All of Alex Schwalb's Comments + Replies

Thanks for the reply. I completely agree that we should look for interventions that improve welfare most per $, and that those, at least for now, are the ones focusing on animals and not humans. 100% of my donations at the moment actually goes to animal causes.

That's a very interesting table about welfare range per calorie consumption. It caused me to update away from my belief that in the ideal far future we should dedicate most resources to creating more happier humans (or the next generation of the most sentient beings), and towards the belief that the ... (read more)

Thanks for writing this interesting article! I had a few objections, but it looks like most of them have been covered.

One thing I would still like to mention is using wild animals as the bar to cross. This only makes sense if the replacement is 1:1, meaning that if we didn't farm x amount of animals, there would have existed an additional x amount of wild animals (not sure if x should be individuals, or some sort of "sentience units" that weigh vertebrates more for example). If this were the case then setting 0 equal to the expected welfare of a wild anima... (read more)

Very interesting article! Although I would disagree that it would be bad to decrease the number of factory farmed animals if they have positive lives. What we're doing when decreasing the number of factory farmed animals is just shifting the biomass to be in different forms. I think humans are capable of much more positive lives than farmed animals, so in the long term future it would be best to have as much biomass in the form of humans (and possibly pets) as possible. A world where humans eat predominantly plants and cultivated meat would be able to supp... (read more)

Are there any rules against using crude language or having a lot of violence in the story?

Thanks for the great post, it was a very enjoyable read.

I'm curious if there are any justification to using qualities such as intelligence, creativity and sociability to determine moral status? They seem pretty arbitrary to me. We might as well consider fluffyness, body weight and visual resolution.

I would think if there is at all something like hierarchical moral status, it would be determined by instrumental qualities such as resource consumption (negative) and altruism (positive)