A meta-question: Could it be more truthful, maybe potentially less triggering, if you name the title “Chicken welfare reforms may be harmful (or more beneficial than current estimates) accounting for effects on wild arthropods?” instead?
Strong upvoted. This (otherwise well-written) post made me update (mildly) in favor of these reforms, so for someone with my specific views, the original title felt a bit misleading, even if not technically wrong.
Thanks, Tejas. I now estimate broiler welfare and cage-free corporate campaigns benefit soil animals 444 and 28.2 times as much as they benefit chicken for my best guess that soil animals have negative lives. So accounting for wild animals made me update towards chicken welfare reforms being much more cost-effective. However, I have still updated against these reforms in the sense I now think there is a much greater fraction of philanthropic spending which is more cost-effective than them. I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free corporate campaigns are 68.9 % (= 744/(1.08*10^3)) and 12.4 % (= 134/(1.08*10^3)) as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities accounting for target beneficiaries and soil animals, whereas I had estimated them to be 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities accounting only for target beneficiaries.
Thanks, Fai! I have now changed “harmful” in the title to “beneficial or harmful”. I was previously emphasising the possibility of harm because cage-free reforms have been considered robustly beneficial interventions. However, I agree the current version is more representative of the post, and my belief that the probability of chicken welfare reforms being harmful is close to 50 %. I estimated93.1 % of the increase in the welfare of soil nematodes, mites, and springtails resulting from increasing cropland, as caused by chicken welfare reforms, comes from decreasing nematode-years, and calculated soil nematodes have negative lives with a probability of 58.7 %, which suggests a probability of 41.3 % (= 1 − 0.587) of chicken welfare reforms being harmful. In reality, the probability of them being harmful is higher due to uncertainty about whether they increase or decrease, especially for cage-free reforms. My assumptions imply these increase feed by only “3.63 %”, “Gemini’s ranges for the FCR of egg production in cages [2.0 to 2.2] and barns [1.9 to 2.1] overlap a lot”.
Thanks for writing the post!
A meta-question: Could it be more truthful, maybe potentially less triggering, if you name the title “Chicken welfare reforms may be harmful (or more beneficial than current estimates) accounting for effects on wild arthropods?” instead?
Strong upvoted. This (otherwise well-written) post made me update (mildly) in favor of these reforms, so for someone with my specific views, the original title felt a bit misleading, even if not technically wrong.
Thanks, Tejas. I now estimate broiler welfare and cage-free corporate campaigns benefit soil animals 444 and 28.2 times as much as they benefit chicken for my best guess that soil animals have negative lives. So accounting for wild animals made me update towards chicken welfare reforms being much more cost-effective. However, I have still updated against these reforms in the sense I now think there is a much greater fraction of philanthropic spending which is more cost-effective than them. I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free corporate campaigns are 68.9 % (= 744/(1.08*10^3)) and 12.4 % (= 134/(1.08*10^3)) as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities accounting for target beneficiaries and soil animals, whereas I had estimated them to be 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities accounting only for target beneficiaries.
Thanks, Fai! I have now changed “harmful” in the title to “beneficial or harmful”. I was previously emphasising the possibility of harm because cage-free reforms have been considered robustly beneficial interventions. However, I agree the current version is more representative of the post, and my belief that the probability of chicken welfare reforms being harmful is close to 50 %. I estimated 93.1 % of the increase in the welfare of soil nematodes, mites, and springtails resulting from increasing cropland, as caused by chicken welfare reforms, comes from decreasing nematode-years, and calculated soil nematodes have negative lives with a probability of 58.7 %, which suggests a probability of 41.3 % (= 1 − 0.587) of chicken welfare reforms being harmful. In reality, the probability of them being harmful is higher due to uncertainty about whether they increase or decrease, especially for cage-free reforms. My assumptions imply these increase feed by only “3.63 %”, “Gemini’s ranges for the FCR of egg production in cages [2.0 to 2.2] and barns [1.9 to 2.1] overlap a lot”.