Ya, I'm not totally sold on the Platinum Rule itself. I think I'm gesturing at one of the most important things to get right (to me), but I don’t mean it's specifically the Platinum rule. I'm trying to develop this further in some other pieces for this sequence.

That being said, I think adding preferences (or allowing new preferences to be added) is importantly different from other tradeoffs, as I discuss in "People aren’t always right about what’s best for themselves".

We can come up with an example with a similarly important moral loss, but without apparently complete identity change. I don't think giving up your most important preference completely changes who you are. You don't become a completely different person when you come to love someone, or stop loving them, even though this is a very important part of you. It still may be an important partial identity change, though, so kind of partial replacement.

Furthermore, we can change your most important preferences without changing all your dispositions. Not just your memories, we can keep your personality traits and intelligence, too, say.

Some other potentially useful references for this debate:

1. Emily Oehlsen's/Open Phil's response to Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare, and the thread that follows, (EDIT) and other comments there.
2. How good is The Humane League compared to the Against Malaria Foundation? by Stephen Clare and AidanGoth for Founders Pledge (using old cost-effectiveness estimates).
3. Discussion of the two envelopes problem for moral weights (can get pretty technical):
   1. Tomasik, 2013-2018
   2. Karnofsky, 2018, section 1.1
   3. St. Jules, 2024 (that's me!)
4. GiveWell's marginal cost-effectiveness estimates for their top charities, of course
5. Some recent-ish (mostly) animal welfare intervention cost-effectiveness estimates:
   1. Track records of Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated charities (animal and global health)
   2. Charity Entrepreneurship prospective animal welfare reports and global health reports
   3. Charity Entrepreneurship Research Training Program (2023) prospective reports
      1.  on animal welfare with cost-effectiveness estimates: Intervention Report: Ballot initiatives to improve broiler welfare in the US by Aashish K and Exploring Corporate Campaigns Against Silk Retailers by Zuzana Sperlova and Moritz Stumpe
   4. Electric Shrimp Stunning: a Potential High-Impact Donation Opportunity by MHR
   5. Prospective cost-effectiveness of farmed fish stunning corporate commitments in Europe by Sagar K Shah for Rethink Priorities
   6. Estimates for some Healthier Hens interventions ideas (and a comment thread)^[1]
   7. Emily Oehlsen's/Open Phil's response above
6. Animal welfare cost-effectiveness estimates based on older intervention work:
   1. Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent by saulius for Rethink Priorities
   2. A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Historical Farmed Animal Welfare Ballot Initiatives by Laura Duffy for Rethink Priorities
7. Megaprojects for animals by JamesÖz and Neil_Dullaghan🔹
8. Meat-eater problem and related posts
9. Wild animal effects of human population and diet change:
   1. How Does Vegetarianism Impact Wild-Animal Suffering? by Brian Tomasik and his related posts
   2. Does the Against Malaria Foundation Reduce Invertebrate Suffering? by Brian Tomasik
   3. Finding bugs in GiveWell's top charities by Vasco Grilo🔸
   4. My recent posts on fishing: Sustainable fishing policy increases fishing, and demand reductions might, too and The moral ambiguity of fishing on wild aquatic animal populations.

1. ^{^}

   Healthier Hens is shutting down or has already shut down, according to the Charity Entrepreneurship Newsletter. Their website is also down.

Looks like a great opportunity! :)

Is there a deadline for this fundraising?

Will there be any updates on how much room is left as you receive donations?

Or, if we go past, how will the additional money be used? According to your priorities?

Also actually giving the fish food could reduce the unpleasantness+give them pleasure when caught.

But there's probably still some risk of longer term injury and pain. And it might condition them to be less risk-averse, and make them more prone to being caught by less humane fishers.

Some prior discussion here.

Or, you could add in large print that they would get more to their Favorite Charity if they just donated the same amount to it directly, not through FarmKind. That should totally dispel any misconception otherwise, if they actually read, understand and believe it.

(b) Causes: The regular donor gets to pick any Favorite Charity, from any cause, and their donation will cause money from the Bonus Fund to go to it. Unless by some miracle, the Bonus Fund supporters would otherwise have collectively donated to the same causes as the regular donors in the same proportions, then regular donations do have direct counterfactual impact on how much money goes to different causes ✅ direct counterfactual impact on donations to different causes ✅ 

The money moved to their Favorite Charity isn't positive counterfactually if their Favorite Charity gets less than the donor would have otherwise donated to their Favorite Charity on their own without FarmKind. I expect, more often than not, it will mean less to their Favorite Charity, so the counterfactual is actually negative for their Favorite Charity.

My guess for the (more direct) counterfactual effects of FarmKind on where money goes is:

1. Shift some money from Favorite Charities to EAA charities.
2. Separately increase funding for EAA charities by incentivizing further (EAA) donation overall. (Shift more money from donors to EAA charities.)

It is possible FarmKind will incentivize enough further overall donation from donors to get even more to their Favorite Charities than otherwise, but that's not my best guess.

FWIW, I agree with point (c) Charities, and I think that's a way this is counterfactual that's positive from the perspective of donors: they get to decide to which EAA charities the bonus funding goes.

But something like DoubleUpDrive would be the clearest and simplest way to do this without potentially confusing or (unintentionally) misleading people about whether their Favourite Charity will get more than it would have otherwise. You'd cut everything about their Favorite Charities and donating to them, and just let them pick among a set of EAA charities to donate to and match those donations to whichever they choose.

I agree that anyone seeing how the system works could see that if they give $150 directly to their Favorite Charity, more will go to their Favorite Charity than if they gave that $150 through FarmKind and split it. But they might not realize it, because FarmKind also giving to their Favorite Charity confuses them.

I think you can have involuntary attention that aren’t particularly related to wanting anything (I’m not sure if you’re denying that).

I agree you can, but that's not motivational salience. The examples you give of the watch beeping and a sudden loud sound are stimulus-driven or bottom-up salience, not motivational salience. There are apparently different underlying brain mechanisms. A summary from Kim et al., 2021:

Traditionally, the allocation of limited attentional resources had been thought to be governed by task goals (Wolfe, Cave, & Franzel, 1989) and physical salience (Theeuwes, 2010). A newer construct, selection history, challenges this dichotomy and suggests previous episodes of attentional orienting are capable of independently biasing attention in a manner that is neither top-down nor bottom-up (Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012). One component of selection history is reward history. Via associative learning, initially neutral stimuli come to predict reward and thus acquire heightened attentional priority, consequently capturing attention even when non-salient and task-irrelevant (referred to as value-driven attentional capture; e.g., Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011).

I'd say there is some "innate" motivational salience, e.g. probably for innate drives, physical pains, innate fears and perhaps pleasant sensations, but then reinforcement (when it's working as typically) biases your systems for motivational salience and action towards things associated with those, to get more pleasure and less unpleasantness.

I'll address two things you said in opposite order.

The thing you wrote is kinda confusing in my ontology. I’m concerned that you’re slipping into a mode where there’s a soul / homunculus “me” that gets manipulated by the exogenous pressures of reinforcement learning. If so, I think that’s a bad ontology—reinforcement learning is not an exogenous pressure on the “me” concept, it is part of how the “me” thing works and why it wants what it wants. Sorry if I’m misunderstanding.

I don't have in mind anything like a soul / homunculus. I think it's mostly a moral question, not an empirical one, to what extent we should consider the mechanisms for reinforcement to be a part of "you", and to what extent your identity persists through reinforcement. Reinforcement basically rewires your brain and changes your desires. I definitely consider your desires, as motivational salience, which have been shaped by past reinforcement, to be part of "you" now and (in my view) morally important.

In my ontology, voluntary actions (both attention actions and motor actions) happen if and only if the idea of doing them is positive-valence, while involuntary actions (again both attention actions and motor actions) can happen regardless of their valence. In other words, if the reinforcement learning system is the reason that something is happening, it’s “voluntary”.

From my understanding of the cognitive (neuro)science literature and their use of terms, attentional and action biases/dispositions caused by reinforcement are not necessarily "voluntary".

I think they use "voluntary", "endogenous", "top-down", "task-driven/directed" and "goal-driven/directed" (roughly) interchangeably for a type of attentional mechanism. For example, you have a specific task in mind, and then things related to that task become salient and your actions are biased towards actions that support that task. This is what focusing/concentration is. But then other motivationally salient stimuli (pain, hunger, your phone, an attractive person) and intense stimuli or changes in background stimuli (a beeping watch, a sudden loud noise) can get in the way.

My impression is that there is indeed a distinct mechanism describable as voluntary/endogenous/top-down attention, which lets you focus and block irrelevant but otherwise motivationally salient stimuli. It might also recruit motivational salience towards relevant stimuli. It's an executive function. And I'm inclined to reserve the term "voluntary" for executive functions.

In this way, we can say:

1. a drug addict's behaviour is often (largely) involuntarily driven, specifically by high motivational salience, like cravings (and perhaps also dysfunction of top-down attention control), and
2. the distractibility of someone with ADHD by their phone or random websites, for example, is involuntary, driven by a dysfunction of top-down attention control, which lets task-irrelevant stimuli, including task-irrelevant motivationally salient stimuli, pull the person's attention.

In both cases, reinforcement for motivational salience is partly the reason for the behaviour. But they seem less voluntary than when executive/top-down control works better.

Motivational salience can also be manipulated in experiments to lead to dissociation with remembered, predicted and actual reward (Baumgartner et al., 2021):

These hyper-reactive states of mesolimbic systems can even cause ‘wanting for what hurts’, such as causing a laboratory rat to compulsively seek out electric shocks repeatedly. In such cases, the ‘miswanted’ shock stimulus is remembered to hurt, predicted to hurt, and actually does hurt—yet is still positively sought as a target of incentive motivation.