How certain are you that there is such a qualitative difference, and that you want to care about it? If there is some empirical (or perhaps also normative) uncertainty, shouldn't you at least attribute some amount of concern for sentient beings that lack self-awareness?

I disagree with the article for the following reason: if I have two hypotheses that both explain an "absence of evidence" occurrence equally well, then that occurrence does not give me reason to favor either hypothesis and is not "evidence of absence."

Example: Vibrams are a brand of toe-shoes that recently settled a big suit because they couldn't justify their claims of health benefits. We have two hypotheses (1) Vibrams work, (2) Vibrams don't work. Now, if a well-executed experiment had been done and failed to show an effect, that would be evidence against a significant benefit from Vibrams. However, if the effect were small or nobody had completed a well-executed experiment, I see no reason that (2) would fit the evidence better than (1), so we are justified in saying this absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Although the original saying, I think, was meant in the absolute sense (evidence meaning proof), it is still fitting in the probabilistic sense. Absence of evidence is only evidence of absence when combined with one hypothesis explaining an occurrence better than the other, so the saying holds.

If I could ask two quick questions, it'd be whether you're a realist and whether you're a cognitivist. The preponderance of those views within EA is what I've heard debated most often. (This is different from what first made me ask, but I'll drop that.)

I know Jacy Anthis - thebestwecan on LessWrong - has an argument that realism combined with the moral beliefs about future generations typical among EAs suggests that smarter people in the future will work out a more correct ethics, and that this should significantly affect our actions now. He rejects realism, and think this is a bad consequence. I think it actually doesn't depend on realism, but rather on most forms of cognitivism, for instance ones on which our coherent extrapolated view is correct. He plans to write about this.

lukeprog (Luke Muehlhauser) objects to CEA's claim that EA grew primarily out of Giving What We Can at http://www.effectivealtruism.org/#comments :

This was a pretty surprising sentence. Weren’t LessWrong & GiveWell growing large, important parts of the community before GWWC existed? It wasn’t called “effective altruism” at the time, but it was largely the same ideas and people.

[confused comment, ignore]

I took the survey and added some predictions to the document.

For people who are not EAs, a lot of questions make little sense.

Was it definitely Peter Singer?

I've now checked out the survey, and have a couple of comments (which I put into the comments field and am reposting here). #1 is important, #2 less so:

1. On moral philosophy: "Consequentialist/utilitarian" should be broken up into something like "Utilitarian" and "Other consequentialist (not utilitarian)", because I am a consequentialist and (probably) not a utilitarian, and that disagreement is one of my main points of contention with the EA movement.

2. I had no idea how to answer the "political views" question. Are these positions ("left", "centre", etc.) supposed to be on the American (U.S.) political spectrum? That'd be my default assumption, but the British/Canadian spelling suggests otherwise... in any case, at least offer as many options as e.g. the Lesswrong survey did.

Are you sure it was used beforehand Jacy? Are there instances you can remember?