveness. But as more research is done, say on ITNs in later stages of their lifecycle and the effects of tapeworms on pigs, maybe trades could be made based on these issues!
Wow, this is amazing! Thank you for putting in the time and effort to write it. I just ordered a copy for the Effective Altruism at Georgia Tech library. Can’t wait to read it!
I think it would be really useful for someone with a mathematical background to develop this further. The flexibility/dedication tradeoff seems about the same as the explore/exploit tradeoff, which I understand to have been studied a fair amount. I’d imagine there’s a lot of theory that could be applied and would allow us to make better decisions as a community, especially now that lots of people are thinking about specializing or funding specialization. I bet we could avoid significant mistakes at a low cost by quantifying investments in each area and comparing them to theoretical ideals.
Congratulations on your first post! I think this is a really cool and interesting idea. The team at Basefund has started doing something similar, so you may want to reach out to them if you’re interested in working on it!
I quite like how you distinguish approaches at the individual level! I think focusing on which area they support makes sense. One lingering question I have is the relative value a donor’s donations vs. the value of their contribution toward building a culture of effective giving. I also think it’s at least somewhat common for people to get into other areas of EA after starting out in effective giving.
Agreed on the intro fellowship point as well! Long-term it supports field-building since plenty of participants filter through, but it’s more directly movement support.
I’m a little less sure on the networking point. I notice that because I’m exploring lots of EA-related areas in relatively low depth, I haven’t hit diminishing returns from talking to people in the community. I do imagine that people who have committed more strongly to an area would get more value from exploring more. I do agree that lots of people outside the traditional EA geographical areas could do fantastic work. Enabling this doesn’t seem very resource-intensive though. I would guess that EA Virtual Programs is relatively cheap, and it allows anyone to get started in EA. Maybe you’d like to see more traditional local groups, though, which would be more costly but could make sense.
I think the uptake of practices category can be separated into two areas. Area one would be promoting the uptake of EA-style thinking in existing foundations and the other work you list under “How I would describe EA’s current approach to social change”. Area two would be pushing for the implementation of policies that have come out of EA research in existing organizations, which is what LEEP and lots of animal welfare orgs do (and I suppose more biosecurity and AI people are getting into the regulatory space as well now). I only question the tractability of area one work, area two work seems to be going quite well! The main challenge in that domain is making sure the policy recommendations are good.
Thank you for the detailed response!
Just messaged you!
It’s great that you’re doing what you can on this front, despite all the challenges! I don’t have specific nutritional advice, though maybe the writer of the first post you linked would.
You may have already considered this (some of your ideas hinted in this direction), but I think it’s important to focus on suffering intensity, which you could measure in terms of suffering per calorie or suffering per pound of food. Doing so will minimize your overall suffering footprint. My understanding is that the differences in capacity for suffering between large and small animals (such as cows and shrimp) aren’t large enough to outweigh the difference in the number of animals you have to eat to get the same number of calories. Additionally, cows seem to be kept in some of the least awful conditions of any factory-farmed animal.
This website, foodimpacts.org, shows this difference in a useful graphic. It also lets you weight the importance you place on welfare vs. climate impacts (though I would set climate to 0%, it may be helpful for you if you prioritize differently).
Brian Tomasic’s How Much Direct Suffering Is Caused by Various Animal Foods? could also be a useful guide, and Meghan Barrett’s work on insect sentience is worth a read if you want to decide whether it’s better to eat insects or other animals.
Great post, thanks for writing it! Healthy and active vegans sharing their stories helps change the narrative, bit by bit.
Destroying viruses in at-risk labs
Thanks to Garrett Ehinger for feedback and for writing the last paragraph.
Military conflict around or in the vicinity of biological research laboratories could substantially increase the risk of releasing a dangerous pathogen into the environment. The fighting and mass movement of refugees combine with other risk factors to magnify the potential ramifications of this risk. Garrett Ehinger elaborates on this issue in his excellent Chicago Tribune piece, and proposes the creation of nonaggression treaties for biological labs in war zones as additional pillars to shore up biosecurity norms.
This seems like a great option, but I think there may be a more prompt technical solution as well. Viruses, bacteria, and other dangerous materials in at-risk labs could be stored in containers that have built-in methods to destroy their contents. A strong heating element could be integrated into the storage compartment of each virus and activated by scientists at the lab if a threat seems imminent. Vibration sensors could also automatically activate the system in case of a bombing or an earthquake. This solution would require funding and engineering expertise. I don’t know how much convincing labs would need to integrate it into their existing setups.
If labs might consider the purchase and implementation of entirely new heating elements with their existing containers to be too tall of an order, there are other alternatives. For example, “autoclaves” (the chemist’s equivalent of a ceramic kiln or furnace) are already commonplace in many biological laboratories for purposes such as medium synthesis or equipment sterilization. There could be value for these labs in developing SOPs and recommendations for the safe disposal of risky pathogens via autoclaves. This solution would be quicker and easier to implement, but in an emergency situation, could require slightly more time to safely destroy all the lab’s pathogens.
Rawls’ veil of ignorance supports maximizing expected value
One common topic in effective altruism introductory seminars is expected value, specifically the idea that we should usually maximize it. It’s intuitive for some participants, but others are less sure. Here I will offer a simple justification for expected value maximization using a variation of the veil of ignorance thought experiment. This line of thinking has helped make my introductory seminar participants (and me) more confident in the legitimacy of expected value.
The thought experiment begins with a group of rational agents in the “original position”. Here they have no knowledge of who or what they will be when they enter the world. They could be any race, gender, species, or thing. Because they don’t know who or what they will be, they have no unfair biases, and should be able to design a just society and make just decisions.
Now for two expected value thought experiments from the Cambridge EA introductory seminar discussion guide. Suppose that a disease, or a war, or something, is killing people. And suppose you only have enough resources to implement one of the following two options:
Version A…
Save 400 lives, with certainty [EV +400/-100]
Save 500 lives, with 90% probability; save no lives, 10% probability [EV +450/-50]
Version B…
100 people die, with certainty [EV +400/-100]
90% chance no one dies; 10% chance 500 people die [EV +450/-50]
Now imagine that you’re an agent behind the veil of ignorance. You could enter the world as any of the 500 individuals. What do you want the decision-maker to choose? In both versions of the thought experiment, option 1 gives you an 80% chance of surviving, but option 2 gives you a 90% chance. The clear choice is option 2.
This framework bypasses the common objection that it’s wrong to take risks with others’ lives by turning both options into a risk. In my experience, part of this objection often has to do with understandable feelings of discomfort with risk-taking in high-stakes scenarios. But here risk-taking is the altruistic approach, so a refusal to accept risk would ultimately be for the emotional benefit of the decider. This topic can also lead to discussion about the meaning of altruism, which is a highly relevant idea for intro seminar participants.
This argument isn’t new (reviewers noted that John Harsanyi was the first to make this argument, and Holden Karnofsky discusses it in his post on one-dimensional ethics), but I hope you find this short explanation useful for your own thinking and for your communication of effective altruism.
I may have made an incorrect assumption! I thought that when you said “the average person can intuit that there’s no reasonable alternative to just politely ignoring the suffering of the quintillions of insects, worms and mites on the planet,” you were arguing that solving the problem wasn’t tractable.
Generally people on the EA Forum prioritize work on problems that do well under the ITN framework. If you suggested that we ignore the suffering, then perhaps you partly accept that there is suffering, and it’s important, though now I’m curious whether you actually think that. Do you believe that insects suffer? If they do suffer, is it important?
I believe that there are hardly any actors in the insect welfare space, and that the resources allocated are very minimal. I guessed that you were aware of this situation as well and considered insect welfare neglected, at least in the sense that there is little being done to improve it (as opposed to in the sense that more resources should go towards it). Maybe you can correct me here too!
That left tractability, which I know is commonly questioned when the topic of insect welfare, especially for wild insects, comes up. I have this question too, despite there being some preliminary reason to think that there are some opportunities for useful work at scale.
I very much agree with you on the opportunity cost issue. The most likely source of donations and talented people for insect welfare work is the effective altruism community. Some of those resources (especially financial, I suspect) would presumably be diverted from global health and development work, which would mean sacrificing some human welfare.
You seem to be thinking more in terms of binaries and major changes than I would. If everyone were convinced that insect welfare was the best thing to work on, there would indeed be fundamental disruptions to the systems that are currently improving human welfare most cost-effectively. I do not think we are remotely close to being at risk for that sort of thing. While any reallocation would come with some loss of human welfare and life, amounts that could realistically be reallocated within the next few years could hardly be considered disruptive on a systemic level.
I also think some of the resources put towards insect welfare would support research that would be useful for future cause prioritization, and could result in meaningful increases or decreases in allocations to insect welfare in the future. I would be excited to learn that insects are not sentient, and we can reallocate resources back to other non-human animals or humans. I would also be happy to learn that we really had been missing something important for a long time, and we should be allocating far more to the insects. Though ultimately I would be aware of the large (on an absolute scale) human cost of the reallocation.
I was using meaningfulness differently than you are. Sometimes people feel negatively about discovering that their past efforts likely led to results that are far less meaningful than the results they could have gotten from doing different work. I think reframing the thought as, “My past work was very meaningful, but my future work can be far more meaningful than even that,” is more productive than, “My past work was relatively meaningless, and my future work will be relatively meaningful.” You seem to be using the word the way I’d choose to use importance. I think it’s more appropriate to focus on importance only on a relative scale when doing cause prioritization, because as you say, we’re doing triage. Reallocating scarce resources to the places they can have the greatest impact is the goal.