It's very unclear what the central point represents on this scale, so it's difficult even to tell whether you lean to the left or to the right.

Engaging with this problem has influenced my priorities to some extent:

1. It has made me less certain about things in general and led me to put relatively more weight on what I see as the most intuitively robust stuff (such as capacity building).
2. I've come to think that solving the cluelessness problem itself should be a priority, perhaps even a top priority, for impartial altruism.

And DiGiovanni's sequence has helped me a lot in understanding the problem. Previously, I was only vaguely familiar with the topic (I'd read a bit of Greaves several years ago). Although I intuitively considered cluelessness very important, I underestimated how much it affects things.

Thanks Vasco.

Advocating for lower meat consumption based on animal right may encourage wildeness preservation

That's why I prefer animal activists to focus on welfare instead.

Things seem even worse with environment-based arguments, both in the long term and in the short term.

the same may apply to advocating for improving the conditions of farmed animals.

Sounds scary, but I guess it's possible to address this problem to some degree. Also, I expect that even if people supporting farmed animal welfare disagree with those advocating for wild animal welfare at some point, they are still more likely than environmentalists/conservationists to be persuaded to care about WAS at some point later.

I am sceptical that advocating for lower meat consumption is a cost-effective way of helping wild animals.

I'm more interested in combined approaches and in encouraging people who are already interested in reducing meat consumption to care about wild animals too. In particular, I'm thinking about raising awareness of the problem discussed in this post and suggesting ways to offset the harm. (Right now, I'm working on a website on reducetarianism and other animal-related topics where I'm trying to address this.)

I've been thinking about the same problem over the past few months. (Thanks to Brian Tomasik and Vasco Grilo.)

There is one upside to leaving insects out of the picture: people who care only about vertebrates may be more likely to take this problem seriously rather than dismiss it. But on the other hand, excluding invertebrates may make the scale of the problem seem too small to warrant much concern^[1]. Many people may simply think "someone else will solve this problem for me" and then forget about it. Also, it's unclear what practical advice for ordinary vegans or reducetarians could draw from your conclusion. It reads more like a high-level political recommendation.

I'm generally slightly in favour of reducing meat consumption because of the potential positive side effects, such as shifting people's values in a more animal-friendly direction. I hope these benefits will outweigh the harm, but the situation is far from satisfactory.

I'm planning to encourage people to offset this harm by supporting wild animal welfare orgs, raising the profile of welfare biology, and so on. But even these efforts will ultimately benefit wild animals only if human values and the activities they motivate turn out to matter in the long run. For example, they might influence the values of an ASI or those of a future civilisation.

Perhaps this way of offsetting would seem satisfactory if one were fully committed to longtermism and maximising expected value. But what if one wants to diversify across different plausible future scenarios in some other way, assigning significant weight to short-term outcomes? If humanity goes extinct soon without creating any aligned successors, this would mean that there would be no long-term gains from influencing people's values, whereas the consequences of people's food choices would still matter. In such scenarios, the harm to wild animals would not be offset without some additional efforts.

So perhaps it's also worth considering short-term ways of improving the situation, such as increasing the amount of land used by humans. These could, in turn, have other negative side effects. For example, what if increasing the human population also accelerates the race towards ASI (which seems to pose a risk of suffering - be it aligned or rogue) or other s-risky outcomes? But perhaps there are ways to increase land use without significantly affecting the human population. In particular, do some forms of agriculture use substantially more land than others?

It seems that the text formatting here is a little broken when it involves formulas.

Yes, but this means that you know something additional about the structure of the representor, not just its range. I'm asking whether we can do better than maximality even for intervals alone, without adding any further details.

(By the way, pictures are broken.)

UPD: Though, you probably mean that we do know some additional structure for EV if we look at how it is constructed from probabilities and utilities, for which we have just intervals without structure.

Thanks.

No, I don't think so. I don't remember him mentioning such an implication, and he has sometimes explicitly mentioned the risk that humanity will end up happy and unconcerned about wild animal suffering, here or elsewhere (example).

Good work! It's useful to have such a collection of arguments on space colonization all in one place.

I personally disagree with Pearce on AI risks and digital suffering (which he denies) and on metaethics (he's a moral realist), for instance.

I also worried that happier people don't necessarily imply wider moral circle, more compassion and so on, so it's not clear what to expect from scenarios where, for example, there is widespread selection against suffering at the genetic level.

(Strategically I agree more with Magnus Vinding and Brian Tomasik on this topic.)

In particular, it would be interesting to know how likely such selection pressures (as described by Pearce) are to be significant, and how they will affect human values.

He seems to be pretty optimistic about his Abolitionist Project (I'm not). If you're familiar with his work, where do you think he's making wrong assumptions when predicting the future?

What do you think about "The Reproductive Revolution" by David Pearce (or his other works, such as "The Hedonistic Imperative") in this context?