Also, yes, I very much had the same dilemma years ago. Mine went something like this:
Heart: I figured it out! All I care about is reducing suffering and increasing happiness!
Brain: Great! I've just read a lot of blogs and it turns out that we can maximise that by turning everything into a homogenous substance of hedonium, including you, your mom, your girlfriend, the cast of Friends, all the great artworks and wonders of nature. When shall we start working on that?
Heart: Ummm, a small part of me think that'd be great but... I'm starting to think that ...
You don’t seem to apply your reasoning that our current values might be “extremely sub-optimal” to your values of hedonium/EA/utilitarianism. But I think there are good reasons to believe they might be very sub-optimal. Firstly, most people (right now and throughout history) would be terrified of everything they care about being destroyed and replaced with hedonium. Secondly, even you say that it “doesn’t make me feel good and it is in direct opposition to most of my values”, despite being one of the few proponents of a hedonium shockwave. I’m unsure why y...
I see. My personal intuition is that it wouldn't convince many people. I mean, cooked food includes cooked meat. So, unfortunately, their argument that we have evolved to have meat in our diets still stands.
I'm afraid I'm failing to connect the dots. How do you see this being related to veganism, and how do you see researching this making an impact?
Also, perhaps it's a bit weird to use it as a benchmark because it's the consumers who pay most of the cost for chicken welfare reforms (and, to a lesser extent, farmers, retailers, and sometimes governments). So the comparison with something like AMF is not very clean. Corporate campaigns are a bit more similar to lobbying governments to distribute bednets. Ugh, I notice that I'm a bit confused about this right now.
I'd say there's about 30% probability I will do it in the next two years. I've just started a project for Open Philanthropy about estimating what should be the speed-up values in cost-effectiveness estimates for corporate and legislative welfare reforms, as that is the most uncertain aspect of these estimates. Open Philanthropy is the main target audience for this type of stuff and I don't think that putting the rest of the numbers together for a cost-effectiveness estimate would influence them much. I'm unsure if another cost-effectiveness estimate is wha...
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Some thoughts.
As long as we don't have an indication that it is significantly less likely to be successful in higher-population countries, it seems fair to focus on the factor that we know will be important: the expected impact, if successful.
Lobbying smaller bodies of government is definitely easier. Whoever decides on policies in small countries has fewer bids of attention and is targeted by fewer lobbyists. You might need a lot of connections and effort to make your voice heard to a decision-maker in a big body...
I relate to that a lot, and I want to share how I resolved some of this tension. You currently allow your heart to only say “I want to reduce suffering and increase happiness” and then your brain takes over and optimizes, ignoring everything else your heart is saying. But it’s an arbitrary choice to only listen to the most abstract version of what the heart is saying. You could also allow your heart to be more specific like “I want to help all the animals!”, or even “I want to help this specific animal!” and then let your brain figure out the best way to d...
Also, it seems that EA forum gets about 14,000 views per day. So you spend about $2,000,000/(365*14,000) = $0.4 per view. That's higher than I would expect.
Note that many of these views might not be productive. For me personally, most of the views are like "I open the frontpage automatically when I want to procrastinate, see that nothing is new & interesting or that I didn't even want to use the forum, and then close it". I also sometimes incessantly check if anyone commented or voted on my post or comment, and that sort of behaviour can drive up the view count.
Also, 4000 users is an underestimate since the majority of people benefit from the EA Forum while logged out (on LW about 10-20% of our traffic comes from logged-in users, my guess is the EA Forum is similar, but not confident), and even daily users are usually not logged in.
You posted this graph
If I understand it correctly, it shows that about 50% of EA forum traffic comes from logged-in users, not 10%-20%.
Also, it seems that EA forum gets about 14,000 views per day. So you spend about $2,000,000/(365*14,000) = $0.4 per view. That's higher than I would expect.
Note that many of these views might not be productive. For me personally, most of the views are like "I open the frontpage automatically when I want to procrastinate, see that nothing is new & interesting or that I didn't even want to use the forum, and then close it". I also sometimes incessantly check if anyone commented or voted on my post or comment, and that sort of behaviour can drive up the view count.
Invertebrate sentience table (introduced here) has "Self-administers analgesics" as one of the features potentially indicative of phenomenal consciousness. But it's only filled for honey bees, chickens, and humans. I agree that more such experiments would be useful. It's more directly tied to what we care about (qualia) than most experiments.
I think that animals might not eat painkillers until they are unconscious out of their survival instinct. There are substances that act as painkillers in nature, and the trait "eat it until you're unconscious" would be...
One Tibetan lama encouraged me against thinking in terms of "should" or "ought"s, and that, instead, a better psychological framing for my day-to-day actions is "would like"
This is common advice:
Hi. Thanks for sharing the model. I’d like to question you putting 32.5% weight on the scale, which you define as “Number of land animals projected to be farmed in 2050 under business-as-usual conditions”. The value of this variable depends on:
I think that the 2, 3, and 4 are relevant and should be in the metric. But of these four, I’d bet it depends on the 1 (current human population) by far the most. No ...
Thanks so much for this work! I think it’s high quality and useful. Some thoughts:
I understand and emphasise with you. The possibility of doom can cause paralysing fear. But it can also free us, shedding all pretense, awakening us to focus on what truly matters without wasting time, and reigniting the love for life. And the love of life seems like a better motivator for working on x-risks than the fear of death. Movies where characters rediscover life after a terminal diagnosis like Living (2022) and songs/poems like this (content warning: some nudity) inspire me to reframe the possibility of doom and death in this way.
Feed costs usually constitute between 50% to 70% of the total livestock production costs. Reducing the costs of farming crops used for feed (like soybeans and corn) would likely make animal farming more efficient and hence increase the number of farmed animals.
I guess that increasing the efficiency of crops farmed directly for human consumption would barely impact the number of farmed animals. Maybe people would produce and consume more non-meat products because they are more profitable and/or cheaper. Hence, they might consume a bit fewer animal pro...
I see. In that case, it might be good for someone else to do the project of determining what weights for your pain categories would be most reasonable, and perhaps you could review that. I'm now considering doing it but it's unlikely that I will.
I see why you made your decisions, but I still think that it would be very useful if people could cite you to say stuff like “According to Welfare Footprint Project, broiler reforms decrease chicken suffering by very roughly 40%-60%”. It’s not for researchers at places like OpenPhil to decide what should be the next welfare ask. It’s for donors, volunteers, researchers who want to mention your conclusions in passing, and even retailers considering whether to sign the Better Chicken Commitment. I don’t know if animal charities would do it, but such a senten...
Thanks for your nice words about our work :) . Yes, I see it can be frustrating to have estimates disaggregated (it is very much for us too), and that it can reduce the use and impact of the work. At this moment though we feel it is important to have a solid evidence-based model to quantify animal suffering. That is, a model that is very robust to scrutiny by academics (so they are more likely to adopt it) and by the industry, one in which all estimates can be justified thoroughly.Traction in the academic community is important because as a small team, we ...
Thanks for the post, it's an interesting idea. I slightly worry about corruption in "unannounced animal welfare audits by accredited and independent third parties". Someone told me years ago that such audits by government agents in Lithuania were a farce. Do you know if such audits work well in practice? One way I see it working is if the auditor is an animal advocate. Is that what tends to happen in practice?
TLDR: Former animal advocacy researcher and programmer looking for part-time or contractor work.
Skills & background: generalist research, cost-effectiveness estimates, knowledge about animal advocacy, programming. See my EA forum profile for work examples.
Location/remote: I live in London, can work in an office or remotely, somewhat open to relocating
Availability & type of work: part-time or contractor work. Might be open to a full-time job for an exceptionally good fit. Can start whenever.
Resume/CV/LinkedIn: https://www.linke...
I'll provide some quick thoughts in case no one else answers in a better way.
I don't know anything about farming in Pakistan in particular, but I'd be surprised if there weren't the same welfare issues as elsewhere. E.g., egg-laying hens are probably raised in cages which is very bad for them. So by being vegan, you would save tens or hundreds of animals per year from suffering in expectation. It's particularly important for animal welfare to avoid eating chicken, eggs, some types of fish, and other small animals.
However, you could potentially help m...
Hi Nathalie. Thank you for engaging with my post. I’ll clarify my thinking.
As I clarified here, I do think that humane slaughter reforms for wild-caught fish and invertebrates are promising. This type of work preceded the WAW movement so I didn’t really associate the two.
Also, removing wild animals in large quantities from its environment has severe ripple effects to its environment and all other animals (and humans)
I agree. Also, humans reduce animal populations way more with things like habitat destruction. According to this report, “popu...
This kurzgesagt video argues against anti-natlism in a way that was convincing to me. It says that fewer babies eventually lead to an ageing population where a small number of working-age people have to support a lot of pensioners and that this is already happening. This can cause loads of problems, like poverty and democraticly-elected governments representing pensioners leading to focus on short-term thinking. That does not sound like the kind of population that would deal well with the effects of climate change because it needs massive investment and fr...
No, sorry, I wasn't saying that. My manager was Jacob Peacock, he was a great manager. He didn't put any unwelcome pressure and wasn't the one who talked to me about the email to OpenPhil. He said that I can publish my WAW articles on behalf of RP but then Marcus disagreed.
It sounds like Rethink stopped Saulius from posting a WAW post (within a work context) and it also looks like there was a potential conflict of interest here for senior staff as posting could affect funding
It is true that I wasn’t allowed to publish some of my WAW work on behalf of RP. Note that this WAW work includes not only the short summary Why I No Longer Prioritize Wild Animal Welfare (which got a lot of upvotes) but also three longer articles that it summarises (this, this, and this). Some of these do not threaten RP’s funding in any way. ...
OpenPhil email was sent to my RP email address, so I think that means that I was representing RP
If you do decide to pose a question, I suggest focusing on whether employees at EA organizations feel any direct or indirect pressure to conform to specific opinions due to organizational policies and dynamics, or even due to direct pressure from management. Or just don't feel free to speak their minds on certain issues related to their job. People should have an option to answer anonymously. Basically to find out if my case was an isolated incident or not.
Thanks Vasco. Personally, I won't do it. Actually, I pushed this issue here way further than I intended to and I don't want to talk about it more. I'm afraid that this might be one of those things that might seem like a big deal in theory but is rarely relevant in practice because reality is usually more complicated. And it's the sort of topic that can be discussed for too long, distracting busy EA executives from their actual work. Many people seem to have read this discussion, so arguments on both sides will likely be considered at RP and some other EA orgs. That is enough for me. I particularly hope it will be discussed by RP's cause prioritization team.
Thank you for your answer Marcus.
What bothers me is that if I said that I was excited about funding WAW research, no one would have said anything. I was free to say that. But to say that I’m not excited, I have to go through all these hurdles. This introduces a bias because a lot of the time researchers won’t want to go through hurdles and opinions that would indirectly threaten RP’s funding won’t be shared. Hence, funders would have a distorted view of researchers' opinions.
Put yourself into my shoes. OpenPhil sends an email to multiple people askin...
Great points, Saulius! I think it would be pretty valuable to have a question post asking about how organisations are handling situations such as yours (you may be interested in doing it; if you or other person do not, I may do it myself). I would say employees/contractors should be free, and ideally encouraged, to share their takes with funders and publicly, more of less regardless of what are the consequences for their organisation, as long as they are not sharing confidential information.
Uh, didn't expect people to notice this old thread. Just to make the situation sound less dramatic, I should've said that I had informed RP that I wanted to quit RP in three months. Then a situation arose after which the person I was supposed to work closely with for those three months didn't want to work with me. I think that was the main reason why I was asked to resign right away instead of after those three months. It makes sense.
When I was asked to resign from RP, one of the reasons given was that I wrote the sentence “I don't think that EAs should fund many WAW researchers since I don't think that WAW is a very promising cause area” in an email to OpenPhil, after OpenPhil asked for my opinion on a WAW (Wild Animal Welfare) grant. I was told that this is not okay because OpenPhil is one of the main funders of RP’s WAW work. That did not make me feel very independent. Though perhaps that was the only instance in the four years I worked at RP.
Because of this instance, I was also con...
Hey Saulius,
I’m very sorry that you felt that way – that wasn’t our intention. We aren’t going to get into the details of your resignation in public, but as you mention in your follow up comment, neither this incident, nor our disagreement over WAW views were the reason for your resignation.
As you recall, you did publish your views on wild animal welfare publicly. Because RP leadership was not convinced by the reasoning in your piece, we rejected your request to publish it under the RP byline as an RP article representative of an RP position. This decision...
Uh, didn't expect people to notice this old thread. Just to make the situation sound less dramatic, I should've said that I had informed RP that I wanted to quit RP in three months. Then a situation arose after which the person I was supposed to work closely with for those three months didn't want to work with me. I think that was the main reason why I was asked to resign right away instead of after those three months. It makes sense.
I obviously have no inside knowledge of the situation @saulius describes here, but I do think it touches on a potential concern of mine that RP could become (or could already be) too influential in the cause prioritization domain. This is not based on anything about RP other than its size: I think it's almost inevitable that any organization that exists (or could plausibly exist) in an RP-like space will have its own private institutional interests that could reasonably be expected to influence its outputs. Allowing those interests to affect outputs seems ...
It wouldn't solve the "Aging populations with lower percentages of working age adults threaten developed economies" problem, which I think is low-key one of the biggest problems in the world and the strongest argument to work on aging.
I remember talking about screwworms with @kcudding and @Holly_Elmore, I don't know how deeply they looked into it but maybe they could comment.
Yes! The biggest issue with eradication in the US and Central America is that it has to be maintained with pretty massive international effort. It uses a non-genetic sterile male technique, which means rearing huge amount of males (which require meat and certain conditions to grow), sterilizing them with x-rays, and releasing them by helicopter over the line Panama/Colombia border where the eradication is maintained. The US needs the cooperation of the rest of the North American countries in providing facilities and granting access to distribute the worms ...
As I understand it, all this data about the impact of events is collected through surveys that are attendees fill immediately after an event. I think that this might introduce some biases. For example, maybe attendees get excited about new connections they made and think that they will collaborate but then never do. If that's not done already, one way to somewhat mitigate this bias would be to also ask at the annual EA survey about the impact of EA events (that year, and in their lifetime). I wonder if conclusions like the one in this article would hold up.
I have a nitpicky comment that may not be very important in the end.
It seems that estimates of how long cage-free and caged hens live and how many eggs they lay are partially based on Norwood and Lusk 2011. I once did that as well but I was told that the book describes small scale cage-free systems that don’t use optimal genetics. Large scale cage-free systems (which perhaps didn’t exist at the time to the same extent) are likely much more similar to current caged systems, especially after industry will have some time to optimize things. If it w...
Thank you very much for doing this. However, I'm surprised by the claim that "research organizations have trouble filling a senior-level researcher talent gap". I've worked as an animal advocacy researcher in EA orgs for five years and had the title of senior researcher. I am looking for a researcher job right now and I can't even find anywhere to apply for, at least without a PhD. Well, GiveWell is hiring but I don't want to work in global health. I was loosely following animal welfare researcher and non-longtermist generalist researcher open jobs at EA o...
These were just some very conservative guesses rather than estimates. Also, I think that the effect depends on circumstances:
I'm the author of that post. Here is an edit I just added:
I don’t have better numbers than what I came up with here, but the overall rationale seems very similar to that of vegan leafletting, and I just don’t believe their numbers. I think people are in general likely to overestimate the effect of conversations they just had.
None of this means volunteering can’t be effective, or is worse than a given volunteer’s best alternative, but I don’t think “I felt helpful” is strong data.
You may know this already, but No Means No Worldwide works with children and adolescents. E.g., the mean age of girls in this study is 12.3 years. Founders Pledge evaluated them (see here for a summary and here for a full report) and provisionally recommended them. I don't know if the person is particularly looking into tackling sexual abuse of younger children, but this charity seems worth mentioning as an option.
I want to illustrate the “larger organizations are much more risk averse” point. When I worked at Rethink Priorities, I felt less freedom to publicly share unpolished and controversial thoughts because that could hurt Rethink Priorities reputation. And the bigger Rethink Priorities grew, the more there was to lose, the more this became a problem. Because of this, articles that I didn’t think were very promising but worth publishing (e.g., aquatic noise) took more time to finish as every claim went through more scrutiny than it would be optimal if I wa...
Note that aggressively seeking a serious monogamous relationship within EA is also problematic. For example, it might be a bad idea to ask out every other EA woman you had a nice 30 minute conversation with (e.g., see this comment).
Some EA parties (including some EA Global afterparties) involve cuddle puddles or hot tubs. The post made me wonder if that is also problematic. I've never heard anyone say that but some people might feel pressure to comply in order to fit in and possibly make important connections. It also probably increases the probability of various problems like touching without consent. Such things might also repulse some new commers from EA, especially after all the scandals. Perhaps people should consider whether such things are appropriate for a given gathering a bit more?
I imagine that few people would say that it’s actively harmful to try to decrease s-risks to digital minds (especially when it involves trying to prevent escalating conflicts, sadism, and retributivism). Most people would say it’s just a waste of money and effort. Most people agree that it’s important that animals used for food are well cared for. Not everyone votes for welfare improvements in ballot initiatives but a significant proportion of people do. And if we had infinite money, I don't think anyone would mind improving conditions for farmed anim...
Hi again Brian. I agree that your vision for the WAW movement is different from what WAW organizations are currently doing. I criticized the latter and don’t have a strong opinion on your vision of focusing on very small animals and reducing populations. I said that I don’t want to reduce populations partly because that usually includes reducing plant productivity which in turn causes more climate change, which might increase s-risks, x-risks, poverty, etc. But perhaps some interventions in your list could reduce populations without causing more envir...
Sorry, I still plan to look into microbes someday but now I don’t know when I’ll get to it anymore. I suddenly got quite busy and I am extremely slow at reading. For now I’ll just say this: I criticized the WAW movement as I currently see it. That is, a WAW movement that doesn’t focus on microbes, nor on decreasing wild animal populations. I currently simply don’t have an opinion about a WAW movement that would focus on such things. There were some restrictions on the kind of short-term interventions I could recommend in my intervention search. Interventions that would help microbes (or help wild populations just by reducing their populations) simply didn’t qualify.
Ok, let’s consider this for each type of farmed animal welfare intervention:
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Brian. I should’ve mentioned that I think that WAW might be tractable for people who think that reducing wild animal populations is good. I don’t think that reducing populations is good because:
Nice ^_^ One final thought. I mentioned that scale depends on multiple parameters:
You account for 2,3, and 4 with a separate variable “expected growth in animal production” which would be something like “projected number of farmed animals in 2050 divided by the current number of farmed animals”. And then also have a variable “Current human population”. I think it makes sense to split because these two variables matter for different reasons, and someone may put weight on one but not the other.