Do you have questions that you want to ask a Rethink Priorities researcher? If so, then good news: We’re going to try out something new on “Charity for All”: A monthly AMA newsletter!
How the AMA will work:
Each month, we will feature a new RP researcher whom you can ask your questions.
We’ll announce each month’s featured researcher near the beginning of the new month in a dedicated post.
Throughout the month, you can ask questions you have for them in the comment section of that post or in a Google form that we set up.
At the end of the month, we’ll publish a newsletter with the researcher’s responses to them.
August’s Researcher: Bob Fischer
For the first installment of “Ask a Researcher,” we’re featuring Bob Fischer. Bob’s a Senior Researcher at Rethink Priorities and a philosophy professor at Texas State University.
You might know Bob’s research for RP if you’ve read the Moral Weight Project, which created a systematic framework for comparing different animals’ ability to experience pain and pleasure.
In addition to his work on animal welfare, Bob led the Worldview Investigations Team’s CURVE sequence, which asked whether we should put all resources into protecting the future instead of taking care of the present. He also contributed to WIT’s CRAFT sequence, which built tools so that people can make better giving decisions when they value lots of different things and don’t know where their money will go the furthest.
If you have questions for Bob, please post them in the comments section below, or submit them to this Google form by August 21st.
For instance, you might want to know about:
Bob’s past research
How he got interested in animal welfare
What books, academics, arguments, etc. have had the biggest impact on his views
How he’s changed his mind due to his research
Current and future projects
The best coffee shops in various cities
And more!
 | A guest post by
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Thanks for the initiative, Laura and Bob! A few questions for Bob:
- What would you do differently, and what do you think Rethink Priorities (RP) should do differently if soil animals were certain to be sentient, and all the other animals (including humans) were certain not to be sentient?
-- I do not hold any of these views, but I would say they describe a relevant hypothetical.
-- I think effects on soil animal are the driver of the overall impact of the vast majority of interventions (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WbmDhpqKcT8gjwpso/saving-human-lives-at-the-lowest-cost-increases-animal#Increase_in_the_welfare_of_soil_ants__termites__springtails__mites__and_nematodes_as_a_fraction_of_the_increase_in_the_welfare_of_the_target_beneficiaries).
- Welfare across species can actually be compared pretty well based on the number of neurons alone?
-- RP’s moral weight project included a report by Adam Shriver concluding “there is no straightforward empirical evidence or compelling conceptual arguments indicating that relative differences in neuron counts within or between species reliably predicts welfare relevant functional capacities” (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/y5n47MfgrKvTLE3pw/p/Mfq7KxQRvkeLnJvoB).
-- However, "number of neurons"^0.188 explains 78.6 % of the variance of the welfare ranges presented in Table 8.6 of your book "Weighing Animal Welfare: Comparing Well-Being Across Species" (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1r26jbZOSy6Cyojg8fPP-gGzk_pQzNKcIxemKNEsiVP0/edit?gid=1821226790#gid=1821226790&range=N1), which contains what RP stands behind now. "What we [RP] stand behind now is really just what we published in the book" (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uBNtahhinshZ3PYkW/effects-on-microorganisms-are-much-larger-than-those-on?commentId=7osxiWnt7QHwn9wEf).
- To which extent do you think cage-free and broiler welfare reforms impact soil animals much more than chickens? For a welfare range proportional to "number of neurons"^0.19, which explains very well the estimates for the welfare range in your book, I estimate cage-free and broiler welfare reforms (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WbmDhpqKcT8gjwpso/saving-human-lives-cheaply-is-the-most-cost-effective-way-of):
-- Increase the welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes 77.8 k and 1.22 M times as much as they increase the welfare of chickens.
-- Decrease the welfare of soil ants and termites 20.4 and 321 times as much as they increase the welfare of chickens, thus being harmful. I believe ants and termites have more neurons than shrimp, which is the animal with the least neurons covered in your book. So I estimate effects on soil animals would still be much larger than those on the target beneficiaries for a welfare per animal-year of exactly 0 for animals with fewer neurons than those considered in your book.
- Do you have any thoughts on land use changes as a way of increasing animal welfare?
-- I estimate funding the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research’s (CEARCH’s) High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF), which has made grants to decrease the consumption of sugar and sodium, thus decreasing human mortality, increasing the consumption of food, and increasing agricultural land, decreases 5.07 billion soil-animal-years per $. For comparison, I estimate cage-free and broiler welfare corporate campaigns only improve 3.00 and 10.8 chicken-years per $ (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8FqWSqv9AeLowgajn/cost-effectiveness-of-corporate-campaigns-for-chicken#Chicken_years_improved_per__).
-- So I think at least figuring out whether soil animals have positive or negative lives is a crucial question. If they have negative lives, as I guess they do, saving human lives cheaply can easily increase animal welfare more cost-effectively than interventions aiming to increase the welfare per animal-year of farmed or wild animals (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WbmDhpqKcT8gjwpso/saving-human-lives-at-the-lowest-cost-increases-animal).
- What do you think is the probablity that cage-free and broiler welfare corporate campaigns increase expected total hedonistic welfare (in other words, increase probability-, intensity-, and duration-adjusted hedonistic welfare)?