The Nonlinear Library EA - Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare by Ariel Simnegar
Nov 19, 2023
24:25
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare, published by Ariel Simnegar on November 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Thanks to Michael St. Jules for his comments.
Key Takeaways
The evidence that animal welfare dominates in neartermism is strong.
Open Philanthropy (OP) should scale up its animal welfare allocation over several years to approach a majority of OP's neartermist grantmaking.
If OP disagrees, they should practice
reasoning transparency by clarifying their views:
How much weight does OP's theory of welfare place on pleasure and pain, as opposed to nonhedonic goods?
Precisely how much more does OP value one unit of a human's welfare than one unit of another animal's welfare, just because the former is a human? How does OP derive this tradeoff?
How would OP's views have to change for OP to prioritize animal welfare in neartermism?
Summary
Rethink Priorities (RP)'s moral weight research endorses the claim that the best animal welfare interventions are orders of magnitude (1000x) more cost-effective than the best neartermist alternatives.
Avoiding this conclusion seems very difficult:
Rejecting hedonism (the view that only pleasure and pain have moral value) is not enough, because even if pleasure and pain are only 1% of what's important, the conclusion still goes through.
Rejecting unitarianism (the view that the moral value of a being's welfare is independent of the being's species) is not enough. Even if just for being human, one accords one unit of human welfare 100x the value of one unit of another animal's welfare, the conclusion still goes through.
Skepticism of formal philosophy is not enough, because the argument for animal welfare dominance can be made without invoking formal philosophy. By analogy, although formal philosophical arguments can be made for longtermism, they're
not required for longtermist cause prioritization.
Even if OP accepts RP's conclusion, they may have other reasons why they don't allocate most neartermist funding to animal welfare.
Though some of OP's possible reasons may be fair, if anything, they'd seem to imply a relaxation of this essay's conclusion rather than a dismissal.
It seems like these reasons would also broadly apply to AI x-risk within longtermism. However, OP didn't seem put off by these reasons when they allocated a majority of longtermist funding to AI x-risk in 2017, 2019, and 2021.
I request that OP clarify their views on whether or not animal welfare dominates in neartermism.
The Evidence Endorses Prioritizing Animal Welfare in Neartermism
GiveWell estimates that its top charity (Against Malaria Foundation) can prevent the loss of one year of life for every $100 or so.
We've estimated that corporate campaigns can spare over 200 hens from cage confinement for each dollar spent. If we roughly imagine that each hen gains two years of 25%-improved life, this is equivalent to one hen-life-year for every $0.01 spent.
If you value chicken life-years equally to human life-years, this implies that corporate campaigns do about 10,000x as much good per dollar as top charities. … If one values humans 10-100x as much, this still implies that corporate campaigns are a far better use of funds (100-1,000x).
Holden Karnofsky,
"Worldview Diversification" (2016)
"Worldview Diversification" (2016) describes OP's approach to cause prioritization. At the time, OP's research found that if the interests of animals are "at least 1-10% as important" as those of humans, then "animal welfare looks like an extraordinarily outstanding cause, potentially to the point of dominating other options".
After the better part of a decade, the latest and most rigorous research funded by OP has endorsed a stronger claim: Any significant moral weight for animals implies that OP should prioritize animal welfare in ne...
Thanks to Michael St. Jules for his comments.
Key Takeaways
The evidence that animal welfare dominates in neartermism is strong.
Open Philanthropy (OP) should scale up its animal welfare allocation over several years to approach a majority of OP's neartermist grantmaking.
If OP disagrees, they should practice
reasoning transparency by clarifying their views:
How much weight does OP's theory of welfare place on pleasure and pain, as opposed to nonhedonic goods?
Precisely how much more does OP value one unit of a human's welfare than one unit of another animal's welfare, just because the former is a human? How does OP derive this tradeoff?
How would OP's views have to change for OP to prioritize animal welfare in neartermism?
Summary
Rethink Priorities (RP)'s moral weight research endorses the claim that the best animal welfare interventions are orders of magnitude (1000x) more cost-effective than the best neartermist alternatives.
Avoiding this conclusion seems very difficult:
Rejecting hedonism (the view that only pleasure and pain have moral value) is not enough, because even if pleasure and pain are only 1% of what's important, the conclusion still goes through.
Rejecting unitarianism (the view that the moral value of a being's welfare is independent of the being's species) is not enough. Even if just for being human, one accords one unit of human welfare 100x the value of one unit of another animal's welfare, the conclusion still goes through.
Skepticism of formal philosophy is not enough, because the argument for animal welfare dominance can be made without invoking formal philosophy. By analogy, although formal philosophical arguments can be made for longtermism, they're
not required for longtermist cause prioritization.
Even if OP accepts RP's conclusion, they may have other reasons why they don't allocate most neartermist funding to animal welfare.
Though some of OP's possible reasons may be fair, if anything, they'd seem to imply a relaxation of this essay's conclusion rather than a dismissal.
It seems like these reasons would also broadly apply to AI x-risk within longtermism. However, OP didn't seem put off by these reasons when they allocated a majority of longtermist funding to AI x-risk in 2017, 2019, and 2021.
I request that OP clarify their views on whether or not animal welfare dominates in neartermism.
The Evidence Endorses Prioritizing Animal Welfare in Neartermism
GiveWell estimates that its top charity (Against Malaria Foundation) can prevent the loss of one year of life for every $100 or so.
We've estimated that corporate campaigns can spare over 200 hens from cage confinement for each dollar spent. If we roughly imagine that each hen gains two years of 25%-improved life, this is equivalent to one hen-life-year for every $0.01 spent.
If you value chicken life-years equally to human life-years, this implies that corporate campaigns do about 10,000x as much good per dollar as top charities. … If one values humans 10-100x as much, this still implies that corporate campaigns are a far better use of funds (100-1,000x).
Holden Karnofsky,
"Worldview Diversification" (2016)
"Worldview Diversification" (2016) describes OP's approach to cause prioritization. At the time, OP's research found that if the interests of animals are "at least 1-10% as important" as those of humans, then "animal welfare looks like an extraordinarily outstanding cause, potentially to the point of dominating other options".
After the better part of a decade, the latest and most rigorous research funded by OP has endorsed a stronger claim: Any significant moral weight for animals implies that OP should prioritize animal welfare in ne...