This is a very reasonable argument, and one we should take seriously. It is one of the driving forces at https://fairstartmovement.org/
Having worked in animal advocacy for 35 years, I've only seen the number of animals consumed per person go up and up and up. (In the US and globally.) You know what they say is the definition of insanity....
Honestly, I think the answer to your question is that humans are, on average, completely and utterly self-centered. Look at how many people concerned with AI safety are totally indifferent to the plight of non-human animals.
I know this is obvious and noted, but uncontrolled suffering is far different. Suffering such that you want to die. (I write about that, in the Worsts, in https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ )
I would ask everyone to check out https://www.preventsuffering.org/
Thanks, Vasco. I find it very difficult to imagine a scenario where I would support the active torture of factory farming chickens for any unknown / theoretical counterpoint. I'd certainly rather be a wild animal than a factory-farmed chicken.
Take care.
Really enjoyed this piece. It is somewhat painful to read, given that I believe most of my professional life did more harm than good.
I do think that partially rationalizing torturing billions of sentient beings every year for more corn in silos in case of a nuclear winter - that's really a stretch.
>Almost every old-school vegan or vegetarian should instantly "get" that people will just lie about you.
I was sure you were going to talk about other vegans attacking you for not being "pure" enough.
Thanks so very much for this. I wish I could give it more upvotes. As I've written about elsewhere, the obsession with expected value while ignoring traceability is one of the worst aspects of that corner of EA. (Why I love https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GXzT2Ei3nvyZEdWef/every-moment-of-an-electron-s-existence-is-suffering )
But didn't the OP also use expected value calculation to conclude that digital minds are going to dominate the value in the future, while admitting the tractability for helping digital minds might be even lower than helping wild animals?
I love this post, and I'm not convinced by some of the counters in the comments. (e.g., I don't think LLMs will help persuade anyone of anything.)
This Ezra Klein podcast is really good, if you haven't heard it.
This is extremely interesting and thought-provoking, but bees beating salmon really does undermine any attempt I can make to give this a lot of credence.
Moreso, though, I object to saying we can trade one week of human life for six days of chicken torture (in the comments). But this is more my critique of utilitarianism, as I lay out in "Biting the Philosophical Bullet" here.
Thanks, Matt. As we say, though, we don't actually think that bees beat salmon. We think that the vertebrates are 0.1 or better of humans, that the vertebrates themselves are within 2x of one another, and that the invertebrates are within 2 OOMs of the vertebrates. We fully recognize that the models are limited by the available data about specific taxa. We aren't going to fudge the numbers to get more intuitive results, but we definitely don't recommend using them uncritically.
I hear--and sometimes share--your skepticism about such human/animal tradeoffs. ...
Upvote just for the memes / images! And great content and comments; wish I had seen something like this 35 years ago.
https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Hi Michelle - thanks for writing this. It is exceedingly thoughtful, compelling, and thorough.
Our kid is 28* - so almost everything we went through was before EA (and before we met Jason Gaverick Matheny). We met at an animal rights group I was running, and we went on to found several animal-focused charities (including One Step for Animals).
One of the reasons I wrote Losing My Religions last year (and have made the eBook free) was to give people an opportunity to live that process and understand the various pressures biology, family, and society pla...
>it has assumed with insufficient reason that all abolitionist thinking and approaches are ineffective.
I appreciate this post, but this statement is, IMHO, simply not true. Many of us were "abolitionists" at one point. Many of us have decades of experience and have studied what has and hasn't moved the needle over the years. See, for example, "The End of Veganism" chapter here.
I didn't vote it down, but I think giving the Catholic Church the "benefit of the doubt" is off-base. You could say the same about anyone doing bad -- "Maybe they're right on some level." The Catholic Church has simply done tons and tons of bad. And I think I'm saying this not just because of my personal hatred of the Catholic Church. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
I'm down with a lot of this, but I'm not sure about the EU. Given the history of war on the continent, I think the EU is a totally reasonable response. Hard to run the counter-factual.
Thanks for writing this. It isn't exactly in the same line, but when I examine my career, I believe I have done more harm than good. It was writing Losing My Religions that really firmed up that conclusion. I hope posts like these -- and the fascinating discussion -- help others to do more good than harm. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Title: Working with the Beef Industry for Chicken Welfare
Author: RobertY
Why it's good: Correct focus on a source of immense, totally unnecessary suffering, with outside-the-box thinking to help mitigate the suffering. Thanks, Robert!
This is really great, Holden. Well-structured piece, too.
Thanks for the comment about the Catch-22 situation facing AI development -- that caution by one group could let a reckless group get there first. I make that point in the Longtermism chapter here, and I wish it would get more consideration.
I find the discussion of these claims interesting. I would also warn about extrapolating this to any other issue. Climate issues are well supported over there. But this doesn't mean the same would be true for issues with minority support. Just in my field, I've seen a minority of animal advocates poison the word "vegan" in the United States, as I document in Losing My Religions.
Do I have this right - Functionalism doesn't support spending more on small invertebrates?
Conscious Subsystems probably supports spending far more on small invertebrates -->
Great post. I'd love to see an entire post on this:
Maybe have it pinned to the top of every page. :-)
I'm not saying the analysis is wrong. I'm just curious if the analyst has ever suffered from depression. Or had someone they love suffer from depression.
It is easy to empathize with polio or malaria, but not as much depression. And when a cheap drug (as noted by other comments) can take one from suicidal to life worth living....
In the fourth decade of animal advocacy, I honestly wonder what has hurt animals more than AR advocates pointing to polls.
Why would we ever, ever, ever look at opinion polls, when every day, everyone is casting an actual ballot at the grocery store and restaurant?
This reminds me of all the interviews where Beyond Meat's Ethan Brown said, "People tell me they don't want GMOs." He is simply talking to the wrong people. Nearly everyone only cares about cheap meat. Full stop. Nothing else matters, no matter what they say.
Once again, researchers fail to distinguish between "pain" and "suffering."
https://www.mattball.org/2022/10/ed-yong-on-insects.html
Open Phil is pretty much the only place I've seen that's done a good job of honestly exploring this distinction:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/2017-report-on-consciousness-and-moral-patienthood/
What indicators of consciousness do you expect mammals and birds to have that insects don't? (Edited to avoid suggesting I'm only asking about the criteria in this post.)
I think criteria 5-8 suggest it's not mere nociception. Of course, they might not establish consciousness, but what more do you expect to do so?
Personally, I'm very sympathetic to Luke Muehlhauser's views in that report and, in particular, illusionism and AST (he doesn't explicitly endorse AST, but I think he said it was the closest attempt), and I still don’t think they rule out insect co...
I fail to see any lack of distinguishing as I do not see any claim on suffering or capacity to suffer in insects, only on insects' abilities to feel pain.
How physical pain relates to subjectively perceived suffering is a whole other topic, and as far as I can tell no subject to this review. (Though I've only read this post, not the review itself.)
I do see that pain-feeling is usually perceived as something innately suffering-inducing, and I see why that's the case. If pain is not somewhat negative for the organism experiencing it, why would that mechanism ...
I think we should just stop overreacting, period. This guy's money doesn't mean he is EA. No one person is EA.
If we spent as much time figuring out how to better be more effective as we do on self-loathing and self-over-analysis, we'd be further along.
IMHO. Of course, I could be wrong.
Hey Vasco,
As a founder of One Step for Animals, you don't need to convince me we should be looking to help chickens. :-)
It is when we say that X chickens = 1 human, or Y mosquitoes = 1 human, or Z electrons = 1 human -- that's where I get off the train (as I lay out in Losing My Religions).
Thanks again and keep up the great work!
Thanks so much, Corentin! You might like my latest book:
https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Take care!
What Jamie said -- the number of neurons across a population is irrelevant. What matters is the capacity for suffering, and that is dependent on the number (and arrangement) of neurons in an individual. This is my favorite discussion:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/2017-report-on-consciousness-and-moral-patienthood/
I fear that thinking in the terms above (total neurons in some group) does significant harm.
This doesn't add much, but thank you for sharing this. I honestly believe that the world would be much better (and many people on this forum much happier) if more people did this.
When I worked as a Department of Energy Global Change Fellow in the 90s, there was a well-known commentary that we're always at peak oil (coal, natural gas, etc.). It never turns out to be true.
Also, about 15 years ago, New Scientist ran a very convincing article that we were about to run out of the metals we need for modern society. It, also, didn't turn out to be true.
I think that posts like this will read like "The Population Bomb" in the future.
Congratulations on being one of the winners of the contest.
Having spent most of my adult life promoting veganism, it is pretty sad to know that ACE found "Around 1% of adults both self-identify as vegetarians and report never consuming meat. It seems that this percentage has not changed substantially since the mid-1990s." That is why One Step for Animals pursues a different path.
I think there is a deeper problem, though, at least in the United States, as I document in the "The End of Veganism" chapter in Losing My Religions.
Happy with every effort to help reduce burnout. We would all do well to take ourselves a little less seriously. (I wish I had understood that decades ago.)
The moral needs PBM. It is the only way to get there. Decades of moral arguments have left us with record-high per-capita consumption of animals.
https://www.mattball.org/2016/10/what-have-we-learned.html
Our kid graduated HS in 2012. They and their best friend both got rejected from Stanford, while a classmate who was a legacy with significantly lower grades, SATs, and extracurriculars got in. It was fine; the friend went to MIT and EK went to Pomona (which is FANTASTIC OMG).
More: https://www.mattball.org/2016/04/ellen-stalwart.html
Honestly, this is why I won't be engaging with comments.
How is this a question based on anything I've written? I'm arguing that we should reduce unnecessary suffering that exists right now. So instead of addressing that, you accuse me of advocating of wanting to kill all humans?
Good faith, indeed. Yikes.
Anyone with legit questions and insights (as I said, I could be wrong!) knows where to find me.
Over and out.
This is how I understand your argument.
P1: Humans are really bad for all other sentient beings. P2: AI can defeat humans. P3: AI would be better for other sentient beings than humans. C: It would be good for sentient beings if AI defeated humans.
I'm asking why "AI" is unique to this argument and why you couldn't replace "AI" with any other method that kills all humans but leaves other sentient beings alive, e.g. "engineered virus". I could be crazy but I genuinely don't see what part of your argument precludes that.
Edit: I should have made it clear in my o...
I changed my mind about promoting veganism.
https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/5/27/15701168/save-animal-lives-eat-beef-not-chicken
Hi Brian,
Thanks so much for mentioning One Step for Animals. Having spent decades promoting dietary change, I know my efforts at my previous nonprofits have ended up leading to more chickens suffering. (This for those not familiar, and this is what got me fired from "Animal Asylum".) One of the reasons I wrote Losing My Religions - hoping readers won't make the same mistake.
As far as funding for One Step, we reach more people with our short video the more people contribute. There seems to be no correlation between current contributions and future contribut... (read more)