NickLaing
Bio
Participation1
I'm a doctor working towards the dream that every human will have access to high quality healthcare. I'm a medic and director of OneDay Health, which has launched 53 simple but comprehensive nurse-led health centers in remote rural Ugandan Villages. A huge thanks to the EA Cambridge student community in 2018 for helping me realise that I could do more good by focusing on providing healthcare in remote places.
How I can help others
Understanding the NGO industrial complex, and how aid really works (or doesn't) in Northern Uganda
Global health knowledge
Posts 25
Comments1585
Thanks @mal_graham🔸 this is super helpful and makes more sense now. I think it would make your argument far more complete if you put something like your third and fourth paragraphs here in your main article.
And no I'm personally not worried about interventions being ecologically inert.
As a side note its interesting that you aren't putting much effort into making interventions happen yet - my loose advice would be to get started trying some things. I get that you're trying to build a field, but to have real-world proof of this tractability it might be better to try something sooner rather than later? Otherwise it will remain theory. I'm not too fussed about arguing whether an intervention will be difficult or not - in general I think we are likely to underestimate how difficult an intervention might be.
Show me a couple of relatively easy wins (even small-ish ones) an I'll be right on board :).
Obviously I'm the opposite of an expert here but here are my reasons, roughly from most important to least important
1. I think the best assessment we have of Animal sentience seems biased towards animals for at least 4 reasons as I outlined here. So I take RP numbers and downward multiply them by something like 10x - 1,000x depending on the animal. IMO the most important bias here was selecting a pro animal-welfare research team with zero animal welfare skeptics.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/E9NnR9cJMM7m5G2r4/is-rp-s-moral-weights-project-too-animal-friendly-four
2. I've been generally unimpressed by responses to criticisms of animal sentience. I've rarely seen an animal welfare advocate make an even small concession. This makes me even more skeptical about the neutrality of thought processes and research done by animal welfare folks.
3. I don't believe that response-to-stimuli is a very useful proxy for sentience, yet this is what sentience percentages are usually based on. Every organism responds to stimuli, including bacteria. They have to in order to survive, in increasingly complex ways as organism complexity increases. I doubt that strong noxious stimuli response = meaningful pain. I think response-to-stimuli is the go-to because we just don't have a good alternative, but that doesn't mean the "best" option is a good one.
I think that brains need a "special" set of conditions to be sentient (see point 4), and to feel pain in a meaningful way. Bees are wildly intelligent and have capabilities way beyond humans in some areas, but I don't think probability of sentience increases roughly linearly with increased complexity of behaviour.
4. I think we should base our priors more on what we are more sure of, which is our understanding of human sentience. I don't think humans are actually "sentient" until we are quite old (see Peter Singer's old work). I have zero memories before age like 3 or 4? Whether a form of sentience is there in the womb or some time after birth, the human brain is way more complex than animals before sentience kicks in. Brain EEGs only show meaningful stimulation at 30 weeks of gestation, and likely it kicks in sometime after that. I think this is an underrated data point, because we have far more confidence in it than any of our pretty wild assertions about animals. To be clear I'm not a pure utilitarian and think humans AND animals have inherent worth outside of sentience and pain.
I'll note that even despite all this I still think Animal Welfare work is hugely important, and even on debate week I voted that marginal money would be slightly better going there than to GHD. Even if my sentience estimate is 1,000x less than yours the work is still likely super important and cost effective.
I feel this. Even with my personal almost negligible probability of bee sentience, it felt horrible spraying a nest the other day, but there's no like insect removal services here in Uganda. Fortunately the swarm vacated and we killed only hundreds not tens of thousands of bees
All the best with the decision.
I agree with your statement in its entirety (even the "fitting comeuppance" bit), but I don't like the tone because it feels a little vindictive and mean to me. FarmKind were genuinely trying to help animals here, maybe messed up and I think you could perhaps be a little nicer while making your well articulated, very good point.
I wish that was the case too, but I think if like FarmKind you need to work with a lot of animal activists (that are often more ideological than utilitarian) while telling the general public its better donate than stop eating meat, then it probably helps to be vegan. Its not the easiest position to be in but I think Farmkind do it very well (besides this campaign).
I don't have "expectations" here, but I'm talking about what puts you in a better position running an org.
I don't expect people to be vegan to run pro-animal campaigns at all (I didn't say that) and I don't think you would have to be vegan to run FarmKind.
thanks for this great analysis. I'm impressed by FarmKind's quick response to this. Knowing the reasoning behind helps me understand better what you were trying to do. Although i still think it wasn't a good campaign, I think it's good that you are trying innovative approaches to both capturing media attention and communicating about the best ways to help animals.
I think it matters and signals integrity that you are both vegan too. this should help more hard love animal rights campaigners realize that you are really in their side and not trying to undermine them.
All the best for future campaigns, don't let this scare you off staying bold and innovative in future :😊!
Thanks for the update, and the reasons for the name change make s lot of sense
Instinctively i don't love the new name. The word "coefficient" sounds mathsy/nerdy/complicated, while most people don't know what the word coefficient actually means. The reasoning behind the name does resonate through and i can understand the appeal.
But my instincts are probably wrong though if you've been working with an agency and the team likes it too.
All the best for the future Coefficient Giving!