This is a linkpost for https://bigthink.com/high-culture/effective-altruism-moral-ambition/
Curated and popular this week
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Notes
The following text explores, in a speculative manner, the evolutionary question: Did high-intensity affective states, specifically Pain, emerge early in evolutionary history, or did they develop gradually over time?
Note: We are not neuroscientists; our work draws on our evolutionary biology background and our efforts to develop welfare metrics that accurately reflect reality and effectively reduce suffering. We hope these ideas may interest researchers in neuroscience, comparative cognition, and animal welfare science.
This discussion is part of a broader manuscript in progress, focusing on interspecific comparisons of affective capacities—a critical question for advancing animal welfare science and estimating the Welfare Footprint of animal-sourced products.
Key points
Ultimate question: Do primitive sentient organisms experience extreme pain intensities, or fine-grained pain intensity discrimination, or both?
Scientific framing: Pain functions as a biological signalling system that guides behavior by encoding motivational importance. The evolution of Pain signalling —its intensity range and resolution (i.e., the granularity with which differences in Pain intensity can be perceived)— can be viewed as an optimization problem, where neural architectures must balance computational efficiency, survival-driven signal prioritization, and adaptive flexibility.
Mathematical clarification: Resolution is a fundamental requirement for encoding and processing information. Pain varies not only in overall intensity but also in granularity—how finely intensity levels can be distinguished.
Hypothetical Evolutionary Pathways: by analysing affective intensity (low, high) and resolution (low, high) as independent dimensions, we describe four illustrative evolutionary scenarios that provide a structured framework to examine whether primitive sentient organisms can experience Pain of high intensity, nuanced affective intensities, both, or neither.
Introdu
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Article 5 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
"Obviously, no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
OK, it doesn’t actually start with "obviously," but I like to imagine the commissioners all murmuring to themselves “obviously” when this item was brought up.
I’m not sure what the causal effect of Article 5 (or the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture) has been on reducing torture globally, though the physical integrity rights index (which “captures the extent to which people are free from government torture and political killings”) has increased from 0.48 in 1948 to 0.67 in 2024 (which is good). However, the index reached 0.67 already back in 2001, so at least according to this metric, we haven’t made much progress in the past 25 years. Reducing government torture and killings seems to be low in tractability.
Despite many countries having a physical integrity rights index close to 1.0 (i.e., virtually no government torture or political killings), many of their citizens still experience torture-level pain on a regular basis. I’m talking about cluster headache, the “most painful condition known to mankind” according to Dr. Caroline Ran of the Centre for Cluster Headache, a newly-founded research group at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.
Dr. Caroline Ran speaking at the 2025 Symposium on the recent advances in Cluster Headache research and medicine
Yesterday I had the opportunity to join the first-ever international research symposium on cluster headache organized at the Nobel Forum of the Karolinska Institutet. It was a 1-day gathering of roughly 100 participants interested in advancing our understanding of the origins of and potential treatments for cluster headache. I'd like to share some impressions in this post.
The most compelling evidence for Dr. Ran’s quote above comes from a 2020 survey of cluster headache patients by Burish et al., which asked patients to rate cluster headach
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A while back (as I've just been reminded by a discussion on another thread), David Thorstad wrote a bunch of posts critiquing the idea that small reductions in extinction risk have very high value, because the expected number of people who will exist in the future is very high: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/mistakes-in-moral-mathematics/. The arguments are quite complicated, but the basic points are that the expected number of people in the future is much lower than longtermists estimate because:
-Longtermists tend to neglect the fact that even if your intervention blocks one extinction risk, there are others it might fail to block; surviving for billions (or more) of years likely requires driving extinction risk very low for a long period of time, and if we are not likely to survive that long, even conditional on longtermist interventions against one extinction risk succeeding, the value of preventing extinction (conditional on more happy people being valuable) is much lower.
-Longtermists tend to assume that in the future population will be roughly as large as the available resources can support. But ever since the industrial revolution, as countries get richer, their fertility rate falls and falls until it is below replacement. So we can't just assume future population sizes will be near the limits of what the available resources will support.
Thorstad goes on to argue that this weakens the case for longtermism generally, not just the value of extinction risk reductions, since the case for longtermism is that future expected population is many times the current population, or at least could be given plausible levels of longtermist extinction risk reduction effort. He also notes that if he can find multiple common mistakes in longtermist estimates of expected future population, we should expect that those estimates might be off in other ways. (At this point I would note that they could also be missing factors that bias their estimates of
Just a general note, I think adding some framing of the piece, maybe key quotes, and perhaps your own thoughts as well would improve this from a bare link-post? As for the post itself:
It seems Bregman views EA as:
Not really sure how donating ~10% of my income to Global Health and Animal Welfare charities matches that framework tbqh. But yeah 'weaponize' is highly aggressive language here, if you take it out there's not much wrong with it. Maybe Rutger or the interviewer think Capitalism is inherently bad or something?
Are we really doing the earn-to-give thing again here? But like apart from the snark there isn't really an argument here, apart from again implicitly associating capitalism with badness. EA people have also warned about the dangers of maximisation before, so this isn't unknown to the movement.
Is this implying that EA is dead (news to me) or that is in terminal decline (arguable, but knowledge of the future is difficult etc etc)?
I mean, this doesn't sound like an argument against EA or EA ideas? It's perhaps why Rutger felt put off by the movement, but then if you want a movement based on 'enthusiasm, compassion, and problem-solving' (which are still very EA traits to me, btw), then that's because it would be doing more good, rather than a movement wracked by guilt. This just falls victim to classic EA Judo, we win by ippon.
I don't know, maybe Rutger has written up more of his criticism somewhere more thoroughly. Feel like this article is such a weak summary of it though, and just leaves me feeling frustrated. And in a bunch of places, it's really EA! See:
So where's the EA hate coming from?I think 'EA hate' is too strong and is mostly/actually coming from the interviewer, maybe more than Rutger. Seems Rutger is very disillusioned with the state of EA, but many EAs feel that way too! Pinging @Rutger Bregman or anyone else from the EA Netherlands scene for thoughts, comments, and responses.In general, I think the article's main point was to promote Moral Ambition, not to be a criticism of EA, so it's not surprising that it's not great as a criticism of EA.
For what it's worth, Rutger has been donating 10% to effective charities for a while and has advocated for the GWWC pledge many times:
So I don't think he's against that, and lots of people have taken the 10% pledge specifically because of his advocacy.
I think sadly this is a relatively common view, see e.g. the deaths of effective altruism, good riddance to effective altruism, EA is no longer in ascendancy
I think this is also a common criticism of the movement though (e.g. Emmet Shear on why he doesn't sign the 10% pledge)
I think this mixes effective altruism ideals/goals (which everyone agrees with) with EA's specific implementation, movement, culture and community. Also, arguments and alternatives are not really about "winning" and "losing"
Then you probably agree that it's great that they're starting a new movement with similar ideals! Personally, I think it has a huge potential, if nothing else because of this:
If we want millions of people to e.g. give effectively, I think we need to have multiple "movements", "flavours" or "interpretations" of EA projects.
You might also be interested in this previous thread on the difference between EA and Moral Ambition.
Feels like you've slightly misunderstood my point of view here Lorenzo? Maybe that's on me for not communicating it clearly enough though.
That's great! Sounds like very 'EA' to me 🤷
I'm not sure everyone does agree really, some people have foundational moral differences. But that aside, I think effective altruism is best understand as a set of ideas/ideals/goals. I've been arguing that on the Forum for a while and will continue to do so. So I don't think I'm mixing, I think that the critics are mixing.
This doesn't mean that they're not pointing out very real problems with the movement/community. I still strongly think that the movement has lot of growing pains/reforms/recknonings to go through before we can heal the damage of FTX and onwards.
The 'win by ippon' was just a jokey reference to Michael Nielsen's 'EA judo' phrase, not me advocating for soldier over scout mindset.
I completely agree! Like 100000% agree! But that's still 'EA'? I just don't understand trying to draw such a big distinction between SMA and EA in the case where they reference a lot of the same underlying ideas.
So I don't know, feels like we're violently agreeing here or something? I didn't mean to suggest anything otherwise in my original comment, and I even edited it to make it more clear I was more frustrated at the interviewer than anything Rutger said or did (it's possible that a lot of the non-quoted phrasing were put in his mouth)
Yes, I think this is a great summary. Hopefully not too violently?
I mostly wanted to share my (outsider) understanding of MA and its relationship with EA
No really appreciated it your perspective, both on SMA and what we mean when we talk about 'EA'. Definitely has given me some good for thought :)
Was going to post this too! Good for community to know about these critiques and alternatives to EA. However, as JWS has already pointed out, critiques are weak or based on strawman version of EA.
But overall, I like the sound of the 'Moral Amibition' project given its principles align so well with EA. Though, there is risk of confusing outsiders given how similar the goals are, and also risk of people falsely being put off EA if they get such a biased perspective.