Quick takes

Contra Vasco Grilo on GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming? The post above explores how under the utilitarian hedonistic moral framework, the meat-eater problem may result in GiveWell grants or AIM charities to be net-negative. The post seems to argue that one expected value grounds, one should let children die of malaria because they could end up eating chicken, for example. I find this argument morally repugnant and want to highlight it. Using some of the words I have used in a reply: Let me quote William MacAskill comments on "What We Owe the Future" and his reflections on FTX (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WdeiPrwgqW2wHAxgT/a-personal-statement-on-ftx): Finally, let me say the post itself seems to pit animal welfare against global poverty causes, which I found divisive and probably counterproductive. I downvoted this post because it is not representative of the values I believe EA should strive for. It may have been sufficient to show disagreement, but if someone goes for the first time into the forum and sees the post with many upvotes, their impression will be negative and may not become engaged with the community. If a reporter reads the forum and reads this, they will negatively cover both EA and animal welfare. And if someone was considering taking the 10% pledge or changing their career to support either animal welfare or global health and read this, they will be less likely to do so. I am sorry, but I will strongly oppose "ends justify the means" argument put forward by this post.

Would it be feasible/useful to accelerate the adoption of hornless ("naturally polled") cattle, to remove the need for painful dehorning? There are around 88M farmed cattle in the US at any point in time, and I'm guessing about an OOM more globally. These cattle are for various reasons frequently dehorned -- about 80% of dairy calves and 25% of beef cattle are dehorned annually in the US, meaning roughly 13-14M procedures. Dehorning is often done without anaesthesia or painkillers and is likely extremely painful, both immediately and for some time afterwards. Cattle horns are filled with blood vessels and nerves, so it's not like cutting nails. It might feel something like having your teeth amputated at the root. Some breeds of cows are "naturally polled", meaning they don't grow horns. There have been efforts to develop hornless cattle via selective breeding, and some breeds (e.g., Angus) are entirely hornless. So there is already some incentive to move towards hornless cattle, but probably a weak incentive as dehorning is pretty cheap and infrequent. In cattle, there's a gene that regulates horn growth, with the hornless allele being dominant. So you can gene edit cattle to be naturally hornless. This seems to be an area of active research (e.g.). So now I'm wondering, are there ways of speeding up the adoption of hornless cattle? If all US cattle were hornless, >10M of these painful procedures would be avoided annually. For example, perhaps you could fund relevant gene editing research, advocate to remove regulatory hurdles, or incentivize farmers to adopt hornless cattle breeds? Caveat: I only thought and read about all this for 15 minutes.

During the animal welfare vs global health debate week, I was very reluctant to make a post or argument in favor of global health, the cause I work in and that animates me. Here are some reflections on why, that may or may not apply to other people: 1. Moral weights are tiresome to debate. If you (like me) do not have a good grasp of philosophy, it's an uphill struggle to grasp what RP's moral weights project means exactly, and where I would or would not buy into its assumptions. 2. I don't choose my donations/actions based on impartial cause prioritization. I think impartially within GHD (e.g. I don't prioritize interventions in India just because I'm from there, I treat health vs income moral weights much more analytically than species moral weights) but not for cross-cause comparison. I am okay with this. But it doesn't make for a persuasive case to other people. 3. It doesn't feel good to post something that you know will provoke a large volume of (friendly!) disagreement. I think of myself as a pretty disagreeable person, but I am still very averse to posting things that go against what almost everyone around me is saying, at least when I don't feel 100% confident in my thesis. I have found previous arguments about global health vs animal welfare to be especially exhausting and they did not lead to any convergence, so I don't see the upside that justifies the downside. 4. I don't fundamentally disagree with the narrow thesis that marginal money can do more good in animal welfare. I just feel disillusioned with the larger implications that global health is overfunded and not really worth the money we spend on it. I'm deliberately focusing on emotional/psychological inhibitions as opposed to analytical doubts I have about animal welfare. I do have some analytical doubts, but I think of them as secondary to the personal relationship I have with GHD.

I'd love to see an 'Animal Welfare vs. AI Safety/Governance Debate Week' happening on the Forum. The risks from AI cause has grown massively in importance in recent years, and has become a priority career choice for many in the community. At the same time, the Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week demonstrated just how important and neglected the cause of animal welfare remains. I know several people (including myself) who are uncertain/torn about whether to pursue careers focused on reducing animal suffering or mitigating existential risks related to AI. It would help to have rich discussions comparing both causes's current priorities and bottlenecks, and a debate week would hopefully expose some useful crucial considerations.

Has anybody changed their behaviour after the animal welfare vs global health debate week? A month or so on, I'm curious if anybody is planning to donate differently, considering a career pivot, etc. If anybody doesn't want to share publicly but would share privately, please feel free to message me. Linking @Angelina Li's post asking how people would change their behaviour, and tagging @Toby Tremlett🔹 who might have thought about tracking this.

I think people working on animal welfare have more incentives to post during debate week than people working on global health. The animal space feels (when you are in it) very funding constrained, especially compared to working in the global health and development space (and I expect gets a higher % of funding from EA / EA-adjacent sources). So along comes debate week and all the animal folk are very motivated to post and make their case and hopefully shift a few $. This could somewhat bias the balance of the debate. (Of course the fact that one side of the debate feels they needs funding so much more is in itself relevant to the debate.) 

Are you an EU citizen? If so, please sign this citizen’s initiative to phase out factory farms (this is an approved EU citizen’s initiative, so if it gets enough signatures the EU has to respond): stopcrueltystopslaughter.com It also calls for reducing the number of animal farms over time, and introducing more incentives for the production of plant proteins. (If initiatives like these interest you, I occasionally share more of them on my blog) EDIT: If it doesn't work, try again in a couple hours/days. The collection has just started and the site may be overloaded. The deadline is in a year, so no need to worry about running out of time.

Animal Justice Appreciation Note Animal Justice et al. v A.G of Ontario 2024 was recently decided and struck down large portions of Ontario's ag-gag law. A blog post is here. The suit was partially funded by ACE, which presumably means that many of the people reading this deserve partial credit for donating to support it. Thanks to Animal Justice (Andrea Gonsalves, Fredrick Schumann, Kaitlyn Mitchell, Scott Tinney), co-applicants Jessica Scott-Reid and Louise Jorgensen, and everyone who supported this work!