I suspect you are overestimating the difficulty of checking the empirical claims. I am pretty confident that funding HIPF decreases the suffering of soil animals much more cost-effectively than cage-free corporate campaigns decrease the suffering of chickens. I estimate HIPF decreases 5.07 billion soil-animal-years per $, and that cage-free corporate campaigns improve 10.8 chicken-years per $. For HIPF to decrease the suffering of soil animals less cost-effectively than cage-free corporate campaigns decrease the suffering of chickens, the reduction in suffering due to improving 1 chicken-year would have to be larger than than from decreasing 469 M soil-animal-years (= 5.07*10^9/​10.8), whereas I calculate chickens only have 921 k (= 221*10^6/​240) times as many neurons as nematodes, which are the soil animals with the fewest neurons. Moreover, I think the number of neurons underestimates the absolute value of the welfare per animal-year. Rethink Priorities’ (RP) moral weight project assumes shrimps have 10^-6 as many neurons as humans (see Table 5 here), but the estimate for their welfare range in Table 8.6 of Bob Fischer’s book is 8 % that of humans.
For the reasons above, I am also pretty confident that funding HIPF changes the welfare of soil animals much more cost-effectively than cage-free corporate campaigns increase the welfare of chickens. However, I am very uncertain about whether HIPF increases or decreases animal welfare due to being very uncertain about whether soil nematodes have positive or negative lives.
To clarify, I believe researching whether soil nematodes have positive or negative lives would increase animal welfare even more cost-effectively than funding HIPF, but that this still increases animal welfare much more cost-effectively than interventions targeting farmed animals.
I would prefer saving human lives to decrease animal welfare such that soil animals had positive lives. I think saving human lives decreases soil-animal-years, and therefore increases/​decreases the welfare of soil animals if these have negative/​positive lives. I guess they have negative lives, although I am very uncertain, and estimate the welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes is −977 k times that of humans for my preferred way of comparing welfare across species.
I suspect you are overestimating the difficulty of checking the empirical claims. I am pretty confident that funding HIPF decreases the suffering of soil animals much more cost-effectively than cage-free corporate campaigns decrease the suffering of chickens. I estimate HIPF decreases 5.07 billion soil-animal-years per $, and that cage-free corporate campaigns improve 10.8 chicken-years per $. For HIPF to decrease the suffering of soil animals less cost-effectively than cage-free corporate campaigns decrease the suffering of chickens, the reduction in suffering due to improving 1 chicken-year would have to be larger than than from decreasing 469 M soil-animal-years (= 5.07*10^9/​10.8), whereas I calculate chickens only have 921 k (= 221*10^6/​240) times as many neurons as nematodes, which are the soil animals with the fewest neurons. Moreover, I think the number of neurons underestimates the absolute value of the welfare per animal-year. Rethink Priorities’ (RP) moral weight project assumes shrimps have 10^-6 as many neurons as humans (see Table 5 here), but the estimate for their welfare range in Table 8.6 of Bob Fischer’s book is 8 % that of humans.
For the reasons above, I am also pretty confident that funding HIPF changes the welfare of soil animals much more cost-effectively than cage-free corporate campaigns increase the welfare of chickens. However, I am very uncertain about whether HIPF increases or decreases animal welfare due to being very uncertain about whether soil nematodes have positive or negative lives.
To clarify, I believe researching whether soil nematodes have positive or negative lives would increase animal welfare even more cost-effectively than funding HIPF, but that this still increases animal welfare much more cost-effectively than interventions targeting farmed animals.
I would prefer saving human lives to decrease animal welfare such that soil animals had positive lives. I think saving human lives decreases soil-animal-years, and therefore increases/​decreases the welfare of soil animals if these have negative/​positive lives. I guess they have negative lives, although I am very uncertain, and estimate the welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes is −977 k times that of humans for my preferred way of comparing welfare across species.
To be clear: I’d be excited for more people to look into these claims! Seems worth investigating. But it’s not my comparative advantage.
Good to know! I think highlighting the importance of the topic is one way of getting more people to investigate it ;).