Welcome Andrei! I've actually mused on this question a lot myself, and I agree it's under-discussed!

What immediately jumps to mind is that this post's argument requires SSA, a view of anthropics (the study of how one should reason about their own existence). Under SSA, you are randomly sampled from a "reference class" of beings. You rightly conclude that under SSA, being born a human is extremely unlikely, so your existence seems to be strong evidence against nonhuman sentience. (This would also imply the sum of artificial and/or future sentience won't be much more than the sum of past sentience, also known as the doomsday argument.)

However, SSA is not the only view of anthropics. SIA is another view (heavily promoted by EA blogger Bentham's Bulldog) which says that worlds with more beings who could be you are more likely, in such a way which (by design) cancels this post's argument, as well as the doomsday argument and several others. I've personally always been more convinced by SIA.

But I don't think it's even necessary to settle anthropics for this. As you wrote, there's a post-birth filter where only a tiny % of people will have come up with this argument. It's like if there's a lottery where you get sent a letter only if you win, and then you get one and think "wow, the lottery must have been rigged in my favor". But winning was guaranteed given you've received that letter. In your last paragraph, it seems like you exempt your own birth from this: "I rolled a one". But that's just what any lottery winner would say! That's why I'm personally still convinced by this filter.

If you’d like to read some arguments, I argue here that the most cost-effective neartermist interventions are in animal welfare. If you lean longtermist, I argue here that under many EAs’ risk aversion, marginal animal welfare donations still make more sense than marginal AI safety funding. If you’re a pure total utilitarian, I would still argue that direct efforts to improve the future for all sentient beings (future-oriented digital minds/animal welfare work) are plausibly higher EV even than x-risk reduction.

Does anyone know whether there's a way to buy cultivated (lab-grown) meat now? I've always wanted to host a cultivated meat barbecue and invite my omnivorous friends, but I have not been able to find any cultivated meat that's currently commercially available.

(I’m biased since I’ve mostly donated to animal welfare / digital minds. I’m also super busy now so it’s possible I just haven’t thought your argument through sufficiently.)

If you’re a pure EV maximizer I agree with your implicit claim that it’s probably best to prioritize AI safety and/or helping steer AI for the benefit of neglected groups (animals and digital minds).

If like most people you have risk aversion, like wanting high confidence you’ve made a positive difference, or wanting to make sure a greater % of EA community resources are devoted to interventions which maximally reduce near-term suffering, I think animal welfare presents by far the best value option, dwarfing global health and especially an option like becoming a doctor.

So I feel like perhaps the crux of your discussion with Bob should be whether he’s a pure EV maximizer or if he has the types of risk aversion which make animal welfare look good. There are also options of working in AI safety and donating to animal welfare—no need to fully commit to one or the other! But I don’t think the Alice analogy goes through because becoming a teacher or doctor doesn’t really make sense under any optimizing view, whereas I think animal welfare makes sense under many such views.

Beautiful post. I especially enjoyed the personal images and wish more EA Forum posts did that.

Sentient Futures

Arthropoda remains my top pick out of those listed, but I chose Shrimp Welfare Project followed by the EA Animal Welfare Fund as my top two votes for strategic voting reasons.

I still think there are strong arguments for animal welfare dominating global health (at least on first-order effects), and that animal welfare is much more funding constrained and neglected than AI safety. (Invertebrates and wild animals still seem like the most impactful and neglected opportunities in animal welfare.) This year, I'm donating to Sentient Futures to try to improve coordination between advocates for neglected beings and the AI space.

I'd be doing less good with my life if I hadn't heard of effective altruism

My donations to effective charities are by far the most impactful thing I've ever done in my life, and that could not have happened without EA.

Organisations using Rethink Priorities’ mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails.

The only argument I can think of against this would be optics. To be appealing to the public and a broad donor base, orgs might want to get off of the train to crazytown before this stop. (I assume this is why GiveWell ignores animal effects when assessing their interventions’ impact, even though those swamp the effects on humans.) Even then, it would make sense to share these analyses with the community, even if they wouldn’t be included in public-facing materials.

I think most views where nonhumans are moral patients imply these tiny animals could matter. Like most people, I find the implications of this incredibly unintuitive, but I don’t think that’s an actual argument against the view. I think our intuitions about interspecies tradeoffs, like our intuitions about partiality towards friends and family, can be explained by evolutionary pressures on social animals such as ourselves, so we shouldn’t accord them much weight.

Hi guys, thanks for doing this sprint! I'm planning on making most of my donations to AI for Animals this year, and would appreciate your thoughts on these followup questions:

1. You write that "We also think some interventions that aren’t explicitly focused on animals (or on non-human beings) may be more promising for improving animal welfare in the longer-run future than any of the animal-focused projects we considered". Which interventions, and for which reasons?
2. Would your tentative opinion be more bullish on AI for Animals' movement-building activities than on work like AnimalHarmBench? Is there anything you think AI for Animals should be doing differently from what they're currently doing?
3. Do you know of anyone working (or interested in working) on the movement strategy research questions you discuss?
4. Do you have any tentative thoughts on how animal/digital mind advocates should think about allocating resources between (a) influencing the "transformed" post-shift world as discussed in your post and (b) ensuring AI is aligned to human values today?