Absolutely, in times like this, you could expect some solidarity to the people, sector, and society this VC is working with. A rich successful VC would better allocate a fund to support employees for a few months until easier landing is possible. This is much more helpful and fair - instead of blogging how they feel empathy but pushing for layoffs nevertheless
Sadly, startups innovations did not find (or even tried) a way to save animals and wild life. If Disney would contribute 1% of all income they got from animals based movies? If Docker would contribute 1% to save whales?
As someone who works in conservation tech, there are a lot of issues. You need to have influence with policymakers (ie the people who can crack down on illegal habitat destruction, or agricultural policy).
It requires a mixture of educating local people about sustainable land use, better environmental monitoring (this is what I do), changing consumer habits so we don't need to deforest to satisfy our food needs, and so on.
There is a lot of money already involved and there are lots of startups doing good work on sustainability which indirectly is beneficial. For example lab grown meat might reduce pressure on livestock farming.
I think it’s an interesting idea we’d need to have someone like gates, focused on how to use that money for effective impact otherwise likely that money would just go to waste... hence nice idea but lot of work to back it up for real impact...
+ 1000 For the animals welfare. The animals that can't blog, tweet, or complain. Wildlife preservation and care for animals is as important as other common non-profit and foundations goals, but often neglected
We agree, effective altruism attempts to focus on problems that are important, tractable and neglected. Animal welfare fits squarely into this bucket for all the reasons you mentioned.
In particular, we often focus on farm animal welfare, as this is an area that is particularly neglected. I love this post from Animal Charity Evaluators[0] which explains that while farmed animals account for 99% of animals killed and used by humans in the US, the vast majority of donations go to animal shelters, with only 1% going to charities which help reduce the suffering of farmed animals.
[0] https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/why-farmed-animals/
Of course, EAs won't tell you this up front, as they know it would be bad PR. (cf. https://medium.com/@jacobfunnell/a-year-in-effective-altruis...: "Some effective altruists hold views that would be strongly controversial to most people outside of EA. EA does a pretty good job of either not mentioning (or actively avoiding) these conclusions in its public-facing literature. Examples include the moral imperative to destroy habitat in order to reduce wild animal suffering, the need to divert funds away from causes like poverty relief and towards artificial intelligence safety research, or the extreme triviality of aesthetic value.")
While there are people who identify as effective altruist who hold views that are controversial, I think it's important to not paint with such a broad brush. As your linked article notes, there is wide disagreement on a range of thorny philosophical issues across a range of cause areas, but the scare quotes/selective quoting makes it seem like these views are unquestioningly accepted by a plurality of people in the community.
Effective altruism is a broad church. The unifying themes are trying to make the world a better place, using reason and evidence as tools for making decision, expanding our circle of compassion, and having epistemic humility (i.e. knowing that we could be wrong about things and being open to changing our minds in proportion to the strength of new evidence). The conclusions people draw can hinge on deep and ultimately irreducible value judgements — a strength of the community is that we can (in general) have these disagreements respectfully and work together productively where there is common ground.
It's not letting me edit my comment, so I'll post this separately.
I can't help but feel that accusing me of "selective quoting" is just a tactic used to deflect a true observation. As far as I can tell, the most well-known EAs who have commented on wild animal suffering have unilaterally come out in support of Tomasik-like conclusions, e.g. CEA's CEO William MacAskill has written an article called "To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion)", and 80,000 Hours director Rob Wiblin has written a blog post called "Why improve nature when destroying it is so much easier?" (https://archive.fo/HbE2a). This has also been my experience in online EA communities, such as the EA Facebook group. I can think of dozens of articles written by prominent EAs supporting habitat destruction, but only one opposing it (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/14l/the_unproven_and_unprov...).
Since there's no robust evidence (eg surveys) on EA views of wild animal suffering, this is the best evidence available.
Thank you for the response and I'm sorry for the tone of my earlier comment.
> As your linked article notes, there is wide disagreement on a range of thorny philosophical issues across a range of cause areas, but the scare quotes/selective quoting makes it seem like these views are unquestioningly accepted by a plurality of people in the community.
There is disagreement within the EA community on ethics. However, almost all the disagreements are between different 'denominations' within the church of consequentialism -- questions like population ethics (total vs. person-affecting vs. negative), theories of well-being (hedonistic vs. preference), and distributional justice (utilitarian vs. prioritarian). The fundamental theory of consequentialism is taken for granted by most EAs. As my linked article says, "ultimately, only people who have a good majority of utilitarians in their moral parliaments are going to be able to get on-board with EA." I think this is true to some extent. While there are non-consequentialist EAs, it's hard to deny that the culture of EA is extremely consequentialist.
Even though I like the abstract idea of effective altruism, my value disagreements make me hesitant to trust certain EA organizations. I'm personally a deontological vegan and very concerned about animals, but if I donate to ACE (see section 7 of https://medium.com/@harrisonnathan/the-actual-number-is-almo...) or the CEA Animal Welfare fund, how do I know the money won't go to something I ethically oppose (like pro-habitat destruction advocacy)?
Yeah, I agree that it's much easier to get on board with the fundamental proposition of EA if you're of a consequentialist disposition, because the 'most' in 'do the most good' implies a maximising view. I don't think that it's inherently antithetical to other value systems, but agree that because there are more consequentialists, it's more culturally consequentialist.
The reason we publish fund manager grant history/writeups is so that you can have a sense of what their values are, and can make some calls about whether that accords with your views. Without presuming to speak for him or pre-empt any decisions, I strongly suspect that Lewis is unlikely to grant to anything on the more speculative/controversial side of animal welfare (in general I think it's more likely to focus on corporate cage-free programs and meat replacement tech). We think there are a lot of good reasons not to use the Funds[1], and if you're worried that you're going to end up funding something that's harmful, you shouldn't donate to that Fund.
Just to add my $0.02, my impression is that while many EAs enjoy discussing the thorny philosophical issues like whether we should be concerned about insect-suffering, or wild-animal suffering, very few would advocate that we actually support habitat destruction or massive interventions in nature. Even groups like FRI, who are heavily focused on suffering, promote the idea of moral uncertainty. They believe that we should avoid drastic actions based on a narrow ethical view, due to uncertainty about which ethical views are more valid.
Like with everything, more controversial issues are more likely to be picked up by the media and blown out of proportion, relative to the actual level of support they receive. I would be extremely surprised if any money from the CEA Animal Welfare Fund went to support habitat destruction to reduce wild-animal suffering. I would be less surprised if money from the fund went to support research into animal consciousness, to help us better compare different types of animal welfare interventions.
I'm not from the media and I am campaigning against "effective altruism" because it promotes eco-terrorism, habitat destruction, call it what you want. I am compelled to do this to protect public safety.
There's no point in denying that a large portion of self-identified EAs are for eco-terrorism, it's all over the internet. There is no gray area here, you are either with the terrorists (strong negative utilitarians) are against them.
Interaction. It's what one does, and what the environment does and how the interaction goes. What ever you do in the wrong environment, will not help, and vice versa.
After years with Python, it's still a mystery to me how the same constructs are so intuitive and readable in Python (think it acceptable that they are less in C++, Java or javascript etc, even Ruby)
It might depend on your previous history. My development arc was C, Perl, Java, Ruby, Python with Javascript in parallel. Python is not particularly intuitive after 10 years of Ruby. Actually it's a mistery to me how people can like such a complicated language. However I got only customers using Python last year so I must make me like it at least a little. I keep thinking I could have been very unlucky and found some Java projects instead.
It's just what you know, coming from the other direction I found Ruby ugly and plenty of warts of its own. But I'm aware this is just a subjective impression and they're broadly very similar.
Yup. I'm with you. For my money, Ruby could fill exactly the space Python does and do it better...but Python has too much steam in its niche and Ruby got pigeon-holed as a web language; such is life.
The python one valued doc, robustness, readability and stability.
The ruby one loved cleverness, beautiful design and conventions.
Eventually they ended up meeting at the middle, but in the mean time, people got tired of :
- having the last monkey patch breaking their code
- having to try to understand the last crazy dsl somebody came up with
- having an incomplete out of data doc and no tests
- having gem install breaks on you randomly
- having to mess with rvm (still an issue though) which never seems to do quite what you want
Ruby is a good language, but it took too much type to come out of it's teen years, playing bold and teasing. Now it's too late.
JS is getting away with it, despite being way inferior to ruby, because it's the only language on the web platform and we are forced to use it. Ruby didn't have this chance.
From a personal friend who is an organic farmer: (a) organic food is hard to do in large fields, since the plants can easily catch anything, and the farmer looses the entire crop.It happens much more than non organic. So the farmer must use very small portions of fields, each with different type of plant, and thus minimise the risk. So no economy of scale (b) you can't use the same plants again and again on the same field, and the cycle of changing plants each time requires to build, dismantle and rebuild another infrastructure each time (c) can't keep in refrigerators long time, so what is not sold quickly, is lost
It is. But there's also the "how large is the rotation?"
There's the typical cash crop rotation: corn to soy. This has the advantage of cash crop and cash crop. These are both well known and the differences in weather over the course of a growing season are minimized - if its a drought year, you've got the appropriate hybrid. If its a wet year, you've got the appropriate hybrid. Very predictable.
When one goes to the idealistic organic the cycle could be: corn, beans, reddish, onion, melon, sunflower, broccoli, carrots, tomatoes. Rather extreme, but an example. Also note that onions and garlic can be mixed, as can peans and beans... but that is the idea.
This works nicely for the home garden plots but when trying to rotate with hundreds of acres of fields its a bit more challenging. Instead of two or three means of harvest its nine different types of plants - tomato harvest is completely unlike corn harvest. Furthermore, it means that the farmer is a bit more at the mercy of the weather (great year for corn, but you've planted radishes because you just had corn two years ago and would need some pesticides or go to a GMO variety of corn... and that's not organic anymore) and the markets (there's no demand for the things that are in the next three seasons in the harvest - do you skip forward four?).
