Following Open Phil’s 2017 report on consciousness and moral patienthood by Luke Muehlhauser, Luke guessed in 2018 a chicken life-year to be worth 0.00005 to 10 human life-years. Pairing this with the above would suggest corporate campaigns for chicken welfare to be 0.5 (= 0.00005*10000) to 100 k (= 10*10000) times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
In other words, under almost any plausible assumptions, under hedonism, corporate campaigns for chicken welfare increase welfare way more cost-effectively than GiveWell’s top charities.
Here, you have a lower-bound that corporate campaigns are only half as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities. That contradicts the following bullet point.
Assuming a loguniform distribution for the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare as a fraction of the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities ranging from 0.5 to 100 k, there would be 75.5 % (= (ln(10^5) - ln(10))/(ln(10^5) - ln(0.5))) chance of corporate campaigns being at least 10 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities. So I agree my wording above (“under almost any plausible assumption”) was too strong in light of Luke’s 2018 guesses. I changed the wording to “under most plausible assumptions”.
Rethink Priorities’ welfare range estimates seem roughly in line with the above. Rethink’s 5th and 95th percentile welfare range for chickens are 0.602 % (= 0.002/0.332) and 2.62 times (= 0.869/0.332) the median welfare range I used to estimate corporate campaigns increase welfare 1.71 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities. If I had used the 5th and 95th percentile welfare range, I would have concluded corporate campaigns increase welfare 10.3 (= 0.00602*1.71*10^3) and 4.48 k times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities. In reality, there are uncertainty in other inputs, so maybe the plausible range of values is actually similar to what Luke guesses back in 2018 (one roughly gets Luke’s interval of 0.5 to 100 k multiplying 10.3 and 4.48 k by 1⁄20 and 20).
Here, you have a lower-bound that corporate campaigns are only half as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities. That contradicts the following bullet point.
Thanks, Joshua!
Assuming a loguniform distribution for the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare as a fraction of the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities ranging from 0.5 to 100 k, there would be 75.5 % (= (ln(10^5) - ln(10))/(ln(10^5) - ln(0.5))) chance of corporate campaigns being at least 10 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities. So I agree my wording above (“under almost any plausible assumption”) was too strong in light of Luke’s 2018 guesses. I changed the wording to “under most plausible assumptions”.
Rethink Priorities’ welfare range estimates seem roughly in line with the above. Rethink’s 5th and 95th percentile welfare range for chickens are 0.602 % (= 0.002/0.332) and 2.62 times (= 0.869/0.332) the median welfare range I used to estimate corporate campaigns increase welfare 1.71 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities. If I had used the 5th and 95th percentile welfare range, I would have concluded corporate campaigns increase welfare 10.3 (= 0.00602*1.71*10^3) and 4.48 k times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities. In reality, there are uncertainty in other inputs, so maybe the plausible range of values is actually similar to what Luke guesses back in 2018 (one roughly gets Luke’s interval of 0.5 to 100 k multiplying 10.3 and 4.48 k by 1⁄20 and 20).