If I were using a login the AI would have had data on me that it could have used even in an incognito mode as people pointed out in this discussion. My test was done on purpose on a public computer without login in order to get a non customized answer. I now asked DeepSeek as well. Same story.

I asked Gemini, ChatGPT, and Mistral how they would distribute one million dollars. (Claude and Grok didn’t work without a login.) Not one allocated even a cent to animals. Ecosia would give most to its own reforestation projects, followed by rewilding projects. That’s not what effective altruists typically do. As long as this is the case, AIs could embrace other EA values and still make the world a living hell for animals. I hope that initiatives like the Falcon Fund can bring change to this issue.

You are right, it's quite an overstatement to call anything obvious in ethics. However, for Quiverfull to be a good thing in utilitarian terms, we would need to think that it is more likely for non-human animals to be worse off without us than the opposite, and that's a difficult position to defend. As far as I know, biomass has stayed the same. Populations by individuals might have decreased slightly, but not by orders of magnitude. And the animals that are living seem to be worse off. Animals in factory farming experience intense suffering and are denied almost anything that makes for a good life, and when we control "pests", the preferred method seems to be poisoning, which makes for a slow and painful death. Also, I've never heard anyone, expert or layperson alike, claiming that humans are on average good for animals, but many think the opposite is true. That doesn't mean that there are no such experts and the fact that many believe in it doesn't make a view right, but we may want to consider this fact in an utilitarian calculation. Do you hold the view that humans are on average good for animals in utalitarian terms, or did you just want to point out that I made too far-reaching a claim?

The smallest common demoninator that is widely shared is that suffering is bad.

It is just as widely accepted that making someone happy is good. Otherwise nice surprises and birthday gifts wouldn’t make sense. If you take only one part of the equation, you will always arrive at strange conclusions. That is like running a business and saying: "It is widely accepted that costs are bad, so we will cut costs without regard for revenues."

it maps to Quiverfull

I don't see how this would be the case. Since it's quite obvious that humans bring more suffering than joy to animals, both farmed and wild, and there are orders of magnitude more non-human than human animals, why would we want to increase the human population applying utilitarian logic? In fact, prominent utilitarians like Peter Singer regularly stress the importance of the right to birth control.

Thank you. 

While I share your moral intuitions, it seems like a bit of a stretch to transfer them directly to other species. Many of your intuitions involve reproductive contexts, such as sperm donation, banning contraception, or financial resources that simply aren't available to them.

Furthermore, r-strategists follow a vastly different evolutionary path. For a human woman, being impregnated and then abandoned clearly frustrates a preference for a partner’s support; however, if a female of another species lacks that preference to begin with, the situation seems less problematic. There is also the matter of dependency: a human mother must care for a vulnerable infant, whereas r-strategists are typically self-sufficient from the moment they hatch.

I’d like to offer a different thought experiment: Suppose an alien species observes all the suffering humans on Earth and concludes they could help us by significantly reducing NPP to ensure less humans, and thus less suffering, exists in the future. Most of us would view this as a catastrophic mistake on their part. Do you believe they could "help" us that way?

Reducing populations of likely-suffering organisms through NPP reduction remains the cleanest intervention regardless of whether their suffering is “full human-like” or “attenuated no-self."

In the comment section of Part 3, you mentioned that you were “writing this sequence for antifrustrationists.” This raises the question: why is this not explicitly stated in the posts themselves? To me, the text reads as a set of general recommendations, when in fact they only seem relevant if one holds a very specific set of beliefs.

From a utilitarian perspective, bringing net primary productivity down is a potential moral catastrophe if the animals living there have reasonably good lives. Not only due to the inevitable zoocide but also because the new equilibrium would contain less overall happiness. However, wouldn't this also be problematic under antifrustrationist terms? By ending their lives, wouldn't you be frustrating their inherent preference to live?

I’ll end on a more personal note: I found the first part of the article to be a truly insightful and interesting read.

I'm very much writing this sequence for antifrustrationists.

This seems to be ad odds with what you wrote in part 1:

Part 1 (this post) starts with a quiz to help you locate yourself on the key axes of disagreement: population ethics, invertebrate sentience, and what metric to use. Your answers determine which conclusions in the later posts follow from your premises.

I must admit that I am still finding it difficult to fully grasp your position. Specifically, regarding the GiveWell top charities, you state:

the soil-animal benefit is a large addition if (probably when) the welfare sign comes out negative.

If I interpret this correctly, it suggests that your recommendations depend, at least to some degree, on the unproven assumption that soil animals live net-negative lives. Would your recommendations change if their welfare signs were found to be positive, or is your view that preventing harm always takes precedence over any amount of positive experience?

Furthermore, would you apply this same logic to humans? For instance, if an advanced Super Intelligence created a weapon that could instantaneously end all life on Earth, would you recommend its use to ensure that no preference could ever be frustrated again?

I’ve read both posts and I found the first part a bit one-sided. In your definition of welfare biology, for instance, you only cited authors who believe soil animals have net-negative lives, while omitting those who argue the opposite.

While the quiz in that first post gave those opposing ideas some moral weight, this second part seems to start with the assumption that soil animals live net-negative lives. I noticed the robustness section doesn't really consider the possibility that this premise could be wrong.

How would your recommendations change if we assumed net-positive lives instead? Would we then have to oppose GiveWell’s top charities, biofuel mandates, or wind turbines by that same logic?

Ultimately, do you think an assumption that can neither be proven nor unproven is a good basis for recommending where people should donate?

Reading your article, I got the impression that you assume soil animals lead lives not worth living, and build your recommendations on that premise. To my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence for such a bold claim and your post doesn’t provide any either. Could you elaborate on this? As written, I found the article quite unsettling.