I feel sorely misunderstood by this post and I am annoyed at how highly upvoted it is. It feels like the sort of thing one writes / upvotes when one has heard of these fabled "longtermists" but has never actually met one in person.

That reaction is probably unfair, and in particular it would not surprise me to learn that some of these were relevant arguments that people newer to the community hadn't really thought about before, and so were important for them to engage with. (Whereas I mostly know people who have been in the community for longer.)

Nonetheless, I'm writing down responses to each argument that come from this unfair reaction-feeling, to give a sense of how incredibly weird all of this sounds to me (and I suspect many other longtermists I know). It's not going to be the fairest response, in that I'm not going to be particularly charitable in my interpretations, and I'm going to give the particularly emotional and selected-for-persuasion responses rather than the cleanly analytical responses, but everything I say is something I do think is true.

How much current animal suffering does longtermism let us ignore?

None of it? Current suffering is still bad! You don't get the privilege of ignoring it, you sadly set it to the side because you see opportunities to do even more good.

(I would have felt so much better about "How much current animal suffering would longtermism ignore?" It's really the framing that longtermism is doing you a favor by "letting you" ignore current animal suffering that rubs me wrong.)

A. If millions of people were being kept in battery cages, how much energy should we redirect away from longtermism to work on that?

[...]

Check out some images of battery cages and picture millions of humans kept in the equivalent for 100% of their adult lives, and suppose with some work we could free them: would you stick to your longtermist guns?

Yes! This is pretty close to the actual situation we are in! There is an estimate of 24.9 million people in slavery, of which 4.8 million are sexually exploited! Very likely these estimates are exaggerated, and the conditions are not as bad as one would think hearing those words, and even if they were the conditions might not be as bad as battery cages, but my broader point is that the world really does seem like it is very broken and there are problems of huge scale even just restricting to human welfare, and you still have to prioritize, which means ignoring some truly massive problems.

B. Power is exploited, and absolute power is exploited absolutely

[...]

But to me it seems quite likely that she thinks it's barbarically inhumane whereas we broadly think it's OK, or at least spend a lot more energy getting worked up about Will Smith or mask mandates or whatnot.  Why do we think it's OK?

????

I don't think that animal suffering is OK! I would guess that most longtermists don't think animal suffering is OK (except for those who have very confident views about particular animals not being moral patients).

Why on earth would you think that longtermists think that animal suffering is OK? Because they don't personally work on it? I assume you don't personally work on ending human slavery, presumably that doesn't mean you think slavery is OK??

C. Sacrificing others makes sense

[...]

And the conclusion that the ongoing (at least plausible) suffering of billions of other creatures, inflicted for our species' benefit, is less pressing than relatively theoretical future suffering, is convenient enough to be worth double-checking.

Convenient??? I feel like this is just totally misunderstanding how altruistic people tend to feel? It is not convenient for me that the correct response to hearing about millions of people in sexual slavery or watching baby chicks be fed into a large high-speed grinder is to say "sorry, I need to look at these plots to figure out why my code isn't doing what I want it to do, that's more important".

Many of the longtermists I know were dragged to longtermism kicking and screaming, because of all of their intuitions telling them about how they were ignoring obvious moral atrocities right in front of them, and how it isn't a bad thing if some people don't get to exist in the future. I don't know if this is a majority of longtermists.

(It's probably a much lower fraction of people focused on x-risk reduction -- you don't need to be a longtermist to focus on x-risk reduction, I'm focusing here on the people who would continue to work on longtermist stuff even if it was unlikely to make a difference within their lifetimes.)

I guess maybe it's supposed to be convenient in that you can have a more comfortable life or something? Idk, I feel like my life would be more comfortable if I just earned-to-give and donated to global poverty / animal welfare causes. And I've had to make significantly fewer sacrifices than other longtermists; I already had an incredibly useful background and an interest in computer science and AI before buying into longtermism.

D. Does longtermism mean ignoring current suffering until the heat death of the universe?

Obviously not? That means you never reduced suffering? What the heck was the point of all your longtermism?

(EDIT: JackM points out that longtermists could increase total suffering, e.g. through population growth that increases both suffering and happiness, so my "obviously not" is technically false. Imagine that the question was about ignoring current utility instead of ignoring current suffering, which is how I interpreted it and how I expect the OP meant it to be interpreted.)

But it's not really clear to me that in a 100 or 1,000 years the future won't still loom large, especially if technological progress continues at any pace at all.

Yes, the future will still loom large? And this just seems fine?

Here's an analogous argument:

"You say to me that I shouldn't help my neighbor, and instead I should use it to help people in Africa. But it's not really clear to me that after we've successfully helped people in Africa, the rest of the world's problems won't still loom large. Wouldn't you then want to help, say, people in South America?"

(I generated this argument by taking your argument and replacing the time dimension with a space dimension.)

E. Animals are part of longtermism

(Switching to analysis instead of emotion / persuasion because I don't really know what your claim is here)

Given that your current post title is "How much current animal suffering does longtermism let us ignore?" I'm assuming that in this section you are trying to say that reducing current animal suffering is an important longtermist priority. (If you're just saying "there exists some longtermist stuff that has something to do with animals", I agree, but I'm also not sure why you'd bother talking about that.)  I think this is mostly false. Looking at the posts you cite, they seem to be in two categories:

First, claims that animal welfare is a significant part of the far future, and so should be optimized (abrahamrowe and Fai). Both posts neglect the possibility that we transition to a world of digital people that doesn't want biological animals any more (see this comment and a point added in the summary of Fai's post after I had a conversation with them), and I think their conclusions are basically wrong for that reason.

Second, moral circle expansion is a part of longtermism, and animals are plausibly a good way to currently do moral circle expansion. But this doesn't mean a focus on reducing current animal suffering! Some quotes from the posts:

Tobias: "a longtermist outlook implies a much stronger focus on achieving long-term social change, and (comparatively) less emphasis on the immediate alleviation of animal suffering"

Tobias: "If we take the longtermist perspective seriously, we will likely arrive at different priorities and focus areas: it would be a remarkable coincidence if short-term-focused work were also ideal from this different perspective."

Jacy: "Therefore, I’m not particularly concerned about the factory farming of biological animals continuing into the far future."

But the great thing about longtermist arguments is you only need a maybe.

That's not true! You want the best possible maybe you can get; it's not enough to just say "maybe this has a beneficial effect" and go do the thing.

Related to the funding point (note 4): 

It seems important to remember that even if high status (for lack of a more neutrally-valenced term) longtermist interventions like AI safety aren't currently "funding constrained," animal welfare at large most definitely is. As just one clear example, an ACE report from few months ago estimated that Faunalytics has room for more than $1m in funding. 

That means there remains a very high (in absolute terms) opportunity cost to longtermist spending, because each dollar spent is one not being donated to an animal welfare org. This doesn't make liberal longtermist spending wrong, but it does make it costly in terms of expected nearterm suffering. 

This is the main reason big longtermist spending gives me pause, even though I just about entirely buy the longtermist thesis. EA is, by and large, pretty good at giving due concern to non-salient opportunity costs, but this seems to be an area in which we're falling short. 

Solving factory farming is different from other near term causes. It's not like EA focused animal charities are saving animals 1 by 1 by buying them off a farm where it won't make any future impact.  It's about making systematic changes that will impact not just the lives of animals today but the lives of animals for future generations to come.  I fear that if AGI is developed while the practice of factory farming still exists there could be a high probability that it perpetuates the problem not solve it.  We need to eliminate factory farming as soon as possible. 

Cynical thoughts related to the point that “there is something suspicious about moral theorizing without sacrifice” and that “we should scrutinize [a conclusion that is extra convenient] extra closely”:

It often feels too convenient for self-identified EAs who have always enjoyed geeking out over machine-learning and AI to conclude they are also doing the most important thing in the world. Sacrifice-less moral theorizing about the far future is much sexier than antagonizing over suffering of the mere mortals (especially voiceless mere mortals), but it does feel suspicious at times and hardly builds trust and cohesion as the community continues to grow.

Re point A and B: one question is how sensitive is the claim to scope? It seems to me that we're in a number of ongoing moral catastrophes (including current commonly discussed EA cause areas like hundreds of thousands of people dying annually from malaria, but also stuff like unjust penal systems, or racism in the developing world, or civil wars, or people dying from poisoned air, or genital mutilation of children), so I see two possible cluster of beliefs:

1. You are scope sensitive, in which case this just reduces back to an argument about expected value. Certainly the hypothetical of humans in battery cages is unusually bad, but how it compares to longtermism isn't structurally dissimilar to how e.g. we should relate to clean water access vs longtermism.

2. You take more of a justice-based, "any moral catastrophe is too much" approach. In that case I'm not sure how you can prioritize ("How can you focus on chickens when thousands of innocents are unjustly imprisoned?")

Re Point C: I'm not sure I understand this point. I think the argument is that there's self-serving bias in the form of "motivated reasoning is more likely to push us towards incorrectly believing that things that benefit us and is costly to others is worth the cost-benefits tradeoff." I basically think this is correct. So, on the margin this should push us to be slightly more willing to be self-sacrificial than if we didn't factor in this bias. In particular, this should slightly push us to favor being (e.g.) slightly more frugal on personal consumption than we otherwise would be, or slightly more willing to do hard/unpleasant work, for longer hours. Though of course there are also good arguments against frugality or overwork.

But the bias claim should basically be neutral towards the question of how we should relate to how we ought to judge what sacrifices others ought to make. This particular angle doesn't (to me) clearly address why we should expect there's more biases in favor of us overrepresenting future generations' interests over the interests of existing animals.

Interesting ! Another argument that we could make is :

• Longtermism is probably not really worth it if the far future contains much more suffering than happiness
• If we take into account humans and farmed animals, it's probable that suffering greatly outweights happiness in our current world (depending of how you measure things, of course, but if you take into account  hens and fish farmed, there are 100 times more of them than humans)
  • (Note that things get much harder to measure if you include wild animals)
• Before caring about longtermism, we should probably care more about making the world a place where humans are not causing more suffering than happiness (so no factory farming)

I think the strength of these considerations depends on what sort of longtermist intervention you're comparing to, depending on your ethics. I do find the abject suffering of so many animals a compelling counter to prioritizing creating an intergalactic utopia (if the counterfactual is just that fewer sentient beings exist in the future). But some longtermist interventions are about reducing far greater scales of suffering, by beings who don't matter any less than today's animals. So when comparing to those interventions, while of course I feel really horrified by current suffering, I feel even more horrified by those greater scales in the future—we just have to triage our efforts in this bad situation.

Related thoughts in the recent 80k SBF interview (which I have only half finished, but is excellent). This link should take you directly to the audio of that part, or you can expand the full transcript on the page and ctrl/cmd-f to "Near-term giving" to read.

Thanks for this! Important questions.

I see how (B) and (C) could be arguments for veganism / for thinking factory farming is really bad, but I don't yet see how they're arguments for working on factory farming rather than for future generations.

• (B) suggests we should consider factory farming morally horrific and inexcusable, but I think that view is totally compatible with doing (non-animal-focused) longtermist work. Since we have to triage, we can see factory farming as an immense problem without considering it the top priority.
  • And insofar as we're worried about exploitative power relationships, that's also a reason to worry about how humanity treats future generations, since we're arguably screwing over powerless future generations pretty badly - skepticism toward exploitation is not just a consideration that suggests focusing on animals.
• (C) suggests we should be more willing to make sacrifices. This suggests veganism, but does it also suggest doing (non-animal-focused) longtermist work? My intuition is not really, since many of the latter jobs don't involve more sacrifice than many jobs focused on animal welfare.
  • If the point was one about what sacrifices humanity should collectively be willing to make, I think that's also a reason to worry about how humanity treats future generations, since giving up some things for them may be in order.

(Edited for clarity/detail)

picture millions of humans kept in the equivalent for 100% of their adult lives, and suppose with some work we could free them: would you stick to your longtermist guns?

What is "longtermism" here? Only working on interventions aimed at helping future generations? 

If we take longtermism to mean "not discounting future lives just because they're in the future", then it seems perfectly consistent to allocate some resources to alleviating suffering of currently-living people.

No, neither is acceptable: longtermism notwithstanding, we should allocate significant resources to combating both.

Note that in practice, the EA community does allocate resources across a portfolio of causes.

The post implies a large trade off between animal welfare and other cause areas.

It seems crucial to consider the actual trade off in energy/resources/attention and it seems plausible the trade off isn’t large at all. It’s important to explain this, but it’s difficult to communicate the underlying situation, for very compelling reasons.

I think some elaboration of the current state of farm animal welfare in EA is important to show why this tradeoff might not be large.

This elaboration or further explanation of the tradeoff won’t appear in this comment. (Someone else can/should do this but I know someone who can give some insight at some point).

Some considerations, not directly related:

If there needs to be (careful, proportionate) adjustment of the political climate of animal activism in certain circles, so that the resulting activity is collegial to EA, that is possible and may not be overly costly. This should be acceptable to altruistic animal activists if it provides EA resources and results in impactful activity.

I don’t think “flow through” effects is a good argument in general but it’s worth noting that farm animal welfare was a cause that brought on some of the strongest longtermists today.

Thanks for writing this! I like the analogy to humans. I did something like this recently with respect to dietary choice. My thought experiment specified that these humans had to be mentally-challenged so that they have similarity capacities for welfare as non-human animals which isn’t something you have done here, but I think is probably important. I do note that you have been conservative in terms of the number of humans however.

Your analogy has given me pause for thought!

There's a crude inductive argument that the future will always outweigh the present, in which case we could end up like Aesop's miser, always saving for the future until eventually we die.

I would just note that, if this happens, we’ve done longtermism very badly. Remember longtermism is (usually) motivated by maximising expected undiscounted welfare over the rest of time.

Right now, longtermists think they are improving the far future in expectation. When we actually get to this far future it should (in expectation) be better than it otherwise would have been if we hadn’t done what we’re doing now i.e. reducing existential risk. So yes longtermists may always think about the future rather than the present (until the future is no longer vast in expectation), but that doesn’t mean we will never reap the gains of having done so.

EDIT: I may have misunderstood your point here

Point D. sounds li, but can be avoided just by thinking carefully at each step (it only applies to very naive implementations). And you mention other counter considerations yourself. Some more thoughts in reply:  

• If we don't get longtermism right, we'll no longer be in a position to deliberately affect the course of the future (accordingly, "future neartermists" won't be in a position to do any good, either)
  • Even worse, if we get things especially wrong, we might accidentally lock in unusually bad futures
• If we get longtermism right, we'd use the transition to TAI to gain better control over the future to no longer live in a state where the world is metaphorically burning (in other words, future near-termists won't be as important anymore)
• Intermediates states where things continue as they are now (people can affect things but don't have sufficient control to get the world they want) seem unstable.

The last bullet point seems right to me because technological progress increases the damage of things going wrong and it "accelerates history" – the combination of these factors leads to massive instability. Technology progress also improves our potential reach for attaining control over things and make them stable, up to the point where  someone messes it up irreversibly. 

I'm pessimistic about attaining the high degrees of control it would require to make the future go really well. In my view, one argument for focusing on ongoing animal suffering is "maybe the long-term future will be out of our control eventually no matter what we do." (This point applies especially to people whose comparative advantage might be near-term suffering reduction.) However, other people are more optimistic.

Point E. seems true and important, but some of the texts you cite seem one-sided to me. (Here's a counter consideration I rarely see mentioned in these texts; it relates to what I said in reply to your point D.)

The other arguments/points you make sound like "longtermists might be biased/rationalizing/speciesists." 

I wonder where that's coming from? I think it would be more potentially persuasive to focus on direct reasons why reducing animal suffering is a good opportunity for impact.  We all might be biased in various ways, so appeals to biases/irrationality rarely do much. (Also, I don't think there's "one best cause" so different people will care about different causes depending on their moral views.)