Vasco Grilo🔸 comments on Manifund’s Falcon Fund

[Vasco Grilo🔸]

Thanks for clarifying, Marcus.

I am very open to funding research on the sentience of nematodes.

Great.

Regarding intensities of pain, I’m open to it, but would be surprised.

Why would you be surprised? I think the uncertainty of the intensity of excruciating pain is a major driver of the uncertainty of the cost-effectiveness of humane slaughter interventions, like advocating for electrically stunning farmed shrimps as done by the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI).

Welfare comparisons across species are also in scope. I consider Bob Fischer to be one of our best people who has a strong hunch for making his research useful, and as much as is practicable/​possible, he should have free rein to do the work he finds most valauble.

I would agree Bob is among the best people to lead research on welfare comparisons across species.

This talk in 2023 is responsible for a lot of my thinking around smaller animals and very much cemented the idea that helping non-human animals was going to be far more cost-effective.

I really liked that talk from Bob. However, I have very little idea about whether interventions targeting invertebrates increase the welfare of their target beneficiaries more or less cost-effectively than ones targeting humans. For individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to “individual number of neurons”^”exponent”, and “exponent” from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable, I estimate that HSI has increased the welfare of shrimps 1.68*10^-6 to 1.68 M times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities increase the welfare of humans.