I'm up for committing to the first week and then continuing if it seems useful. :)
It actually seems pretty difficult to see how having children would, on average, be anywhere near as strong an option if your outcome measures are (1) number of children who would otherwise would not exist/reach adulthood and (2) number of children produced using your (presumably much better than donor-average) genetic material.
There are a lot of factors that influence the cost to raise a child (e.g. family income, number of children in a single household), but the USDA's figures suggest that even a relatively low-income family ($0-60k combined household ...
Is there any good reason for having children you don't particularly want to have rather than (a) donating lots of high-quality gametes and (b) giving some or all of the money you would've spent on child-rearing to an organization that prevents the premature deaths of other children?
This could be changed by promoting efficient altruism, creating local meetups of efficient altruists, etc. It's not only to find new altruists, but to give some social bonus (= warm fuzzies) to both existing and the new ones.
There's a significant difference between selling effective altruism to non-EAs and selling a specific effective charity to non-EAs. I suspect that the former is both more valuable (in the long term) and more difficult. Upping the warm-fuzzies seems to me like it would work toward both (as well as EA retention, although I know of no ...
Yes!
Tangentially related: I've wondered whether there might be high expected value for creating an organization (perhaps a temporary one, or one existing within a larger existing org) dedicated to figuring out how to sell EA charities effectively. There is already a growing body of research on charitable giving, but the opportunities are hardly tapped out. There seems to be an understanding that donating to EA charities tends to provide fewer warm-fuzzies than giving to their (most successful) non-EA counterparts, but few people talking about it seem to consider this very dire or changeable.
It's an interesting theory, but I'm hesitant to give much weight to weakly-supported hypotheses intended to explain very broad and inclusive phenomena, like "murders (or a lack thereof) occurring within these arbitrary geographical borders." This is especially true when there's no shortage of plausible theories and a lot of potentially-useful information is missing.
The changeling myths seem to serve the purpose of guilt-relief only insofar as they also aid shame-relief, so I''m not sure they're all that helpful. (Am I missing something?)
Basically, this reads to me like an interesting but not particularly credible just-so story.
This seems irresponsible and unwise when you have substantial fixed costs, all necessary for core activities, and not much in the way of back-up resources. I can see it feasibly leading to a bunch of problems, including (a) the incentive to save up financial resources rather than put them to use toward high-EV activities and (b) difficulty hiring staff smart enough to realize that the resources from which their salaries are paid out will be highly variable month-to-month.
I just googled it. I suspect that the "refined" in "refined carbohydrates" is a stand-in for "bad, for reasons left unspecified."
Having spent a fair amount of time around CFAR staff, in the office and out, I can testify to their almost unbelievable level of self-reflection and creativity. (I recall, several months ago, Julia joking about how much time in meetings was spent discussing the meetings themselves at various levels of meta.) For what it's worth, I can't think of an organization I'd trust to have a greater grasp on its own needs and resources. If they're pushing fundraising, I'd estimate with high confidence that it's because that's where the bottleneck is.
I think donating ...
I'm not sure what you mean by "valid" here - could you clarify? I will say that I think a world where beings are deriving utility from the perception of causing suffering without actually causing suffering isn't inferior to a world where beings are deriving the same amount of utility from some other activity that doesn't affect other beings, all else held equal. However, it seems like it might be difficult to maintain enough control over the system to ensure that the pro-suffering beings don't do anything that actually causes suffering.
It strikes me as folly, too. But "Let's go kill the sharks, then!" does not necessarily follow from "Predation is not anywhere close to optimal." Nowhere have I (or anyone else here, unless I'm mistaken) argued that we should play with massive ecosystems now.
I'm very curious why you don't feel any need to exterminate or modify predators, assuming it's likely to be something we can do in the future with some degree of caution and precision.
Yes, I'm using "natural lifespan" here as a placeholder for "the typical lifespan assuming nothing is actively trying to kill you." It's not great language, but I don't think it's obviously tautological.
The shark's "natural" lifespan requires that it eats other creatures. Their "natural" lifespan requires that it does not.
Yes. My question is whether that's a system that works for us.
If you eliminate some species because you think they're mean, you're going to damage a lot more.
I'd just like to point out that (a) "mean" is a very poor descriptor of predation (neither its severity nor its connotations re: motivation do justice to reality), and (b) this use of "damage" relies on the use of "healthy" to describe a population of beings routinely devoured alive well before the end of their natural lifespans. If we "damaged" a previously "healthy" system wherein the same sorts of things were happening to humans, we would almost certainly consider it a good thing.
For the record, the chicken that survived had retained most of the brainstem. He was able to walk ("clumsily') and attempted some reflexive behaviors, but he was hardly "functional" to anyone who knows enough about chickens to assume that they do more than walk and occasionally lunge at the ground.
The chicken's ability to survive with only the brain stem isn't shocking. Anencephalic babies can sometimes breathe, eat, cry, and reflexively "respond" to external stimuli. One survived for two and a half years. This was a rare case, but...
I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you've provided says:
[Beyond Meat] mimics chicken to such a degree that renowned New York Times food journalist and author Mark Bittman claimed that it "fooled me badly in a blind tasting".
But reading Bittman's piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:
...It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both a
If AMF can add about 30 years of healthy human life for $2000 by averting malaria and a human is worth 40x that of a chicken, then we'd need to pay less than $1.67 to avert a year of suffering for a chicken (assuming averting a year of suffering is the same as adding a year of healthy life, which is a messy assumption).
This might be a minor point, but I don't think it's necessarily a given that one year of healthy, average-quality life offsets one year of factory farm-style confinement. If we were only discussing humans, I don't think anyone would consider a year under those conditions to be offset by a healthy year.
Do you consider young children and very low-intelligence people to be morally-relevant?
(If - in the case of children - you consider potential for later development to be a key factor, we can instead discuss only children who have terminal illnesses.)
We're treading close to terminal values here. I will express some aesthetic preference for nature qua nature.
That strikes me as inconsistent, assuming that preventing suffering/minimizing disutility is also a terminal value. In those terms, nature is bad. Really, really bad.
I also recognize a libertarian attitude that we should allow other individuals to live the lives they choose in the environments they find themselves to the extent reasonably possible.
It seems arbitrary to exclude the environment from the cluster of factors that go into living &...
We need to value the species as a whole, not just the individual members; and we need to value their inherent nature as predators and prey.
Why?
While zoos have their place, we should not seek to move all wild creatures into safe, sterile environments with no predators, pain, or danger any more than we would move all humans into isolated, AI-created virtual environments with no true interaction with reality.
Assuming that these environments are (or would be) on the whole substantially better on the measures that matter to the individual living in them, why shouldn't we?
I'm much less (emotionally) motivated to try new things/deviate from my routine than I'd like to be, especially when an intervention's purpose is to improve something I'm currently not doing very well at. For example, I feel a lot more motivated to try something that might further improve a project that's already going very well than I am to try something that might turn around a project that's failing. I suspect that this is related to ugh fields. Any suggestions?