Assuming the harm of both actions to be equal, this is only really a fair comparison if eating meat and punching your neighbour is equally costly.
I’d argue that not-eating-meat is costly, and not-punching-your-neighbour is cheap (or personally beneficial) in the medium to long run. (That deciding not to eat meat is currently costly sucks and should be changed.)
I don’t think that calling meat-eating frivolous is very helpful.
Most vegans revert to consuming some degree of animal products (as far as I understand the research they end up eating meat again, but in lower quantities), indicating that there are significant costs involved.
A side-constraint about harm is generally plausible to me.
I’m still somewhat sceptical about the argument:
- Either you extend this norm to not ommiting actions that could prevent harm from happening, or you seem to be making a dubious distinction between acts and omissions. Extending the norm would possibly give reasons for longtermists to prioritise other ways to prevent harm over not eating meat (and then this should be part of the longtermist cost-benefit-analysis the OP asks for).
- There should be some way to account for the fact that in some cases violating the side-constraint is costly, while in other cases complying with the side-constraint is costly.
I completely agree that longtermists should take animal welfare into account, and that is not happening to an adequate degree at the moment. I’m far less sure, whether comparing meat-eating to punching your neighbour is going to achieve this.
Hey Rupert
[I just want to clarify that, of the large existing diets, I think that vegans probably have the morally best diet. I also don’t want to discourage anyone from becoming vegan or vegetarian. I just want to somewhat push back at the idea that being vegan comes at trivial personal costs.]
Yes, I was vegetarian for around 5 years, 2 of which I was vegan. I’ve since become what you might call reducetarian (of which no chicken or pork, mainly milk, sometimes beef and eggs).
Personally, I can say that the costs of transitioning are quite high. I guess that during the whole transition it took me around 30 to 150 hours of work, which I wouldn’t have had with a standard diet (it’s hard to quantify in retrospect and depends on how you define work). But transitioning has also quite some fun aspect, restricting your diet forces your creativity, you get to know new people etc. So I’d say that costs of transitioning are hard to evaluate.
I suspect that I would pay anywhere from $400 to $1200 per year from my non-altruistic budget to keep my standard diet (depending on lots of factors, especially income at the time). The main reasons for reverting were taste, ease and nutritional value. I could well be that my WTP for a standard diet is higher than average. I also suspect that this cost estimate will dramatically decrease over the next years as vegan products become tastier and more available, and this could very well mean I’ll become vegan again.
For some people, like Michael, the costs involved appear to be rather small. But it doesn’t seem very plausible that 84% of vegans, or so, revert to consuming animal products if they typically perceive the cost of not eating meat to be only $100 per year (let’s say adjusted to an average american income).
One bad aspect of the vegan movement is the insistance that personal costs are very small. Claims that are often made circle around “You won’t miss the taste of animal products after a while.”, or “Having a healthy vegan diet is easy.”. I believe that both these points are simply untrue for many people.
“Wischedag” isn’t really a last name and alliterates with “Waschke”. “Hans” is a german placeholder name.
I’d love to have a weekly/monthly open post, where everyone could ask questions and post small ideas. I imagine something similar to LessWrongs “Open & Welcome Thread”. This could make some people more comfortable with starting to contribute to the forum.
Arrest this man!
Thanks a lot, this sounds really interesting.
Do you have any sense, why producers are not already fortifying feed with at least some of the nutrients?
If deficiencies contribute significantly to the mortality of the hen, wouldn’t it be in their self-interest to do so?
I’m not an expert but skimmed the two documents that seemed most relevant. The mortality rate analysis of the study and how they derive the $1235 per life estimate from it.
Two things that I noticed, which jlewars didn’t mention yet:
[Again not an expert, so don’t make any conclusions based on what I write here.]
They estimate that their intervention results in “9.2 additional baby lives saved for every 1000 live births”. This point estimate comes with a pretty large confidence interval (95% CI: 0.9,17.6). So the $1235 per life saved should possibly be read as similarly uncertain.
They note that “The NMR [Neonatal Mortality Rate] seen in our study is much higher than the national average and most likely because participants were recruited from tertiary care facilities and have Special Newborn Care Unit beds.”. If I understand it correctly, the intervention in the study was conducted on a quite specific vulnerable subgroup. With Quasi-Experiments and RCTs the external validity (how well does the intervention work on a different study group, in a different region?) is questionable, especially whenever there aren’t many additional studies being done in different contexts.
So, even if Noora Health’s intervention was as effective as they suggest, the question of how well the intervention is scaled for mothers in other contexts is a separate question. (However, if they use additional funding in a similar context this is not such a big problem.)
The “Personal Blogposts” section has recently become swamped with [Event] posts.
Most of them are irrelevant to me. Is there a way to hide them in the “All Posts”-view?
(Repost from Shortform because I didn’t get an answer. Hope that’s ok.)
The “Personal Blogposts” section has recently become swamped with [Event] posts.
Most of them are irrelevant to me. Is there a way to hide them in the “All Posts”-view?
Very useful!
It’s only free for the first 12 months though. After that, it’s $16 for every million characters.
How far would one be allowed to spread those audiobooks before running into legal troubles?
If the books are in public domain, would Amazon hold some copyright on the audio version?
I’d like to be able to search the “80000 hours” and the “Effective Altruism” LinkedIn groups for members from my city. The group member lists are only searchable for names.
I think it could be a good way to contact local EA-aligned people who aren’t on our radar.
Is there any workaround for doing this?
If that was the main constraint, then why limit this opportunity to 17 focus universities – 16 of which are in the UK or US?
Of course, some qualified candidates might be willing to move but others may be unable or unwilling to do so.
Thank you so much for this tool, it looks very valuable!
A small problem I get at the moment: If I choose any location, it gives me “Unknown field names: remote opportunity?. Please ensure that the field exists and is not incorrectly mapped.”
For many non-native speakers having a conversation in English is quite cognitively demanding – especially when talking about intellectual topics they just learned about. Even reasonably proficient speakers often struggle to express themselves as clearly as they could in their native language, there is a trade-off between fluent speech and optimal word choice/sentence construction. If given 2x more time, or the chance to write down their thoughts, they would possibly not misuse the jargon to the same degree.
Many people get excited about EA when they first hear about it and read a lot of materials. At this speed of learning retention of specific concepts is often not very good at first – but gets a lot better after a few repetitions.
It’s possible that they would be better off learning and using the concepts in a slower yet more accurate way. Misuse of concepts might be some evidence for them not being the most promising candidates for intellectual contributions. But there seem to be other characteristics that could easily compensate for a sub-optimal-but-good rate of learning (e.g. open-mindedness, good judgment, persistence, creativity).
I stumbled on this flow chart from 2015 about how different value and empirical judgements might change what cause areas we’d want to work on and with which methods:
http://globalprioritiesproject.org/2015/09/flowhart/
It’s a bit dated by now. But I think an updated version of this could be very valuable for newcomers to EA.
According to this CSET report, Europe (especially the Netherlands, UK, Germany) plays a role in the semiconductor supply chain. Is this significant enough to grant Europe a “seat at the AI table” in the future?
Some quick ideas:
Existential Jackpot
Existential Boon
Surprising Societal Boon
Unanticipated Societal Windfall
Major Unexpected Gains
Unexpected Supergains
White Swan Event [I just checked, that already has a different meaning.]
Quick thing anyone could do, to make this book (or any other book you find valuable) more available.
Most university/city libraries offer the possibility to recommend books to them. I`ve done this myself many times (also for this book) and my university library sofar ordered every book I`ve recommended.