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AGB 🔸Oct 17 202443

Hi Michael,

Sorry for putting off responding to this. I wrote this post quickly on a Sunday night, so naturally work got in the way of spending the time to put this together. Also, I just expect people to get very upset with me here regardless of what I say, which I understand - from their point of view I'm potentially causing a lot of harm - but naturally causes procrastination.

I still don't have a comprehensive response, but I think there are now a few things I can flag for where I'm diverging here. I found titotal's post helpful for establishing the starting point under hedonism:

For the intervention of cage free campaigns, using RP's moral weights, the intervention saves 1996 DALY's per thousand dollars, about a 100 times as effective as AMF.

However, even before we get into moral uncertainty I think this still overstates the case:

Animal welfare (AW) interventions are much less robust than the Global Health and Development (GHD) interventions animal welfare advocates tend to compare them to. Most of them are fundamentally advocacy interventions, which I think advocates tend to overrate heavily.

How to deal with such uncertainty has been the topic of much debate, which I can't do justice to here. But one thing I try to do is compare apples-to-apples for robustness where possible; if I relax my standards for robustness and look at advocacy, how much more estimated cost-effectiveness do I get in the GHD space? Conveniently, I currently donate to Giving What We Can as 'Effective Giving Advocacy' and have looked into their forward-looking marginal multiplier a fair bit; I think it's about 10x. Joel Tan looked and concluded 13x. I've checked with others who have looked at GWWC in detail; they're also around there. I've also seen 5x-20x claims for things like lead elimination advocacy, but I haven't looked into those claims in nearly as much detail.

Overall I think that if you're comfortable donating to animal welfare interventions, comparing to AMF/Givewell 'Top Charities' is just a mistake; you should be comparing to the actual best GHD interventions under your tolerance for shaky evidence, which will have estimated cost-effectiveness 10x higher or possibly even more.
Also, I subjectively feel like AW is quite a bit less robust than even GHD advocacy; there's a robustness issue from advocacy in both cases, but AW also really struggles with a lack of feedback loops - we can't ask the animals how they feel - and so I think is much more likely to end up causing harm on its own terms. I don't know how to quantify this issue, and it doesn't seem like a huge issue for cage-free specifically, so will set this aside. Back when AW interventions were more about trying to end factory farming rather than improving conditions on factory farms it did worry me quite a bit.
As I noted in my comment under that post, Open Phil thinks the marginal FAW opportunity going forward is around 20% of Saulius, not 60% of Saulius; I haven't seen anything that would cause me to argue with them on this, and this cuts the gap by 3x.
Another issue is around 'pay it forward' or 'ripple' effects, where helping someone enables them to help others, which seem to only apply to humans not animals. I'm not looking at the long-term future here, just the next generation or so; after that I tend to think the ripples fade out. But even over that short time, the amount of follow-on good a life saved can do seems significant, and probably moves my sense of things by small amount. Still, it's hard to quantify and I'll set this aside as well.

After the two issues I am willing to quantify we're down to around 3.3x, and we're still assuming hedonism.

On the other hand, I have the impression that RP made an admirable effort to tend towards conservatism in some empirical assumptions, if not moral ones. I think Open Phil also tends this way sometimes. So I'm not as sure as I usually would what happens if somebody looks more deeply; overwhelmingly I would say EA has found that interventions get worse the more you look at them, which is a lot of why I penalise non-robustness in the first place, but perhaps Open Phil + RP have been conservative enough that this isn't the case?

***

Still, my overall guess is that if you assume hedonism AW comes out ahead. I am not a moral realist; if people want to go all-in on hedonism and donate to AW on those grounds, I don't see that I have any grounds to argue with them. But as my OP alluded to, I tend to think there is more at stake / humans are 'worth more' in the non-hedonic worlds. So when I work through this I end up underwhelmed by the overall case.

***

This brings us to the much thornier territory of moral uncertainty. While continuing to observe that I'm out of my depth philosophically, and am correspondingly uncertain how best to approach this, some notes on how I think about this and where I seem to be differing:

I find experience machine thought experiments, and people's lack of enthusiasm for them, much more compelling than 'tortured Tim' thought experiements for trying to get a handle on how much of what matters is pleasure/suffering. The issue I see with modelling extreme suffering is that it tends to heavily disrupt non-hedonic goods, and so it's hard to figure out how much of the badness is the suffering versus the disruption. We can get a sense of how much people care about this disruption from their refusal to enter the experience machine; a lot of the rejections I see and personally feel boil down to "I'm maxing out pleasure but losing everything that 'actually matters'".

RP did mention this but I found their handling unconvincing; they seem to have very different intuitions to me for how much torture compromises human ability to experience what 'actually matters'. Empirical evidence from people with chronic nerve damage is similarly tainted by the fact that e.g. friends often abandon you when you're chronically in pain, you may have to drop hobbies that meant a lot to you, and so on.

I've been lucky enough never to experience anything that severe, but if I look at the worst periods of my life it certainly seemed like a lot more impact came from these 'secondary' effects - interference with non-hedonic goods - than from the primary suffering. My heart goes out to people who are dealing with worse conditions and very likely taking larger 'secondary' hits.

I also just felt like the Tortured Tim thought experiment didn't 'land' even on its own terms for me, similar to the sentiments expressed in this comment and this comment.

See in context

Multiplier Arguments are often flawed

by AGB 🔸

Oct 13 20245 min read 64

189

Animal welfareCause prioritizationGlobal health & developmentBuilding effective altruismAnimal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week Criticism of work in effective altruismCriticism of effective altruismExpected value

Frontpage

Multiplier Arguments are often flawed

Foreword

Two envelopes: the EA version

What just happened?

Tl;DR: Multiplier Arguments are incredibly biased in favour of switching, and they get more biased the more uncertainty you have. Used naively in cases of high uncertainty, they will overwhelmingly suggest you switch intervention from whatever you use as your base.

Some implications

Global Health vs. Animal Welfare

Conclusion

64 comments

Foreword

Sadly, it looks like the debate week will end without many of the stronger^[1] arguments for Global Health being raised, at least at the post level. I don't have time to write them all up, and in many cases they would be better written by someone with more expertise, but one issue is firmly in my comfort zone: the maths!

The point I raise here is closely related to the Two Envelopes Problem, which has been discussed before. I think some of this discussion can come across as 'too technical', which is unfortunate since I think a qualitative understanding of the issue is critical to making good decisions when under substantial uncertainty. In this post I want to try and demystify it.

This post was written quickly, and has a correspondingly high chance of error, for which I apologise. I am confident in the core point, and something seemed better than nothing.

Two envelopes: the EA version

A commonly-deployed argument in EA circles, hereafter referred to as the "Multiplier Argument", goes roughly as follows:

Under 'odd' but not obviously crazy assumptions, intervention B is >100x as good as intervention A.
You may reasonably wonder whether those assumptions are correct.
But unless you put <1% credence in those assumptions, or think that B is negative in the other worlds, B will still come out ahead.
1. Because even if it's worthless 99% of the time, it's producing enough value in the 1% to more than make up for it!
So unless you are really very (over)confident that those assumptions are false, you should switch dollars/support/career from A to B.

I have seen this for both Animal Welfare and Longtermism as B, usually with Global Health as A. As written, this argument is flawed. To see why, consider the following pair of interventions:

A has produces 1 unit of value per $, or 1000 units per $, with 50/50 probability.
B is identical to A, and independently will be worth 1 or 1000 per $ with 50/50 probability.

We can see that B's relative value to A is as follows:

In 25% of worlds, B is 1000x more effective than A
In 50% of worlds, B and A are equally effective.
In 25% of worlds, B is 1/1000th as effective as A

In no world is B negative, and clearly we have far less than 99.9% credence in A beating B, so B being 1000x better than A in its favoured scenario seems like it should carry the day per the Multiplier Argument...but these interventions are identical!

What just happened?

The Multiplier Argument relies on mathematical sleight of hand. It implicitly calculated the expected ratio of impact between B and A, and the expected ratio in the above example is indeed way above 1:

E(B/A) = 25% * 1000 + 50% * 1 + 25% * 1/1000 = 250.5

But the difference in impact, or E(B-A), which is what actually counts, is zero. In 25% of worlds we gain 999 by switching from A to B, in a mirror set of worlds we lose 999, and in the other 50% there is no change.

In fact, we could use a Multiplier Argument to construct a seemingly-overwhelming argument for switching from A to B, and then use the same argument to argue for switching back again! Which is essentially the classic Two Envelopes Problem.

Some implications

One implication is that you cannot, in general, ignore the inconvenient sets of assumptions where your suggested intervention B is losing to intervention A. You need to consider A's upside cases directly, and how the value being lost there compares to the value being gained in B's upside cases.

If A has a fixed value under all sets of assumptions, the Multiplier Argument works. One post argues this is true in the case at hand. I don't buy it, for reasons I will get into in the next section, but I do want to acknowledge that this is technically sufficient for Multiplier Arguments to be valid, and I do think some variant of this assumption is close-enough to true for many comparisons, especially intra-worldview comparisons.

But in general, the worlds where A is particularly valuable will correlate with the worlds where it beats B, because that high value is helping it beat B! My toy example did not make any particular claim about A and B being anti-correlated, just independent. Yet it still naturally drops out that A is far more valuable in the A-favourable worlds than in the B-favourable worlds.

Global Health vs. Animal Welfare

Everything up to this point I have high confidence in. This section I consider much more suspect. I had some hope that the week would help me on this issue. Maybe the comments will, otherwise 'see you next time' I guess?

Many posts this week reference RP's work on moral weights, which came to the surprising-to-most "Equality Result": chicken experiences are roughly as valuable as human experiences. The world is not even close to acting as if this were the case, and so a >100x multiplier in favour of helping chickens strikes me as very credible if this is true.

But as has been discussed, RP made a number of reasonable but questionable empirical and moral assumptions. Of most interest to me personally is the assumption of hedonism.

I am not a utilitarian, let alone a hedonistic utilitarian. But when I try to imagine a hedonistic version of myself, I can see that much of the moral charge that drives my Global Health giving would evaporate. I have little conviction about the balance of pleasure and suffering experienced by the people whose lives I am attempting to save. I have much stronger conviction that they want to live. Once I stop giving any weight to that preference ^[2], my altruistic interest in saving those lives plummets.

To re-emphasise the above, down-prioritising Animal Welfare on these grounds does not require me to have overwhelming confidence that hedonism is false. For example a toy comparison could^[3] look like:

In 50% of worlds hedonism is true, and Global Health interventions produce 1 unit of value while Animal Welfare interventions produce 500 units.
In 50% of worlds hedonism is false, and the respective amounts are 1000 and 1 respectively.

Despite a 50%-likely 'hedonism is true' scenario where Animal Welfare dominates by 500x, Global Health wins on EV here.

Conclusion

As far as I know, the fact that Multiplier Arguments fail in general and are particularly liable to fail where multiple moral theories are being considered - as is usually the case when considering Animal Welfare - is fairly well-understood among many longtime EAs. Brian Tomasik raised this issue years ago, Carl Shulman makes a similar point when explaining why he was unmoved by the RP work here, Holden outlines a parallel argument here, and RP themselves note that they considered Two Envelopes "at length".

It is not, in isolation, a 'defeater' of animal welfare, as a cursory glance at the prioritisation of the above would tell you. I would though encourage people to think through and draw out their tables under different credible theories, rather than focusing on the upside cases and discarding the downside ones as the Multiplier Argument pushes you to do.

You may go through that exercise and decide, as some do, that the value of a human life is largely invariant to how you choose to assign moral value. If so, then you can safely go where the Multiplier Argument takes you.

Just be aware that many of us do not feel that way.

^{^}

Defined roughly as 'the points I'm most likely to hear and give most weight to when discussing this with longtime EAs in person'.

^{^}

Except to the extent it's a signal about the pleasure/suffering balance I suppose. I don't think it does provides much information though; people generally seem to have a strong desire to survive in situations that seem to me to be very suffering-dominated.

^{^}

For the avoidance of doubt, to the extent I have attempted to draw this out my balance of credences and values end up a lot more messy.

189 Reactions

Overwhelming Hierarchicalism

Solely by virtue of our shared species, helping humans may be lexicographically preferential to helping animals, or perhaps their preferences should be given an enormous multiplier.

I use the term "overwhelming" because depending on which animal welfare BOTEC is used, if we use constant moral weights relative to humans, you'd need a 100x to 1000x multiplier for the math to work out in favor of global health. (This comparison is coherent to me because I accept Michael St. Jules' argument that we should resolve the two envelopes problem by weighing in the units we know, but I acknowledge that this line of reasoning may not appeal to you if you don't endorse that resolution.)

I personally find overwhelming hierarchicalism (or any form of hierarchicalism) to be deeply dubious. I write more about it here, but I simply see it as a convenient way to avoid confronting ethical problems without having the backing of any sound theoretical justification. I put about as much weight on it as the idea that the interests of the Aryan race should be lexicographically preferred to the interests of non-Aryans. There's just no prior for why that would be the case.

Denial of animal consciousness

Yud and maybe some others seem to believe that animals are most likely not conscious. As before, they'd have to be really certain that animals aren't conscious to endorse global health here. Even if there's a 10% chance that chickens are conscious, given the outsize cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns if they are, I think they'd still merit a significant fraction of EA funding. (Probably still more than they're currently receiving.)

I think it's fair to start with a very strong prior that at least chickens and pigs are probably conscious. Pigs have brains with all of the same high-level substructures, which are affected the same way by drugs/painkillers/social interaction as humans' are, and act all of the same ways that humans act would when confronted with situations of suffering and terror. It would be really surprising a priori if what was going on was merely a simulacrum of suffering with no actual consciousness behind it. Indeed, the vast majority of people seem to agree that these animals are conscious and deserve at least some moral concern. I certainly remember being able to feel pain as a child, and I was probably less intelligent than an adult pig during some of that.

Apart from that purely intuitive prior, while I'm not a consciousness expert at all, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness says that "there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds". Rethink Priorities' and Luke Muehlhauser's work for Open Phil corroborate that. So Yud's view is also at odds with much of the scientific community and other EAs who have investigated this.

All of this is why I feel like Yud's Facebook post needed a very high burden of proof to be convincing to me. Instead, it seems like he just kept explaining what his model (a higher-order theory of consciousness) believes without actually justifying his model. He also didn't admit any moral uncertainty about his model. He asserted some deeply unorthodox and unintuitive ideas (like pigs not being conscious), admitted no uncertainty, and didn't make any attempt to justify them. So I didn't find anything about his Facebook post convincing.

Conclusion

To me, the strongest reason to believe that animals don't count at all is because smart and well-meaning people like Jeff, Yud, and Zvi believe it. I haven't read anything remotely convincing that justifies that view on the merits. That's why I didn't even mention these arguments in my follow-up post for Debate Week.

Trying to be charitable, I think the main reasons why nobody defended that view during Debate Week were:

They didn't have the mental bandwidth to be willing to deal with an audience I suspect would be hostile. Overwhelming hierarchicalism is very much against the spirit of radical empathy in EA.
They may have felt like most EAs don't share the basic intuitions underlying their views, so they'd be talking to a wall. The idea that pigs aren't conscious might seem very intuitive to Eliezer. To me, and I suspect to most people, it seems wild. I could be convinced, but I'd need to see way more justification than I've seen.

^{^}

in 2017, Holden's personal reflections "indicate against the idea that e.g. chickens merit moral concern". In 2018, Holden stated that "there is presently no evidence base that could reasonably justify high confidence [that] nonhuman animals are not 'conscious' in a morally relevant way".

NickLaingOct 17 20243

Strong downvoted because I find this statement repugnant "I put about as much weight on it as the idea that the interests of the Aryan race should be lexicographically preferred to the interests of non-Aryans."

Why go there? You don't do yourself or animal welfare proponents any favors. Make the argument in a less provocative way.

We know conclusively that human experience is the same. On the animal front there are very many datapoints (mind complexity, brain size, behavior) which are priors that at least push us towards some kind of heirachialism.

I have a lot of respect for most pro-animal arguments, but why go this way?

JackMOct 17 20247

Hierarchicalism, as Ariel presents it, is based solely on species membership, where humans are prioritized simply because they are humans. See here (bold emphasis mine):

Solely by virtue of our shared species, helping humans may be lexicographically preferential to helping animals

So, the argument you're making about mind complexity and behavior goes beyond the species-based hierarchicalism Ariel refers to:

We know conclusively that human experience is the same. On the animal front there are very many datapoints (mind complexity, brain size, behavior) which are priors that at least push us towards some kind of heirachialism.

While I understand the discomfort with the Aryan vs. non-Aryan analogy, striking analogies like this can sometimes help expose problematic reasoning. I feel like it's a common approach in moral philosophy. But, I recognize that these comparisons are emotionally charged, and it's important to use them carefully to avoid alienating others.

Ariel Simnegar 🔸Oct 17 20245

(I didn't downvote your comment, by the way.)

I feel bad that my comment made you (and a few others, judging by your comment's agreevotes) feel bad.

As JackM points out, that snarky comment wasn't addressing views which give very low moral weights to animals due to characteristics like mind complexity, brain size, and behavior, which can and should be incorporated into welfare ranges. Instead, it was specifically addressing overwhelming hierarchicalism, which is a view which assigns overwhelmingly lower moral weight based solely on species.

My statement was intended to draw a provocative analogy: There's no theoretical reason why one's ethical system should lexicographically prefer one race/gender/species over another, based solely on that characteristic. In my experience, people who have this view on species say things like "we have the right to exploit animals because we're stronger than them", or "exploiting animals is the natural order", which could have come straight out of Mein Kampf. Drawing a provocative analogy can (sometimes) force a person to grapple with the cognitive dissonance from holding such a position.

While hierarchicalism is common among the general public, highly engaged EAs generally don't even argue for hierarchicalism because it's just such a dubious view. I wouldn't write something like this about virtually any other argument for prioritizing global health, including ripple effects, neuron count weighting, denying that animals are conscious, or concerns about optics.

NickLaingOct 19 202418

"There's no theoretical reason why one's ethical system should lexicographically prefer one race/gender/species over another, based solely on that characteristic. In my experience, people who have this view on species say things like "we have the right to exploit animals because we're stronger than them", or "exploiting animals is the natural order" I completely agree with this (although I think its probably a straw man, I can't see anyone here arguing those things).

I just think its a really bad idea to compare almost most argument (including non-animal related ones) with Nazi Germany and that thought-world. I think its possible to provoke without going this way.

1) Insensitive to the people groups that were involved in that horrific period of time
2) Distracts the argument itself (like it has here, although that's kind of on me)
2) Brings potential unnecessary negative PR issues with EA, as it gives unnecessary ammunition for hit pieces.

Its the style not the substance here I'm strongly against.

JackMOct 16 202414

I'm surprised this is the argument you went for. FWIW I think the strongest argument might be that global health wins due to ripple effects and is better for the long-term future (but I still think this argument fails).

On animals just "not counting" - I've been very frustrated with both Jeff Kauffman and Eliezer Yudkowsky on this.

Jeff because he doesn't seem to have provided any justification (from what I've seen) for the claim that animals don't have relevant experiences that make them moral patients. He simply asserts this as his view. It's not even an argument, let alone a strong one.

Eliezer has at least defended his view in a Facebook thread which unfortunately I don't think exists anymore as all links I can find go to some weird page in another language. I just remember two things that really didn't impress me:

I wish I remembered this better, but he made some sort of assertion that animals don't have relevant experiences because they do not have a sense of self. Firstly, there is some experimental evidence that animals have a sense of self. But also, I remember David Pearce replying that there are occasions when humans lose a sense of self temporarily but can still have intense negative experiences in that moment e.g. extreme debilitating fright. This was a very interesting point that Eliezer never even replied to which seemed a bit suspect. (Apologies if I'm misremembering anything here).
He didn't respond to the argument that, under uncertainty, we should give animals the benefit of the doubt so as to avoid potentially committing a grave moral catastrophe. This may not be relevant to the question of animal welfare vs global health, but it is relevant to, for example, the choice to go vegan. His dismissal of this argument also seemed a bit suspect to me.

I think there has been very little argument for animals not counting at the post level because, quite simply, the argument that (in expectation) they do count is just far stronger. See the new 80,000 Hours article on factory farming which does a nice job summarizing the key points.

Jeff Kaufman 🔸Oct 18 202446

Jeff because he doesn't seem to have provided any justification (from what I've seen) for the claim that animals don't have relevant experiences that make them moral patients. He simply asserts this as his view. It's not even an argument, let alone a strong one.

I agree I haven't given an argument on this. At various times people have asked what my view is (ex: we're taking here about something prompted by my completing a survey prompt) and I've given that.

Explaining why I have this view would be a big investment in time: I have a bundle of intuitions and thoughts that put me here, but converting that into a cleanly argued blog post would be a lot more work than I would normally do for fun and I don't expect this to be fun.

This is especially the case because If I did a good job at this I might end up primarily known for being an anti-animal advocate, and since I think my views on animals are much less important than many of my other views, I wouldn't see this as at all a good thing. I also expect that, again, conditional on doing a good job of this, I would need to spend a lot of time as a representative of this position: responding to the best counter arguments, evaluating new information as it comes up, people wanting me to participate in debates, animal advocates thinking that changing my mind is really very important for making progress toward their goals. These are similarly not where I want to put my time and energy, either for altruistic reasons personal enjoyment.

The normal thing to do would be to stop here: I've said what my view is, and explained why I've never put the effort into a careful case for that position. But I'm more committed to transparency than I am to the above, so I'm going to take about 10 minutes (I have 14 minutes before my kids wake up) to very quickly sketch the main things going into my view. Please read this keeping in mind that it is something I am sharing to be helpful, and I'm not claiming it's fully argued.

The key question for me is whether, in a given system, there's anyone inside to experience anything.
I think extremely small collections of neurons (ex: nematodes) can receive pain, in the sense of updating on inputs to generate less of some output. But I draw a distinction between pain and suffering, where the latter requires experience. And I think it's very unlikely nematodes experience anything.
I don't think this basic pleasure or pain matters, and if you can't make something extremely morally good by maximizing the number of happy neurons per cubic centimeter.
I'm pretty sure that most adult humans do experience things, because I do and I can talk to other humans about this.
I think it is pretty unlikely that very young children, in their first few months, have this kind of inner experience.
I don't find most things that people give as examples for animal consciousness to be very convincing, because you can often make quite a simple system that displays these features.
While some of my views above could imply that some humans are more valuable come up morally than others, I think it would be extremely destructive to act that way. Lots and lots of bad history there. I treat all people as morally equal.
The arguments for extending this to people as a class don't seem to me to justify extending this to all creatures as a class.
I also think there are things that matter beyond experienced joy and suffering (preference satisfaction, etc), and I'm even less convinced that animals have these.
Eliezer's view is reasonably close to mine, in places where I've seen him argue it.

(I'm not going to be engaging with object level arguments on this issue -- I'm not trying to become an anti-animal advocate.)

JackMOct 18 202412

Thanks for your response.

This is especially the case because If I did a good job at this I might end up primarily known for being an anti-animal advocate

I'd be interested to know how likely you think it is that you could do a "good job". You say you have a "bundle of intuitions and thoughts" which doesn't seem like much to me.

I'm also very surprised you put yourself at the far end of the spectrum in favor of global health > animal welfare based on a "bundle of intuitions and thoughts" on what is ultimately a very difficult and important question.^[1] In your original comment you say "This isn't as deeply a considered view as I'd like". Were you saying you haven't considered deeply enough or that the general community hasn't?

And thanks for the sketch of your reasoning but ultimately I don't think it's very helpful without some justification for claims like the following:

I think it is pretty unlikely that very young children, in their first few months, have this kind of inner experience.

^{^}

I also put myself at the fair end of the spectrum in the other direction so I feel I should say something about that. I think arguments for animal sentience/moral patienthood are pretty strong (e.g. see here for a summary) and I would not say I'm relying on intuition. I'm not of course sure that animals are moral patients, but even if you put a small probability on it, the vast numbers of animals being treated poorly can justifiably lead to a strong view that resources for animal welfare are better in expectation than resources for global health. Ultimately for this argument not to work based on believing animals aren't moral patients, I think you probably need to be very confident of this to counteract the vast numbers of animals that can be helped.

Jeff Kaufman 🔸Oct 18 20249

I'd be interested to know how likely you think it is that you could do a "good job".

I do think I could do a good job, yes. While I've been thinking about these problems off and on for over a decade I've never dedicated actual serious time here, and in the past when I've put that kind of time into work I've been proud of what I've been able to do.

You say you have a "bundle of intuitions and thoughts" which doesn't seem like much to me.

What I meant by that is that I don't have my overall views organized into a form optimized for explaining to others. I'm not asking other people to assume that because I've inscrutably come to this conclusion I'm correct or that they should defer to me in any way. But I'd also be dishonest if I didn't accurately report my views.

In your original comment you say "This isn't as deeply a considered view as I'd like". Were you saying you haven't considered deeply enough or that the general community hasn't?

Primarily the former. While if someone in the general community had put a lot of time into looking at this question from a perspective similar to my own and I felt like their work addressed my questions that would certainly help, given that no one has and I'm instead forming my own view I would prefer to have put more work into that view.

JackMOct 18 202416

To clarify, when I asked if you could do a good job I meant can you put together a convincing argument that might give some people like me pause for thought (maybe this is indeed how you understood me).

If you think you can, I would strongly encourage you to do so. As per another comment of mine, tens of millions of dollars goes towards animal welfare within EA each year. If this money is effectively getting burned it is very useful for the community to know. Also, there is no convincing argument that animals are not moral patients on this forum (or indeed anywhere else) that I am aware of, so your view is exceedingly neglected. I think you could really do a whole lot of good if you do have a great argument up your sleeve.

Your argument that you would effectively be forced into becoming an anti-animal advocate if you convincingly wrote up your views - sorry I don’t really buy it. For example, I don’t think Luke Muehlhauser has been forced into becoming a pro-animal advocate, in the way you hypothesise that you would, after writing his piece. This just seems like too convenient an excuse, sorry.

Of course you're not under any obligation to write anything (well...perhaps some would argue you are, but I'll concede you're not). But if I thought I had a great argument up my sleeve, mostly ignored by the community, which, if true, would mean we were effectively burning tens of millions of dollars a year, I know I'd write it up.

Jeff Kaufman 🔸Oct 18 20248

Ah, thank you for clarifying! That is a much stronger sense of "doing a good job" than I was going for. I was trying to point at something like, successfully writing up my views in a way that felt like a solid contribution to the discourse. Explaining what I thought, why I thought it, and why I didn't find the standard counter arguments convincing. I think this would probably take me about two months of full-time work, so a pretty substantial opportunity cost.

I think I could do this well enough to become the main person people pointed at when they wanted to give an example of a "don't value animals" EA (which would probably be negative for my other work), but even major success here would probably only result in convincing <5% of animal-focused EAs to change what they were working on. And much less than that for money, since most of the EA money is from OP, which funds animal work as part of an explicit process of worldview diversification.

Jeff Kaufman 🔸Oct 18 20246

Your argument that you would effectively be forced into becoming an anti-animal advocate if you convincingly wrote up your views - sorry I don’t really buy it.

I would be primarily known as an anti-animal advocate if I wrote something like this, even if I didn't want to be.

On whether I would need to put my time into continuing to defend the position, I agree that I strictly wouldn't have to, but I think that given my temperament and interaction style I wouldn't actually be able to avoid this. So I need to think of this as if I am allocating a larger amount of time than what it would take to write up the argument.

LinchOct 18 20241

Your argument that you would effectively be forced into becoming an anti-animal advocate if you convincingly wrote up your views - sorry I don’t really buy it.

I don't think this is what Jeff said.

JackMOct 18 20247

OK so he says he would primarily be "known" as an anti-animal advocate not "become" one.

This is especially the case because If I did a good job at this I might end up primarily known for being an anti-animal advocate

But he then also says the following (bold emphasis mine):

I also expect that, again, conditional on doing a good job of this, I would need to spend a lot of time as a representative of this position: responding to the best counter arguments, evaluating new information as it comes up, people wanting me to participate in debates, animal advocates thinking that changing my mind is really very important for making progress toward their goals. These are similarly not where I want to put my time and energy, either for altruistic reasons personal enjoyment.

I'm struggling to see how what I said isn't accurate. Maybe Jeff should have said "I would feel compelled to" rather than "I would need to".

LinchOct 18 20246

To my eyes "be known as an anti-animal advocate" is a much lower bar than "be an anti-animal advocate."

For example I think some people will (still!) consider me an "anti-climate change advocate" (or "anti-anti-climate change advocate?") due to a fairly short post I wrote 5+ years ago. I would, from their perspective, take actions consistent with that view (eg I'd be willing to defend my position if challenged, describe ways in which I've updated, etc). Moreover, it is not implausible that from their perspective, this is the most important thing I do (since they don't interact with me at other times, and/or they might think my other actions are useless in either direction).

However, by my lights (and I expect by the lights of e.g. the median EA Forum reader) this would be a bad characterization. I don't view arguing against climate change interventions as an important aspect of my life, nor do I believe my views on the matter as particularly outside of academic consensus.

Hence the distinction between "known as" vs "become."

JackMOct 18 20242

You seem to have ignored the bit I made in bold in my previous comment

LinchOct 18 20244

I don't think there is or ought to be an expectation to respond to every subpart of a comment in a reply

JackMOct 18 2024-4

It's the only part of my comment that argues Jeff was effectively saying he would have to "be" an animal advocate, which is exactly what you're arguing against.

So I guess my best reply is just to point you back to that...

Oh well, was nice chatting.

LinchOct 18 20242

I guess I still don't think of "I would need to spend a lot of time as a representative of this position" as being an anti-animal advocate. I spend a lot of time disagreeing with people on many different issues and yet I'd consider myself an advocate for only a tiny minority of them.

Put another way, I view the time spent as just one of the costs of being known as an anti-animal advocate, rather than being one.

MichaelStJulesOct 18 20248

What do you think of the following evidence?

Rats and pigs seem to be able to discriminate anxiety from its absence generalizably across causes with a learned behaviour, like pressing a lever when they would apparently feel anxious.^[1] In other words, it seems like they can be taught to tell us what they're feeling in ways unnatural and non-instinctive to them. To me, the difference between this and human language is mostly just a matter of degree, i.e. we form more associations and form them more easily, and we do recursion.

Graziano (2020, pdf), an illusionist and the inventor of Attention Schema Theory, also takes endogenous/top-down/voluntary attention control to be evidence of having a model (schema) of one's own attention.^[2] Then, according to Nieder (2022), there is good evidence for the voluntary/top-down control of attention (and working memory) at least across mammals and birds, and some suggestive evidence for it in some fish.

And I would expect these to happen in fairly preserved neural structures across mammals, at least, including humans.

I also discuss desires and preferences in other animals more here and here.

^{^}

Carey and Fry (1995) showed that pigs generalize the discrimination between non-anxiety states and drug-induced anxiety to non-anxiety and anxiety in general, in this case by pressing one lever repeatedly with anxiety, and alternating between two levers without anxiety (the levers gave food rewards, but only if they pressed them according to the condition). Many more such experiments were performed on rats, as discussed in Sánchez-Suárez, 2016, summarized in Table 2 on pages 63 and 64 and discussed further across chapter 3.

Rats could discriminate between the injection of the anxiety-inducing drug PTZ and saline injection, including at subconvulsive doses. Various experiments with rats and PTZ have effectively ruled out convulsions as the discriminant, further supporting that it’s the anxiety itself that they’re discriminating, because they could discriminate PTZ from control without generalizing between PTZ and non-anxiogenic drugs, and with the discrimination blocked by anxiolytics and not nonanxiolytic anticonvulsants.

Rats further generalized between various pairs of anxiety(-like) states, like those induced by PTZ, drug withdrawal, predator exposure, ethanol hangover, “jet lag”, defeat by a rival male, high doses of stimulants like bemegride and cocaine, and movement restraint.

However, Mason and Lavery (2022) caution:

But could such results merely reflect a “blindsight-like” guessing: a mere discrimination response that need not reflect underlying awareness? After all, as we have seen for S.P.U.D. subjects, decerebrated pigeons can use colored lights as DSs (128), and humans can use subliminal visual stimuli as DSs [e.g., (121)]. We think several refinements could reduce this risk.

I would expect that checking which brain systems are involved and what their typical functions are could provide further evidence. The case for other mammals would be strongest, given more preserved functions across them, including humans.

^{^}

Graziano (2020, pdf):

Any creature that can endogenously direct attention must have some kind of attention schema, and good control of attention has been demonstrated in a range of animals including mammals and birds (e.g., Desimone & Duncan, 1995; Knudsen, 2018; Moore & Zirnsak, 2017). My guess is that most mammals and birds have some version of an attention schema that serves an essentially similar function, and contains some of the same information, as ours does. Just as other animals must have a body schema or be condemned to a flailing uncontrolled body, they must have an attention schema or be condemned to an attention system that is purely at the mercy of every new sparkling, bottom-up pull on attention. To control attention endogenously implies an effective controller, which implies a control model.

CB🔸Oct 18 20244

Thanks for taking the time to expose your view clearly here, and explaining why you do not spend a lot of time on the topic (which I respect).

If I understand correctly, the difference in consideration you make between humans and animals seems to boil down to "I can talk to humans, and they can tell me that they have an inner experience, while animals cannot (same for small children)".

While nobody disputes that, I find it weird that your conclusion is not "I'm very uncertain about other systems", but "other systems that cannot tell me directly about their inner experience (very small children, animals) probably don't have any relevant inner experience". I'm not sure how you got to that conclusion. At the very least, this would justify extreme uncertainty.

Personally, I think that the fact that animals display a lot of behaviour similar to humans in similar situations should be a significant update toward thinking they have some kind of experience. For instance, a pig is screaming and trying to escape when it is castrated, just as humans would do (we have to observe behaviours).

We can probably build robots that can do the same thing, but that just means we're good at mimicking other life forms (for instance, we can also build LLMs which tell us they are conscious, and we don't use that to think humans are not sentient).

LinchOct 18 20244

If I understand correctly, the difference in consideration you make between humans and animals seems to boil down to "I can talk to humans, and they can tell me that they have an inner experience, while animals cannot (same for small children)".

I don't think this is what Jeff believes, though I guess his literal words are consistent with this interpretation.

MichaelStJulesOct 16 20249

Eliezer has at least defended his view in a Facebook thread which unfortunately I don't think exists anymore as all links I can find go to some weird page in another language.

The discussion is archived here and the original Facebook post here.

It was also discussed again three years ago here.

JackMOct 16 20249

Thank you! Links in articles such as this just weren't working.

This is the relevant David Pearce comment I was referring to which Yudkowsky just ignored despite continuing to respond to less challenging comments:

Some errors are potentially ethically catastrophic. This is one of them. Many of our most intensely conscious experiences occur when meta-cognition or reflective self-awareness fails. Thus in orgasm, for instance, much of the neocortex effectively shuts down. Or compare a mounting sense of panic. As an intense feeling of panic becomes uncontrollable, are we to theorise that the experience somehow ceases to be unpleasant as the capacity for reflective self-awareness is lost? “Blind” panic induced by e.g. a sense of suffocation, or fleeing a fire in a crowded cinema (etc), is one of the most unpleasant experiences anyone can undergo, regardless or race or species. Also, compare microelectrode neural studies of awake subjects probing different brain regions; stimulating various regions of the “primitive” limbic system elicits the most intense experiences. And compare dreams – not least, nightmares – many of which are emotionally intense and characterised precisely by the lack of reflectivity or critical meta-cognitive capacity that we enjoy in waking life.
Anyone who cares about sentience-friendly intelligence should not harm our fellow subjects of experience. Shutting down factory farms and slaughterhouses will eliminate one of the world’s worst forms of severe and readily avoidable suffering.

AGB 🔸Oct 16 20244

I think there has been very little argument for animals not counting at the post level because, quite simply, the argument that (in expectation) they do count is just far stronger.

I'm confused how this works, could you elaborate?

My usual causal chain linking these would be 'argument is weak' -> '~nobody believes it' -> 'nobody posts it'.

The middle step fails here. Do you have something else in mind?

FWIW, I thought these two comments were reasonable guesses at what may be going on here.

JackMOct 16 20247

I'm not sure the middle step does actually fail in the EA community. Do you have evidence that it does? Is there some survey evidence for significant numbers of EAs not believing animals are moral patients?

If there is a significant number of people that think they have strong arguments for animals not counting, they should definitely post these and potentially redirect a great deal of altruistic funding towards global health.

Anyway, another possible causal chain might be:

'argument is weak but some people intuitively believe it in part because they want it to be true' -> 'there is no strong post that can really be written' -> 'nobody posts it'

Maybe you can ask Jeff Kauffman why he has never provided any actual argument for this (I do apologize if he has and I have just missed it!).

AGB 🔸Oct 16 20246

Ah, gotcha, I guess that works. No, I don't have anything I would consider strong evidence, I just know it's come up more than anything else in my few dozen conversations over the years. I suppose I assumed it was coming up for others as well.

they should definitely post these and potentially redirect a great deal of altruistic funding towards global health

FWIW this seems wrong, not least because as was correctly pointed out many times there just isn't a lot of money in the AW space. I'm pretty sure GHD has far better places to fundraise from.

To the extent I have spoken to people (not Jeff, and not that much) about why they don't engage more on this, I thought the two comments I linked to in my last comment had a lot of overlap with the responses.

JackMOct 16 20247

FWIW this seems wrong, not least because as was correctly pointed out many times there just isn't a lot of money in the AW space. I'm pretty sure GHD has far better places to fundraise from.

This is bizarre to me. This post suggests that between $30 and 40 million goes towards animal welfare each year (and it could be more now as that post was written four years ago). If animals are not moral patients, this money is as good as getting burned. If we actually were burning this amount of money every year, I'd imagine some people would make it their overwhelming mission to ensure we don't (which would likely involve at least a few forum posts).

Assuming it costs $5,000 to save a human life, redirecting that money could save up to 8,000 human lives every year. Doesn't seem too bad to me. I'm not claiming posts arguing against animal moral patienthood could lead to redirecting all the money, but the idea that no one is bothering to make the arguments because there's just no point doesn't stack up to me.

AGB 🔸Oct 18 20249

For the record, I have a few places I think EA is burning >$30m per year, not that AW is actually one of them. Most EAs I speak to seem to have similarly-sized bugbears? Though unsurprisingly they don't agree about where the money is getting burned..

So from where I stand I don't recognise your guess of how people respond to that situation. A few things I believe that might help explain the difference:

Most of the money is directed by people who don't read or otherwise have a fairly low opinion of the forum.
Posting on the forum is 'not for the faint of heart'.
On the occasion that I have dug into past forum prioritisation posts that were well-received, I generally find them seriously flawed or otherwise uncompelling. I have no particular reason to be sad about (1).
People are often aware that there's an 'other side' that strongly disagrees with their disagreement and will push back hard, so they correctly choose not to waste our collective resources in a mud-slinging match.

I don't expect to have capacity to engage further here, but if further discussion suggests that one of the above is a particularly surprising claim, I may consider writing it up in more detail in future.

JackMOct 18 20244

Most EAs I speak to seem to have similarly-sized bugbears?

Maybe I don't speak to enough EAs, which is possible. Obviously many EAs think our overall allocation isn't optimal, but I wasn't aware that many EAs think we are giving tens of millions of dollars to interventions/areas that do NO good in expectation (which is what I mean by "burning money").

Maybe the burning money point is a bit of a red herring though if the amount you're burning is relatively small and more good can be done by redirecting other funds, even if they are currently doing some good. I concede this point.

To be honest you might be right overall that people who don't think our funding allocation is perfect tend not to write on the forum about it. Perhaps they are just focusing on doing the most good by acting within their preferred cause area. I'd love to see more discussion of where marginal funding should go though. And FWIW one example of a post that does cover this and was very well-received was Ariel's on the topic of animal welfare vs global health.

NickLaingOct 17 20242

As a small note, I don' think the "believe it because they want it to be true" is really an argument either way. To state the obvious, animal welfare researchers need sentience to be true, otherwise all the work they are doing is worth a lot less.

So I don't think the "want it to be true" argument stands really at all. Motivations are very strong on both sides, and from a "realpolitik" kind of perspective, there's so much more riding on this from animal researchers than there is for people like Yud and Zvi.

On the other hand, the "very few people believe animals aren't moral patients and haven't made great arguments for it" point for me stands very strong.

JackMOct 17 20243

Animal welfare researchers need sentience to be true, otherwise all the work they are doing is worth a lot less.

That is fair, but there are several additional reasons why most people would want it that animals are not moral patients:

They can continue to eat them guilt-free and animals are tasty.
People can give to global health uncertainty-free and get "fuzzies" from saving human lives with pretty high confidence (I think we naturally get more fuzzies by helping people of our own species).
We wouldn't as a human species then be committing a grave moral atrocity which would be a massive relief.

There aren't really similar arguments for wanting animals to be moral patients (other than "I work on animal welfare") but I would be interested if I'm missing any relevant ones.

JackMOct 14 202411

You preface this post as being an argument for Global Health, but it isn't necessarily. As you say in the conclusion it is a call not to "focus on upside cases and discard downside ones as the Multiplier Argument pushes you to do". For you this works in favor of global health, for others it may not. Anyone who think along the lines of "how can anyone even consider funding animal welfare over global health, animals cannot be fungible with humans!", or similar, will have this argument pull them closer to the animal welfare camp.

In 50% of worlds hedonism is true, and Global Health interventions produce 1 unit of value while Animal Welfare interventions produce 500 units.
In 50% of worlds hedonism is false, and the respective amounts are 1000 and 1 respectively.

I take on board this is just a toy example, but I wonder how relevant it is. For starters I have a feeling that many in the EA community place higher credence on moral theories that would lead to prioritizing animal welfare (most prominent of which is hedonism). I think this is primarily what drove animal welfare clearly beating global health in the voting. So the "50/50" in the toy example might be a bit misleading, but I would be interested in polling the EA community to understand their moral views.

You can counter this and say that people still aren't factoring in that global health destroys animal welfare on pretty much any other moral view, but is this true? This needs more justification as per MichaelStJules' comment.

Even if it is true, is it fair to say that non-hedonic moral theories favor global health over animal welfare to a greater extent than hedonism favors animal welfare over global health? That claim is essentially doing all the work in your toy example, but seems highly uncertain/questionable.

AGB 🔸Oct 14 20249

For you this works in favor of global health, for others it may not.

In theory I of course agree this can go either way; the maths doesn't care which base you use.

In practice, Animal Welfare interventions get evaluated with a Global Health base far more than vice-versa; see the rest of Debate Week. So I expect my primary conclusion/TL;DR^[1] to mostly push one way, and didn't want to pretend that I was being 'neutral' here.

For starters I have a feeling that many in the EA community place higher credence on moral theories that would lead to prioritizing animal welfare (most prominent of which is hedonism)...So the "50/50" in the toy example might be a bit misleading, but I would be interested in polling the EA community to understand their moral views.

Ah, interesting that you think many people put >50% on hedonism and similarly-animal-friendly theories. 50% was intended to be generous; the last animal-welfare-friendly person I asked about this was 20-40% IIRC. Pretty sure I am even lower. So yes I'd also be interested in polling here, more of wider groups (population? philosophers?) than of EA but I'd take either.

^{^}

Copying to save people searching for it:
Multiplier Arguments are incredibly biased in favour of switching, and they get more biased the more uncertainty you have. Used naively in cases of high uncertainty, they will overwhelmingly suggest you switch intervention from whatever you use as your base.

LinchOct 18 20242

Ah, interesting that you think many people put >50% on hedonism and similarly-animal-friendly theories. 50% was intended to be generous; the last animal-welfare-friendly person I asked about this was 20-40% IIRC. Pretty sure I am even lower.

One thing to be careful of re: question framing is to make sure to constrain the set of theories under consideration to altruism-relevant theories. Eg many people will place nontrivial credence in nihilism, egotism, commonsense morality, but most of those theories will not be particularly relevant to the prioritization for altruistic allocation of marginal donations.

JackMOct 14 20242

I'm not sure what the scope of "similarly-animal-friendly theories" is in your mind. For me I suppose it's most if not all consequentialist / aggregative theories that aren't just blatantly speciesist. The key point is that the number of animals suffering (and that we can help) completely dwarfs the number of humans. Also, as MichaelStJules says, I'm pretty sure animals have desires and preferences that are being significantly obstructed by the conditions humans impose on them.

I took the fact that the forum overwhelmingly voted for animal welfare over global health to mean that people generally favor animal-friendly moral theories. You seem to think that it's because they are making this simple mistake with the multiplier argument, with your evidence being that loads of people are citing the RP moral weights project. I suppose I'm not sure which of us is correct, but I would point out that people may just find the moral weights project important because they have some significant credence in hedonism.

JasonOct 14 202412

<<I took the fact that the forum overwhelmingly voted for animal welfare over global health to mean that people generally favor animal-friendly moral theories.>>

I think "generally favor" is a touch too strong here -- one could discount them quite significantly and still vote for animal welfare on the margin because the funding is so imbalanced and AW is at a point where the funding is much more leveraged than ~paying for bednets.

NickLaingOct 14 20243

Yep completely with Jason here. I voted a smidge in favor of giving the 100 million to animal rights orgs yet I'm pretty sure you'd consider me to have very human-friendly moral theories

To push that thinking a bit further compared with the general public, EAs have extremely animal friendly theories. For example I would easily be in the top 1 percent of animal-friendly-moral theory humans (maybe top 0.1 percent) but maybe in the bottom third of EAs?

That is a datapoint as much as many might mostly discount it.

JackMOct 14 20242

What is your preferred moral theory out of interest?

When you say top 1 percent of animal-friendly-moral theory humans but maybe in the bottom third of EAs, is this just say hedonism but with moral weights that are far less animal-friendly than say RP's?

NickLaingOct 15 20242

Thanks Jack, I don't have a clear answer to that right now. I have a messy mix of moral theories in which hedonism would contribute.

I'm so uncertain about the moral weights of animals right now (and more so after debate week, but updated a bit in favor of animals) and I value certainty quite a lot. I have quite a low threshold for feeling like Pascal is mugging me ;).

JackMOct 14 20242

Again I think it depends on what we mean by an animal-friendly moral theory or a pro-global health moral theory. I'd be surprised though if many people hold a pro-global health moral theory but still favor animal welfare over global health. But maybe I'm wrong.

AGB 🔸Oct 14 20249

I’ll leave this thread here, except to clarify that what you say I ‘seem to think’ is a far stronger claim than I intended to make or in fact believe.

JackMOct 14 20242

Sorry that is fair, I think I assumed too much about your views.

Ben Millwood🔸Oct 14 20249

Sadly, it looks like the debate week will end without many of the stronger arguments[1] for Global Health being raised, at least at the post level.

Defined roughly as 'the points I'm most likely to hear and give most weight to when discussing this with longtime EAs in person'.

I had some hope that the week would help me on this issue. Maybe the comments will, otherwise 'see you next time' I guess?

Sorry to distract from the object level a bit, but I had a reaction to the parts I quoted above as feeling pretty unfriendly and indirectly disparaging to the things other people have written on the forum.

I realise that you said (to paraphrase) "there are many strong arguments that were not raised", and not "the arguments that were raised were not strong". Maybe you meant that there had been good arguments already, but more were missing. (Maybe you meant not enough had been posted about GH at all.) But I don't think it's too surprising that I felt the second thing in the air, even if you didn't say it, and I imagine that if I had written a pro-GH argument in the last week, I might feel kind of attacked.

AGB 🔸Oct 14 20248

Yeah I think there's something to this, and I did redraft this particular point a few times as I was writing it for reasons in this vicinity. I was reluctant to remove it entirely, but it was close and I won't be surprised if I feel like it was the wrong call in hindsight. It's the type of thing I expect I would have found a kinder framing for given more time.

Having failed to find a kinder framing, one reason I went ahead anyway is that I mostly expect the other post-level pro-GH people to feel similarly.

NickLaingOct 15 20245

I agree with @AGB 🔸. I think there was only one seriously pro GH article from @Henry Howard🔸 (which I really appreciated), and a couple of very moderate push backs that could hardly be called strong arguments for GH (including mine). On the other hand there were almost 10 very pro animal-welfare articles.

MichaelStJulesOct 14 20246

If A has a fixed value under all sets of assumptions, the Multiplier Argument works. One post argues this is true in the case at hand.
(...)
You may go through that exercise and decide, as some do, that the value of a human life is largely invariant to how you choose to assign moral value.

I actually argue in that post that it shouldn't be fixed across all sets of assumptions. However, the main point is that our units should be human-based under every set of assumptions, because we understand and value things in reference to our own (human) experiences. The human-based units can differ between sets of assumptions.

So, for example, you could have a hedonic theory, with a human-based hedonic unit, and a desire theory, with a human-based desire unit.^[1] These two human-based units may not be intertheoretically comparable, so you could end up with a two envelopes problem between them.

The end result might be that the value of B relative to A doesn't differ too much across sets of assumptions, so it would look like we can fix the value of A, but I'm not confident that this is actually the case. I'm more inclined to say something like "B beats A by at least X times across most views I entertain, by credence". I illustrated how to bound the ratios of expected values with respect to one another and how animals could matter a lot this way in this section.

^{^}

Or, say, multiple hedonic theories, each with its own human-based hedonic unit.

AGB 🔸Oct 14 20243

Hi Michael, just quickly: I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your post. For concreteness, the specific claim I was noting was:

I argue that we should fix and normalize relative to the moral value of human welfare, because our understanding of the value of welfare is based on our own experiences of welfare, which we directly value.

In particular, the bolded section seems straightforwardly false for me, and I don't believe it's something you argued for directly?

MichaelStJulesOct 14 20247

Could you elaborate on this? I might have worded things poorly. To rephrase and add a bit more, I meant something like

We understand welfare and its moral value in relation to our own experiences, including our own hedonic states, desires, preferences and intuitions. We use personal reference point experiences, and understand other experiences and their value — in ourselves and others — relative to those reference point experiences.

(These personal reference point experiences can also be empathetic responses to others, which might complicate things.)

The section the summary bullet point you quoted links to is devoted to arguing for that claim.

Anticipating and responding to some potential sources of misunderstanding:

I didn't intend to claim we're all experientialists and so only care about the contents of experiences, rather than, say, how our desires relate to the actual states of the world. The arguments don't depend on experientialism.
I mostly illustrated the arguments with suffering, which may give/reinforce the impression that I'm saying our understanding of value is based on hedonic states only, but I didn't intend that.

AGB 🔸Oct 14 20246

I can try, but honestly I don't know where to start; I'm well-aware that I'm out of my depth philosophically, and this section just doesn't chime with my own experience at all. I sense a lot of inferential distance here.

Trying anyway: That section felt closer to empirical claim that 'we' already do things a certain way than an argument for why we should do things that way, and I don't seem to be part of the 'we'. I can pull out some specific quotes that anti-resonate and try to explain why, with the caveat that these explanations are much closer to 'why I don't buy this' than 'why I think you're wrong'.

***

The strengths of our reasons to reduce human suffering or satisfy human belief-like preferences, say, don’t typically seem to depend on our understanding of their empirical or descriptive nature. This is not how we actually do ethics.

I am most sympathetic to this if I read it as a cynical take on human morality, i.e. I suspect this is more true than I sometimes care to admit. I don't think you're aiming for that? Regardless, it's not how I try to do ethics. I at least try to have my mind change when relevant facts change.

An example issue is that memory is fallible; you say that I have directly experienced human suffering, but for anything I am not experiencing right this second all I can access is the memory of it. I have seen firsthand that memory often edits experiences after the fact to make them substantially more or less severe than they seemed at the time. So if strong evidence showed me that somthing I remember as very painful was actually painless, the 'strength of my reason' to reduce that suffering would fall^[1].

You use some other examples to illustrate how the empirical nature does not matter, such as discovering seratonin is not what we think it is. I agree with that specific case. I think the difference is that your example of an empirical discovery doesn't really say anything about the experience, while mine above does?

Instead, we directly value our experiences, not our knowledge of what exactly generates them...how suffering feels to us and how bad it feels to us...do not change with our understanding of its nature

Knowing what is going on during an experience seems like a major contributor to how I relate to that experience, e.g. I care about how long it's going to last. Looking outward for whether others feel similarly, It Gets Better and the phrase 'light at the end of the tunnel' come to mind.

You could try to fold this in and say that the pain of the dental drill is itself less bad because I know it'll only last a few seconds, or conversely that (incorrectly) believing a short-lived pain will last a long time makes the pain itself greater, but that type of modification seems very artificial to me and is not how I typically understand the words 'pain' and 'suffering'.

...But to use this as another example of how I might respond to new evidence: if you showed me that the brain does in fact respond less strongly to a painful stimulus when the person has been told it'll be short, that could make me much more comfortable describing it as less painful in the ordinary sense.

There are other knowledge-based factors that feel like they directly alter my 'scoring' of pain's importance as well, e.g. a sense of whether it's for worthwhile reasons.

And it could end up being the case — i.e. with nonzero probability — that chickens don’t matter at all, not even infinitesimally...And because of the possible division by 0 moral weight, the expected moral weights of humans and all other animals will be infinite or undefined. It seems such a view wouldn’t be useful for guiding action.

I'm with your footnote here; it seems entirely conceivable to me that my own suffering does not matter, so trying to build ratios with it as the base has the same infinity issue, as you say:

However, in principle, humans in general or each proposed type of wellbeing could not matter with nonzero probability, so we could get a similar problem normalizing by human welfare or moral weights.

Per my OP, I roughly think you have to work with differences not ratios.

***

Overall, I was left with a sense from below quote and the overall piece that you perceive your direct experience as a way to ground your values, a clear beacon telling you what matters, and then we just need to pick up a torch and shine a light into other areas and see how much more of what matters is out there. For me, everything is much more 'fog of war', very much including my own experiences, values and value. So - and this may be unfair - I feel like you're asking me 'why isn't this clear to you?' and I'm like 'I don't know what to tell you, it just doesn't look that simple from where I'm sitting'.

Uncertainty about animal moral weights is about the nature of our experiences and to what extent other animals have capacities similar to those that ground our value, and so empirical uncertainty, not moral uncertainty.

^{^}

Though perhaps not quite to zero; it seems I would need to think about how much of the total suffering is the memory of suffering.

MichaelStJulesOct 14 20243

Thanks, this is helpful!

I think what I had in mind was more like the neuroscience and theories of pain in general terms, or in typical cases — hence "typically" —, not very specific cases. So, I'd allow exceptions.

Your understanding of the general neuroscience of pain will usually not affect how bad your pain feels to you (especially when you're feeling it). Similarly, your understanding of the general neuroscience of desire won't usually affect how strong (most of) your desires are. (Some people might comfort themselves with this knowledge sometimes, though.)

This is what I need, when we think about looking for experiences like ours in other animals.

On your specific cases below.

The fallible pain memory case could be an exception. I suspect there's also an interpretation compatible with my view without making it an exception: your reasons to prevent a pain that would be like you remember the actual pain you had (or didn't have) are just as strong, but the actual pain you had was not like you remember it, so your reasons to prevent it (or a similar actual pain) are not in fact as strong.

In other words, you are valuing your impression of your past pain, or, say, valuing your past pain through your impression of it.^[1] That impression can fail to properly track your past pain experience.^[2] But, holding your impression fixed, if your past pain or another pain were like your impression, then there wouldn't be a problem.

And knowing how long a pain will last probably often does affect how bad/intense the overall experience (including possible stress/fear/anxiety) seems to you in the moment. And either way, how you value the pain, even non-hedonically, can depend on the rest of your impression of things, and as you suggest, contextual factors like "whether it's for worthwhile reasons". This is all part of the experience.

^{^}

The valuing itself is also part of the impression as a whole, but your valuing is applied to or a response to parts of the impression.

^{^}

Really, ~all memories of experiences will be at least somewhat off, and they're probably systematically off in specific ways. How you value pain while in pain and as you remember it will not match.

Lukas FinnvedenOct 16 20244

Many posts this week reference RP's work on moral weights, which came to the surprising-to-most "Equality Result": chicken experiences are roughly as valuable as human experiences.

I thought that post used the "equality result" as a hypothetical and didn't claim it was correct.

When first introduced:

Suppose that these assumptions lead to the conclusion that chickens and humans can realize roughly the same amount of welfare at any given time. Call this “the Equality Result.” The key question: Would the Equality Result alone be a good reason to think that one or both of these assumptions is mistaken?

At the end of the post:

Finally, let’s be clear: we are not claiming that the Equality Result is correct. Instead, our claim is that given the assumptions behind the Moral Weight Project (and perhaps even without them), we shouldn’t flinch at “animal-friendly” results.

I think the right post to reference readers to is probably this one where chicken experiences are 1/3 of humans'. (Which isn't too far off from 1x, so I don't think this undermines your post.)

Multiplier Arguments are often flawed

189

Foreword

Two envelopes: the EA version

What just happened?

Some implications

Global Health vs. Animal Welfare

Conclusion

189

Reactions

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Overwhelming Hierarchicalism

Denial of animal consciousness

Conclusion