This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
One reason I'm excited about work on lead exposure is that it hits a sweet spot of meaningfully benefiting both humans and nonhumans. Lead has dramatic and detrimental effects for not just mammals, but basically all animals, from birds to aquatic animals to insects.
Are there other interventions that potentially likewise hit this sweet spot?
Someone+anonymous I think) recently suggested family planning at this intersection as well, because less humans = less animal suffering too. I did however think as a counterpoint this could be offset by the accelerated development associated with family planning could mean quicker transitions to factory farming too, bit that's just conjecture.
On this note any interventions that speed development could potentially be in the "negative" , anti sweet spot here too as developing country = more meat eaten = more factory farming.
Perhaps the soaking beans thing could also own slightly in this direction, someone suggested if coming beans were cheaper it could push further against eating meat, and also prevent deforestation which could either increase our reduce wild animal suffering - increase animal suffering by reducing habitat, or reduce it as less weeks animals can survive in the deforested area
Wow it's complicated
It’s noteworthy that if the procreation asymmetry is rejected, the sign of family planning interventions is the opposite of the sign of lifesaving interventions like AMF. Thus, those who support AMF might not support family planning interventions, and vice versa.
I admire you for repeatedly pushing a point that is so ideologically awkward for people, but that's not quite right. Sometimes family planning just changes when people have kids, rather than how many. In those cases, the other gains from it are good on all sensible views, and there's no objection based on "creating happy people is good".
I appreciate that, and I agree with you!
However, as far as I'm aware, EA-recommended family planning interventions do decrease the amount of children people have. If these charities benefit farmed animals (and I believe they do), decreasing the human population is where these charities' benefits for farmed animals come from.
I've estimated that both MHI and FEM prevent on the order of 100 pregnancies for each maternal life they save. Unless my estimates are way too high (please let me know if they're wrong; I'm happy to update!), even if only a very small percentage of these pregnancies would have resulted in counterfactual births, both of these charities would still on net decrease the amount of children people have.
To the extent that they change timing rather than total number, the benefits (e.g. reduced maternal mortality) are probably overstated also, because you some of the maternal deaths you thought you prevents were actually just delayed.
Despite this I think Ariel is correct and these interventions are reducing the number.
Big picture wise isn't this making a normative judgement? Assuming a carrying capacity of earth for total biomass, less humans means more animal lives who are unable to record or communicate their experiences. We don't know what animals experience pre language but it's possible they are unable to reliably encode their experiences without the structure of a human language. (Similar to how humans have little memory from early childhood)
I am not sure it's a fair normative judgement to conclude this is an improvement.
Take it to the limit. All of humanity has died off except a small 100 person tribe. Nature has reclaimed everything else. Is this a net better world?
That biomass assumption has fallout if it's correct. For example blocking housing expansion for more wolf habitat might be the same tradeoff. Are the qalys of wolves better than the humans who might live there?
I think the biomass assumption does have a flaw: when we generate artificial fertilizer from fossil fuel and feed humans and pets with the agricultural products we are in disequilibrium, we can only do this for a finite amount of time before we can't.
Pork tapeworms are another cause area where both humans and nonhumans could benefit:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oZff425xLnikfxeGD/pat-myron-s-shortform?commentId=7WPBp7dh9sA3BKEpB
I’m a huge fan of lead elimination too! And I could imagine that, for instance, cleaning up soil from battery recycling or mining could benefit some animals.
But just wanted to note that some of the most promising interventions to protect humans (eg getting lead out of spices, paint, cookware, cosmetics, toys, water pipes, etc) might not have much effect on nonhuman animals.