What The Daily Show got wrong about EA

I can't help but quibble with a good thing.

Last month, the great

Glenn

tagged me as one of ten writers who might want to write about shrimp. His call-out tactic reminded me of the ice bucket challenge; to one-up him, and and raise even more awareness, I briefly considered dumping an ice slurry full of shrimp on my head. But I feared that kids these days may not even know about the ice bucket challenge, which first went viral way back in 2014.¹ Sadly, I also don’t know many other Substackers (apart from those tagged by Glenn) who might accept my call to write about shrimp.

So instead of a stunt, I figured I’d do three things: briefly explain what this is all about, link and describe opportunities to help, and quibble with the recent Daily Show episode that put this topic back in the blogosphere.

What is this all about?

A shocking 440 billion shrimp are farmed for human consumption each year. That’s over 50 times as many as there are humans alive today. It’s about 14,000 shrimp per second.

The typical method of slaughtering these shrimps is to place them in an ice slurry in which they simultaneously suffocate and freeze to death over the course of about 20 minutes. There’s a lot of evidence that this is agonizing! And because there are so many farmed shrimp, the scale of that suffering is truly horrific.

Thankfully, a few effective altruists (EAs) found a pragmatic way to help. They founded the Shrimp Welfare Project, which provides electrical stunners to large shrimp farmers. The stunners quickly render the shimp unconscious so they don’t feel any pain as they die. Because the stunners are relatively cheap and can stun many shrimp at a time, it works out that a single dollar can prevent about 1,500 shrimp from being tortured this way per year, plus another 1,500 for each year the stunner remains operational.

Based on the best guesses of relevant scientists and philosophers about how bad different types of suffering are, that works out to be much more suffering averted per dollar than other animal welfare charities (even more than other EA animal charities, which often focus on factory farmed chickens). So lots of EAs have recently started supporting the Shrimp Welfare Project.

How can I help?

If the thought of 440 B I L L I O N beings per year writhing in breathless pain for 20 minutes each bums you out a tiny bit as much as it should, the most direct way to help is to donate money to the Shrimp Welfare Project. In addition to preventing millions of innocent shrimp from a slow and torturous death, donations also let you feel better about yourself, and brag about what a good person you are to your morally inferior² friends. As the final section of this post will remind us, those are two distinct benefits that should not be confused with the first.

Recurring donations of a moderate size have the added perk of getting you free paid subscriptions to cool newsletters like

Bentham's Bulldog

and

United States of Exception

. You’ll also get a free subscription to my newsletter, though I admit you can get that anyway by clicking this big tempting button:

If you’re even more committed to helping, you can sign up for this fundraiser wherein you commit to posting about the Shrimp Welfare Project later this year. Don’t worry: they’ll email you a reminder.

How does The Daily Show come into all this?

The reason we’re talking about this now is that last month, The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng did a six-minute bit on the Shrimp Welfare Project. You can watch it here. (If you can’t play sound right now, don’t worry; the parts I’ll quibble with are quoted below the video).

Overall, I’ve decided the video is great. That took some deciding because my first watch made me uncomfortable. Halfway through, it felt like both EA and the SWP were getting mocked by the Amazon Now guy, who’s “repeat things forcefully” approach to comedy has never quite resonated with me. But by the end, Ronny and the show seem to come around to SWP as an eccentric but laudable charity—which it is!

Most importantly, the video was free publicity for an extremely niche cause that will probably result in more donations and more shrimp saved. The comments seem highly admiring of SWP, and the founder—Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla—comes across as humble and able to take a joke. EAs on the Forum, equally able to take a joke, gratefully took the W and moved on.

I can take Ronny’s jokes too, I swear. But since I’m tagged to write about shrimp, I can’t help but quibble with his other guest on the show.

Two minutes in, Ronny interviews Emma Marris, “Environmental Ethics Journalist and Author,” who says:

Emma: “Effective Altruism is a way of looking at ethics as a big math problem.”

Ronny: “And that’s…bad?”

Emma: “I think it’s bad, because I don’t think that you can actually do ethics like math, because there’s not just a bunch of things that you can put numbers on. There’s a bunch of different kinds of values that are all in the mix.”

Ronny then cuts to as reasonable an overview of EA as a comedy show can be expected to deliver. But soon, Emma reappears to continue her argument:

Emma: “I think it’s fair to look at charities and ask the question, ‘how much of the money that you get are you actually using to make the world a better place.’ But I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with giving to stuff that is right in my backyard and that I care about and have, like, an emotional relationship, you know, like places that I love, or species that I love.”

Let me briefly explain why Emma’s two points are wrong, in reverse order.

Wrong v. not as good

First, of course there is nothing wrong with giving to charitable causes in your backyard that you love or know or care about. There is also nothing wrong with buying a car, or tickets to a sports game, or anything else that gives you pleasure. So long as it isn’t hurting anyone, it isn’t wrong in my book.

We’re just saying, the backyard causes are not as good. They’re probably better than buying tickets to a sports game; but they could be closer, in effect, to buying the tickets than they are to EA causes. That’s because the backyard causes are typically selected in the same way you pick consumer goods: based on how the options make you feel.³

Every cause you might give to lies somewhere on two spectrums: “how good does this make me feel?” and “how much good does this do for others?” When selecting where to give, most people pay more attention to the first spectrum than the second. Effective altruism nudges us to give more thought to the second spectrum: to compare causes based on their demonstrable outputs for others, whether they give us warm fuzzies or not.

Few things above 0 on the “good for others” spectrum are bad. And if Emma the environmentalist wants to spend her extra resources helping endangered ducks off the coast of Maine or something, that’s probably better than doing nothing. So that’s great! To condemn any endeavor that isn’t the single most impactful use of your time would also condemn most things EAs do with their time, like play weird video games and reschedule 1:1s.

Emma should admit, though, that what draws her to endangered ducks is largely the effect they produce within herself, due to her own idiosyncracies and emotional fixations. That’s the spectrum she’s optimizing for when she picks the ducks over all the other causes out there. Indeed, she all but admits this in the video. To prioritize stuff “that I care about and have, like, an emotional relationship” with is to prioritize one’s own cares and emotions.⁴

Again, this is normal and not evil. Sometimes, I give for fuzzies too; the EAs haven’t thrown me out yet. EA doesn’t mean you can never be partial to causes dear to your heart. But you should at least be self-aware about your partiality and honest about the tradeoffs involved, just as you are with things you buy purely for self-gratification.

Different kinds of values still need to be compared

The other bit I’ll address is Emma’s description of EA ethics as “one big math problem,” and her objection that ethics is “not just a bunch of things that you can put numbers on. There’s a bunch of different kinds of values.”

The trouble with this is that “different kinds” of values still need to be compared against each other. Every ethical question that’s at all interesting involves different values that come into tension. To be ethical, you have to prioritize. And prioritization requires a weighting of values that’s most easily expressed in numbers.

I wrote a bit about this in October, which I’ll quote:

Anyone deciding where to give their money has to compare some ways of helping against others. The difficulty of this comparison does not negate its necessity. You cannot escape it by “trusting your gut” or simply not thinking about it. If you refuse to put a number on how many apples you think an orange is worth, your giving choices reveal your answer all the same.

What is possible is to hide from the answer your giving choices reveal: to plug your ears, refuse to run the numbers, and carry on in blissful ignorance of the good you declined to do. This is, by far, the most popular giving strategy. It is also a strategy extremely unlikely to result in an answer your conscience would approve of were it presented to you in plain English.

If you want a fuller rebuttal of Emma’s point here, go read that whole post. It didn’t receive as much love as it deserved. And it’s very late now, so I should get to bed instead of retyping a summary.

Postscript

Just as I was finishing, I discovered that Emma has written critique of EA that’s more detailed than her < 1 minute clip on a comedy show. She makes better arguments there, but also some very confused ones. Her thesis reads:

Effective altruism distills all of ethics into an overriding variable: suffering. And that fatally oversimplifies the many ways in which the living world can be valuable. Effective altruism discounts the ethical dimensions of relationships, the rich braid of elements that make up a “good life,” and the moral worth of a species or a wetland.

The first sentence is just not true. A subset of EAs sees reducing suffering as the primary moral goal, but that subset does not seem like a majority. For example, one way to eliminate all suffering would be to bring about the end of the world, which is famously something most EAs would like to prevent. A lot of her other mistakes are downstream of that confusion.

Nor does EA discount the ethical dimensions of those other things she mentioned. You can be an EA while valuing almost anything, so long as you recognize that “the good” is quantifiable and it’s better to have more of it. If you see moral worth in a species or wetland, you should agree that saving five species/wetlands is better than saving just one, etc. You should know that one day, you’ll need to decide how much a wetland is worth compared to other things, too.

Emma writes:

There’s something inherently valuable about complex life on Earth, about the way energy flows from body to body, about the diversity of kinds of life, about the relationships between ourselves and other forms of life. This value goes beyond humans’ aesthetic appreciation of the more-than-human world. It is not the value of “naturalness,” because that is a value based on a false nature-human binary. This is a value of a deeply intertwined world that includes us.

It’s beautiful writing, and I don’t disagree. Also: what do we do when preserving the full splendor of that complex, intertwined biodiversity comes at the cost of other “inherently valuable” things? Won’t it be necessary to determine which is more valuable? To quantify how much value it has?

1. My girlfriend informs me that it went viral again this summer, revealing how out of touch I am with the Tiks and the Toks, except as markers of time on my inexorable march towards being middle-aged.

2. In this narrow respect!

3. Albeit, from a smaller subset of recipients society has deemed prosocial, typically on account of their nonprofit status.

4. To be sure, some of those cares are values that I can’t objectively refute. She likely gives an unusually high weight to saving endangered species, for example. These values could be rooted in sophisticated belief systems (“all life relies on fragile and interconnected ecosystems that we damage at our own peril”); evolutionary urges (“I feel stronger duties to beings in closer proximity to me); or even something psychological (“I see the ducks’ departure from my swimming pool as a metaphor for my own family slipping away from me.”)

But even given those values, she’s not saving as many endangered species as she could if she applied some EA reasoning! I can tell that because the question she thinks it’s fair to ask of charities—"how much of the money that you get are you actually using to make the world a better place?”—is a really dopey way to evaluate a charity’s outputs.

And the fact that Emma’s not even trying to optimize—that she’s hostile to the very attempt to optimize—the output she claims to care about is evidence that it’s not actually what she values most directly. Subconsciosuly, she may care more about how good it feels to express that value: a feeling she can enjoy no matter how many ducks are actually saved.