TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
A preliminary estimate, and a request for better ones.
Summary
I believe the standard literature estimates for the number of DALYs attributable to a case of stunting are too low, largely because they don’t account for the long term effects. This means that childhood nutritional interventions that reduce the prevalence of stunting may be substantially more cost-effective than previously believed.
Epistemic status
Exploratory and back-o...
TL;DR: Kairos has raised $50 million from Coefficient Giving for two years of funding, one of the largest commitments they’ve made towards AI safety fieldbuilding to date. We’re using this to make an ambitious push for growing Kairos, broadening our portfolio of talent infrastructure projects and incubating new organizations. We’ve doubled in size in the last six mon...
It seems prima facie plausible to me that interventions that save human lives do not increase utility on net, due to the animal suffering caused by saving human life. Has anyone in the broader EA community looked into this? I'm not strongly committed to this, but I'd be interested in seeing what people have reasoned about this.
Yeah there have been a sporadic musings about this one the forum. If you search " Vasco Grilo' he has a bit of interesting stuff on this.
My broad personal opinion is that in Uganda when I live at least, most animals (apart from battery hens) have net positive lives as they are not intensively farmed. Unfortunately this is changing fast
Because of this I don't think saving lives in this country is going to increase net animal suffering (or not very much). Whether we should just optimise for utility anyway it's obviously another question.
Others will disagree, it's an in interesting if a bit dark topic...
See the meat-eater problem tag and the posts tagged with it. That being said, wild animal effects can complicate things.
Globally, there are around 20 billion farmed chickens alive at any moment, mostly factory farmed, so about 3 per human alive, higher in high-income countries and lower in low-income countries. There are also probably over 100 billion fish being farmed at any moment, so over 12 per human alive. See Šimčikas, 2020 for estimates.