I feel like this/adjacent debates often gets framed as “normal poverty stuff vs weird longtermist stuff” but a lot of my confidence in the above comes from farmed animal welfare strictly dominating GiveWell in terms of any plausibly relevant criteria save for maybe PR.
I do not agree with the “any plausibly relevant criteria” part. However, I do think the best interventions to help farmed animals increase welfare way more cost-effectively than GiveWell’s top charities. Some examples illustrating this:
I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare increase welfare 1.71 k times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities. I used Rethink Priorities’ median welfare change for chickens of 0.332, which I think is the best we have.
Stephen Clare and Aidan Goth (at Founders Pledge at the time) estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 926 (= 25⁄0.027) times as effective as Against Malaria Foundation.
For Open Phil’s bar to be consistent with the above, it has to:
Stipulate non-hedonic benefits are very poorly correlated with hedonic benefits, contra this post of Rethink Priorities’ moral weight project sequence. “We argue that even if hedonic goods and bads (i.e., pleasures and pains) aren’t all of welfare, they’re a lot of it. So, probably, the choice of a theory of welfare will only have a modest (less than 10x) impact on the differences we estimate between humans’ and nonhumans’ welfare ranges”.
I share your sense that Open Phil should ideally be commenting on the points above, as opposed to just framing the movement of their global health and wellbeing bar as a trade-off with spending on their human-centric areas (including mitigation of GCRs).
Thanks for pointing that out, Aaron!
I do not agree with the “any plausibly relevant criteria” part. However, I do think the best interventions to help farmed animals increase welfare way more cost-effectively than GiveWell’s top charities. Some examples illustrating this:
I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare increase welfare 1.71 k times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities. I used Rethink Priorities’ median welfare change for chickens of 0.332, which I think is the best we have.
Stephen Clare and Aidan Goth (at Founders Pledge at the time) estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 926 (= 25⁄0.027) times as effective as Against Malaria Foundation.
For Open Phil’s bar to be consistent with the above, it has to:
Put very low weight on hedonism.
Stipulate non-hedonic benefits are very poorly correlated with hedonic benefits, contra this post of Rethink Priorities’ moral weight project sequence. “We argue that even if hedonic goods and bads (i.e., pleasures and pains) aren’t all of welfare, they’re a lot of it. So, probably, the choice of a theory of welfare will only have a modest (less than 10x) impact on the differences we estimate between humans’ and nonhumans’ welfare ranges”.
I share your sense that Open Phil should ideally be commenting on the points above, as opposed to just framing the movement of their global health and wellbeing bar as a trade-off with spending on their human-centric areas (including mitigation of GCRs).