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“Plausibly best people who have ever lived” is a much lower bar than “best people who have ever lived”.
If you are like me, this comment will leave you perplexed. After a while, I realized that it should not be read as
Plausibly, best people who have ever lived is a much lower bar than best people who have ever lived.
but as
‘Plausibly best people who have ever lived’ is a much lower bar than ‘best people who have ever lived’.
Flipping the Repugnant Conclusion
Imagine a world populated by many, many (trillions) of people. These people's lives aren't purely full of joy, and do have a lot of misery as well. But each person thinks that their life is worth living. Their lives might be a be bit boring or they might be full of huge ups and downs, but on the whole they are net-positive.
From this view it seems really strange to think that it would be good for every person in this world to die/not exist/never have existed in order to allow a very small number of privileged people to live spectacular lives. It seems bad to stop many people from living a life that they mostly enjoy, in order to allow the flourishing of the few.
I think this hypothetical is a decent intuition pump for why the Repugnant Conclusion isn't actually repugnant. But I do think it might be a little bit dishonest or manipulative. It frames the situation in terms of fairness and equality; we can sympathize with the many slightly happy people who are maybe being denied the right to exist, and think of the few extremely happy people as the privileged elite. It also takes advantage of status quo bias; by beginning with the many slightly happy people it seems worse to then 'remove' them.
I've always thought the Repugnant Conclusion was mostly status quo bias, anyway, combined with the difficulty of imagining what such a future would actually be like.
I think the Utility Monster is a similar issue. Maybe it would be possible to create something with a much richer experience set than humans, which should be valued more highly. But any such being would actually be pretty awesome, so we shouldn't resent giving it a greater share of resources.
Humans seem like (plausible) utility monsters compared to ants, and many religious people have a conception of god that would make Him a utility monster ("maybe you don't like prayer and following all these rules, but you can't even conceive of the - 'joy' doesn't even do it justice - how much grander it is to god if we follow these rules than even the best experiences in our whole lives!"). Anti-utility monster sentiments seem to largely be coming from a place where someone imagines a human that's pretty happy by human standards, and thinks the words "orders of magnitude happier than what any human feels", and then they notice their intuition doesn't track the words "orders of magnitude".
Updating Moral Beliefs
Imagine there is a box with a ball inside it, and you believe the ball is red. But you also believe that in the future you will update your belief and think that the ball is blue (the ball is a normal, non-color-changing ball). This seems like a very strange position to be in, and you should just believe that the ball is blue now.
This is an example of how we should deal with beliefs in general; if you think in the future you will update a belief in a specific direction then you should just update now.
I think the same principle applies to moral beliefs. If you think that in the future you'll believe that it's wrong to do something, then you should believe that it's wrong now.
As an example of this, if you think that in the future you'll believe eating meat is wrong, then you sort of already believe eating meat is wrong. I was in exactly this position for a while, thinking in the future I would stop eating meat, while also continuing to eat meat. A similar case to this is deliberately remaining ignorant about something because learning would change your moral beliefs. If you're avoiding learning about factory farming because you think it would cause you to believe eating factory farmed meat is bad, then you already on some level believe that.
Another case of this is in politics when a politician says it's 'not the time' for some political action but in the future it will be. This is 'fine' if it's 'not the time' due to political reasons, such as the electorate not reelecting the politician. But I don't think it's consistent to say an action is currently not moral, but will be moral in the future. Obviously this only works if the action now and in the future are actually equivalent.
Curated and popular this week
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This is a linkpost for a paper I wrote recently, “Endogenous Growth and Excess Variety”, along with a summary.
Two schools in growth theory
Roughly speaking:
In Romer’s (1990) growth model, output per person is interpreted as an economy’s level of “technology”, and the economic growth rate—the growth rate of “real GDP” per person—is proportional to the amount of R&D being done. As Jones (1995) pointed out, populations have grown greatly over the last century, and the proportion of people doing research (and the proportion of GDP spent on research) has grown even more quickly, yet the economic growth rate has not risen. Growth theorists have mainly taken two approaches to reconciling [research] population growth with constant economic growth.
“Semi-endogenous” growth models (introduced by Jones (1995)) posit that, as the technological frontier advances, further advances get more difficult. Growth in the number of researchers, and ultimately (if research is not automated) population growth, is therefore necessary to sustain economic growth.
“Second-wave endogenous” (I’ll write “SWE”) growth models posit instead that technology grows exponentially with a constant or with a growing population. The idea is that process efficiency—the quantity of a given good producible with given labor and/or capital inputs—grows exponentially with constant research effort, as in a first-wave endogenous model; but when population grows, we develop more goods, leaving research effort per good fixed. (We do this, in the model, because each innovator needs a monopoly on his or her invention in order to compensate for the costs of developing it.) Improvements in process efficiency are called “vertical innovations” and increases in good variety are called “horizontal innovations”. Variety is desirable, so the one-off increase in variety produced by an increase to the population size increases real GDP, but it does not increase the growth rate. Likewise exponential population growth raise
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As we mark one year since the launch of Mieux Donner, we wanted to share some reflections on our journey and our ongoing efforts to promote effective giving in France. Mieux Donner was founded through the Effective Incubation Programme by Ambitious Impact and Giving What We Can.
TLDR
* Prioritisation is important. And when the path forward is unclear, trying a lot of different potential priorities with high productivity leads to better results than analysis paralysis.
* Ask yourself what the purpose of your organisation is. If you are a mainly marketing/communication org, hire people from this sector (not engineers) and don’t be afraid to hire outside of EA.
* Effective altruism ideas are less controversial than we imagined and affiliation has created no (or very little) push back
* Hiring early has helped us move fast and is a good idea when you have a clear process and a lot of quality applicants
Summary of our progress and activities in year 1
In January 2025, we set a new strategy with time allocation for our different activities. We set one clear goal - 1M€ in donations in 2025. To achieve this goal we decided:
Our primary focus for 2025 is to grow our audience. We will experiment with a variety of projects to determine the most effective ways to grow our audience.
Our core activities in 2025 will focus on high-impact fundraising and outreach efforts. The strategies where we plan to spend the most time are :
* SEO content (most important)
* UX Optimization of the website
* Social Media ; Peer to Peer fundraising ; Leveraging our existing network
The graphic below shows how we plan to spend our marketing time:
We are also following partnership opportunities and advising a few high net worth individuals who reached out to us and who will donate by the end of the year.
Results: one year of Mieux Donner
On our initial funding proposal in June 2024, we wrote down where we wanted to be in one year. Let’s see how we fared:
Meta Goals
* Spendi
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Sometimes working on animal issues feels like an uphill battle, with alternative protein losing its trendy status with VCs, corporate campaigns hitting blocks in enforcement and veganism being stuck at the same percentage it's been for decades. However, despite these things I personally am more optimistic about the animal movement than I have ever been (despite following the movement for 10+ years). What gives?
At AIM we think a lot about the ingredients of a good charity (talent, funding and idea) and more and more recently I have been thinking about the ingredients of a good movement or ecosystem that I think has a couple of extra ingredients (culture and infrastructure). I think on approximately four-fifths of these prerequisites the animal movement is at all-time highs. And like betting on a charity before it launches, I am far more confident that a movement that has these ingredients will lead to long-term impact than I am relying on, e.g., plant-based proteins trending for climate reasons.
Culture The culture of the animal movement in the past has been up and down. It has always been full of highly dedicated people in a way that is rare across other movements, but it also had infighting, ideological purity and a high level of day-to-day drama. Overall this made me a bit cautious about recommending it as a place to spend time even when someone was sold on ending factory farming. But over the last few years professionalization has happened, differences have been put aside to focus on higher goals and the drama overall has gone down a lot. This was perhaps best embodied by my favorite opening talk at a conference ever (AVA 2025) where Wayne and Lewis, leaders with very different historical approaches to helping animals, were able to share lessons, have a friendly debate and drive home the message of how similar our goals really are. This would have been nearly unthinkable decades ago (and in fact resulted in shouting matches when it was attempted). But the cult
I was going for the second, adding some quotes to make it clearer.