There seems to be movement towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions. Here are some ways I can see this going badly:
1. Resistance against being told what to do
People hate being told what to do.
Most of the top global health interventions aren't imposed (and probably shouldn't be, because that leads to backlash). People can refuse a mosquito net if they want, the cash incentives, the cataract surgery. A handful of paint manufacturers might feel slightly annoyed about have to change away from lead paint formulations but if the paint's the same price then people outside that handful won't care.
Many of the animal welfare interventions are lobbying for new regulations on the way factory farming is done: regulating out chicken cages, regulating how fish and shrimp are farmed and slaughtered. These are impositions on the farmers and, when it increases prices, on consumers. Even lobbying corporations to use more ethical meat/eggs (e.g. Humane Society Of The United States's work on encouraging California to ban battery cages) could put unsympathetic consumers offside if it makes their McMuffins more expensive.
Where the intervention is imposed, there will be resistance and that will limit progress.
2. Too socially acceptable to dismiss
Saving children from malaria, diarrheal disease, lead poisoning, or treating cataracts and obstetric fistula is hard to argue against without sounding like a bad person.
It's quite socially acceptable to make fun of vegetarians and vegans. The movement's appeal is narrower, the arguments will be more easily dismissed, it's harder for the ideas to gain traction
3. More politicised = more resistance
Animal welfare is already politicised in a way that global health is not. Even fake meat, which simply adds a new product to the market and doesn't impose anything on anyone, has become such a threat to certain parties that people are trying to ban it.
Discussions of banning cage eggs or regulations for shrimp welfare will quickly turn into conspiracies about how woke bleeding-heart elites are imposing their values on good, honest cage egg-eaters or shrimp torturers.
Malaria nets and unleaded paint are less politically-charged.
4. The weirdest stuff will put people off the moderate stuff
The animal welfare arguments with the broadest appeal are those that appeal to intuition: Most people would not torture a cow, pig or bird without feeling some sense of intuitive guilt or disgust, so paying a factory farm to do this out of sight obviously doesn't make sense and this is a strong argument. We don't need a way of measuring suffering to make this argument because it appeals to beliefs and intuitions that people already have. Arguments can be mounted against cage eggs, sow stalls, mulesing, suffocating animals in CO2 in this way. Depending on the person, you might be able to make arguments for fish or shrimp with these appeals too.
When the question move beyond human intuitions/beliefs, (generally somewhere at about the point of fish/shrimp), we run into problems with using analogies like above and the arguments fall back on complex and obtuse utility calculus arguments attempting to compare animal and human suffering/welfare. Often these complex arguments lead to conclusions that the Average Joe will balk at like "giving 2000 shrimp a less painful death is equivalent to a human life".
Discussions of shrimp welfare, of mass vaccination eco-engineering projects to limit unnecessary wild animal suffering from disease, of regulating the way that maggots are slaughtered are all weird. Weird ≠ incorrect, but it does create blocks to uptake and prevents people from supporting the more moderate parts of the same movement.
Global health doesn't seem to have as much of a weird fringe.
5. The research may turn out to be futile or counterproductive
I have concerns about the usefulness of a lot of the research being done on animal welfare and I suspect the research might end up reflecting poorly on the EA movement generally when it turns out that it has yielded few useful answers for the resources spent.
The main problem is that once we move beyond intuition-based arguments for animal treatment and into utility-calculus welfare research, the arguments become riddled with measurement problems and confidence intervals too wide to be useful.
Can't define it, can't measure it
None of "sentience", "conciousness", "suffering", "pain" are measurable or even clearly defined. Animal welfare research seems to use proxy measures like behaviours:
- fruit flies can be made to exhibit depression symptoms that improve with antidepressants
- ants supposedly continue to eat when their abdomens are cut off
- some insects grow bigger wings in more confined spaces so they can fly away and escape the crowding
- maggots take longer to die in a microwave then when blended
You can also use biomarkers of stress like cortisol or growth rates, or look at neural structures, and there are 6-point and 8-point frameworks (as described here) for determining whether something experiences "pain".
But whether any of these proxy measures is reliable and really tells us anything is unclear and it's hard to see how it ever will be clear.
Approximations are too approximate
The attempts by the Rethink Priorities Welfare Range Estimates project to create a framework for comparing animal suffering is necessary for doing the cost-benefit analyses we would need to decide whether the cost to humans of an intervention is worth the benefit to animals. Unfortunately these ranges have such wide confidence intervals that, putting aside the question of whether the methodology and ranges are even valid, it doesn't seem to get us any closer to doing the necessary cost-benefit analyses.
Here's some research and posts I've come across in my brief search that I think suffers from this problem of not being actionable because of the impossibility of doing cost-benefit analyses:
- Grinding as a slaughter method for farmed black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) larvae
- Farmed Yellow Mealworm Welfare: Species-Specific Recommendations for a Global Industry
- Reducing aquatic noise as a wild animal welfare intervention
- Welfare Footprint's work on welfare in salmon farms
- Cost-effectiveness of Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative
- What matters to shrimps? Factors affecting shrimp welfare in aquaculture
- Factory-farming is as bad as one Holocaust every 2 days?
- Scale of the welfare of various animal populations
The exception is interventions that don't cost anything. These we could reasonably implement without the need for cost-benefit analysis. Replacing the killing of maggots with microwaves with some cost-equivalent method that maggots seem to enjoy more, might be reasonable. So might be using red lights for photophobic insect farms. If shrimp stunning was zero-cost (it's not) and they seemed to prefer it, might as well do it. Where some horrible wild animal disease can be reduced at minimal cost and with confidence of no unexpected downstream problems (big "if" and probably unknowable), let's do it.
Mostly the interventions will cost human resources in the form of time, money, or human or other animal suffering. Without any way to do this cost-benefit analysis with some confidence (not the Welfare Range's impractical confidence intervals) the research can't give us actionable information and may be a complete waste of time.
Beyond the possibility of it being useless, the research could be counterproductive if it uses up resources that could have gone to other things or delegitimises other work by the EA community by making us look silly.
A common refrain I see in animal welfare research on and off this forum is "more research is needed". Maybe it's not.
Global health is better set-up for quantitative research and cost-benefit analysis which is why it's formed the basis of EA.
6. More prone to slippery slope argument
The ever-expanding moral circle of the EA animal welfare community is admirable but it's hard to know where to stop
If we consider the suffering of fish why not shrimp? If shrimp why not bees? If bees why not maggots? If maggots why not mosquitos? If mosquitos why not demodex mites?, if demodex mites why not nematodes? oysters?
The slippery slope fallacy is only a fallacy when there's some reason why A won't inevitably lead to Z and in the case of moral circle expansion it is hard to say where or why there is a line that would stop us slipping all the way to the bottom and pondering fungus welfare. This will both 1. generate resistance to even the moderate parts of the animal welfare movement and 2. will have parts of the movement lost in the weeds of crazy town.
This doesn't apply in global health. "So we get rid of malaria, next you'll want to get rid of rabies, or trichomoniasis". Yes.
7. Poor optics of valuing animals over people
The argument that human welfare pales in comparison to chicken, fish or shrimp welfare is a difficult one to make to the face of any of the millions of people currently living in dire poverty deprived of health, education, opportunity. It will come across to many as cold, out-of-touch, privileged, classist.
This will generate resistance to the animal welfare movement and EA more broadly.
8. Will be called culturally insensitive
Animal products are a core part of many cultures. EA Funds directs "grants to advocacy organizations working in 26 countries". Most of these are in Western countries currently. As time goes on (maybe already?) the majority of animals will be raised/killed/consumed in India, Southeast Asia and Africa.
Where these cultures are outside the Western sphere (in which most of EA operates), there will be accusations of cultural insensitivity and "imposition of Western Values™" when EA tells people (or funds advocacy orgs that tell people) to minimise their consumption of animal products or advises how to treat their animals.
Global health is less burdened with accusations of imposed Western Values because not dying of diarrhea, measles or lead poisoning and not having cataracts are mostly universal cultural traits
9. Outcomes will be harder to measure, we won't get feedback on progress
One of the benefits of global health is that there are usually clear outcomes you can measure to get feedback on your progress: malaria cases, lead levels, polio rates.
Most of the interventions in animal welfare have difficult-to-measure outcomes. First of all we have no objective way to measure animal suffering and compare it to our intuitive feelings about human welfare, but then on top of that many of the interventions are lobbying for regulation in complex political systems so it will be difficult to attribute any outcome to a given action.
This post is mostly about how animal welfare is less popular than global health but I don't really see the tie-in for how this (probably correct) claim translates to it being less effective. Taking the first argument at face value, that some people won't like being in some ways forced to pay more or change their habits, does not seem to translate to "it is not cost effective to do successfully force them (and one hopes eventually change their hearts and minds) anyway." This was precisely the case for a lot of social movements (abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights, worker's rights, the environmental movement, etc.) but all these movements were to various degrees successful.
It seems to me that in order for any of these popularity based arguments to hold water, you need a follow-on of "and therefore it is not cost effective to invest in them, and here is the evidence." However, I think we have a lot of evidence for cost-effectiveness in investing animal interventions. See cage-free egg campaigns for example. I similarly don't understand the relevance of other popularity-based concerns, such as being accused of being culturally insensitive. What is the implication for effectiveness if such accusations are made? Why does that matter?
Keeping the public on side is actually quite important for getting things done.
Backlash against the thing you’re trying to promote blows out costs, making the plan less cost-effective
50% of people are women so I think women’s suffrage had a pretty strong support base before it was made law. Similar story for your other examples I think: build support, then laws. Abolition seems like an example of where a counter-movement blew out the cost of change a lot.
Seems to me that the effectiveness costs of public support are already baked into existing effectiveness estimates. It also seems to me that the fact that animal welfare is comparatively unpopular means that it is more neglected and therefore has more low-hanging fruit.
I don't think any of the popularity-based arguments really support the claim that there is going to be a large backlash that has not yet manifested. I agree that a world where we knew everyone would be 100 percent behind the idea of improving welfare but for some reason hadn't made it happen out of inertia would make animal welfare interventions even more cost effective. However, I don't think this means that we should favor global health and development over animal welfare any more than the possibility that people might resent helping the poor people in poor countries over poor people in our own countries means we should focus more on helping the domestic poor out of fear of backlash.
You can’t bake-in something as unpredictable as how movements and counter-movements evolve and interact.
We need to be more open to uncertainty and consider unexpected ways in which our best laid plans may go astray. Animal Welfare is rife with these uncertainties.
I'm not super knowledgeable about women's suffrage, but
I could similarly say ">99.999% of animals are nonhumans, so nonhuman animal welfare has an extremely large support base." But that's not the relevant support base for the discussion at hand.
I didn't say universal or 50% support. Many women were against, many men were for. My point is that it had a stronger support base than shrimp welfare before we tried to regulate it.
The idea that you can go regulating without considering public support/resistance is silly
Sorry you're right, you didn't say this -- I misread that part of your comment.
I still think your framing misses something important: the logic "50% of people are women so I think women’s suffrage had a pretty strong support base" applies at all points in time, so it doesn't explain why suffrage was so unpopular for so long. Or to put it another way, for some reason the popularity and political influence of the suffrage movement increased dramatically without the percentage of women increasing, so I'm not sure the percentage of people who are women is relevant in the way you're implying.
On the other hand I didn't say this! The degree of public support is certainly relevant. But I'm not sure what your practical takeaway or recommendation is in the case of an unpopular movement.
For example you point out abolition as an example where resistance caused massive additional costs (including the Civil War in the US). I could see points 1, 3, 7, and possibly 8 all being part of a "Ways I see the Quaker shift to abolitionism backfiring" post. They could indeed be fair points that Quakers / other abolitionists should have considered, in some way -- but I'm not sure what that post would have actually wanted abolitionists to do differently, and I'm not sure what your post wants EAs to do differently.
Maybe you just intend to be pointing out possible problems, without concluding one way or another whether the GH -> AW shift is overall good or bad. But I get a strong sense from reading it that you think it's overall bad, and if that's the case I don't know what the practical upshots are.
I'm surprised by how much of this post is in the future tense and framed as imagining what will happen if we do animal welfare reform. Animal welfare reform has been a part of EA for around as long as EA has existed, and there's now more than a decade of track record to look at. So when you say things like:
my response is, well, we already did all this stuff, did we see these negative side effects or not?
This is a good point, but I think Henry's post should probably be read as above the consequences of a "movement towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions" -- i.e., a major increase in the scope and ambition of AW efforts, especially if seen as at the cost of GW efforts.
Broadly speaking, I would say that the major efforts have been things that could draw on meaningful pre-existing popular support and that the things that could provoke backlash have tended to be small enough (or focused on internal spaces like the Forum) to not be on the general population's radar. How much AW can expand within the former category (and without going too much into the latter) is one of my major uncertainties for funding allocation.
Wild animals and weirdness
Section 4 ("The weirdest stuff will put people off the moderate stuff") argues that perceptions of the weirdness of a given cause or intervention "create blocks to uptake and prevents people from supporting the more moderate parts of the same movement."
Insofar as this is true, it's important to know the degrees of perceived weirdness. To my pleasant surprise, I've found that wild animal welfare seems much less weird to most people than it does to most EAs. This is based on my experience working at Wild Animal Initiative for the last five years, hearing my colleagues' reports of their conversations with people (primarily scientists), and generally talking about it at every chance I get (both with EAs and non-EAs).
Apologies for the forthcoming generalizations about EAs. I'm trying to describe general patterns; I'm not trying to flatten everyone into one caricature.
How the idea is introduced
In my experience, EAs often explain wild animal welfare along these lines: "Nature is really brutal. The animals with the worst lives are the most numerous. We should destroy habitat or eliminate predators."
In contrast, my colleagues and I have settled on an approach that's closer to this: "You seem like you care about animals. So do we. People talk a lot about human harms to animals, but there's so much we don't know about naturally occurring harms. We think it would be good to protect wild animals from things like disease or starvation if we could. But ecosystems are really complicated, so that's why we're focused on doing research first."
It turns out most people respond really well to that. In fact, our biggest communication challenge is not people thinking we're too weird, but rather people not thinking we're weird enough. That is, "reducing wild animal suffering" sounds a lot like "protecting endangered species." They get the overlap quickly; it's the differences that take longer to explain.
What things are discussed
In my experience, most EA discussions of wild animal welfare focus on extreme thought experiments, extreme interventions, and core philosophical principles. My hypothesis is that that's largely because of a temperamental inclination toward abstraction and consistency, which is why many of us (including me) like to steer conversations toward areas of deepest disagreement or highest uncertainty.
Turns out there's no rule that says you have to single out whatever someone loves most and declare it must be wiped from this earth. The thought experiments and zany interventions are also of only limited usefulness, because they're almost completely untethered from the considerations that will guide the next steps of research and movement-building.
So we and other researchers in the field mostly discuss things that are both more palatable and more achievable in the near term (or at least representative of how we might do things in the near term, which "feeding lions cultivated meat via drones" is not): vaccination against diseases, contraception to prevent starvation, promoting habitats/land uses that host populations with higher total welfare than the alternatives, reducing sources of stress, etc.
Baseline attitudes toward nature
I think most people in the industrialized West like wildlife. It seems like the default is people seeing themselves on the same side as animals (e.g., happy to see them at all, sad to see them suffer), and exceptions come when people come into direct conflict with animals (urban pest species, predators of livestock, etc.). Crucially, these attitudes seem to be not just about preferences ("I like animals"), but also tied into identity at a very basic, nonpartisan level: "I'm the kind of person who appreciates wildlife," "Nice people are nice to animals," etc. I've singled out "animals" here, but in reality these preferences and identities tend to bundle animals and nature into one, and "nature" is what's mentioned more often: "Nature is beautiful," "I'm the kind of person who respects nature," etc.
Before I got involved in EA, I had only ever met a handful of people who disliked nature. (They were all kids -- I was also a kid -- who grew up in densely urban areas, and their main issue seemed to be with bugs, particularly mosquitoes.) Now that I'm deep in the EA bubble and talking about nature a lot, I've met tons of EAs who say they've always disliked nature: they thought it was obviously cruel, harsh, unwelcoming, gross, etc. (I even met one person who said they didn't even understand why anyone thought natural vistas looked beautiful until a psychedelic experience gave them that experience for the first time.) Either I grew up super sheltered (likely true), or EA has a way of attracting weirdos (definitely true -- again, I offer myself as evidence).
Another thing that causes many EAs to underestimate how willing -- how excited -- most people are to help wildlife is their experiences advocating for farmed animals. Most people have very different attitudes toward farmed animals than wild animals, and they have a vested interest in not changing what they eat or how our economy works. As Henry points out, mocking vegans is a cultural norm, and sometimes even part of people's identities. Fortunately, when asked to help wild animals, people don't interpret that as an attack on their integrity or their lifestyle, so they don't have the same defensive reaction.
Conclusion
That was wordier than I expected. All I really wanted to say is I know we can make "mass vaccination eco-engineering projects to limit unnecessary wild animal suffering from disease" sound pretty weird, but most people think "protecting wildlife from diseases" sounds like a pretty good idea. There are still lots of challenges to people fully understanding, accepting, and improving wild animal welfare, but we shouldn't make those challenges out to be worse than they are.
Interesting!
Good to know that predicting reasonable things in a reasonable way, well, works. This stresses the importance of the way we present things.
Thanks so much for this excellent list Henry. Although I personally agree with only some of these as being major issues, I think it's the best collection of well structured arguments of problems with a potential shift towards animal welfare that I've seen.
Things I agree are major issues
Things I personally don't think are a big issue
Historically, it would be fair to characterize the main EA funder as a "Western liberal" in at least some ways, and probably a significant number of other (and potential future) donors as well.
Plenty of work has been done outside the West, e.g. through the Open Wing Alliance. Several ACE recommendations work primarily outside the West. AFAIK, we aren't really being called culturally insensitive so far. So, this doesn't seem to be materializing, or at least not in a way that's seriously hindering us.
And costly welfare reforms will only go through where they are reasonably aligned with the values of the producers or consumers (possibly sometimes aligned only with end consumers in the West, not with the non-Western producers for imported products). I think EAA grantmakers and the EAA orgs they support are basically as sensitive to cultural values as they need to be. Outreach is usually carried out mostly by local advocates. Consideration of cultural values also affects organizational strategies, like what kind of outreach is done, e.g. less antagonistic in East Asia, if I recall correctly.
"There seems to be movement towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions."
What is this based on? I don't believe this tracks with e.g. distribution of EA-associated donations.
I think the voting on this debate week is at least one data point too.
Velocity vs displacement
Would you mind expanding on your comment? I don't know what exactly you mean by it.
My understanding is that no one is seriously verifying how many deaths or disease cases GiveWell-recommended charities have prevented. Rather, studies of the effectiveness of the types of interventions these charities use are generalized, with adjustments for context. There's a risk that we're just missing something, say that the program isn't implemented as expected, or we've made the wrong adjustments for context. As far as I can tell, we're only tracking inputs, and then we're estimating the outputs. The cost-effectiveness analyses are effectively ex ante or prospective. (Maybe except for GiveDirectly, for which there have been RCTs.)
Animal welfare intervention cost-effectiveness analyses seem more ex post or retrospective. For corporate outreach, we track which companies have made commitments, and we track progress on those commitments, e.g. % of their eggs cage-free with EggTrack.
There is still the problem of assessing causal impact, of course, and there's been some formal (observational/non-RCT) research on this (Mendez & Peacock, 2022) and some more informal analyses, including fact-checking accomplishments and what the industry had otherwise planned.
We also do have analyses of the welfare effects of some major animal welfare reforms in terms of duration and intensity of suffering reduced through Welfare Footprint Project, and some other similar projects. But these are not specific to the work of specific non-profits, so not really ex post/retrospective.
This seems very ungenerous to the global health space:
That is how RCTs work. You can't have a separate RCT for every situation unfortunately.
For what it's worth, I don't specifically think our research for estimating cost-effectiveness of corporate chicken welfare work is more reliable/less biased than GiveWell's research overall. I'd say
And prospective marginal cost-effectiveness is more decision-relevant than retrospective cost-effectiveness, to guide donations and grants, which further favours GiveWell.
Fair, they're not just monitoring inputs, but also often proper use and implementation (on top of other factors that may affect cost-effectiveness, which they adjust for). However, that could still leave many potential holes along the way to the outcomes that actually matter in themselves.
In the case of AMF, compared to the RCTs, there can be changes to or differences in
I think GiveWell (or the charities) tracks and/or makes some adjustments for some of these, too, of course, and we might expect the others not to matter much at all.
On the other hand, counting cataract surgeries seems pretty close to tracking an actual outcome that matters in itself or that is itself close to welfare, improved vision.[1]
But we could have ongoing RCTs of GiveWell recommendations to check that the charities are still having important effects, although that may raise ethical issues at this point. Instead, M&E, observational research, fact checking and other investigation could be used to provide more independent evidence for outcomes closer to the ones we actually care about and our causal effects on them, like has been done for corporate chicken welfare work.
They could verify the severity of cataracts cases being treated and that the cataracts are actually cured by the surgeries (in a representative or random sample of treated individuals). (Maybe they do all this; I didn't check.) Cataracts don't go away on their own, so we only need to make assumptions about how many would have otherwise gotten (successful) treatment anyway (and when) to estimate the causal effects on cataracts.
Still, the quality of life impacts of the cataract surgeries could also be different compared to studies. There could be differences in social support. There could be differences in vision unrelated to cataracts, like people being more nearsighted, reducing the impact of cataract surgery without correction for nearsightedness, although I don't expect differences in nearsightedness to matter much.
I think this is also true for some of the more moderate/less weird animal welfare reforms we ask for:
But this may be less true for plant-based advocacy, invertebrate welfare and wild animal welfare. Open Phil has stopped funding work in the last two.
I strongly disagree that we should avoid doing a thing just because the optics/vibes of it might not be mainstream, or that it requires people to change what they're doing.
I am also strongly against "we shouldn't do this because it is culturally insensitive." There are lots of cultural practices I find abhorrent (e.g., female genital mutilation). I don't care if stopping it "offends" other people. Cultures are perfectly capable of promoting very bad practices.
This is not trying to do the most good with limited resources. This is "trying to do the most good with limited resources, subject to the constraint of not making some people angry or seeming too weird."
(For what it's worth, I voted fairly strongly on the side of spending on more on global health as opposed to animal welfare.)
I think this post is overall great, even though I favour animal over global health stuff right now, but doing stuff just for the optics feels really sleazy and naive utilitarian to me.
I don't think Henry is suggesting that, though (although I see how one could read observation 7 that way and welcome his clarification). The post is about movement "towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions."
At most, I read his post as suggesting things like (1) we may need to leave some stuff on the table because poor optics doom an effort requiring public support to failure, and (2) partially withdrawing from GH may not be a good idea in part for optics reasons. While one could disagree with those kinds of conclusions as well, I think they are more subtle and sophisticated than "doing stuff just for the optics."
I wouldn't advocate giving $100M to Make A Wish just for optics.
But you shouldn't ignore optics, because it affects tractability and can have downstream effects on other parts of the movement.
In a decision between two options where it's ambiguous which is better (global health vs animal welfare) but one has better optics, it is particularly relevant.
I think you are too optimistic about how much the average person in the global north care about people in the global south (and possibly too pessimistic about how much people care about animals, but less confident about that).
"Saving children from malaria, diarrheal disease, lead poisoning, or treating cataracts and obstetric fistula is hard to argue against without sounding like a bad person."
The argument that you should help locally instead (even if the people making that argument don't do so) is easily made without sounding like a bad person. I live in the Netherlands and any spending on developmental cooperation or charity work tends to be very unpopular, our current government also pledged to cut a lot of that spending. Pushback on 'giving money to Africa' is something I certainly encounter, it might be less than for being vegan but I'm not sure and also not sure by how much. I would want better data on this, this piece seems to assume a big difference in how socially acceptable, moderate and politizised global health is compared to animal welfare. I would like to see better data on whether that assumption is true or not.
I find the slippery slope argument pretty weak, historically expanding the moral circle (to women, slaves, people of color, lhbtqi+ people) has been quite important and still requires a lot of work. It seems much easier to not go far enough than to go too far, and expanding the moral circle to animals or people in the global south is both an expansion. A core strength of EA is that there is a lot of attention to groups that are outside the moral circle of many comperatively affluent and wealthy people or institutions (the global poor, animals, and future generations). The slippery-slope argument is only meaningful if going down the slope would be bad, which is unclear to me.
Yes, but I think there's a difference at work here:
This can also cut the other way if we're trying to ensure we have a positive impact (difference-making risk averse or difference-making ambiguity averse). We have no objective way to measure how much potential harm saving humans or improving their incomes does to nonhuman animals through the meat eater problem or wild animal effects.
I think we agree: the massive uncertainty in the utility calculus approach to this problem could go either way and so it tells us nothing.
In the end we're forced to fall back on our moral intuitions like: "harpooning whale feels bad" and comparative arguments like: "well if you wouldn't suffocate your dog, how can you pay someone to suffocate a pig?". This is the only feasible approach.
I think we can put some reasonable bounds on our uncertainty and ranges, and they can tell us some useful things. Or, at least, I can, according to my own intuitions, and end up prioritizing animal welfare this way.
Also, I've argued here that uncertainty about moral weights actually tends to further favour prioritizing nonhumans.
Thanks for the post, Henry.
Large uncertainty also means a high cost-effectiveness of animal welfare research which tries to decrease the uncertainty, given the high value of information.
That assumes that “further research” will reduce these confidence intervals significantly, which I am skeptical of.
You could fund 1000 PostDocs for 1000 years each to study “why is there something rather than nothing” or “is one person’s perception of blue the same as another’s” and it’s no given that you’ll get closer to an answer.
I am willing to discuss (either in the comments or on a call) any of these arguments. I don't think any of them hold much water and I doubt that in total they are enough to shift the weight of what we should do.
I am glad @Henry Howard🔸 wrote them up, but to the extent there is now a big list of arguments I don't find compelling I am slightly more convinced.
The challenges you've identified regarding the shift from global health to animal welfare—such as resistance, politicization, and cultural insensitivity—largely stem from insufficient communication, which can be significantly improved with more funding. By investing in effective messaging strategies, we can make animal welfare interventions more relatable and acceptable to the broader public, thereby increasing their popularity and impact. Moreover, the Effective Altruism community risks reputational damage by advocating for animal welfare without adequately investing in public communication; without a strong messaging system, we may alienate potential supporters and undermine our efforts. Therefore, allocating more resources to both animal welfare initiatives and their communication is crucial—not only to address these concerns but also to enhance the movement's credibility and ensure our interventions are both effective and well-received.
[trigger warning: allusions to pending US electoral candidate who identified as a Nazi and posted anti-trans content...]
Could you say more about why you think the challenges "largely stem from insufficient communication"? I don't disagree that a better comms strategy would be helpful and probably a prudent use for some of the additional $100MM. But I'm struggling to see how it would be a game-changer for most of the challenges Henry describes.
E.g.,: companies and consumers resist things that cost them money, and they use the political system to seek relief from those things. And no communication strategy is going to convince agricultural industries that EA AW wouldn't be at least a near-existential threat to many of their business lines if it achieved its hopes and dreams. Moreover, changing hearts and minds on such an emotionally laden topic as food would be a massive undertaking -- to give a vaguely relevant data point, PepsiCo spent ~$2B on advertising in the US alone in 2022. And getting people to believe things they don't want to believe on a mass scale is hard even when those things are scientifically true (yes the vaccines work, no they will not improve your 5G reception).
Also, the upside of an affirmative comms strategy is limited when you have provided a determined opponent a bunch of open goals to score on. For instance, right now there's a major candidate for governor of a US state who made a bunch of disturbing comments on an adult entertainment discussion board (e.g., calling himself a Nazi). For a significant portion of the US population, some of the things that are said on this Forum register as more offensive than that (e.g., meat-eater problem, implications that a human life is morally worth less than giving a few thousand shrimps a more humane death).[1]
I don't see how throwing money at developing and executing a better comms plan helps much with those kinds of vulnerabilities. I wouldn't be interested in engaging any more with content about the Nazi-identifying governor; it just wouldn't be worth my time on the very very slim chance further information would update my vote. I expect many people would have a similar reaction when opponents successfully tied EA AW to the meat-eater problem.
I am reporting, not endorsing, this view! I'm using it as an example because I think it's easy for people in/adjacent to the EA bubble to not understand how certain positions may play in (e.g.) the deep South where I grew up.
I guess I would revise my comment to be more modest in its proposition.
One part of what the OP is saying is that increased funding for animal welfare by EA would result in greater pushback against EA in general for putting resources toward something it considers strange or weird or otherwise contrary to their values.
I'm saying that the effect of this "EA is weird for prioritizing Animal Welfare" would probably be less than the effect of the better messaging, communication, and marketing, that the money would enable. So the net effect of more money in animal welfare (assuming prudent communications and marketing spend in the deployment) would be better public perception of EA rather than worse.
You're right that the underlying perceptions and views are unlikely to be adequately addressed even if all the $200 mil was going to marketing, but with a prudent portion of it going there, I would anticipate the net effect on public perception of EA to be positive rather than negative.
I agree with most of these points, but many of them don’t really argue against the forum question as posed. (Not that you were saying they do.).
The “should” in the question, in my mind, seems to rule out these second order image concerns, difficulty of garnering support, etc.
Although I know many EAs will agree with you, I think second order concerns such as image and reference on the movement are valid considerations, although usually less important than first order.
I think I was unclear. I agree "second order concerns such as image and reference on the movement are valid considerations" and I even think these are often more important. (Perhaps 'indirect' is a better word than 'second order').
But it's more about how I interpreted the question
I interpreted this this a normative 'axiology' question ... if society could shift it's resources towards this by $100m, would that improve welfare?
Rather than a 'would it be strategic for EAs to publicly shift their donations in this way'. But I now see that other interpretations of this question are valid.
Public support is important for getting things done actually. It's affects tractability.
In the case where it's ambiguous which of options A and B are better, but they have different levels of public support, it becomes an important consideration.
I agree with many of the points made in the above comment but do not plan to change my vote. When one looks at current expenditures on public health (in the many $trillions of dollars) versus on animal welfare (around $9 billion in revenues annually in the USA), the marginal increase in the utility of grants in the animal welfare space are likely to be greater than those in public health. Open Philanthropy's history project comments on the challenge of producing positive impact in the health space given the large amounts currently devoted annually to support biomedical research let alone the much larger amounts devoted to health treatment, disease surveillance, and prevention.
Would you be able to share a source for the $9 billion figure? I'm interested in for another project I am working on, not as it relates to this debate.
Pressuring people and entities to do things they would rather not do (like incurring business expenses to improve animal welfare) can be a powerful mechanism of action (MOA), both because of leverage and because certain objectives may be hard to accomplish otherwise.
But it has some important limitations as well, several of which relate to your points. The reliance on consumer, social, or political pressure limits the range of viable targets, likely requires pulling some punches to maintain the public support needed for the MOA to work, invites countermeasures by opponents who can appeal to (e.g.) a higher power like the legislature, and so on.
Thus, it doesn't generally play well with (e.g.) an attitude of truthseeking-and-damn-the-torpedoes or something that looks like an epistemic precommitment to not caring what outsiders think. Those stances may work with bednets and conducting certain types of research where little third-party support/cooperation is needed, but I'd note how those interventions are not nearly as leveraged.
Executive summary: The shift from global health to animal welfare interventions in effective altruism may backfire due to various challenges, including resistance to imposed changes, social dismissal, politicization, and difficulties in measuring outcomes.
Key points:
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