Animal welfare space needs considerably more rigorous research (which should be done, but will cost much less than $100m) before knowing if it includes better investments than the top ones in global health.
Thanks! - super helpful and interesting, much appreciated.
I suppose my takeaway, all the while setting consciousness aside, is [still] along the lines: (a) 'having preferences' is not a sufficient indicator for what we're trying to figure out; (b) we are unlikely to converge on a satisfying / convincing single dimension or line in the sand; (c) moral patienthood is therefore almost certainly a matter of degree (although we may feel like we can assign 0 or 1 at the extremes) - which fits my view of almost everything in the world; (d) empirically coming up with concrete numbers for those interior values is going to be very very hard, and reasonable people will disagree, so everyone should be cautious about making any strong or universal claims; and (e) this all applies to plants just as much as to AI, so they deserve a bit more consideration in the discussion.
I think I have a similar question to Will: if there can be preferences or welfare without consciousness, wouldn't that also apply to plants (+ bacteria etc)? (and maybe the conclusion is that it does! but I don't see people discussing that very much, despite the fact that unlike for AI it's not a hypothetical situation) It's certainly the case "that their lives could go better or worse, or their concerns and interests could be more or less respected".
Along those lines, this quote seemed relevant: "our concepts were pinned down in a situation where there weren’t a lot of ambiguous cases, where we had relatively sharp distinctions between, say, humans, nonhuman animals, and inanimate objects" [emphasis not mine] Maybe so, but there's a big gap between nonhuman animals and inanimate objects!
If farmed chickens plausibly have overall net positive lives (per the discussion above), and if you're something like a total utilitarian, then you should want more of them to exist; hence eat more in order to at least weakly increase demand / production.
Alternately, if you think it's very difficult to know for sure whether chickens have net positive lives or not, and you enjoy the taste of chicken, then that's another case for eating more of them.
I attended an interesting (not just researchers!) Wellbeing Forum in London on Monday. Focus topics highlighted two unusual (for this topic) themes that might both be of interest to people here: 'Human wellbeing in the age of AI' and 'religion and spirituality' (using recent large global polling data from Gallup). Feel free to DM me if you want more info or have any questions.
Hi - thanks again for taking more time with this, but I don't think you do understand my model. It has nothing to do with capital assets, hiring/firing workers, or switching suppliers. All that it requires is that some decisions are made in bulk, i.e. at a level of granularity larger than the impact of any one individual consumer. I agree this is less likely for retail stores (possibly some of them order in units of 1? wouldn't it be nice if someone actually cared enough to look into this rather than us all arguing hypothetically...), but it will clearly happen somewhere back up the supply chain, which is all that my model requires.
Your mistake is when you write "Say they need to order in multiples of 10, and they order the minimum multiple of 10 that's at least 7 over what they predict." That's not what my model predicts (I think it's closer to M&H's first interpretation of buffers?), nor does it make economic sense, and it builds in linearity. What a profit-maximizing store will do is to balance the marginal benefit and marginal cost. Thus if they would ideally order 7 extra, but they have to order in multiples of 10 and x=4 mod10, they'll order x+6 not x+16 (small chance of one extra stock-out vs large chance of 10 wasted items). They may not always pick the multiple-of-10 closest to 7 extra, but they will balance the expected gains and losses rather than using a minimum. From there everything that I'm suggesting (namely the exponential decline in probability, which is the key point where this differs from all the others) follows.
And a quick reminder: I'm not claiming that my model is the right one or the best one, however it is literally the first one that I thought of and yet no one else in this literature seems to have considered it. Hence my conclusion that they're making far stronger claims than are possibly warranted.
I still haven't read Budolfson, so I'm not claiming that M&H misinterpret him. As I said, I did read their entire paper, and in the section specifically about him they describe two interpretations of "buffer", neither of which matches my model. So if his model is similar to mine, they got it wrong. If his model is different than mine, then they don't seem to have ever considered a model like mine. Either way a bad sign.
Everything you write about how you think they might respond to me (i.e. your three bullet points and the subsequent paragraph) is 100% consistent with my model and doesn't change any of its implications. In my model stores use predicted demand and can update it as often as they want. The point is that purchasing is in bulk (at least at some level in the supply chain); therefore there is a threshold; and the optimal threshold (every single time) will be chosen to be away from the mean prediction. This can still be extremely sensitive, and may well be. [Apologies if my brief descriptions were unclear, but please do take another look at it before responding if you don't see why all this is the case.]
To the final point, yes of course if someone decides to stop purchasing then the store [probabilistically] starts ordering fewer chickens [than otherwise]; I didn't disagree with that sentence of theirs, and it is also 100% consistent with my model. The question is the magnitude of that change and whether it is linear or not, crucial points to which they have nothing to contribute.
Yes all fair, and I'd say it goes beyond counterfactuals. I'm not sure people fully realize how sensitive many conclusions are to all sorts of assumptions, which are often implicit in standard models. I am on record disagreeing strongly with John Halstead about the likely cost-effectiveness of advocating for economic growth, and I feel similarly about much of the longtermist agenda, so this isn't specific to animals. My personal sense is that if you can save an existing human life for a few thousand dollars (for which the evidence is very clear, although point taken that the marginal impact isn't definitively pinned down - however I'd guess within a factor of two,), that's an extremely high bar to overcome.
Interesting - thanks for the extra info re Budolfson. I did in fact read all of M&H, and they give two interpretations of the buffer model, neither of which is related to my model, so that's what I was referring to. [That's also what I was referring to in my final paragraph: none of the sources you cited on that side of the causal efficacy argument seems to have considered anything like my model, which remains true given my current knowledge.] In fact if Budolfson was saying something more like my model, which does seem to be the case, then that's an even worse sign for M&H because they must not have understood it.
The paragraph you quote from Budolfson is indeed more similar to my model, except that in my case the result follows from profit-maximizing behavior (in a competitive industry if you like!) rather than ad hoc and unusual assumptions.
Suppose that I consider a threshold (for increasing or decreasing production next cycle) right at the mean of expected sales (15,000 in the example): half the time I'll stockout and have disappointed customers; half the time I'll have extra stock and have to sell it on a secondary market, or give it away, or waste it. Which is worse for business? Plausibly stocking out is worse. So my threshold will be higher than the mean, reducing the probability of stocking out and increasing the prob of excess. The optimal level will be set just so that at the margin, the badness of stocking out (larger) multiplied by the prob of stocking out (smaller) will exactly offset the badness of excess times the prob of excess. Because it is above the mean, which is in fact the true best-guess state of the world (ignoring any individual consumer), and because the distribution around the mean will plausibly be Gaussian (normal), which declines exponentially from the mean - not linearly! - every individual consumer should rationally believe that their decision is less than 1/n likely to be taking place at the threshold. QED.
Animal welfare space needs considerably more rigorous research (which should be done, but will cost much less than $100m) before knowing if it includes better investments than the top ones in global health.
Thanks! - super helpful and interesting, much appreciated.
I suppose my takeaway, all the while setting consciousness aside, is [still] along the lines: (a) 'having preferences' is not a sufficient indicator for what we're trying to figure out; (b) we are unlikely to converge on a satisfying / convincing single dimension or line in the sand; (c) moral patienthood is therefore almost certainly a matter of degree (although we may feel like we can assign 0 or 1 at the extremes) - which fits my view of almost everything in the world; (d) empirically coming up with concrete numbers for those interior values is going to be very very hard, and reasonable people will disagree, so everyone should be cautious about making any strong or universal claims; and (e) this all applies to plants just as much as to AI, so they deserve a bit more consideration in the discussion.
When is Plant Welfare Debate Week??
I think I have a similar question to Will: if there can be preferences or welfare without consciousness, wouldn't that also apply to plants (+ bacteria etc)? (and maybe the conclusion is that it does! but I don't see people discussing that very much, despite the fact that unlike for AI it's not a hypothetical situation) It's certainly the case "that their lives could go better or worse, or their concerns and interests could be more or less respected".
Along those lines, this quote seemed relevant: "our concepts were pinned down in a situation where there weren’t a lot of ambiguous cases, where we had relatively sharp distinctions between, say, humans, nonhuman animals, and inanimate objects" [emphasis not mine] Maybe so, but there's a big gap between nonhuman animals and inanimate objects!
Super thank you - I especially liked the last line about saving the world...
If farmed chickens plausibly have overall net positive lives (per the discussion above), and if you're something like a total utilitarian, then you should want more of them to exist; hence eat more in order to at least weakly increase demand / production.
Alternately, if you think it's very difficult to know for sure whether chickens have net positive lives or not, and you enjoy the taste of chicken, then that's another case for eating more of them.
I attended an interesting (not just researchers!) Wellbeing Forum in London on Monday. Focus topics highlighted two unusual (for this topic) themes that might both be of interest to people here: 'Human wellbeing in the age of AI' and 'religion and spirituality' (using recent large global polling data from Gallup). Feel free to DM me if you want more info or have any questions.
Hi - thanks again for taking more time with this, but I don't think you do understand my model. It has nothing to do with capital assets, hiring/firing workers, or switching suppliers. All that it requires is that some decisions are made in bulk, i.e. at a level of granularity larger than the impact of any one individual consumer. I agree this is less likely for retail stores (possibly some of them order in units of 1? wouldn't it be nice if someone actually cared enough to look into this rather than us all arguing hypothetically...), but it will clearly happen somewhere back up the supply chain, which is all that my model requires.
Your mistake is when you write "Say they need to order in multiples of 10, and they order the minimum multiple of 10 that's at least 7 over what they predict." That's not what my model predicts (I think it's closer to M&H's first interpretation of buffers?), nor does it make economic sense, and it builds in linearity. What a profit-maximizing store will do is to balance the marginal benefit and marginal cost. Thus if they would ideally order 7 extra, but they have to order in multiples of 10 and x=4 mod10, they'll order x+6 not x+16 (small chance of one extra stock-out vs large chance of 10 wasted items). They may not always pick the multiple-of-10 closest to 7 extra, but they will balance the expected gains and losses rather than using a minimum. From there everything that I'm suggesting (namely the exponential decline in probability, which is the key point where this differs from all the others) follows.
And a quick reminder: I'm not claiming that my model is the right one or the best one, however it is literally the first one that I thought of and yet no one else in this literature seems to have considered it. Hence my conclusion that they're making far stronger claims than are possibly warranted.
I still haven't read Budolfson, so I'm not claiming that M&H misinterpret him. As I said, I did read their entire paper, and in the section specifically about him they describe two interpretations of "buffer", neither of which matches my model. So if his model is similar to mine, they got it wrong. If his model is different than mine, then they don't seem to have ever considered a model like mine. Either way a bad sign.
Everything you write about how you think they might respond to me (i.e. your three bullet points and the subsequent paragraph) is 100% consistent with my model and doesn't change any of its implications. In my model stores use predicted demand and can update it as often as they want. The point is that purchasing is in bulk (at least at some level in the supply chain); therefore there is a threshold; and the optimal threshold (every single time) will be chosen to be away from the mean prediction. This can still be extremely sensitive, and may well be. [Apologies if my brief descriptions were unclear, but please do take another look at it before responding if you don't see why all this is the case.]
To the final point, yes of course if someone decides to stop purchasing then the store [probabilistically] starts ordering fewer chickens [than otherwise]; I didn't disagree with that sentence of theirs, and it is also 100% consistent with my model. The question is the magnitude of that change and whether it is linear or not, crucial points to which they have nothing to contribute.
Yes all fair, and I'd say it goes beyond counterfactuals. I'm not sure people fully realize how sensitive many conclusions are to all sorts of assumptions, which are often implicit in standard models. I am on record disagreeing strongly with John Halstead about the likely cost-effectiveness of advocating for economic growth, and I feel similarly about much of the longtermist agenda, so this isn't specific to animals. My personal sense is that if you can save an existing human life for a few thousand dollars (for which the evidence is very clear, although point taken that the marginal impact isn't definitively pinned down - however I'd guess within a factor of two,), that's an extremely high bar to overcome.
Interesting - thanks for the extra info re Budolfson. I did in fact read all of M&H, and they give two interpretations of the buffer model, neither of which is related to my model, so that's what I was referring to. [That's also what I was referring to in my final paragraph: none of the sources you cited on that side of the causal efficacy argument seems to have considered anything like my model, which remains true given my current knowledge.] In fact if Budolfson was saying something more like my model, which does seem to be the case, then that's an even worse sign for M&H because they must not have understood it.
The paragraph you quote from Budolfson is indeed more similar to my model, except that in my case the result follows from profit-maximizing behavior (in a competitive industry if you like!) rather than ad hoc and unusual assumptions.
Suppose that I consider a threshold (for increasing or decreasing production next cycle) right at the mean of expected sales (15,000 in the example): half the time I'll stockout and have disappointed customers; half the time I'll have extra stock and have to sell it on a secondary market, or give it away, or waste it. Which is worse for business? Plausibly stocking out is worse. So my threshold will be higher than the mean, reducing the probability of stocking out and increasing the prob of excess. The optimal level will be set just so that at the margin, the badness of stocking out (larger) multiplied by the prob of stocking out (smaller) will exactly offset the badness of excess times the prob of excess. Because it is above the mean, which is in fact the true best-guess state of the world (ignoring any individual consumer), and because the distribution around the mean will plausibly be Gaussian (normal), which declines exponentially from the mean - not linearly! - every individual consumer should rationally believe that their decision is less than 1/n likely to be taking place at the threshold. QED.