What's the reason this would be worse than current data centers? Does this require one to believe that sentience is limited to/substantially more likely in biological neurons than silicon? I would like to understand what the net effect of this is likely to be and why the same arguments wouldn't apply to other data centers currently being built.
I agree with most of the post but am not sure about the "farmed honeybees live net negative lives" component. It seems like the strongest arguments from here + the RP report are 1) honeybee lives are short (so % of life spent dying is larger) and 2) the transport = stressful argument. Other than that:
re: inspections - I would expect inspections to be net positive, they are inspecting for a reason, presumably this reduces disease risk? If it was harmful to production why would farmers do it?
re: honey harvesting - 1) my understanding is that the excess energy from honey is used by the hive to swarm/create new hives, so it seems like you could harvest down to what the hive needs to survive but not swarm and 2) it seems like hive starving is bad for the farmers too so I would presume that this is something they care about too. But I might be wrong! It would be good to see what the cost of hive replacement is, if that were super cheap relative to honey it would make sense that farmers wouldn't care - but I feel like bees are somewhat expensive and hard to get. I'm not sure.
re: hives are bad - bees seem to prefer them to wild hives, freezing seems to be solvable via insulation, if I had to guess I'd say that these are probably much better to live in on balance than feral hives. (If the response is "wild bees are also net negative" I'd want to hear about how farmed bees impact wild pollinator populations)
re: malnourishment - I'm not totally sure this is true - I think I've heard that some honeybee providers require that farmers who work with them feed them only sugar because that had better outcomes than feeding honey, and this also seems like a case where farmers incentives are aligned with bee welfare (sick hives = less honey)
re: queens - seems bad but a small percent of overall bees.
transport is the strongest argument. But I think they are transported mainly for pollination reasons, not honey reasons - almonds, fruit, coffee etc will still need pollinators so I don't know how much reducing demand for honey would actually reduce transport. It might even increase the invasiveness of transport because producers wouldn't have an incentive to keep bee welfare high for honey production.
re: "bees have short lives so % of time dying is higher" - I don't know. I'd want to get more evidence on this. I feel like the same argument could be applied to humans - we live 80 years on average, the last five are usually pretty bad (low mobility, mind goes, lots of physical issues, lots of pain) - but idk if I'd be comfortable saying it would be better if everyone died five years earlier. (to be clear: I'm very persuaded by "humans vastly underestimate how bad end of life is" - strongly recommend being mortal by atul gawande - but I wouldn't say with much confidence that the last ~8% of life is net negative for most humans)
Also, honeybees have lower infant mortality rates than mammals, the behaviors of farmed bees seem reasonably close to what they would do in the wild (no gestation crates, they still fly out, find food, come back, colony culture exists, etc). I would say that bees probably have one of the highest baseline lives of any creature in the world. They have a lower infant mortality rate than pre-industrial revolution humans. They'd probably be top 0.01% of animals I'd most want to be to be reborn as. I'm wondering if your threshold for which animals have net negative lives is much lower than mine - where do (farmed or wild) honeybees rank vs other wild (or farmed) animals, in your opinion? Was the life of a pre-industrial revolution human better or worse than a modern honeybee?
The two things that would make me change my mind are 1) learning more about the prevalence/magnitude of a negative aspect of farming bees (I could be persuaded that transport is bad enough to outweigh everything else, for example) or 2) if I had a much stronger prior on negative utilitarianism for animals (e.g. if large mammals have on average net negative lives then honeybees likely would as well).
I also agree that bees are charismatic, but I think a "bee welfare" advocacy strategy (insulate hives in winter, less invasive inspections, no transport) would be a better sell. Overall these issues seem much more solvable and low stakes than other insect/fish/bird/mammal factory farming. But I could be wrong!
My impression has been that plant-based meat is more expensive and tastes worse than current meat - even if PTC is sometimes overrated (though I found this comment persuasive in response) I'd be surprised if a substantially cheaper and similar-to-better tasting option wouldn't cause a pretty large dent in meat consumption over a long enough time horizon. It seems like you think that existing plant based options are close to price/taste competitiveness already, was my above impression incorrect?
I feel like penetration of plant based options has been pretty limited so far, and my impression of cultivated meat is that it's high risk/high reward (may not end up working, but if it does has much greater potential of creating super cheap, great tasting protein than existing methods). My inclination is that I would be happy to gamble a risk of cannibalizing existing plant based success on a shot that we get a cultivated breakthrough, particularly given that I don't think we're on a ~great trajectory at the moment. But I might be wrong! Regardless this was a great post, thank you for sharing!
I think not adopting policies or helping people to immigrate would be a very tough sell, given (my impression, at least) of the overwhelmingly strong evidence of immigration on quality of life and economic growth - I was under the impression that the evidence was pretty strong on the "brain drain=good" side, though I could be wrong. An important part of being EA is being evidence based, and I'd need to see evidence that brain drain is actually bad on net.
This also seems very morally problematic - "US passport for me but not for thee" doesn't seem like something I would be comfortable supporting ethically without very strong evidence otherwise. Forcing someone to work and live somewhere against their will seems really bad. I wouldn't want to be plucked up, moved to a developing country, be forced to work, and told I couldn't leave, and I'd encourage people to not do that to others as well.
I think the question is how much you view being vegetarian as a burden/a good deed that you are doing vs just a feature of your everyday life. For me, I don't even think about it, so I don't believe that I have the "good deed offset" issue you mentioned. But others may be different!
A second question is how much weight you give to a deontological moral system being correct - e.g. you probably wouldn't eat factory farmed humans regardless of how that might affect your other actions because that seems immoral.
A third question is what would the replacement activity for being vegetarian be? Would you realistically replace that with something as comparably high impact (e.g. - eating a serving of chicken requires ~4 hours of ~torturing the chicken to get you the food - do you think whatever you would replace that with would be worth torturing a chicken for four hours? If you aren't spending the extra time donating more to effective animal charities that seems like a high bar to clear.)
Lastly, you can avoid much of the negative impact of meat eating if you eat from places here you are highly confident in the good treatment of animals (difficult to do but possible) or just eat beef and bivalves (much easier). So if you do change I'd recommend being thoughtful about it like you would with all other decisions!
Is there any scenario where only voting for your first choice would be wise? I don't think there is any downside to listing a second choice, assuming that you do actually prefer that second choice over any of the other options should your first choice be eliminated.
This all makes sense to me - I am fairly new but I also think that EAs already think a lot about the downsides of their actions (the pattern of "advantages of x minus disadvantages of x mean that the expected value is Y" seems pretty common, and rethink priorities portfolio builder tool (https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/portfolio-builder-tool) also has "expected negative value" bits, and pe ple seem to care a lot about downstream ripple effects from e.g. health interventions. Are there some specific examples of EAs ignoring downsides that motivated this post?
Are there ripple effects from GHD outside of economic growth that you are thinking about? I think my initial reaction was that there seem to be very durable, reliable ways to increase economic growth which likely are much more effective than GHD. Some of my thoughts came from this here , but also direct cash transfers or even investing in the stock market would (I think) be a more reliable way to increase economic growth than GHD.
This may be out of scope of the debate week question, but I feel like if the case for GHD is (suffering reduction + flow through effects which seem to mostly be downstream of economic growth) I think the fact that there are other reliable, durable, (probably) more cost-effective interventions to achieve economic growth means that the existence of ripple effects shouldn't alter my decisionmaking, unless there is a unique ripple effect from GHD that other interventions would not capture.
I think a worldview diversification argument makes sense here - if having more humans is intrinsically valuable for non-hedonic reason, or we might be wrong and non-human animals aren't sentient, or if there is a lot of uncertainty around either the value of economic growth or the effectiveness of other interventions on economic growth I think that a case for GHD totally makes sense. Curious if you had anything in mind for a ripple effect unique to GHD that couldn't be achieved by another intervention or if you had other thoughts!
I personally think that we shouldn't weigh the ripple effects too highly in our decisions - if you care about reducing short term suffering and long term expanding the moral circle, I would be skeptical that a single intervention would better accomplish both of those objectives than two separate interventions tailored to each.
What's the reason this would be worse than current data centers? Does this require one to believe that sentience is limited to/substantially more likely in biological neurons than silicon? I would like to understand what the net effect of this is likely to be and why the same arguments wouldn't apply to other data centers currently being built.
Looks neat! How much worse do you think a rabies death would be compared to the other death the raccoon would have experienced?
I agree with most of the post but am not sure about the "farmed honeybees live net negative lives" component. It seems like the strongest arguments from here + the RP report are 1) honeybee lives are short (so % of life spent dying is larger) and 2) the transport = stressful argument. Other than that:
Also, honeybees have lower infant mortality rates than mammals, the behaviors of farmed bees seem reasonably close to what they would do in the wild (no gestation crates, they still fly out, find food, come back, colony culture exists, etc). I would say that bees probably have one of the highest baseline lives of any creature in the world. They have a lower infant mortality rate than pre-industrial revolution humans. They'd probably be top 0.01% of animals I'd most want to be to be reborn as. I'm wondering if your threshold for which animals have net negative lives is much lower than mine - where do (farmed or wild) honeybees rank vs other wild (or farmed) animals, in your opinion? Was the life of a pre-industrial revolution human better or worse than a modern honeybee?
The two things that would make me change my mind are 1) learning more about the prevalence/magnitude of a negative aspect of farming bees (I could be persuaded that transport is bad enough to outweigh everything else, for example) or 2) if I had a much stronger prior on negative utilitarianism for animals (e.g. if large mammals have on average net negative lives then honeybees likely would as well).
I also agree that bees are charismatic, but I think a "bee welfare" advocacy strategy (insulate hives in winter, less invasive inspections, no transport) would be a better sell. Overall these issues seem much more solvable and low stakes than other insect/fish/bird/mammal factory farming. But I could be wrong!
My impression has been that plant-based meat is more expensive and tastes worse than current meat - even if PTC is sometimes overrated (though I found this comment persuasive in response) I'd be surprised if a substantially cheaper and similar-to-better tasting option wouldn't cause a pretty large dent in meat consumption over a long enough time horizon. It seems like you think that existing plant based options are close to price/taste competitiveness already, was my above impression incorrect?
I feel like penetration of plant based options has been pretty limited so far, and my impression of cultivated meat is that it's high risk/high reward (may not end up working, but if it does has much greater potential of creating super cheap, great tasting protein than existing methods). My inclination is that I would be happy to gamble a risk of cannibalizing existing plant based success on a shot that we get a cultivated breakthrough, particularly given that I don't think we're on a ~great trajectory at the moment. But I might be wrong! Regardless this was a great post, thank you for sharing!
I think not adopting policies or helping people to immigrate would be a very tough sell, given (my impression, at least) of the overwhelmingly strong evidence of immigration on quality of life and economic growth - I was under the impression that the evidence was pretty strong on the "brain drain=good" side, though I could be wrong. An important part of being EA is being evidence based, and I'd need to see evidence that brain drain is actually bad on net.
This also seems very morally problematic - "US passport for me but not for thee" doesn't seem like something I would be comfortable supporting ethically without very strong evidence otherwise. Forcing someone to work and live somewhere against their will seems really bad. I wouldn't want to be plucked up, moved to a developing country, be forced to work, and told I couldn't leave, and I'd encourage people to not do that to others as well.
I think the question is how much you view being vegetarian as a burden/a good deed that you are doing vs just a feature of your everyday life. For me, I don't even think about it, so I don't believe that I have the "good deed offset" issue you mentioned. But others may be different!
A second question is how much weight you give to a deontological moral system being correct - e.g. you probably wouldn't eat factory farmed humans regardless of how that might affect your other actions because that seems immoral.
A third question is what would the replacement activity for being vegetarian be? Would you realistically replace that with something as comparably high impact (e.g. - eating a serving of chicken requires ~4 hours of ~torturing the chicken to get you the food - do you think whatever you would replace that with would be worth torturing a chicken for four hours? If you aren't spending the extra time donating more to effective animal charities that seems like a high bar to clear.)
Lastly, you can avoid much of the negative impact of meat eating if you eat from places here you are highly confident in the good treatment of animals (difficult to do but possible) or just eat beef and bivalves (much easier). So if you do change I'd recommend being thoughtful about it like you would with all other decisions!
Is there any scenario where only voting for your first choice would be wise? I don't think there is any downside to listing a second choice, assuming that you do actually prefer that second choice over any of the other options should your first choice be eliminated.
This all makes sense to me - I am fairly new but I also think that EAs already think a lot about the downsides of their actions (the pattern of "advantages of x minus disadvantages of x mean that the expected value is Y" seems pretty common, and rethink priorities portfolio builder tool (https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/portfolio-builder-tool) also has "expected negative value" bits, and pe ple seem to care a lot about downstream ripple effects from e.g. health interventions. Are there some specific examples of EAs ignoring downsides that motivated this post?
Are there ripple effects from GHD outside of economic growth that you are thinking about? I think my initial reaction was that there seem to be very durable, reliable ways to increase economic growth which likely are much more effective than GHD. Some of my thoughts came from this here , but also direct cash transfers or even investing in the stock market would (I think) be a more reliable way to increase economic growth than GHD.
This may be out of scope of the debate week question, but I feel like if the case for GHD is (suffering reduction + flow through effects which seem to mostly be downstream of economic growth) I think the fact that there are other reliable, durable, (probably) more cost-effective interventions to achieve economic growth means that the existence of ripple effects shouldn't alter my decisionmaking, unless there is a unique ripple effect from GHD that other interventions would not capture.
I think a worldview diversification argument makes sense here - if having more humans is intrinsically valuable for non-hedonic reason, or we might be wrong and non-human animals aren't sentient, or if there is a lot of uncertainty around either the value of economic growth or the effectiveness of other interventions on economic growth I think that a case for GHD totally makes sense. Curious if you had anything in mind for a ripple effect unique to GHD that couldn't be achieved by another intervention or if you had other thoughts!
This post asks a similar question! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pZT9FjRehCouvrRXz/seeking-ripple-effects
I personally think that we shouldn't weigh the ripple effects too highly in our decisions - if you care about reducing short term suffering and long term expanding the moral circle, I would be skeptical that a single intervention would better accomplish both of those objectives than two separate interventions tailored to each.