Sounds fun! Is CRS funding your independent research for now? Any idea who will/might fund you for this kind of work, otherwise?

I think we would need to unpack too many things for addressing your first and third paragraphs to be worth it. (And I think you already know what I personally think about the first one.) I'll just note that, tentatively ~bracketing out some effects is not incompatible with valuing further research on them.

many people care not only about increasing welfare in expectation, but also about not decreasing welfare. For those people, the uncertain effects can matter a lot.

I tentatively agree and think this should be the strongest argument against our "indeterminate effects = 0" move, from RP's perspective. (Although I do not understand the most plausible versions of risk/ambiguity aversion well enough to be confident here, and remain sympathetic to this response Laura gave you when you raised the same point elsewhere. Defo still something I'd like to revisit at some point, though!)

From the point of view of decreasing the chance of causing large harm, funding CCF is much worse than doing nothing? This could be an uncomfortable conclusion, but it seems worth communicating if you want to empower donors to act in agreement with their values.

I don't think this part is fair, though. If donating to the CCF is bad because of risk aversion + substantial off-target effects, donating to pretty much anything is bad, then. Again, here, you're raising a potential problem that goes well beyond the CCF. (I understand very well that your views imply prioritizing research, though. And we might come closer to this ourselves if/once we estimate VOI for different projects and account for off-target effects.)

I did mean actually neutral. I assume that our position would be to tentatively assign a value of 0 to effects where any precise number within a range spanning over 0 seems arbitrary, which approximates bracketing out effects we are clueless about. (I know that you are skeptical of bracketing and might say that 0 is just as arbitrary as any other number.)

you could still disclaim you do not know whether the interventions being funded increase or decrease welfare such that other funders update towards funding research decreasing the relevant uncertainties.

I think we overall would disagree with the first part, due to being sympathetic to bracketing out effects we are clueless about, or maybe believing these are not that large to begin with. (I am probably the person on the team most sympathetic to deep uncertainty about this, though.) But fwiw, we are planning on considering including "meta" funds/projects in the allocation, including those that reduce our key uncertainties. (Our key uncertainties may very well differ from yours, though.)

For work on moral weights to inform CCF's allocation, you would have to combine it with research on the effects on non-target individual (for example, estimating the soil-arthropod-years affected per electrically stunned shrimp)?

Well, this depends on what the moral weight research concludes, but in many scenarios, yes, we would need to if we wanted off-target effects to influence the CCF allocation (which, again, we might not want). Fwiw, I don't expect "estimating the soil-arthropod-years affected per electrically stunned shrimp" to be the hardest part, relative to figuring out the sign of this + other potential off-target effects of shrimp stunning (and how to weight all this). And I don't expect the CCF team to figure this out any time soon. The AW team might be more likely to make some progress, but I also don't expect it to figure this out.

Hey Vasco. I wasn't one of the post's authors, but chiming in on RP's general tentative take on modeling off-target effects. (I'll let the others comment on why this was not mentioned in the post, if they want to. But, fwiw, excluding "flow-through effects" is listed as a limitation of our model on the CCF website.)

I agree this is a limitation, and I am tentatively in charge of thinking more about how we could model off-target effects in a non-arbitrary way (which you know I am pessimistic about). This is however low on my/our list of priorities, since I doubt that whatever way of modeling them we might eventually opt for would substantially update the CCF's allocation. We'd most likely remain neutral on whether a given off-target effect is positive or negative, overall, in a way that leaves the precise allocation unchanged.

While this remains a limitation of the model behind the CCF, I think it is a much broader problem that the EA community may want to grapple with. I don't think off-target effects are a reason for anyone to distrust the CCF's current allocation, more than they are a reason to doubt any precise allocation---given the immense imprecision/ambiguity surrounding the scale and (especially) the sign of these off-target effects. And while you know I am myself sympathetic to such doubt, I still see a lot of value in thinking about where money should be allocated, conditionalizing on worlds in which off-target effects and other sources of deep uncertainty are not paralyzing.

I am not aware of any intervention supported by impact-focussed funders which increases animal welfare accounting for effects on soil invertebrates.

RP's work on moral weights and animal welfare might happen to address parts of this concern of yours in the future (and inform our CCF allocation), fwiw. (Macroscopic Ventures' AW team might also do related work.) But you will not find the answers you're looking for from our CCF team on this point.

Curious why you've been cross-posting things about AI recently. Any cause prio update?

When you suppose here that consequentialist bracketing implies neartermism, are you conditioning on space-time region bracketing? (Which is arguably more action-guiding than any form of person-based bracketing?)

Follow-up assuming you'll answer "no", Anthony: same even ex post, right?

Oops sorry for the GW-GD confusion, but yeah, this changes nothing to my point I think.

I agree that it is possible for them to occur, but there is no probability distribution I would include in my representor under which they are sufficiently likely to occur that the comparison between actions is indeterminate.

This seems hardly defensible. 
- The average human being (including in poor countries) contributes to the farming of so many animals throughout their lifetime (at least in expectation). You would have to be astonishingly confident that the welfare of the animals we eat do not significantly matter for your above conclusion to follow.
- The number of far-future lives we indirectly influence might be astronomical such that long-term effects (almost) always dominate. I don't see on what basis you can exclude this possibility from your probability distributions, given the arguments given here and refs therein.

(I don't recall this specific example from Mogensen and don't have time to dive back into it, so I won't comment on that, sorry.)

Yeah, I think it's easy to find a counterexample to "unconditional cluelessness" (i.e., even in the box situation), but much harder to find one relevant to what you and I should do in our present non-simplified situations (which is presumably what Anthony meant for us to discuss).

I'm not familiar with Pearce's "selection pressure" argument. Is he saying evolution will make people sympathetic to the abolitionist project? 

If yes, I think this happens only in "crazy worlds" very different from ours, where the exact opposite might also happen and where our take on which is more likely is worth nothing. (I'm now actually more sympathetic to some version of this position my post criticizes.)