Given the recent post on the marketability of EA (which went so far as to suggest excluding MIRI from the EA tent to make EA more marketable - or maybe that was a comment in response to the post; don't remember), a brief reaction from someone who is excited about Effective Altruism but has various reservations. (My main reservation, so you have a feel for where I'm coming from, is that my goal in life is not to maximize the world's utility, but, roughly speaking, to maximize my own utility and end-of-life satisfaction, and therefore I find it hard to get excited about theoretically utility maximizing causes rather than donating to things which I viscerally care about -- I know this will strike most people here as incredibly squishy, but I'd bet that much of the public outside the EA community probably has a similar reaction, though few would actually come out and say it)

• I like your idea about high-leverage values spreading.
• The ideas about Happy Animal Farm / Promoting Universal Eudaimonia seem nuts to me, so much so that I actually reread the post to see if this was a parody. If it gains widespread popularity among the EA movement, I will move from being intrigued about EA and excited to bring it up in conversation to never raising it in conversations with all but the most open-minded / rationalist people, or raising it in the tone of "yeah these guys are crazy but this one idea they have about applying data analysis to charity has some merit... Earning to Give is intriguing too...." I could be wrong, but I'd strongly suspect that most people who are not thoroughgoing utilitarians find it incredibly silly to argue that creating more beings who experience utility is a good cause, and this would quickly push EA away from being taken seriously in the mainstream.
• The humane insecticides idea doesn't seem AS silly as those two above, but it places EA in the same mental category as my most extreme caricature of PETA (and I'm someone who eats mostly vegan, and some Certified Humane, because I care about animal welfare). I don't think insects are a very popular cause.

Just my 2 cents.

Upvoted, because although I disagree with much of this on object level, I think the post is totally legit and I think we should encourage original thinking.

Perhaps we need to find a time and place to start a serious discussion of ethics. I think hedonistic utilitarianism is wrong already on the level of meta-ethics. It seems to assume the existence of universal morals which from my point of view is a non-sequitur. Basically all discussions of universal morals are games with meaningless words, maps of non-existing territories. The only sensible meta-ethics I know is equating ethics with preferences. It seems that there is such a thing as intelligent agents with preferences (although we have no satisfactory mathematical definition yet). Of course each agent has its own preferences and the space of possible preferences is quite big (orthogonality thesis). Hence ethical subjectivism. Human preferences don't seem to differ much from human to human once you take into account that much of the differences in instrumental goals are explained by different beliefs rather than different terminal goals (=preferences). Therefore it makes sense in certain situations to use approximate models of ethics that don't explicitly mention the reference human, like utilitarianism. On the other hand, there is no reason the precise ethics should have a simple description (complexity of value). It is a philosophical error to think ethics should be low complexity like physical law since ethics (=preferences) is a property of the agent and has quite a bit of complexity put in by evolution. In other words, ethics is in the same category as the shape of Africa rather than Einstein's equations. Taking simplified models which take only one value into account (e.g. pleasure) to the extreme is bound to lead to abhorrent conclusions as all other values as sacrificed.

Rat happiness is HALF as good as human happiness? I'm not so sure about that.

I would be willing to support high leverage value spreading though. And I'd like to know what Pearce is up to these days. Many people are strangely skeptical or dismissive of universal eudaimonia scenarios, and it's an important idea to establish.

Wouldn't farming bees be better than farming rats? They are even smaller, and you could support the operation by selling the honey. (If bees don't win because they are smaller, why not go bigger and create a happy farm full of egg laying chickens or something? Same advantage of being able to support the operation by selling animal products.)

Upvoted as these are interested ideas, particularly the humane pesticide. On the other hand, the happy animal farm idea is too far outside the mainstream and would be too damaging to the reputation of EA for me to want it to get too much support from the EA movement at the current time.

I would suggest 1) the happy animal farm idea shouldn't be explored too much until at least EA has established itself 2) if these ideas are explored, they should be framed more as philosophical discussion than as a solid policy proposal 3) if in the future, someone decides to pursue this, it shouldn't be directly supported by mainstream EA organisations. Even AI safety research is enough to make people skeptical of EA.

My concern with working to achieve universal eudaimonia is that, technologically, we are quite far from being able to achieve this. There is possibility that if we focus solely on that, society in general will suffer, perhaps to the point where we collapse and are never able to achieve eudaimonia. We might also miss out on the chance of stopping some x-risk because we put too many resources into eudaimonia. Also, I believe that by helping the world overcome poverty and working on short-term technology boosts, we get closer to a point where working on universal eudaimonia is more achievable.

I don't have any values or thought experiments to back this up, these are just my initial concerns. That's not to say that I don't think the concept should be worked on. I met David Pearce this year and he convinced me that such a concept should be the 'final goal' of humanity and EA.