JoA🔸
Bio
Participation3
Volunteer spread over multiple animal welfare orgs, freelance translator, and enthusiastic donor. Reasonably clueless about what interventions are impartially good. Past experiences include launching an animal ethics university group, coordinating small campaigns in animal advocacy, and designing automated workflows in that context.Â
"We have enormous opportunity to reduce suffering on behalf of sentient creatures [...], but even if we try our hardest, the future will still look very bleak." - Brian Tomasik
How I can help others
Happy to give feedback on projects, or get on a call about anything to give advice and share contacts.
Posts 4
Comments75
Great post! It's quite common to see solid ideas like this on the EA Forum, but seeing them executed is rare. And it's a nice change to see a more in-person kind of outreach for effective giving, in particular for animals. I'm interested to see a follow-up learned on what you'll have learned after giving season!
Were I to pick only one that's at once rigorous and accessible, I'd say the first post in Anthony DiGiovanni's sequence on Unawereness (20m read officially, but has some references and charts, so I'd say it probably takes 10 minutes to read it: 1. The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance: Introduction
Hi! My superficial understanding is that grantmakers in s-risks have a certain bar for what they're open to funding, and that they generally have the capacity to fund a marginal independent researcher if their work is sufficiently promising. If, in the future, you seem like an individual with a track record that is good enough in funders' views (maybe that can come through doing independent research, applying to fellowships, doing non-S-risk related research at AI labs, etc.), then receiving funding will be possible, as money does not seem to be the primary constraint (at leas that's not what grantmakers in the field seem to think). But that is a high bar to pass.Â
If you actually manage to save a 150,000$ per year, Macroscopic can advise you in donations to reduce S-risks, which would be a considerable contribution to a cause you seem to care about a lot. (I have no ties to Macroscopic, the information is publically available on their website)
Thank you for this post, Zlatko! Welcome to the forum, and well-done for your transparent criticism of a perspective you find repugnant. Many individuals prefer to call such perspectives "crazy" without justification. So reading this was a good way to start the week.
I think this post is quite valuable, since it defends a point of view (that it's not super cautious to just reduce the amount of net-negative lives) that seems somewhat common in EA, but is also rarely defended as such. Some thoughts (lengthy, but there's a lot of content in your post!):
- I think this is a much stronger point than arguing that many animal lives could simply be positive on a hedonistic utilitarian view (less repugnant, requires less arguments from implausible interpersonal tradeoffs)
- In the takeaways, however, you don't focus on what should be the biggest (drawing from your argument as only basis) from an EA perspective: that we should be in favor of actions that increase the numbers of lives. Then, it's probably good to promote veganism as this seems to increase the farming of small animals on the margin. And to promote actions that reduce the amount of agricultural land, so that more wild animals can live there. Both of these actions seem fairly morally acceptable (especially if one realizes that wild animals have been there long before us, and that we may have some duties of preservation), compared to more "maximizing" takes on maximizing the amount of individual lives on earth. Doing this seems massively more important (on a numbers-scale), if one thinks life has positive value, than counteracting the small effects of lives not being lived caused by a few plant-based advocacy organizations (let alone wild animal advocacy, which doesn't seem to have affected the world much for now).
My crux for why I do not adhere to the argument personally:
- I appreciated that you made a distinction between strong suffering that one may still accept, and extreme suffering. They also seem very different in my view, and the distinction is often glossed over in critiques on negative utilitarianism. You also say "Most suffering is not in that category.", and I entirely agree.
- However, I'm inclined to believe that most of the beings who life you discuss do contain extreme suffering, even if it's a minority of the suffering they experience (imo, extreme suffering = mid-high ranges of disabling pain in the Welfare Footprint sense ?). Chronic hunger (more intense than one may think, Ctrl+F chronic hunger here), being eaten alive, being eaten from the inside by parasites, being suffocated to death over the course of half an hour, are all likely cases of extreme suffering to me. So the question is not just about whether there's a strong positive value to a life containing suffering. but whether it's such a strong positive value that it "outweighs" the experience of extreme suffering (you may be familiar with the sympathy-based argument against extreme suffering being outweighable).
- More minor crux: you discuss animals still having a taste of potential positive experiences of life, but I'd be skeptical that we can draw a comparison between humans, even living in difficult conditions (let alone humans living a relatively sheltered life, like me), and hens who spend their entire life in a cage where they can't spread their wings. I assume, eg, "tasting food" feels very different when you've only been able to eat it with a mutilated beak, than for humans who can sometimes eat sufficiently while being relatively untroubled, and thus really enjoy the food. And in the case of wild animals, it seems many die so shortly after birth that they may not even have a single occasion to eat, or appreciate their environment.
Thanks again for this post, and perhaps more importantly, for opening your perspectives and donating outside of your preferred cause area! That's not so common in EA, and I think this can be valuable for making progress in doing good impartially.
Hi Zoe! It's thrilling to meet others with interest in invertebrate welfare (doesn't happen every day), and congratulations again for donating to a cause that is rarely considered appealing! Unsurprisingly, there's really no consensus on what one should do for animals in the face of AGI. However, there's a lot of exchange around what AI could mean for animals on the Sentient Futures slack, and if you have some thoughts you want to share about this, I'm sure there are many members there (including me) who'd be happy to read your current takes on the topic!Â
(20% Wild Animal Welfare)
Nice poll, but tough call! With the little we know, the effects of interventions on wild animals seem likely to outweigh those on farmed animals. However, we do not have a clear notion of how current wild animal interventions (even field-building and research) will affect wild animals in the long run (though this is also true of interventions that don't aim to help wild animals).
I do not think a "robust" and "safe" pick in animal welfare exists yet (that we're aware of): under the current state of my uncertainties, I'm voting with my dollars on invertebrate welfare interventions (though those are still probably outweighed by effects on wild invertebrates). Though I'm gradually seeing the appeal of funding more research (especially on small wild animals).Â
Slightly in favor of wild animal welfare here, because it seems likely that if we gain enough knowledge to find a robust intervention in animal welfare, it will target wild animals directly or indirectly (since they're probably the dominant group of moral patients).