Thanks for the well-argued and insightful post!

On alt proteins, if we ever substantially beat price parity (say by 50%), it’s just hard for me to see how we wouldn’t get mass consumer adoption. This comes from a model of most people’s stated preferences as downstream of what’s most convenient and protects their egos most. That’s the model I think best explains most people’s historical responses to moral catastrophes. Under this model, people maintaining they’d stick to factory farmed meat over cultivated meat is hopefully a temporary cope which will go away once cultivated meat becomes much more convenient than factory farmed meat. So for me, that model is the main reason why I still think alt proteins are a good use of funds. (Probably the stronger argument against alt proteins is that it may be unclear whether reducing meat consumption is good when accounting for wild animal effects!)

On cage-free campaigns and shrimp stunning, my main caveat would be that since animal welfare interventions affect such a huge number of individuals, I’d still expect the magnitude of their direct welfare effects (ignoring indirect effects) to be huge relative to global health. Of course, that only underscores your point that the sign deserves more research, and I look forward to reading comments from others far more knowledgeable than I am on this.

Would Rethink Priorities’ animal welfare research group look like a good investment under your views?

If you’re saying EA forum engagement may be net negative and are willing to engage on that here, I’d be curious to understand your perspective on that.

Speaking for myself, reading and engaging on this forum ~2y ago helped me substantially with my cause prioritization in my donations and my identification as an EA community member. Now that the forum isn’t as active as it was, I’ve been wanting to push myself to contribute more, as a public service with the hope that others will benefit the same way.

What’s been informing your perspective?

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.