A lot of people in the effective-altruism and utilitarian communities give to developing-world charities. GWWC requires that donations be given to charities that benefit people in the developing world for them to count toward the pledge. Most of the donations made by 80k members go to developing-world charities. Peter Singer promotes giving to developing-world charities. GiveWell focuses on developing-world health, though its focus is expanding with GiveWell Labs.

So I'm wondering why so many smart, compassionate people favor developing-world charities. They seem like a good bet if you're not aware of more-marginal causes, but they don't make a whole lot of sense to me otherwise. There are far more animals than humans, and there will be far more future humans/post-humans/animals than there are current humans. I'm wondering whether I'm missing something. Here are the explanations I came up with.

Evaluation. Some developing-world charities have been vetted, and some outstanding ones have been identified by GiveWell and GWWC. Animal charities haven't been evaluated nearly as thoroughly. Existential-risk charities seem even worse in this respect, and they're inherently hard to evaluate.

If this is the problem, it seems that people should just fund evaluation of the under-evaluated charities, since the value of information is so great. If this isn't practical right now, they could wait.

Popularity. Developing-world health is a more popular cause than animal welfare or existential risk. If many people believe something, it's probably for a reason—maybe even a good one. Better to follow the conventional wisdom now, and change our minds later when we have more information.

Popularity might be a useful heuristic, but there ultimately has to be a rationale. Otherwise, this is just circular reasoning.

Uncertainty about the future. People might resist giving to organizations such as the SIAI because of the uncertainty about its effects. It could be making things better, it could be making things worse, or it could simply be irrelevant.

But giving to developing-world health has exactly the same problem. The vast majority of the value of such giving is concentrated in the far future. Will giving to developing-world health increase or decrease existential risk? It's not clear, but this factor dominates the expected-value calculation.

Public image. It's easier to get people to give to developing-world health than to animal welfare or existential-risk reduction. So maybe we should promote what's more palatable, and focus on more-marginal causes later.

There's something to this. Maybe it's better to try to get prospective do-gooders to start giving to mainstream charities. But it still seems that we should focus our own money on whatever causes are most effective. It might be the case that my picture of which organizations like-minded people give to is distorted for this reason (i.e., people are trying to seem more mainstream)

Other (less-good) explanations. Animals aren't sentient, or if they are, they don't matter. Future generations don't matter, or we can apply a discount rate to their welfare. Third-world charities produce tangible benefits, while existential-risk and animal-welfare charities have effects that are delayed or indirect. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett fund developing-world health. Developing-world health is a "sure" bet.

Are there other (good) reasons, or did I not do justice to some of the ones I listed?

You mostly summed up the reasons why I don't donate to developing-world charities. And some of these objections to other charities are quite valid.

Evaluation and uncertainty about the future/effectiveness of intervention are my main reasons for being frustrated with the options of animal welfare and x-risk charities I know.

Popularity and public image are actually good reasons for private donors to not give to those charities, because other people are more likely to address those.

If this isn't practical right now, they could wait.

Yup. I am waiting.

I accept the Doomsday argument, and thus consider existential risk certain enough that it's not really worth trying to stop.

Thanks for making this thread Pat! I had been thinking just the same thing!

Hedonic Treader wrote:

If this isn't practical right now, they could wait.

Yup. I am waiting.

So what's your stratefy if you dont mind me asking? wait and build your resources?

@DanielLC: would you not therefore give to non-human animal charities?

I think Arepo may have the most convincing argument on this I've heard, hopefully he'll show up

Ruairi wrote:So what's your stratefy if you dont mind me asking? wait and build your resources?

Wait, build my resources, gather information, and try to evaluate how my own disutility from more work trades off against altruistic utility from charity.

I have not found a way to be really productive without being miserable, or to be happy without being unproductive. This is a problem. I try to find the most rational utilitarian answer to these trade-offs, but I frequently suffer from cognitive overload due to the complexities.

It would be easy if you had a maximally efficient charity that says, "You can buy X hedons in the universe for $Y", but of course there's no such thing. (I wouldn't trust such an answer anyway.)

@DanielLC: would you not therefore give to non-human animal charities?

I don't consider animals as sentient as humans. If I find an animal charity that's still better, I'd give there.

oh right, how much less sentient? How many pigs are worth one human? And why?

Short version of humans vs animals for me:

a. Helping humans provides benefits that compound over time for a very long time.
b. These benefits greatly exceed any downstream costs of having humans be more prosperous.
c. Helping animals may have benefits that compound for a little while, but not plausibly for nearly as long.
d. The long-term compounding benefits of helping humans put a huge multiplier on the value of helping humans.
e. Because of this multiplier, helping humans beats helping animals.

On the poor vs. meat-eater issue, I expect that factory farming will end on a short enough time scale (in super long terms), to offset damages. (I also generally have much less sympathy for animals than humans, especially animals like insects, and I don't think this is entirely due to any factual mistake, so I stand by this to a considerable extent.) I also believe that helping humans is a useful way of speeding up the destruction of nature, so if you're worried about wild animal suffering, you should seriously consider helping of humans as a tool.

Given this view, human helping should be optimized for long run growth. I accept this and I eagerly await GiveWell's investigation of meta-research as a promising cause in this category. In the mean time, I think helping insecticide treated nets and deworming are an extremely cheap way of buying human empowerment, which produces growth.

I think if you want to make an argument that helping animals is better than helping humans, you have to appeal to very speculative futuristic considerations, such as permanently altering some large share of humanity's values. I think it would be a big mistake to point to Alan Dawrst's write-up about what donations to Vegan Outreach can do for animals and think that the case in favor of helping animals over humans is closed.

I'm uncertain about direct x-risk reduction vs. ordinary helping of humans. It's important to remember that ordinary human helping may be x-risk positive because it may reduce the amount of time that humans spend in an unusually high x-risk period of their existence (there are opposing considerations though). Also, though Nick Bostrom makes it sound obvious that x-risk reduction beats general promotion of growth in his Astronomical Waste paper, I think the point is not obvious. If you look at controllable events from human history that sped up growth and controllable events in human history that reduced x-risk directly, it is a real toss up to say which did better on the long term scale.

All things considered, I lean in favor of x-risk reduction and think donations to 80,000 Hours is the best bet (disclaimer: I'm affiliated with CEA).

oh right, how much less sentient? How many pigs are worth one human? And why?

The obvious answer would be that it's proportional to brain mass. The doomsday argument can be slightly modified to suggest that it's less. It's more likely to be a particularly intelligent species if intelligent species's are more sentient.

utilitymonster, what's your name? Wondering if we've met in person without knowing now (PM if - like me - you prefer keep your online and offline identity separate outside the EA community)

Pat - developing world charities as opposed to what? Donors have to give to something, and no cause is obviously the best. DWCs are one of the strongest contenders, so doesn't seem at all surprising that they receive a lot of EA support.

utilitymonster and Arepo could you guys please eloborate on "Helping humans provides benefits that compound over time for a very long time".

Is the idea that happier humans help you make more happy humans? Could you elaborate more on this whole idea in general please?

"Helping humans provides benefits that compound over time"

Human population size and quality of life has been on a firm upward trajectory of exponential growth since the industrial revolution. If someone had done something like "save one life" or "have a child" at the time of the industrial revolution, the benefits (and harms) of this would have compounded exponentially over that time period, putting a huge multiplier on the value of the action. This is a standard economic justification for using a discount rate. The mechanism is basically just one person being more empowered and then making beneficial trades, increasing specialization, and then there are diffuse benefits eventually distributed over almost the whole population. Nothing comparable is true about helping animals unless your ultimate justification for helping animals has to do with indirect benefits to humans.

Exponential growth will eventually end (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/l ... rowth.html), but there is still a lot of room above us.

Arepo wrote:developing world charities as opposed to what?

Anything else, including existential-risk reduction, meta-charities, donor-adivsed funds (waiting), and animal welfare. Each will appeal to different groups of people, but I'm just looking for a coherent, informed set of beliefs that would favor developing-world charities over everything else.

utilitymonster wrote:Given this view, human helping should be optimized for long run growth. I accept this and I eagerly await GiveWell's investigation of meta-research as a promising cause in this category. In the mean time, I think helping insecticide treated nets and deworming are an extremely cheap way of buying human empowerment, which produces growth.

Exponentially compounding benefits could definitely be a game-changer. I'm not convinced, however, that developing-world charities are the best way of bringing these about.

* Is there evidence that bed nets and deworming promote growth? Opponents of aid often say that the countries that received the most aid experience the slowest growth. Obviously, there are some problems with that argument, but is there evidence that these sorts of interventions increase economic growth?

* Promoting open borders and free trade is a more focused way of promoting economic growth. On the one hand, it's hard to evaluate the success of lobbying and advocacy. On the other hand, eliminating trade barriers would directly increase economic growth, while it's not clear that bed nets or deworming would. It seems that open borders and free trade deserve more attention than they get.

* Here's a bad argument (one that you didn't make): "In the past, innovations and improvements in living standards had compounding benefits. Therefore, innovations and improvements in living standards today will have compounding benefits." If humans go extinct, the benefits won't have a chance to compound. What's the annual return for an investment that doubles every year for nine years and then loses all its value in the tenth year? Not very good. Existential-risk reduction seems more important than a slight increase in the economic growth rate.

utilitymonster wrote:All things considered, I lean in favor of x-risk reduction and think donations to 80,000 Hours is the best bet.

This makes sense. But I still don't understand why people give to DWCs instead of x-risk reduction or 80,000 Hours.

DanielLC wrote:I accept the Doomsday argument, and thus consider existential risk certain enough that it's not really worth trying to stop.

This makes sense. But can't you prevent more brain-mass–adjusted suffering by giving to animal-welfare charities than to DWCs?

Forgive my perhaps niave questions (if they are niave) but how do you know its extra happiness that gets compounded and not unhappiness? Are you banking on in vitro mean happening soon?

Exponentially compounding benefits could definitely be a game-changer. I'm not convinced, however, that developing-world charities are the best way of bringing these about.

It's totally non-obvious. I think it's a plausible contender for "best given current knowledge."

* Is there evidence that bed nets and deworming promote growth? Opponents of aid often say that the countries that received the most aid experience the slowest growth. Obviously, there are some problems with that argument, but is there evidence that these sorts of interventions increase economic growth?

People sometimes reason "It is unclear whether aid in general increased econ growth" --> "X is a type of aid" --> "It is unclear whether X increased econ growth" --> "It unclear whether aid even helps people"

I think you at most got to the second to last step. But I think this kind of argument fails. Even very skeptical folks like Bill Easterly think that deworming and net distribution do a lot of good. And there is some RCT evidence that deworming increases future earnings of schoolchildren by a substantial amount (see Baird et. al. 2011, "Worms at Work" is the title I think). The intuitive argument is just that healthier people can more effectively participate in local economies, which produces economic growth.

* Promoting open borders and free trade is a more focused way of promoting economic growth. On the one hand, it's hard to evaluate the success of lobbying and advocacy. On the other hand, eliminating trade barriers would directly increase economic growth, while it's not clear that bed nets or deworming would. It seems that open borders and free trade deserve more attention than they get.

Support the idea, don't know of any intervention that has a sufficiently high chance of working to be attractive.

* Here's a bad argument (one that you didn't make): "In the past, innovations and improvements in living standards had compounding benefits. Therefore, innovations and improvements in living standards today will have compounding benefits." If humans go extinct, the benefits won't have a chance to compound. What's the annual return for an investment that doubles every year for nine years and then loses all its value in the tenth year? Not very good. Existential-risk reduction seems more important than a slight increase in the economic growth rate.

Let p be the probability of long term survival. Multiply by any benefits I described earlier by p. I don't think it substantially changes the argument.

x-risk reduction vs. growth promotion is a difficult issue which I haven't seen discussed at the level of rigor I'd like to warrant a confident the level of confidence that I see many pro-x-risk people as having. This depends a lot on how hard it is to reduce x-risk. If you think your favorite charity can reduce x-risk by 1/1000, then you probably should focus on x-risk reduction. I guess I side with the x-risk reduction folks, but I sometimes worry that I put too high of probability on longshots because I have a hard time distinguishing fuzzy things that should be 10^-6 from fuzzy things that should be 10^-3, or some such.

Forgive my perhaps niave questions (if they are niave) but how do you know its extra happiness that gets compounded and not unhappiness? Are you banking on in vitro mean happening soon?

To some extent, I'm banking on "not factory farming, or anything too similar to it, forever" and "humans dominate more of nature in the long run". I'm not wedded to any conjunctive explanation of how that's going to happen. I don't claim to know these things.

Hm, seems to me like if you do think humans will go extinct sometime soon then invitro meat needs to be widespread significantly before that to go for what you're proposing.

And is it really compounding? What would that like look in real life? So you make one person healthy and they add to the community and make more people healthy? But does it really keep going? Why isn't everyone already healthy by now then? Or am I mis-understanding?

And is it really compounding? What would that like look in real life? So you make one person healthy and they add to the community and make more people healthy? But does it really keep going? Why isn't everyone already healthy by now then? Or am I mis-understanding?

Answer: you help one person and they make trades with many people, who in turn make trades with many people, etc. It actually seems very unlikely to just stop, given how interconnected the global economy is. Why aren't we all healthy yet? It's not compounding of health but compounding of wealth and population, and it's exponential growth, not instantaneous growth to the top.

Hm, seems to me like if you do think humans will go extinct sometime soon then invitro meat needs to be widespread significantly before that to go for what you're proposing.

I think this was addressed by my point about "let p be the probability of..." etc. As long as you're not really sure that humans are going to go extinct before factory farming is abandoned or very shortly after, the argument basically works, even for values that put a lot of weight on animal welfare.

I'll add that I don't think anything I've said addresses the more speculative worries about future suffering.

(Coming late to this thread.)

Excellent post, Pat! I think you hit most of the main reasons why people give to developing-world charities, and I agree with your critique of those reasons.

And thanks to everyone else for the dicussion. While I don't agree with everyone's conclusions, each one of you made excellent arguments.

Hedonic Treader, any ideas where you would give if you were forced to do so now? At least, what category?

Hedonic Treader wrote:I have not found a way to be really productive without being miserable, or to be happy without being unproductive. This is a problem. I try to find the most rational utilitarian answer to these trade-offs, but I frequently suffer from cognitive overload due to the complexities.

What constitutes being "unproductive"? I think that reading, spending time on forums like this, learning new things about the universe, etc. can be very productive in utilitarian terms, if not in remunerative terms. Might you be interested in becoming a professional researcher -- say, about risks of future suffering, or about neuroscience, or about something else?

As far as the compounding argument, I disagree that animal charities don't have the same degree of compounding that human charities have. Since the main long-term goal of animal charities is to increase concern for animal suffering, veg outreach (and wild-animal-suffering outreach) multiplies itself through a cycle of more vegetarians -> more donors -> more vegetarians, and through exponential (or at least logistic) spread of memes.

What's more, I think the value of meme-spreading outweighs the value of accelerated human progress, because humans are going to advance eventually whether we prevent malaria or not, but concern to avoid creating more suffering by wild animals (and artificial sentients) might never happen if we don't work on it.

utilitymonster wrote:I also believe that helping humans is a useful way of speeding up the destruction of nature, so if you're worried about wild animal suffering, you should seriously consider helping of humans as a tool.

This is true, and it's one reason I do favor developing-world charities over nothing. But it doesn't have a clear impact on wild-animals in the long-term future, unlike meme-spreading.

Pat wrote:

Arepo wrote:developing world charities as opposed to what?

Anything else, including existential-risk reduction, meta-charities, donor-adivsed funds (waiting), and animal welfare. Each will appeal to different groups of people, but I'm just looking for a coherent, informed set of beliefs that would favor developing-world charities over everything else.

As utilitymonster implied, I don’t think you’ll find such a confident argument here; there’s too much uncertainty about all these goals, so there’s decent possibility that someone who favours one category has overlooked or underrated some major element of another one.

The only thing I’d add to what he’s said here is that if you begin with roughly equal credence the potential value of donations to each type of cause (and there’s no obvious reason why you should, except perhaps the wide uncertainty of them all), developing world charities should be relatively more valuable because of the array of organisations working on them who’ve been researched extensively by Givewell and GWWC. That means if you give to a DWC recommended by them, you can be reasonably confident you’re doing about the best we could currently do in terms of developing world improvement. The others suffer in this comparison:

--Meta-charities ditto (though in this case it’s pretty much impossible for them to be rated in any meaningful way, since they’d basically have to review each other), though I suspect giving to Givewell and CEA to the point where they can’t use further funding is pretty close to the value of DWCs - and possibly much higher

--Donor-advised funds I don’t really know much about, but I think I’ve seen them criticised around here (by Alan?) for reasons that sounded convincing. In general donating to what you think are the best causes now probably beats any interest rate the market can give you (because of the compound benefits described above, which I suspect exceed any market return). The best reason for waiting would be if you expect someone to find a significantly better cause to put your money in in the fairly near future, but the only such examples I know of are GWWC’s Sabin and RESULTS research, both of which they seem to think are

--UM’s already discussed animal welfare. I’d add that it’s a slight casualty of circumstance, too – Givewell have denied any interest at all in it and while GWWC seem theoretically more open to looking into it, they’ve so far prioritised other research ahead of it. So while the possibility space has been well-explored, it’s harder to be confident about what the most effective group has been (obviously Alan’s done some research here, which must be worth quite a lot, but he’s only one person working in an amateur capacity, so we have to be cautious about putting too much confidence in his conclusions)

--X-risk only has a couple of organisations working on it, so (arguably) less of the possibility-space of X-risk research has been explored. None of those organisations have been reviewed and rated highly by disinterested assessors. (also most X-risk research in practice doesn't seem to have much real world-relevance outside the cause the researchers are focusing on, so again it loses out on compounding benefits

I would like to see the metacharities put some effort into animal/environmental* causes though, since it seems like they could make some quick gains by applying the same cost-benefit methodology to the hundreds of groups that exist in both, whereas with developing world health metaevaluation they might have plucked most of the low hanging fruit.**

* I know there’s a case for environmental degradation being a good thing, but at the very least where it affects humans – climate change for eg – there’s the possibility of the same type of compounding gains from reducing it, not to mention some possible x-risk bonuses from reducing wars and social instability fought over resources etc.

** I have no idea if they actually have yet – UM might be able to offer more info on this.

Arepo wrote:Donor-advised funds I don’t really know much about, but I think I’ve seen them criticised around here (by Alan?) for reasons that sounded convincing.

Heh, I have a donor-advised fund myself. But yes, I have also made the point -- originally stolen from Gaverick, who deserves the credit for it -- that returns from charity are probably higher than returns from capital markets. The big argument for waiting is, of course, "returns to wisdom" -- which is the only way you can potentially get a 1 trillion percent annual compounding of value, short of fantasy scenarios where the Lords of the Matrix give you superpowers.

Some obligatory references: "Donate vs. Invest" and "Donation Tax Deductions."

Arepo wrote:Givewell have denied any interest at all in it and while GWWC seem theoretically more open to looking into it, they’ve so far prioritised other research ahead of it.

Of course, GiveWell has openly acknowledged that this is partly because of their own values rather than the area itself, but yes, they claim it's also partly because of the area. It's also because there's 10.000 times less academic research on animal outreach than on developing-world health, so these things will almost necessarily be "less rigorous" until research catches up.

Arepo wrote:None of those organisations have been reviewed and rated highly by disinterested assessors.

Of course, presumably many of the donors were disinterested before they started donating? (I'm not necessarily defending xrisk groups; I'm just making a general comment.)

And GiveWell isn't disinterested -- just "differently interested." (Political correctness, yo.)

Pat, I think you omit the main reason:

Speciesism. Most people in the effective-altruism and utilitarian communities are speciesist, and they support the unjustified discrimination of non-human animals.

utilitymonster wrote:Short version of humans vs animals for me:

a. Helping humans provides benefits that compound over time for a very long time.
b. These benefits greatly exceed any downstream costs of having humans be more prosperous.
c. Helping animals may have benefits that compound for a little while, but not plausibly for nearly as long.
d. The long-term compounding benefits of helping humans put a huge multiplier on the value of helping humans.
e. Because of this multiplier, helping humans beats helping animals.

I think a, b, c and d don't cause e.

Total suffering of farmed and wild animals is very higher than total suffering of humans. We can avoid a lot of more suffering if we help animals than if we help humans, even if we accept a, b, c and d.

utilitymonster wrote: I also believe that helping humans is a useful way of speeding up the destruction of nature, so if you're worried about wild animal suffering, you should seriously consider helping of humans as a tool.

I think that destroying nature isn't the most cost-effective thing that we can do. There are another possibilities, like promotion of anti-speciesism or increasing concern for wild-animal suffering.

If someone thinks that promotion of anti-speciesism or increasing concern for wild-animal suffering are inneffective, that doesn't cause that helping humans is the best choice. If someone thinks that destruction of nature is a good choice, why helping of humans as a tool? It would be a better choice to destroy nature directly.

Daniel Dorado wrote:Most people in the effective-altruism and utilitarian communities are speciesist, and they support the unjustified discrimination of non-human animals.

I wouldn't go so far as to say most of us (e.g., on Felicifia or 80K Hours) are speciesist, except perhaps unconsciously, but there's no doubt that this is *the biggest reason* why people at large help humans more than animals. It's true even for GiveWell:

I really don’t understand why anyone would waffle on this issue because it seems incredibly clear. In case anyone forgot, we eat animals; we use them for hard labor; we keep them as pets. We don’t generally assign animals the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Why? Because they’re animals.

But to be fair, I should also quote from Holden's follow-up comment:

This is a very old post, but I wanted to comment since it continues to get strong reactions.

I personally agree with the basic idea that, all else equal, it’s much better to help a human than to help an animal. However, I do not agree with the words above: “giving to charities that help animals effects almost no good.”

Daniel Dorado wrote:I think that destroying nature isn't the most cost-effective thing that we can do. There are another possibilities, like promotion of anti-speciesism or increasing concern for wild-animal suffering.

Yes.

Daniel Dorado wrote:If someone thinks that promotion of anti-speciesism or increasing concern for wild-animal suffering are inneffective, that doesn't cause that helping humans is the best choice. If someone thinks that destruction of nature is a good choice, why helping of humans as a tool? It would be a better choice to destroy nature directly.

Yes, exactly. The claim that we should donate to developing-world health in order to destroy the environment seems implausible, because the cause has not been chosen with maximal wildlife reduction in mind. Maybe it would turn out after extensive analysis that the same charity that maximizes GiveWell's health criteria also maximally prevents suffering in the wild, but this seems unlikely.

I don't think human helping > animal helping because I think that the most important consideration is what destroys wildlife the most. It was just a passing comment. However, I think people are seriously underestimating the potential of human empowerment as a tool for destroying nature. This really is relevant for those of you who claim that stopping wild animal suffering is the best cause.

Thought experiment: Two Romans want to destroy as much wildlife as possible. Roman #1 tries to come up with a sophisticated, more targeted method of destroying wildlife, such as torching forests, persuading others to torch forests, starting a logging company, spreading anti-speciesist memes, preaching vegetarianism, or discrediting the people who preach reverence for nature. Roman #2 just tries to empower human beings as much as he can. Roman #2 would probably destroy more wildlife than Roman #1, once you account for all the long-term compounding of that human empowerment (note that it either wasn't exponential growth back then, or was much slower growth).

That's supposed to illustrate why I think it is not true that "directly destroy nature" is the best way to destroy nature.

Thanks, utilitymonster. It's always nice to hear others' suggestions about wild animals.

utilitymonster wrote:However, I think people are seriously underestimating the potential of human empowerment as a tool for destroying nature. This really is relevant for those of you who claim that stopping wild animal suffering is the best cause.

Could be, but it doesn't compete with promoting antispeciesism and making people not want to spread life into space / run sentient simulations / etc. Those speculative scenarios outweigh suffering on earth by orders of magnitude in expectation.

However, I think people are seriously underestimating the potential of human empowerment as a tool for destroying nature. This really is relevant for those of you who claim that stopping wild animal suffering is the best cause.

Could be, but it doesn't compete with promoting antispeciesism and making people not want to spread life into space / run sentient simulations / etc. Those speculative scenarios outweigh suffering on earth by orders of magnitude in expectation.

I agree that my arguments have not addressed that issue. My arguments only address folks who are working on animal helping that has nothing to do with speculative far future stuff, and think that animal helping is obviously better than human helping. The speculative far future stuff calls for separate analysis.

Arepo wrote:developing world charities as opposed to what?

Pat wrote:Anything else, including existential-risk reduction, meta-charities, donor-advised funds (waiting), and animal welfare. Each will appeal to different groups of people, but I'm just looking for a coherent, informed set of beliefs that would favor developing-world charities over everything else.

Arepo wrote:As utilitymonster implied, I don’t think you’ll find such a confident argument here; there’s too much uncertainty about all these goals, so there’s decent possibility that someone who favours one category has overlooked or underrated some major element of another one.

I know that it doesn't make sense to be certain about which cause is best. But a lot of people do give to developing-world charities, and their behavior makes sense only if they haven't considered the alternatives or if they have considered the alternatives and see developing-world charities as the best cause. I want to know what those in the second group think.

Arepo wrote:The only thing I’d add to what he’s said here is that if you begin with roughly equal credence the potential value of donations to each type of cause (and there’s no obvious reason why you should, except perhaps the wide uncertainty of them all), developing world charities should be relatively more valuable because of the array of organisations working on them who’ve been researched extensively by Givewell and GWWC. That means if you give to a DWC recommended by them, you can be reasonably confident you’re doing about the best we could currently do in terms of developing world improvement.

I agree, but it seems to me that the prima facie case for DWCs is weaker than that for meta-charity, existential risk, or animal welfare. Far more money goes to DWCs than to the alternatives I mentioned, so we should expect a lower marginal return. Ignorance and biases probably explain the preference for DWCs over the more abstract, delayed, or non-human benefits offered by the alternatives.

Even if I'm wrong about this, though, it seems to me that DWCs would be a poor choice. That DWCs have been investigated by GiveWell and GWWC doesn't seem like a good reason to donate to them. This reasoning reminds me of the joke about the drunk who looked for his keys under the street lamp because that's where the light was. It would make more sense to shine more light on other areas where the keys may be, by funding research about charities in other areas.

Arepo wrote:--X-risk only has a couple of organisations working on it, so (arguably) less of the possibility-space of X-risk research has been explored. None of those organisations have been reviewed and rated highly by disinterested assessors. (also most X-risk research in practice doesn't seem to have much real world-relevance outside the cause the researchers are focusing on, so again it loses out on compounding benefits

I'd think that as long as an x-risk organization actually reduces existential risk, and as long as that's a good thing, donations to the organization would have compounding benefits in the sense that if everybody dies, we miss out on all compounding benefits.

Let's say a single mom decides to invest all her savings in a single stock that she judges to have the highest expected return instead of buying life insurance because life insurance (at least the kind that she was considering) doesn't offer compounding returns. The company goes bankrupt and she dies, so all her children starve to death. Another single mom buys enough life insurance that her children could do OK if she dies, and she invests the rest of her savings so that they might be able to attend college.

Our society seems to be following the first mom's strategy. There are lots of people inventing new things, empowering others, and educating themselves. There are almost no people trying to save humanity from extinction.

utilitymonster wrote:That's supposed to illustrate why I think it is not true that "directly destroy nature" is the best way to destroy nature.

If an American wants to destroy nature, I see at least 3 choices:

1. To support developing-world charities.
2. To destroy nature directly.
3. To support an anti-evironmentalist charity.

It's not clear for me if 1 is more effective than 2. A pyromaniac can be very destructive.

But I think 3 is more effective than 1 and 2. An anti-evironmentalist charity could lobby for politicians that destroy a lot of nature, lobby against environmentalist charities and so on.

The big argument for waiting is, of course, "returns to wisdom" -- which is the only way you can potentially get a 1 trillion percent annual compounding of value, short of fantasy scenarios where the Lords of the Matrix give you superpowers.

On reflection, this seems potentially self-defeating in practice. If you know nothing about metaresearch, it's surely better to give now (there's a chance our knowledge of charities will get worse etc). If you know enough to have a specific expectation that some group will discover something even better, then it seems like rather than investing you might do best to fund that group - unless you think their only effect will be to change your donation habits. Given the amount of money Givewell have redirected, this seems unlikely.

Even if you think that group is unlikely to find anything better but is merely the best-equipped group to do so, it might still be worth funding them so that if they produce a null result, other people following the wait-and-see approach will be able to start giving their money away to the best causes sooner.

Needs a more rigorous argument, I know - this only just occurred to me.

Arepo wrote:Givewell have denied any interest at all in it and while GWWC seem theoretically more open to looking into it, they’ve so far prioritised other research ahead of it.

Of course, GiveWell has openly acknowledged that this is partly because of their own values rather than the area itself, but yes, they claim it's also partly because of the area.

Yeah, I meant to caveat against the idea that this was any fault of the animal groups, but it's still a factor against supporting them.

Of course, presumably many of the donors were disinterested before they started donating? (I'm not necessarily defending xrisk groups; I'm just making a general comment.)

Sure, I'm thinking of a thorough professional Givewell-esque assessment rather than individuals' retrospectively reported decisions, though.

And GiveWell isn't disinterested -- just "differently interested." (Political correctness, yo.)

They might be that true, but I'd say they're definitely disinterested in the sense of having little stake in the outcome (pedantry, yo )

Pat wrote:I agree, but it seems to me that the prima facie case for DWCs is weaker than that for meta-charity, existential risk, or animal welfare.

I was not trying to say this was necessarily a big factor - I basically agree with what utilitymonster's written here and think it's main argument against animal welfare causes at least. I was just adding that for anyone who does think it's close, there's this other factor.

Far more money goes to DWCs than to the alternatives I mentioned, so we should expect a lower marginal return.

Not clear to me - 'DWCs' is a huge umbrella term, and many of the groups in it are very underfunded. That's one of the main reasons GWWC and GW found such huge discrepancies between various groups who'd come under it.

Ignorance and biases probably explain the preference for DWCs

I think this is just equivalent to saying you disagree with them.

I'd think that as long as an x-risk organization actually reduces existential risk,

I have a big problem with x-risk organisations precisely because people freely make this assumption on little evidence. It's very hard for an x-risk-research org to show that they've actually acheived anything, since generally speaking they'll struggle to show proof of concept. If something we hadn't realised might kill us doesn't kill us, it's going to be hard to know whether it was ever a genuine threat. If it does kill us, the argument is obviously irrelevant.

What's more, x-risk organisations can't just use Pascalian reasoning to say 'x-risk is so important that you shouldn't fund anyone else', because every organisation has some effect on it. Ones whose economic benefits compound might well have a much better long-term prospect than short-sightedly funding a few underinformed researchers in the relative dark ages rather than - say - building a robust economy that gets us greater scientific wisdom sooner and greater total resources to throw at the problem in 50 years time.

I don't usually like burden of proof arguments, but I think they apply very thoroughly here - DWC (and animal welfare causes) already have great cost-benefit ratios, so to take a rational altruist's money away from them, x-risk orgs need to show not only that they reduce x-risk, but that they do it better than anyone else.

And when you account for compounding welfare benefits, x-risk no longer has dominion over Pascalian arguments a 1% chance of saving 10^10 lives might amount to 10^8 ‘lives saved’, but if those lives will otherwise have 10 hedons apiece (meaning you’ve bought 10^9 expected hedons), then assuming you’d instead gone for a 1% chance of increasing their welfare by a factor of 10 conditional on them surviving, you’d have bought up to (0.99*10^10*10)/100 hedons – about the same gain.

So then numbers would really start to matter again – you’d be looking at whether expected hedons conditional on survival were a better buy than hedons generated by avoiding x-risk. DWCs might well be a primary candidate for the former, since they have more memetic value and wider benefits than X-risk research.

Our society seems to be following the first mom's strategy.

Disagree. Our society has a few dominant cells in the single mum's liver sucking huge amounts of resources in, and not really bothering to clean up afterwards primarily to the benefit of the same few liver cells and their progeny. To put it another way, I don't think this is a useful analogy

Arepo wrote:If you know nothing about metaresearch, it's surely better to give now (there's a chance our knowledge of charities will get worse etc).

Sorry, could you explain how our knowledge would get worse over time?

Arepo wrote:Even if you think that group is unlikely to find anything better but is merely the best-equipped group to do so, it might still be worth funding them so that if they produce a null result

By "returns to wisdom" I'm thinking about none of the scenarios you listed. Rather, I mean that we ourselves learn about more possibilities, more ideas, more arguments, and get more experience with how the world works. This isn't the result of research by a specific group. It's just about us getting older and wiser.

Seven years ago, I knew basically nothing about insect suffering, strong AI, the doomsday argument, the simulation argument, anthropics, decision theory, reinforcement learning, or many of the other topics discussed here. I didn't know that Vegan Outreach or The Humane League existed. I thought preserving fauna-rich wildlife was a really important cause. I had just begun to learn that animals could feel conscious pain. What a difference seven years of wisdom makes!

Arepo wrote:They might be that true, but I'd say they're definitely disinterested in the sense of having little stake in the outcome (pedantry, yo )

Haha. But the xrisk, animal-welfare, etc. donors have no more stake in the outcome at the beginning of their research process, unless you're thinking that many of them donate for other reasons (e.g., to fit in with the social group).

Arepo wrote:you’d be looking at whether expected hedons conditional on survival were a better buy than hedons generated by avoiding x-risk. DWCs might well be a primary candidate for the former, since they have more memetic value

I would make the same claim except replacing "DWCs" by "antispeciesism charities."

Brian Tomasik wrote:

Sorry, could you explain how our knowledge would get worse over time?

I didn't mean that as a serious suggestion (though I suppose you could be relying on people with less competence/more difference in values than you realised), just making the point that our belief that time leads to greater knowledge of charities is contingent on what we know about the world. So if we expect our knowledge of charities to get better, (I was suggesting, though given your next point this is much less relevant to you than I thought) it must be because we expect some group to make it better.

By "returns to wisdom" I'm thinking about none of the scenarios you listed. Rather, I mean that we ourselves learn about more possibilities, more ideas, more arguments, and get more experience with how the world works. This isn't the result of research by a specific group. It's just about us getting older and wiser.

Ah. That's a bit different then, though now there really is the possibility (and eventually the inevitability) of us getting older and less wise.

Also, if you can conceive of data that might change your mind, you might still do better by paying someone to look into it rather than looking into it yourself. If you can't imagine any such data, it seems like a mistake to forgo the compound benefits of wealth if only because you'll never be able to tell when the optimal wisdom moment is.

Arepo wrote:just making the point that our belief that time leads to greater knowledge of charities is contingent on what we know about the world.

This is an unimportant point, but I still don't see how our actual knowledge of the world can get worse over time unless we forget things, lose data, or rely on old studies that used to be true but are true no longer.

Arepo wrote:Also, if you can conceive of data that might change your mind, you might still do better by paying someone to look into it rather than looking into it yourself.

Yes, although there will always remain "things you never knew you never knew" (to quote Pocahontas). Sometimes a random walk through life experiences is more globally informative than a highly rigorous but myopic analysis.

Arepo wrote:

Ignorance and biases probably explain the preference for DWCs

I think this is just equivalent to saying you disagree with them.

I should have explained that better. By ignorance, I meant that (for example) most people don't realize that there's a good chance humans will go extinct in the next few hundred years, that animals account for most of the suffering on earth, that you can't just give money to a charity that sent you a solicitation and expect that the money will anywhere near as much good as if you made an informed decision. Basically, the things that Alan mentioned:

Alan Dawrst wrote: Seven years ago, I knew basically nothing about insect suffering, strong AI, the doomsday argument, the simulation argument, anthropics, decision theory, reinforcement learning, or many of the other topics discussed here. I didn't know that Vegan Outreach or The Humane League existed. I thought preserving fauna-rich wildlife was a really important cause. I had just begun to learn that animals could feel conscious pain. What a difference seven years of wisdom makes!

Eliezer Yudkowsky, senior crackpot at the Singularity Institution for the Arrantly Insane, has a list of biases that militate against concern about existential risk. Some of the ones that make the most sense to me are
* Availability: Threats to the survival of humanity necessarily don't make many dramatic appearances, while most people know that people in the developing world are poor and could use some help. Similarly, animal suffering doesn't get much airtime.
* Scope neglect. Way more animals and future beings than current humans.
* Pluralistic ignorance. If this is such an important issue, why aren't more people doing something about it? Partly because they're asking the same question.

I also think the case against speciesism is sufficiently strong for it to be considered a bias.

I'm trying to concretize the case for donating to DWCs. Here's what I came up with:

1) If you donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, it'll be able to distribute more nets.
2) These nets will improve the recipients' health.
3) Better health will allow the recipients to to become more economically productive. The rate of economic growth will increase.
4) Enormous welfare gains will result.

maybe also

4a) After a while, people will become so rich that they will choose to spend more money on metacharities or x-risk research.

I haven't seen a case for (3). If we can't assume that x risk organizations reduce x risk, we shouldn't assume that the AMF increases economic growth, especially since that's not even its goal. (My guess is that in expectation, spending money on x-risk research decreases x risk and spending money on mosquito nets increases growth.) How do we know that the AMF is the best charity for promoting economic growth? It was evaluated according to different criteria. Maybe we should promote globalization, or fund economically productive research, or invest in developing countries.

I'm not sure about (3), either. I might be 10,000 times as rich as Socrates, but I'm not 10,000 times as happy as he was. Economic growth in the developing world would bring improved health care and nutrition, then it would bring cars and iPads and existential angst. It's not clear that welfare changes in the future will be for the better. Maybe we'll become workaholics or be tortured by religious zealots.

Do people really buy an argument like the one I outlined above? Do they believe it with such certainty that they'd rather give now than wait or support research into the question?

Our society seems to be following the first mom's strategy.

Disagree. Our society has a few dominant cells in the single mum's liver sucking huge amounts of resources in, and not really bothering to clean up afterwards primarily to the benefit of the same few liver cells and their progeny. To put it another way, I don't think this is a useful analogy

I think you're right about the metaphor. But I think I'm right that far more resources—from workers, entrepreneurs, governments, corporations, universities, etc.—go into increasing economic growth than go into reducing the risk of extinction, and that ratio is probably not optimized for maximizing total economic productivity over the rest of history.

Pat wrote:Eliezer Yudkowsky, senior crackpot at the Singularity Institution for the Arrantly Insane

"Arrantly" is a new word for me. I was only familiar with "errant," like what knights are.

While I'm not sure if SIAI's work is overall net positive or negative for reducing suffering, I don't think SIAI is insane or that Eliezer is a crackpot. Rather, SIAI folks are genuinely smart and usually sincere. That said, I take it you were being a bit sarcastic.

Pat wrote:How do we know that the AMF is the best charity for promoting economic growth? It was evaluated according to different criteria.

Yes. That said, the connection does seem plausible, at least insofar as the direction is right. (AMF probably increases the kinds of growth people usually care about.) But it could be much less effective than, say, lobbying to increase government funding of science research. (In any event, I think economic growth isn't the right metric to be optimizing.)

Brian Tomasik wrote:Hedonic Treader, any ideas where you would give if you were forced to do so now? At least, what category?

New Harvest again. I think cultured meat - or any meat alternative that meets the criteria of cost, subjective quality, nutrition and cultural acceptance of real meat would be a breakthrough technology. It could solve the poor meat-eater problem, prevent billions of torture incidents all over the globe and enable humans to see animals as fellow sentient beings without having to rationalize why they cut out body parts of their screaming bodies as an industry routine. I'm not sure NH is the perfect choice, but it's the one I would make if I had to choose right now.

Hedonic Treader wrote:I have not found a way to be really productive without being miserable, or to be happy without being unproductive. This is a problem. I try to find the most rational utilitarian answer to these trade-offs, but I frequently suffer from cognitive overload due to the complexities.

What constitutes being "unproductive"? I think that reading, spending time on forums like this, learning new things about the universe, etc. can be very productive in utilitarian terms, if not in remunerative terms. Might you be interested in becoming a professional researcher -- say, about risks of future suffering, or about neuroscience, or about something else?

By "unproductive", I meant doing things other than earn money efficiently. I agree not all of these things are useless in a utilitarian sense, but money is the unit of caring and it moves people more reliably than many other interactions. Switching careers would incur transition costs and not necessarily make me happier - instead I adjust my work-life balance to psychologically sustainable levels.

As far as the compounding argument, I disagree that animal charities don't have the same degree of compounding that human charities have. Since the main long-term goal of animal charities is to increase concern for animal suffering, veg outreach (and wild-animal-suffering outreach) multiplies itself through a cycle of more vegetarians -> more donors -> more vegetarians, and through exponential (or at least logistic) spread of memes.

Maybe it depends on the nature of the animal charity. It is entirely possible that there still is untapped potential, but I'm not sure how giving money to these charities unlocks that potential efficiently (as compared to raising the relevant points in related discussions when it is appropriate), and where diminishing returns set in. For instance, I don't think there are many non-vegetarians/vegans who have never heard the arguments from PETA campaigns etc. It isn't clear to me that many more people are available for cheap "conversion".

utilitymonster wrote:I also believe that helping humans is a useful way of speeding up the destruction of nature, so if you're worried about wild animal suffering, you should seriously consider helping of humans as a tool.

If poor people become more wealthy, they may use more resources, but also have fewer children. Population growth is one of the factors that accelerates destruction of ecosystems. Furthermore, there may be backlash effects when too much nature is destroyed in a way that interferes with human needs. If partial environmental collapse can make people poor again, the rest of nature will probably (?) recover.

Alan Dawrst wrote:

Pat wrote:Eliezer Yudkowsky, senior crackpot at the Singularity Institution for the Arrantly Insane

"Arrantly" is a new word for me. I was only familiar with "errant," like what knights are.

While I'm not sure if SIAI's work is overall net positive or negative for reducing suffering, I don't think SIAI is insane or that Eliezer is a crackpot. Rather, SIAI folks are genuinely smart and usually sincere. That said, I take it you were being a bit sarcastic.

Yeah, that was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek (I did cite a paper by him in the same sentence), but it could have been taken the wrong way. My bad for not inserting a smiley. I agree with you about Mr. Yudkowsky and the rest of the SIAI people. I've given to the SIAI in the past and would consider doing so again.

Alan Dawrst wrote:

Pat wrote:How do we know that the AMF is the best charity for promoting economic growth? It was evaluated according to different criteria.

Yes. That said, the connection does seem plausible, at least insofar as the direction is right. (AMF probably increases the kinds of growth people usually care about.) But it could be much less effective than, say, lobbying to increase government funding of science research.

I hadn't thought of that. That could quite possibly be more effective than lobbying against trade and immigration restrictions. In the interest of exploring the realm of possibilities, here are a few more ideas.

Many European countries have relatively inflexible workforces (i.e., unions are prevalent and it's difficult to fire people). In addition, these countries tend to have high levels of taxation. Through market-oriented reforms, they would be able to sustainably boost their growth rate. (This would probably have to wait till Europe sorts out its current problems.) So you could try to influence policy in these nations, through contributions to political campaigns (this might be difficult if you're a foreigner), think tanks, or organizations that lobby. [ETA: I guess I shouldn't have singled out European countries, since policy in the US is by no means optimized for economic growth. The tax code could be made more efficient, corporate welfare and military spending could be reduced, etc. But there's probably more low-hanging fruit in Europe (see http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking). P.S. I'm not a political conservative.]

You could invest in venture capital. In this area, it seems that you could make a bigger difference on the margin than you would by investing in the S&P 500 (I could well be wrong about this; I'm not well-versed in economics).

Other areas of aid, such as education or microlending, might become more attractive relative to global health if evaluated on their contribution to long-term economic growth.

I very much doubt political lobbying for well-known causes is ever a good use of a utilitarian’s time or money. Aside from the epistemic and factual uncertainties (eg does maximised economic growth actually foster development more than controlled growth in key areas? And what actually is ‘economic growth’? If we produce twice as many felt-tip pens this year as the year before and everything else remains constant, has our economy grown?), the marginal value of your dollar is much lower when more people have already tried to achieve the same goal, and possibly approaching zero if the opposing groups are obtuse enough (eg how much more money must have gone into anti-healthcare propaganda when Obama made the possibility of state-funded medicine tangible than beforehand?).

In general, if we want some particular thing (say better developing world health), it seems much more cost-effective to find the best existing causes in that area and fund them directly than to fund political groups to press for that thing, which even if it gets through will almost certainly do so in some watered down version (eg if the govt diverted £50million to developing world tomorrow, it’s pretty unlikely it would all go to AMF, SCI and DtW).

I would weight the epistemic value of the Heritage Foundation’s answers to such questions as close to zero since their explicit goal is to promote their views and since those views coincide with a lot of influential people’s self-interest - and have no testable consequences.

Hedonic Treader wrote:For instance, I don't think there are many non-vegetarians/vegans who have never heard the arguments from PETA campaigns etc. It isn't clear to me that many more people are available for cheap "conversion".

That may be true for some PETA campaigns, but I don't think it's true for the more effective outreach by The Humane League and others. For example, the number of people who visit Who's Against Animal Cruelty? and leave comments about how they're going to eat less meat is almost linearly proportional to ad spending, and I don't think diminishing returns are much of an issue at this point.

Pat wrote:You could invest in venture capital. In this area, it seems that you could make a bigger difference on the margin than you would by investing in the S&P 500 (I could well be wrong about this; I'm not well-versed in economics).

I tend to assume that capital markets are at least close enough to efficient that where you choose to invest doesn't matter that much. If the market valuations are based on things grounded in the real world, then prices should roughly converge to the same answer without much regard for your buying/selling choices. Even if this isn't true, I doubt that $1 invested in venture capital actually increases venture funding by a full $1.

Brian Tomasik wrote:For example, the number of people who visit Who's Against Animal Cruelty? and leave comments about how they're going to eat less meat is almost linearly proportional to ad spending, and I don't think diminishing returns are much of an issue at this point.

How much additional room for funding would you see for these types of campaigns before you would expect diminishing returns to make them comparatively inefficient?

Hedonic Treader wrote:How much additional room for funding would you see for these types of campaigns before you would expect diminishing returns to make them comparatively inefficient?

Right now, they haven't even saturated the 15-25 age demographic. Other age demographics could be targeted as well, with probably at most a factor of 2 or 3 reduction in effectiveness? And the ads I'm thinking of are mainly for the US, but they could be done globally, and with lower costs per click. In other words, probably the ads could be increased many times their current scale without running out of people to target. And these are just Facebook ads; there's also Google, Bing, etc.

I'll ask some folks closer to the work if they have more to say about your question.

Arepo wrote:I very much doubt political lobbying for well-known causes is ever a good use of a utilitarian’s time or money. Aside from the epistemic and factual uncertainties (eg does maximised economic growth actually foster development more than controlled growth in key areas? And what actually is ‘economic growth’? If we produce twice as many felt-tip pens this year as the year before and everything else remains constant, has our economy grown?), the marginal value of your dollar is much lower when more people have already tried to achieve the same goal, and possibly approaching zero if the opposing groups are obtuse enough (eg how much more money must have gone into anti-healthcare propaganda when Obama made the possibility of state-funded medicine tangible than beforehand?).

Are you saying that the value of donating to DWCs isn't that doing so will increase economic growth per se, but that it'll make people better off so that they'll be able to contribute to a better tomorrow? That makes sense—plutocracy probably isn't the best thing even if it maximizes economic growth. If people in developing nations are healthy, they'll be better able to make contributions to human knowledge, and humanity will benefit.

The idea of "death panels" (a phrase coined by the former governor of my state) still brings a smile to my face, a small compensatory factor in favor of the anti-Obamacare propaganda.

Arepo wrote:In general, if we want some particular thing (say better developing world health), it seems much more cost-effective to find the best existing causes in that area and fund them directly than to fund political groups to press for that thing, which even if it gets through will almost certainly do so in some watered down version (eg if the govt diverted £50million to developing world tomorrow, it’s pretty unlikely it would all go to AMF, SCI and DtW).

I suppose this is an empirical question, one about which there is little evidence one way or another. It may indeed make more sense to go with a proven intervention in this situation. Or perhaps risk aversion has led people to neglect opportunities in the lobbying and influence sector. This isn't clear to me.

I now have a better idea of how a case for donating to developing-world charities could be given a utilitarian justification. It goes something like this.

The average charity isn't doing much good. Most of them aren't held accountable—if they do gather data, it's mostly for self promotion. And measuring certain charities' degree of success is impossible. Try doing a double-blind placebo-controlled study on whether the SIAI's activities are reducing the risk of human extinction. So we should limit our search to those charities for which there is strong evidence that they're achieving their goals.

That leaves you with certain animal-welfare and developing-world charities. Animal-welfare charities are probably more effective at preventing near-term suffering, but we're interested in the long term. Developing-world charities have the edge here because the benefits that they provide compound: healthy people can contribute to society, and having more productive humans around will bend the expected hedonic trajectory of the future upward. Increased economic growth will allow us to colonize space sooner and may thus even reduce the risk of extinction. More wealth would also allow us to spend money on technologies and activities of interest to utilitarians, such as reëngineering nature.

While animal-welfare charities offer some possibility of compounding benefits, these are limited: the number of humans to whom antispeciesist ideas could spread is limited, and the number of animals who suffer doesn't change much.

This isn't so bad. My main problem with it is that it assumes a rather rosy view of the future, which may not be justified. Also, it seems to contain an uneven degree of skepticism: charities have to show that they are achieving their goals, but there doesn't have to be strong evidence that these goals are linked to increased economic growth, which in turn must be linked to increases in future welfare.

Pat wrote:Are you saying that the value of donating to DWCs isn't that doing so will increase economic growth per se, but that it'll make people better off so that they'll be able to contribute to a better tomorrow?

That’s about the size of it.

Arepo wrote:I suppose this is an empirical question, one about which there is little evidence one way or another. It may indeed make more sense to go with a proven intervention in this situation. Or perhaps risk aversion has led people to neglect opportunities in the lobbying and influence sector. This isn't clear to me.

There's little direct evidence, but I think it's a decent working hypothesis unless you have (or have reason to suspect the availability of) contrary evidence - it seems analogous to the idea that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, though there’s certainly room to argue against it.

So we should limit our search to those charities for which there is strong evidence that they're achieving their goals.

I would make this point weaker - something like 'so in the absence of other strongly relevant factors, we should limit our search to well-explored sectors, and in the presence of such factors we should mitigate our expectation of their weight by around two or three orders of magnitude' (that being the difference GWWC and GW have found between the best and average charities in the health sector - though it might actually be conservative, given that they've presumably focused their investigation on charities they expected to have some chance of being among the top candidates)

That leaves you with certain animal-welfare and developing-world charities.

I don't know that it *only* leaves you with them. They're the only ones that anyone we know of has publicly tried to pool and assess data on, but there are plenty of other well-trodden sectors where comparable metaresearch might be relatively straightforward - climate change is an obvious one, perhaps disaster-response, *conceivably* some political causes, but the more humans are involved in the problem/solution they’re addressing the harder it’s going to be to make useful generalisation.

Animal-welfare charities are probably more effective at preventing near-term suffering, but we're interested in the long term. Developing-world charities have the edge here because the benefits that they provide compound: healthy people can contribute to society, and having more productive humans around will bend the expected hedonic trajectory of the future upward. Increased economic growth will allow us to colonize space sooner and may thus even reduce the risk of extinction. More wealth would also allow us to spend money on technologies and activities of interest to utilitarians, such as reëngineering nature.

Yeah.

This isn't so bad. My main problem with it is that it assumes a rather rosy view of the future, which may not be justified.

It doesn’t really ‘assume’ it. Assuming that the compounding argument is >50% likely to be sound (and that countereffect exists with negative expectation to outweigh it, which I think is what Brian would claim), then the reason is Pascalian, much as the arguments for x-risk are; a 0.1% extra chance of 0.1% extra compounding productivity into a future with 10^38 humans (number from Bostrom’s Astronomical Waste paper) is a gain so colossal that it dwarfs any present-day considerations.

Also, it seems to contain an uneven degree of skepticism: charities have to show that they are achieving their goals, but there doesn't have to be strong evidence that these goals are linked to increased economic growth, which in turn must be linked to increases in future welfare.

Yeah, it does get a bit murky here. I think there *is* a lot of evidence that certain levels of health correlate with economic growth (eg the correlation of health with IQ. It’s by no means clear, but again the Pascalian argument seems to apply – you only need to be fractionally more confident about the compounding benefits of X than those of Y for X to have massively higher expectation.

Pat wrote:

And measuring certain charities' degree of success is impossible. [...] So we should limit our search to those charities for which there is strong evidence that they're achieving their goals.

I would disagree here. Even if there's only a tiny chance that a charity has a really positive impact than that it has a really negative impact, the Pascalian computation favors it over something that we're pretty certain about but has mediocre impact.

Pat wrote:

Animal-welfare charities are probably more effective at preventing near-term suffering, but we're interested in the long term. Developing-world charities have the edge here because the benefits that they provide compound

I have argued that animal-welfare charities also compound in memetic terms. But we've discussed this many times; no need to beat a dead horse. (Still, that's better than beating a live one, I suppose.)

Arepo wrote:(and that countereffect exists with negative expectation to outweigh it, which I think is what Brian would claim)

Right. OTOH, even if we think human survival is more likely to be bad than good, it's not clear to me the expected sign of the impact of Third World health interventions on P(human survival).

Speaking of memetic concerns, another reason to consider giving to developing world charities is a good base through which you can use to convince other people to become large-scale donors. A large portion of people are too speciesist to consider giving to animal-welfare charities, even among those who are or would donate a substantial portion of their income.

I live in a world where many of my friends and family think a worthwhile donation is to the local Goodwill or to the concert hall. It's hard enough to convince people to donate to the developing world where you can save *human* lives for fairly cheap, let alone convince them to begin to value animal lives and then donate to their welfare.

peterhurford wrote:It's hard enough to convince people to donate to the developing world where you can save *human* lives for fairly cheap, let alone convince them to begin to value animal lives and then donate to their welfare.

I know what you mean. I still promote giving to human charities among audiences where there's no hope of interest in animals. But where animals do have a chance, I'd rather go for the gold.

Brian Tomasik wrote:But where animals do have a chance, I'd rather go for the gold.

I'd sympathize with that. A lot of my problems are personal conflicts between a desire for ideal utilitarianism and my current situation. I will now heap my woes onto an unsuspecting you, though I don't want to derail the thread:

I'm still a college student, so my income is in the $4000/year range, though I intend to work more this upcoming year to make more income. I've currently been doing my best to be frugal and donating 10% of that amount to Givewell, but that was before I came to value nonhuman animals (reading your utilitarian essays helped in part with that!).

Now, I've been working on being as vegan as possible, though the best I've cobbled together so far is a greatly-reduced-eggs occasional-sushi vegetarianism. I face a fair amount of social pressure -- some of my college friends are vegetarian, but I only know one vegan. None of my family is vegetarian. None of my friends or family are willing to donate any more than 2% of their income.

Lastly, all my donation finances go through my dad. I haven't told him that I'm vegetarian/vegan yet. I don't really know how I'm going to go against the grain of my family like that. I also don't know how I'd get him to know I'm donating to something like out there like non-global-warming existential risk (SIAI) or Vegan Outreach/New Harvest.

I don't want this to make it sound like I'm unhappy -- I'm not. But I'm confused about how to go about living more closely with my values.

////

Lastly and unrelatedly, does anyone know if there are any attempts to get current vegan utilitarian philanthropists to donate to animal welfare charities? I'm definitely thinking Peter Singer here.

Thanks, Peter! Unsuspecting Felicifia participants are some of the best people onto whom to heap woes.

peterhurford wrote:I'm still a college student

Any ideas on future career plans?

peterhurford wrote:I've currently been doing my best to be frugal and donating 10% of that amount to Givewell, but that was before I came to value nonhuman animals (reading your utilitarian essays helped in part with that!).

peterhurford wrote:Now, I've been working on being as vegan as possible, though the best I've cobbled together so far is a greatly-reduced-eggs occasional-sushi vegetarianism.

Congrats! That said, I'm not a fan of eating fish (especially small fish) because it takes a lot of them to produce a given quantity of meat. You might consider eating more dairy if you want to keep the amount of animal protein constant.

peterhurford wrote:I face a fair amount of social pressure -- some of my college friends are vegetarian, but I only know one vegan. None of my family is vegetarian. None of my friends or family are willing to donate any more than 2% of their income.

That's tough. OTOH, it means there's more upside if you can persuade others to get interested in these topics.

In addition, you can make more friends who can pressure you in the right direction. For example, you can find some of us on Facebook here or here or here.

peterhurford wrote:I also don't know how I'd get him to know I'm donating to something like out there like non-global-warming existential risk (SIAI) or Vegan Outreach/New Harvest.

I guess it's a risk to figure out whether he'll go for "strange" donations. How big is the downside? Maybe it could make your relationship more awkward? Might it also mean less financial support in the future? How much longer will your finances go through him?

BTW, any ideas on your preferred charity? I currently favor Vegan Outreach and The Humane League, partly to help factory-farmed animals in the short term, but mainly to spread concern for animal suffering in general in the hopes of reducing the spread of wild-animal suffering in the far future. If an organization forms to work on wild-animal suffering directly, I'll probably favor donating to that even more.

Feel free to continue questions like these, either on this thread or on some others that relate to the topic. Discussing life-relevant questions is one of the most valuable functions of the Felicifia community.

peterhurford wrote:Lastly and unrelatedly, does anyone know if there are any attempts to get current vegan utilitarian philanthropists to donate to animal welfare charities? I'm definitely thinking Peter Singer here.

Several people have mentioned it to him. (I actually wrote to him about this and other topics way back in 2005.) Singer does donate some to veg groups, but I think the amount is smaller than donations to Third World groups. I'm not sure whether this is due to cognitive bias on his part or whether he knows that he's a huge public figure and so wants to broaden his tent as much as possible.

peterhurford, I'm trying desperately to find something helpful to say, so far I'm still coming up blank. To a lesser extent
I think I have the same issue.

I don't mean to sound gloomy but I think unfortunately there are always a small number of people will be strongly against whatever values one holds and sometimes they will decide to like one less for it :/

Ruairi wrote:I don't mean to sound gloomy but I think unfortunately there are always a small number of people will be strongly against whatever values one holds and sometimes they will decide to like one less for it :/

Yes, you can't please everyone. For almost anything you do, some people will dislike it.

Of course, pleasing people isn't the goal. Many of us take at least a few positions that are quite unpopular and could easily boost our popularity by changing our stance.

But I guess I'm just making an intuitive point that we shouldn't be too worried when people oppose our beliefs, because this is not abnormal in a diverse world.

Brian Tomasik wrote:Feel free to continue questions like these, either on this thread or on some others that relate to the topic. Discussing life-relevant questions is one of the most valuable functions of the Felicifia community.

I've decided to continue the me-relevant conversation at Peter's Utilitarian Life Planning Thread.

Brian Tomasik wrote:

peterhurford wrote:Lastly and unrelatedly, does anyone know if there are any attempts to get current vegan utilitarian philanthropists to donate to animal welfare charities? I'm definitely thinking Peter Singer here.

Several people have mentioned it to him. (I actually wrote to him about this and other topics way back in 2005.) Singer does donate some to veg groups, but I think the amount is smaller than donations to Third World groups. I'm not sure whether this is due to cognitive bias on his part or whether he knows that he's a huge public figure and so wants to broaden his tent as much as possible.

Which veg groups does Singer donate to and how much, approximately? Has he given any sort of public acknowledgement of this? I think it makes sense that he would want to broaden his tent.

What about other prominent philanthropists? I know a lot of them express skepticism on the moral worth of nonhuman animals. I always wondered how someone can get on board with utilitarianism, but then restrict it only to humans.

peterhurford wrote:What about other prominent philanthropists? I know a lot of them express skepticism on the moral worth of nonhuman animals. I always wondered how someone can get on board with utilitarianism, but then restrict it only to humans.

For example, I know yboris has frequennted Felicia before, I know him to be a well-respected utilitarian philanthropist, and he donates nearly entirely to developing world charity.

Boris is not biased towards humans, IMO. I suspect (though haven't discussed with him) his reasons for favouring DWCs are something like mine. I've sent a message to him to ask if he wants to join this thread.

Hey all
Sorry I've not been around the forums in a long time; someone messaged me on Facebook to let me know I should say 'hi' here
Thank you for the kind words about me. Pretty much I didn't get to read anything until the first post that mentions my name so what I say about giving to developing-world charities must have been stated previously.

Starting January 1st, 2012 I give 50% of my income to Against Malaria Foundation (as per GiveWell recommendation). I occasionally send off $50 to animal rights groups (VeganOutreach or The Humane League as per Brian Tomasik's recommendations). I'm still young in my giving (only 2 years as part of Giving What We Can and before that wasn't giving much). I care about (wild) animal suffering and am aware of the immediate problem(s) affluence for more people will cause animals (more factory farms). I'm also aware of x-risks.

One way seems reasonable to reconcile these problems (and I'm all ears about other ways to see it all) is to prevent complete human extinction (unless all organisms die on earth many animals in the wild will suffer for millions of years). There are many approaches to tackle x-risks, but as of now there isn't a clearly great organization doing work like that (combating AI threat seems necessary though at this point who is doing it well?). The best model I see to personally help at this time is to decrease extreme inequities in the world - these are likely to cause wars, political instability, and perhaps most crucially, thus, short-term thinking.

In the short-term suffering may increase for animals as more people become wealthy, but hopefully (is this reasonable to expect?) people will turn their attention to problems like over-pollution, unsustainable consumption, etc; basically more long-term thinking which will hopefully significantly decrease x-risks. In due time (as we're seeing already) more and more people will be on board with animal rights.

ps - we live in an exciting/scary time. Never has any individual been so able to help/hurt so many. There are problems that could wipe out all human beings, and we're in near-reach of technological solutions to many of these problems.

pps - I don't mean to suggest my model of how to help is the best for everyone; for example persuasive individuals may have better impact directly helping another important issue. Perhaps getting more people to learn from positive psychology would be a shorter path to a happier life for all, a peaceful co-existence where there is a strong cultural norm against greed that has driven some of the financial disasters; perhaps targeted rationality education implemented in schools would guard future generations from anti-intellectual anti-scientific thinking within governments.

ppps - how many of you have heard of Leverage Research

yboris wrote:Sorry I've not been around the forums in a long time; someone messaged me on Facebook to let me know I should say 'hi' here. Thank you for the kind words about me. Pretty much I didn't get to read anything until the first post that mentions my name so what I say about giving to developing-world charities must have been stated previously.

Hey, thanks for stopping by. I didn't mean to single you out, you were just one of the few vegan philanthropists (and by philanthropists, I mean those in the GWWC / smart giving / Peter Singer / optimal philanthropy movements) that came to mind, and I was interested in hearing your perspective, as others.

I don't know that many current philanthropists that are also concerned for nonhuman animal suffering, but I'd even be curious to hear the perspectives of those who don't value nonhuman animals. Let me know if you have any contacts.

~

yboris wrote:The best model I see to personally help at this time is to decrease extreme inequities in the world - these are likely to cause wars, political instability, and perhaps most crucially, thus, short-term thinking.

Definitely. The concern I share here and with many other donation targets is the guesswork involved with how we're steering the future with our donations. I think such guesswork is very important and maybe even necessary to making a donation, but I try not to give it much credit. (And I don't demean "guesswork" to just replace doing something with smug skepticism, but rather to maybe think priorities lie in better research.)

That being said, I definitely do think it established that helping rid the world of deaths by malaria (as the AMF would do) does create positive upward pressure on a lot of other social problems. I recall GiveWell's few discussions about how sometimes the problems in developing world education, overpopulation, and extreme poverty are the result, at least in large part, of the disease burden.

~

yboris wrote:ps - we live in an exciting/scary time. Never has any individual been so able to help/hurt so many. There are problems that could wipe out all human beings, and we're in near-reach of technological solutions to many of these problems.

Indeed. That's very inspiring to think about, though it does pronounce my fear of getting it wrong.

~

yboris wrote:Perhaps getting more people to learn from positive psychology would be a shorter path to a happier life for all, a peaceful co-existence where there is a strong cultural norm against greed that has driven some of the financial disasters; perhaps targeted rationality education implemented in schools would guard future generations from anti-intellectual anti-scientific thinking within governments.

I think positive psychology is definitely important, especially with helping people live frugal lifestyles and donating more. I wonder how we could popularize such cultural memes? I know you mentioned rationality education; would CFAR do a thing like this?

~

yboris wrote:ppps - how many of you have heard of Leverage Research

I haven't. Is this the one? I'll have to look into it further. Seems really neat.

yboris wrote:One way seems reasonable to reconcile these problems (and I'm all ears about other ways to see it all) is to prevent complete human extinction (unless all organisms die on earth many animals in the wild will suffer for millions of years)

What if a future with human civilisation is worse than a future without it D:

It's not obvious to me whether poverty reduction decreases or increases extinction risk. In the short term, I would guess that economic development and education increase extinction risk, because more technology implies more potential for disaster. Before nuclear weapons, there was no artificial way to kill off all humans.

That said, you probably only care about futures in which humans advance to a super-technological civilization, and in that case, the increased risk of extinction due to technology might be seen as "growing pains" that we have to go through at one time or another, with no way to avoid them. Even if so, it's still not clear why speeding up technology would make us safer; at best, it seems pretty much neutral in terms of extinction risk? (I'm assuming a sufficiently low chance of natural extinction in the meanwhile.)

In any event, it's not obvious to me if reducing extinction risks is an ideal goal. As Ruairi said:

Ruairi wrote:What if a future with human civilisation is worse than a future without it D:

If we assume a pessimistic view of nature (wild animals experiencing net-negative utility), then human civilization has the direct impact of replacing these systems - maybe with something that already has or will soon have net-positive utility (content humans, happy pets etc.), or something that simply contains less sentience density (comparatively large living space per human in western nations, lots of agricultural land where there once were forests). These assumptions would have to be assessed quantitatively. It is probable that poverty reduction increases this effect (smaller families, more resource use per capita).

In case of a technology-driven big future (high sentience density per resources, space colonization, speculative physics tech), it depends both on the probability of the scenario and the expected utility average that dominates it. Still the most important utilitarian question imo, and still the most speculative.

I agree that it is definitely uncertain (and could go either way) whether or not developing world charities decrease existential risk, and I imagine they have much less impact on x-risk than donating to, say, the SIAI. (I also agree it's unclear whether x-risk reduction would be a utilitarian good.)

What I do think is important for developing world charities is a different long-term benefit -- not just the prevention of suffering from disease / poverty / hunger (in this case, it would be preventing malaria via AMF), but a decent shot at pushing up a success spiral -- less disease meaning potentially less population growth, more school attendence, etc. Though the success spiral would only exist in the aggregate, and would, I think, be dwarfed by the prevention of suffering from the individual person with malaria.

As a postscript, promoting veganism also has a very likely positive cycle on the aggregate -- the more vegans there are around you, the easy it will be for you (or the individual in question) to go vegan.

Hedonic Treader wrote:or something that simply contains less sentience density (comparatively large living space per human in western nations, lots of agricultural land where there once were forests).

Yes. This is actually one reason why, despite playing devil's advocate, I support poverty/disease reduction on balance. I just don't think the spillover benefits are as substantial as others do.

Hedonic Treader wrote:Still the most important utilitarian question imo, and still the most speculative.

Yeah.

peterhurford wrote:less disease meaning potentially less population growth

Why is less population growth good?

peterhurford wrote:As a postscript, promoting veganism also has a very likely positive cycle on the aggregate -- the more vegans there are around you, the easy it will be for you (or the individual in question) to go vegan.

Yep, this is my inveterate claim.

Brian Tomasik wrote:

Hedonic Treader wrote:How much additional room for funding would you see for these types of campaigns before you would expect diminishing returns to make them comparatively inefficient?

I'll ask some folks closer to the work if they have more to say about your question.

All right -- here are replies from two folks at The Humane League. I added emphasis myself.

First:

All FB ads are going to have a declining rate of return, from the first dollar spent to the ten millionth, but saturation is in my opinion really far off. Key question is at what point it becomes less effective than other scalable uses of the money, and I think that point is beyond at least 1-5 million per year in the US, and maybe 20 million internationally.

Of course, such calculations would be helped along if all the major veg advocacy programs groups know of and are doing had reliable (or reliable-ish/similarly gathered) data to compare things!

Second:

Brian, That is an interesting question. First, from what I understand about advertising, there is a maxim that people need to hear a message at least seven times before they remember it. So perhaps repeated exposure shouldn't be discounted as valuable.

Regarding demographics, we could also target sub-ideal demographics and accept a reduction in conversion, but at that point we should probably look to other advertising platforms instead. In other words, if we hypothetically saturated 13-24 year-olds on Facebook, it might be better to target 13-24 year-olds on Google than 24-34 year-olds on Facebook.

Regarding Facebook numbers, there are currently 155 million Facebook profiles. If we reduce that to the countries we target (US, UK, Ireland, Israel, Australia, Belize, Canada, and South Africa) and people 13-24 years old (both genders), we still have over 100 million profiles. Just females, 53 million. The ads we are currently running hit a little over 7 million of those (both genders), or 4.5 million (females).

Of course there a lot of sets of "likes" we are not going to be able to access, nor would we really want to. I have, however, come up with a list of potential ads which I work from. If we add those "likes" to our targets, the numbers reach 13.3 million (both), 7.8 million (female).

So just working off that list (of ads I feel would be roughly as effective as those we are running now), there are 6.3 million "ideal" people we are not yet reaching.

Thanks for following up with this, Brian.

Is there any estimate on how much it would cost to reach these people? Which organizations would put such a system in place, and how would they go about doing it?

peterhurford wrote:Is there any estimate on how much it would cost to reach these people?

Ads for these demographics are 10-20 cents per click in the US.

peterhurford wrote:Which organizations would put such a system in place, and how would they go about doing it?

Marginal donations to The Humane League can go toward veg ads if you request it. You can email Nick Cooney for more info: ncooney [put the at symbol here] farmsanctuary [put the dot here] org.

Brian Tomasik wrote:Ads for these demographics are 10-20 cents per click in the US.

I suppose what I meant was how much money would be needed to saturate the entire demographics. And I doubt it's quite as simple as 1 million people = 1 million clicks = 20 cents / click * 1 million clicks = $200K?

Brian Tomasik wrote:Marginal donations to The Humane League can go toward veg ads if you request it. You can email Nick Cooney for more info: ncooney [put the at symbol here] farmsanctuary [put the dot here] org.

Thanks. I'll have to contact Nick Cooney sometime soon.

Can I inquire into the details of your arrangement with Vegan Outreach?

peterhurford wrote:I suppose what I meant was how much money would be needed to saturate the entire demographics. And I doubt it's quite as simple as 1 million people = 1 million clicks = 20 cents / click * 1 million clicks = $200K?

I'm still trying to figure that out with the folks at The Humane League. I'll reply back on this thread if I have an update.

peterhurford wrote:Can I inquire into the details of your arrangement with Vegan Outreach?

Sure. I'm a regular donor to VO, and this year, upon discovering Nick's work with veg ads, I told VO that I wanted to fund veg ads with my donation. They agreed, and one of their employees is now working with Nick to set up the landing page and the ads campaign.

I've put some pictures of VO's ads at the very bottom of my veg-ads piece. As noted there, "The updated ads do not contain 'veganoutreach.org' underneath the title, which should help avoid scaring away those who aren't already sympathetic." I've also suggested that VO might avoid mentioning vegetarianism at all, in case that brings in more of the unconverted and fewer of the already-converted; they haven't yet gotten a chance to try this.

In addition to The Humane League and Vegan Outreach, another group running online ads is VegFund. I think all of these groups are good, although I know most about The Humane League's work and so can vouch for it most strongly. I also appreciate the fact that The Humane League does a lot of R&D around ad experimentation as well as measurement of impact on the target audience through follow-up surveys.

Thanks for the information, Brian. This is really helpful in comparing charities for non-speciesists. I'm still a bit concerned that more vegetarians will make more wild animals suffer indirectly, or that it just shifts meat consumption to people who would otherwise not have been able to afford it. It's not clear to me that awareness of human-made animal abuse automatically translates to a net reduction in animal suffering. Nevertheless, it may make some bans on the worst abuse practices more likely, which is clearly good.

Brian Tomasik wrote:I've put some pictures of VO's ads at the very bottom of my veg-ads piece. As noted there, "The updated ads do not contain 'veganoutreach.org' underneath the title, which should help avoid scaring away those who aren't already sympathetic." I've also suggested that VO might avoid mentioning vegetarianism at all, in case that brings in more of the unconverted and fewer of the already-converted; they haven't yet gotten a chance to try this.

Yes, I thought that too. However, I also like the famous veg role-model approach if the target audience is emotionally invested in those celebrities.

Hedonic Treader wrote:I'm still a bit concerned that more vegetarians will make more wild animals suffer indirectly, or that it just shifts meat consumption to people who would otherwise not have been able to afford it. It's not clear to me that awareness of human-made animal abuse automatically translates to a net reduction in animal suffering.

Hi HT. What do you think about animal charities that promote hardcore anti-speciesism more directly? This isn't usual in America and USA, but there are several Spanish and South-Americans charities with that approach (they promote veganism too, but not only). When I speak with Spanish and South-American vegans (where it's more usual that vegans are anti-speciesist), I can see that a lot of them accept the wild-animal suffering issue very easily.

Daniel Dorado wrote:What do you think about animal charities that promote hardcore anti-speciesism more directly? This isn't usual in America and USA, but there are several Spanish and South-Americans charities with that approach (they promote veganism too, but not only). When I speak with Spanish and South-American vegans (where it's more usual that vegans are anti-speciesist), I can see that a lot of them accept the wild-animal suffering issue very easily.

Hi Daniel. I don't know any charities with a focus on anti-speciesism per se, only animal rights and animal welfare charities. I've never seen a charity engaging with wild-animal suffering except for human-caused and specific cases of suffering such as from hunting, whaling etc. These campaigns usually ignore natural suffering. What exactly is it that these Spanish and South-American charities you know do?

Hedonic Treader wrote:

Daniel Dorado wrote:What do you think about animal charities that promote hardcore anti-speciesism more directly? This isn't usual in America and USA, but there are several Spanish and South-Americans charities with that approach (they promote veganism too, but not only). When I speak with Spanish and South-American vegans (where it's more usual that vegans are anti-speciesist), I can see that a lot of them accept the wild-animal suffering issue very easily.

Hi Daniel. I don't know any charities with a focus on anti-speciesism per se, only animal rights and animal welfare charities. I've never seen a charity engaging with wild-animal suffering except for human-caused and specific cases of suffering such as from hunting, whaling etc. These campaigns usually ignore natural suffering. What exactly is it that these Spanish and South-American charities you know do?

Some examples:

- They promote anti-speciesism in websites, leaflets, talks...
- They attack environmentalism and they differentiate between environmentalism and anti-speciesism.
- They promote veganism without health, enviromental and third-world arguments.
- They do performances showing animal corpses.
- They do undercovers in farms, ships...
- Animal Equality spoke explicitely about wild-animal suffering in an interview.
- They promote vegan pet food.

Thanks Daniel!

That's all awesome! Unfortunately I can't speak Spanish but I might google translate that interview

Hedonic Treader wrote:Thanks for the information, Brian. This is really helpful in comparing charities for non-speciesists.

I'm glad. Also stay tuned for more research and documentation on these sorts of topics by 80K Hours this summer. The 80K project doesn't yet have a website, but if you PM me your email address, I can send along some info. Either way, we'll no doubt announce more on Felicifia later in the summer.

Hedonic Treader wrote:or that it just shifts meat consumption to people who would otherwise not have been able to afford it.

Ignoring long-term changes to market dynamics, we can quantify the extent of this effect through elasticities. Bailey Norwood does so in Compassion by the Pound. I don't have that book at the moment, but I do have figures from an earlier draft, which was called Ham and Eggonomics:

If [someone] gives up Total Consumption of ... the Product Falls By ...
One Pound of Milk 0.56 lbs
One Pound of Beef 0.68 lbs
One Pound of Veal 0.69 lbs
One Pound of Pork 0.74 lbs
One Pound of Chicken 0.76 lbs
One Egg 0.91 egg.

It's fascinating that the animal products that are least bad in terms of direct suffering per pound purchased are also the ones that, if cut back, also cause the least reduction in total production.

Hedonic Treader wrote:It's not clear to me that awareness of human-made animal abuse automatically translates to a net reduction in animal suffering.

Definitely. The causal pathways of the future are very murky. But it seems like promoting antispeciesism, such as through mass veg outreach, is one of the better ways to improve prospects for the long-term future of wild animals. Other options are the direct antispeciesist charities that Daniel cited. Apart from a charity that talks about wild-animal suffering directly, can you think of better things do to? Perhaps promoting fake meat?

Hedonic Treader wrote:Yes, I thought that too. However, I also like the famous veg role-model approach if the target audience is emotionally invested in those celebrities.

Veg role models are actually a really smart idea. They're a hook to interest people who might not care about animals but do care about celebrities. They implicitly show that it's possible to be a healthy vegetarian. And they give people motivation to emulate the famous people whom they look up to.

I agree that it is definitely uncertain (and could go either way) whether or not developing world charities decrease existential risk, and I imagine they have much less impact on x-risk than donating to, say, the SIAI. (I also agree it's unclear whether x-risk reduction would be a utilitarian good.)

It's not at all obvious how puting x-risk first could change policies in the near time. Assuming the concept applicable in long-term scenarios, the vegan/animal rights -- or more urgent causes-- movements do not have to change their goals.

People who are concerned with x-risk normally put a list of priorities where enviromentalism is not on the top, and in a broad perpesctive, do analysis to map influence factors. Mostly because the number of people concerned with animal suffering is superior to who bother about x-risk. This disproportion could be one of reasons to change, but they are not mutually exclusive.

Brian Tomasik wrote:Ignoring long-term changes to market dynamics, we can quantify the extent of this effect through elasticities. Bailey Norwood does so in Compassion by the Pound. I don't have that book at the moment, but I do have figures from an earlier draft, which was called Ham and Eggonomics

Thanks for this pointer! So there indeed is a replacement effect for most foods that matter. I also hope that more vegetarians/vegans will create incentives for food producers to improve animal product substitutes.

Bailey Norwood does so in Compassion by the Pound.

Here's a free pdf of Norwood's book.

Hedonic Treader wrote:I also hope that more vegetarians/vegans will create incentives for food producers to improve animal product substitutes.

Yep. See, e.g., this.

It may also create pressure for meat producers to improve living conditions.

Daniel Dorado wrote:Some examples:

- They promote anti-speciesism in websites, leaflets, talks...
- They attack environmentalism and they differentiate between environmentalism and anti-speciesism.
- They promote veganism without health, enviromental and third-world arguments.
- They do performances showing animal corpses.
- They do undercovers in farms, ships...
- Animal Equality spoke explicitely about wild-animal suffering in an interview.
- They promote vegan pet food.

Daniel Dorado (if you read this), if you could give money to one charity now, what would it be?

You didn't ask me but give it to EAA ! http://www.effectiveanimalactivism.org/

Ruairi wrote:You didn't ask me but give it to EAA ! http://www.effectiveanimalactivism.org/

New to me, thanks. I must have overlooked it so far. It's a meta charity, right? What would they do with more funding on the margin?

Hedonic Treader wrote:

Ruairi wrote:You didn't ask me but give it to EAA ! http://www.effectiveanimalactivism.org/

New to me, thanks. I must have overlooked it so far. It's a meta charity, right? What would they do with more funding on the margin?

Oh cool I thought everyone knew about it!

I think they're going to hire a paid staff member, afaik they don't currently have any. Further than that there were suggestions of online ads, going to AR conferences, etc.

Worth noting that they talk about WAS http://www.effectiveanimalactivism.org/wild

Probably best to contact Eitan for more info; http://www.facebook.com/eitan.fischer

I think theres a good chance that maybe they could direct donations to something specific

Hi Ruari, I just read the FAQ of EAA and they write:

Are you asking for us to donate money to Effective Animal Activism?

No. We are not asking for you to give us any money. Instead, we ask that you commit to giving a substantial amount of money or time to those charities that you think will do the most good . Thus we are not competing with charities or other NGOs, but are playing a complementary role.

So they're not currently interested in direct donations to them, but to their recommended charities. Since they acknowledge the importance of wild-animal suffering but recommend donations to THL and VO, I guess they follow the logic that general awareness of animal suffering will later translate into reduced WAS. They also explicitly mention the group (?) Animal Ethics as a potential future contender for WAS reduction. I'm curious where that goes.

Hedonic Treader wrote:Hi Ruari, I just read the FAQ of EAA and they write:

Are you asking for us to donate money to Effective Animal Activism?

No. We are not asking for you to give us any money. Instead, we ask that you commit to giving a substantial amount of money or time to those charities that you think will do the most good . Thus we are not competing with charities or other NGOs, but are playing a complementary role.

So they're not currently interested in direct donations to them, but to their recommended charities. Since they acknowledge the importance of wild-animal suffering but recommend donations to THL and VO, I guess they follow the logic that general awareness of animal suffering will later translate into reduced WAS. They also explicitly mention the group (?) Animal Ethics as a potential future contender for WAS reduction. I'm curious where that goes.

They don't really want public donations yet, but;

EAA is part of 80,000 hours. To donate and request earmarking to EAA, please contact us.

We do not currently recommend Effective Animal Activism as a top charity, because we have no substantial track-record to show strong evidence of our effectiveness. However, many of our members and research team believe that the impact of donating to EAA may be very large. We think that we may be able to offer donors more than $1 in donations to our top charities for every $1 donated to EAA. We currently plan to use donations primarily towards hiring a part-time or full-time employee.

from; http://www.effectiveanimalactivism.org/Get-involved

Do you know about Animal Ethics? That's another org. that's currently being set up. Email me at rd5683@hotmail.com and I'll forward you the relevant conversations.

Basically EAA is not currently looking for donations from the public, but from their own members/people from 80k, felicifia, etc. is fine (AFAIK).

EAA is interested in donations from everyone -- it's just that they don't want to recommend themselves because this would open themselves up to obvious legitimacy concerns, at least in the eyes of outsiders.

Anyway, I was going to add to this thread the following comment. It's occasionally claimed that one of the best things we can do for animals in the future is help people in the developing world in the present because this will foster the conditions under which people can even begin to think about altruism rather than just their own survival. I think this is very implausible in a dollar-for-dollar sense. There are tens of billions of dollars of foreign aid. The amount donated toward animals is probably in the tens/hundreds of millions per year, and the amount donated toward effective animal activism is probably a few million. The amount donated toward wild-animal suffering meme-spreading is currently zero, yet there seems to be a lot of low-hanging fruit for the wild-animal movement to harvest. So in terms of marginal use of dollars, it's dubious that contributing extra money toward international aid is the best thing we can do.

There's a further point, though: Does it actually matter that much if people in the developing world become altruistic? If the future will be determined by technology / seed AI made in rich countries, then what matters is the values among the wealthy people in rich countries. It won't really be harmful if people in Bangladesh aren't able to spend time on altruism for animals. Sure, we'd love it if they could, but what matters in the end is the quality of the values among the powerful. So it's not clear to me that reducing poverty has much memetic value at all? (One exception could be that in a world with less poverty, people would make up fewer excuses for why it's okay for people to stay in poverty, which would improve their ethical values. But this seems like a small effect.)