This is a thread for explaining your vote, discussing it, and maybe changing your mind. It'll be pinned on the frontpage throughout the Donation Election.
Some comments on this thread are cross-posted from a text box which appears when you reach the end of the voting process, but everyone is welcome to post here whenever.
You can read about all the candidates here, and donate to the donation election fund here.
I gave some preference to smaller global health organizations this time around. The main value of my vote, I think, lies in signalling -- at least for most of the ballot. The big GHW players are great, but their room for more funding and established evidentiary bases can make it difficult for smaller or newer organizations.
You could make a similar argument about small animal-welfare orgs. But past voting results reflect more votes for those orgs, and so I adjudge the marginal value of adding to that signal to be lower.
I ranked Arthropoda Foundation 1st. I think funding research on the welfare of soil animals would increase welfare more cost-effectively than research on the welfare of farmed invertebrates, but that this is the closest one can get, and that Arthropoda is the organisation best placed to do it.
i agree it's a great area for funding and I'm surprised there's not more research ongoing on this. My concern is that Anthropoda is operated by some of the same people
And most/all of whom were not just welfare researchers, but at least to some extent animal welfare proponents/activists before this research started. As far as I can see there is no-one even moderately skeptical of animal welfare/sentience working on these things, although i get that might be too high a bar here because why would skeptical people want to devote their lives to this kind of research?
I think this personel overlap has the potential to cause conflicts of interests.
I don't know whether there are enough people in the field to be able to have less personel overlap between these orgs but it feels a bit icky at best and dangerous at worst.
I'm not recommending people don't donate to these orgs Im just pointing out the extreme personel overlap in this funding/research ecosystem and that i don't love the situation.
For what it’s worth (as someone who helped found Arthropoda but is no longer involved), I’d very much like there to be more convincing arguments against taking insects and other arthropods seriously. I feel pretty heavily incentivized to believe arguments against it as doing the animal welfare work I care more about emotionally (wild animal welfare) would be far easier. Working on animal welfare (and any other issue, if you care about second order effects) is vastly harder if you care about effects on insects, and I’d prefer the simpler world of only caring about vertebrates.
I think it’s pretty typical for the people who work on a cause area to be convinced that cause area matters. This is of course a source of bias, but, for example, asking global health charities to hire at least some people skeptical that we should improve the lives of people in developing countries seems like…. a hard request to fulfill at a minimum?
And, I believe that I and probably other people who have worked in this space are skeptics - just not extreme ones. I personally would not bet on any insects having morally relevant experiences, and put the odds at probably <30%. Relative to many this is less skeptical, but in absolute terms it still is skepticism - it sounds like you’re just advocating for there to be extreme skeptics - e.g. people who put the odds at, say, <1%. To analogize to global health again, it already feels odd to say “global health organizations should have folks who think there is a >70% chance this isn’t good thing to do”, let alone asking them to have staff who think there is a >99% chance.
Hi Abraham.
Being sceptical about a high probability of sentience does not imply scepticism about work on increasing the welfare of arthropods being very cost-effective (I know you understand this). At least for people caring about expected welfare, I think endorsing a probability of sentience of 10 % leads to only slighly more scepticism about the cost-effectiveness of the work relative to one of 100 %.
Hey @Vasco Grilo🔸 Abraham and i aren't discussing the cost effectiveness of the work, we're discussing the merits of having all people who believe in high probabilities of insect sentience working on and funding the work. He was making the point that he was one of the founders of Arthropoda even while his personal percentage chance on moral relevance of insects isn't necessarily that high.
it's good to hear that there are more skeptical people working in this space on your front. i take the point about life for all animal welfare people being harder if the consensus becomes we need to care a lot about insects
I don't understand the comparison to working with humans at all though, it seems a bit absurd. Basically 100 percent of people think humans matter, so it's not even possible to find people who don't care about them? whereas with insects getting people with 1% - 30% priors on sentience working on that seems reasonable? Orgs like GiveWell and Global health researchers are often skeptical about what they are researching. You're right though that bias is an issue in all research, in it's just about mitigating it.
There are skeptical scientists out there I've even seen them commenting on the forum - could they not be brought on board? I get that might be impossible if it's a volunteer organization, but i would hope some people involved were on good terms/friends with more skeptical people.
My main point isn't that i think people shouldn't work on what they care about, it's that we have purely highly motivated people funding/running a range of organizations that are researching a critically important question about animal welfare, which seems like potentially a strong source of bias.
This is not an unreasonable take, but just in the interest of having an accurate public record, I'm actually the strategy director for WAI (although I was the executive director previously). Also, none of us at Arthropoda are technically animal welfare scientists. Our training is all in different things (for example, my PhD is in engineering mechanics and Bob's a philosopher who published a lot of skeptical pieces on insects).
Basically, I think we came to Arthropoda because the work we did before that changed our minds. More importantly, I don't think the majority of Arthropoda's work will be about checking for sentience? Rather, we're taking a precautionary framework about insects being sentient and asking how to improve their welfare if they are. In this context our views on sentience seem less likely to cause a COI -- although I also expect all our research to be publicly available for people to red-team as needed :)
Finally, fully agree on the extreme personnel overlap. I would love to not be co-running a bug granting charity as a volunteer in addition to my two other jobs! But the resource constraints and unusualness of this space are unfortunately not particularly conducive to finding a ton of people willing to take on leadership roles.
"Rather, we're taking a precautionary framework about insects being sentient and asking how to improve their welfare if they are".
If this is the case, i think this mission could have been made a bit more clear on @Bob Fischer 's funding post and on the website itself. Re-reading the post though that sentiment does come through if a bit unclearly. On a first read i really did think a big part of it was still researching insect sentience.
Also on a completely side/ personal note I'm a bit concerned that you "would love to not be co-running a bug granting charity as a volunteer in addition to my two other jobs!" I think we are generally more productive if we are happy doing what we love and the work is sustainable. I've tried at times dying on the altar of important work and it wasn't helpful for me or the work!
Thanks, Nick.
I am not sure I understand this. People at Arthropoda have an incentive to promote and take seriously negative findings about ways to help farmed arthropods such that the scarce available resources to do this are not wasted. You may be referring to findinds which should update one towards prioritising humans over animals, but Arthropoda is not focussed on this. My concern is that they are not prioritising soil arthropods enough.
@Vasco Grilo🔸 I wasn't clear sorry, i meant negative findings in the scientific sense, in this case unremarkable findings that might provide evidence against insect sentience. Have edited above hope it's more clear now.
And my comment didn't address your soil arthropods concern, it was an unrelated point about Anthropoda. i think i failed on clarity here...
I thought quite some people who are doing insect sentience research were skeptical about it to start with. Yes, they mostly already cared about animals. Negative findings would help people to reorient toward animals that are more evidently sentient, and I do think people will be motivated to promote that conclusion.
The main reason I voted for Forethought and MATS was because I believe AI governance/safety is both unusually important, with only Farmed/Wild animal welfare being competitive in terms of EV, and I believe that AI has a reasonable chance to be so powerful as to make other cause area assumptions irrelevant, meaning their impact is much, much less predictable without considering AI governance/safety.
I strongly believe animal advocacy is the most powerful way to save the most lives and better the world.
They all touch on mental health interventions in some way.
i prioritized the center for election science because reforming our social choice mechanisms offers the highest expected utility of any available intervention. specifically, moving to methods that maximize voter satisfaction efficiency (vse)—such as approval or score voting—yields massive downstream benefits by improving government decision-making quality. as the analysis at rangevoting.org/livessaved demonstrates, the economic and humanitarian impact of even a slight improvement in the quality of elected officials dwarfs the impact of direct aid like malaria nets. optimizing the decision-making stack is the necessary precursor to solving other global challenges effectively.
i prioritized the center for election science because reforming our social choice mechanisms offers the highest expected utility of any available intervention. specifically, moving to methods that maximize voter satisfaction efficiency (vse)—such as approval or score voting—yields massive downstream benefits by improving government decision-making quality. as the analysis at ScoreVoting.net/LivesSaved explains, the economic and humanitarian impact of even a slight improvement in the quality of elected officials dwarfs the impact of direct aid like malaria nets. optimizing the decision-making stack is the necessary precursor to solving other global challenges effectively.
Nothing else matters reform because without putting reform any voting policy change won’t actually take effect