(4) My main concern, as someone who does human-related cause prioritization research, is the meat eater argument and whether helping to save human lives is net negative from overall POV, given the adverse consequences for animal suffering. I am moderately optimistic that this is not so, and that saving human lives is net positive (as we want/​need it to be) .
Great to know you are considering impacts on animals! Even if the meat eater problem is not a major concern according to your calculations, has CEARCH considered that the best animal welfare interventions may be orders of magnitude more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities? CEARCH uses a cost-effectiveness bar of 10 times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities, but I think this is very low. I estimated corporate campaigns for broiler welfare are 1.71 k times as cost-effective as the lowest cost to save a life among GW’s top charities.
With respect to the meat eater problem, I think the conclusion depends on the country. This influences the consumption per capita of animals, how much of each animal species is consumed, and the conditions of the animals. High income countries will tend to have greater consumption per capita and worse conditions, given the greater prevalence of factory-farming. For reference:
I estimated the annual suffering of all farmed animals combined is 4.64 times the annual happiness of all humans combined, which goes against your conclusion. For simplicity, I set the welfare per time as a fraction of the welfare range of each farmed animal of any species to a value I got for broilers in a reformed scenario.
However, I estimated accounting for farmed animals only decreases the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities by 14.5 %, which is in line with your conclusion. Yet, I am underestimating the reduction in cost-effectiveness due to using current consumption, given it will tend to increase with economic growth.
I think considering impacts on animals may well affect CEARCH’s prioritisation:
Interventions in different countries may have super different impacts on animals (as illustrated by the 2 distinct conclusions above). I guess this is more relevant for CEARCH than GiveWell because I have the impression you have been assessing interventions whose beneficiaries are from a set of less homogeneous countries, which means the impacts on animals will vary more, and therefore cannot be neglected so lightly.
Interventions to extend life have different implications from interventions to improve quality of life. In general, interventions which improve quality of life without affecting lifespan and income much will have smaller impacts on animals (at least nearterm, i.e. neglecting how population size changes economic growth, and hence the trajectory of the consumption of animals). This is relevant to CEARCH because you have looked not only into interventions mostly saving lives and increasing income, but also into mental health.
I also encourage you to publish your estimates regarding the meat eater problem. I am not aware of any evaluator or grantmaker (aligned with effective altruism or not) having ever published a cost-effectiveness analysis of an intervention to improve human welfare which explicitly considered the impacts on farmed animal welfare (although I am aware of another besides you which have an internal analysis). So CEARCH would be the 1st to do so. For the reasons above, I think it would also be great if you included impacts on animals as a standard feature of your cost-effectiveness analyses.
Hi Joel,
Great to know you are considering impacts on animals! Even if the meat eater problem is not a major concern according to your calculations, has CEARCH considered that the best animal welfare interventions may be orders of magnitude more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities? CEARCH uses a cost-effectiveness bar of 10 times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities, but I think this is very low. I estimated corporate campaigns for broiler welfare are 1.71 k times as cost-effective as the lowest cost to save a life among GW’s top charities.
With respect to the meat eater problem, I think the conclusion depends on the country. This influences the consumption per capita of animals, how much of each animal species is consumed, and the conditions of the animals. High income countries will tend to have greater consumption per capita and worse conditions, given the greater prevalence of factory-farming. For reference:
I estimated the annual suffering of all farmed animals combined is 4.64 times the annual happiness of all humans combined, which goes against your conclusion. For simplicity, I set the welfare per time as a fraction of the welfare range of each farmed animal of any species to a value I got for broilers in a reformed scenario.
However, I estimated accounting for farmed animals only decreases the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities by 14.5 %, which is in line with your conclusion. Yet, I am underestimating the reduction in cost-effectiveness due to using current consumption, given it will tend to increase with economic growth.
I think considering impacts on animals may well affect CEARCH’s prioritisation:
Interventions in different countries may have super different impacts on animals (as illustrated by the 2 distinct conclusions above). I guess this is more relevant for CEARCH than GiveWell because I have the impression you have been assessing interventions whose beneficiaries are from a set of less homogeneous countries, which means the impacts on animals will vary more, and therefore cannot be neglected so lightly.
Interventions to extend life have different implications from interventions to improve quality of life. In general, interventions which improve quality of life without affecting lifespan and income much will have smaller impacts on animals (at least nearterm, i.e. neglecting how population size changes economic growth, and hence the trajectory of the consumption of animals). This is relevant to CEARCH because you have looked not only into interventions mostly saving lives and increasing income, but also into mental health.
I also encourage you to publish your estimates regarding the meat eater problem. I am not aware of any evaluator or grantmaker (aligned with effective altruism or not) having ever published a cost-effectiveness analysis of an intervention to improve human welfare which explicitly considered the impacts on farmed animal welfare (although I am aware of another besides you which have an internal analysis). So CEARCH would be the 1st to do so. For the reasons above, I think it would also be great if you included impacts on animals as a standard feature of your cost-effectiveness analyses.