That argument is weak to me because you could take any intervention we are clueless about and it would look better than global health interventions within most of the interval.
The overall effect of global health and development (GHD) interventions depends on effects of animals due to the meat-eating problem. So I think clueless about the benefits of helping animals implies cluelessness about whether GHD interventions are beneficial or harmful.
Besides not touching on all of these considerations, many of my modelled inputs are highly uncertain too. However, this means extending human lives globally, and in China, India and Nigeria may be, in the nearterm, not only beneficial, but also hugely harmful. Using RP’s [Rethink Priorities’] 5th and 95th percentile welfare range of shrimp of 0 and 1.15, and maintaining all the other inputs, the harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals as a fraction of the direct benefits of human life in 2022 would be:
Globally, 5.61 to 372.
In China, 12.3 and 841.
In India, 1.70 and 131.
In Nigeria, 1.12 and 45.3.
If our interval spans zero to close to infinity then global health interventions are going to be a speck near the bottom of that interval.
The cluelessness for GHD interventions would in that case be way more severe. It would go from minus to plus infinity instead of 0 to infinity. Less abstractly, one can be much more confident that humane slaughter interventions are beneficial than that saving human lives is beneficial. Humane slaughter interventions may have negligible benefits if the animals helped turn out to have a negligible welfare range, but it is very hard for them to be harmful in expectation, because they have minor effects on human- and animal-years. In contrast, saving human lives may well increase the animal-years with negative lives, thus potentially being harmful.
That might be true by your lights Vasco, but we are discussing a specific issue here (GiveWell vs. Animal Welfare confidence intervals) and I think its a bit disingenuous to bring adjacent arguments like the meat eating problem into this here.
Hi Nick.
The overall effect of global health and development (GHD) interventions depends on effects of animals due to the meat-eating problem. So I think clueless about the benefits of helping animals implies cluelessness about whether GHD interventions are beneficial or harmful.
The cluelessness for GHD interventions would in that case be way more severe. It would go from minus to plus infinity instead of 0 to infinity. Less abstractly, one can be much more confident that humane slaughter interventions are beneficial than that saving human lives is beneficial. Humane slaughter interventions may have negligible benefits if the animals helped turn out to have a negligible welfare range, but it is very hard for them to be harmful in expectation, because they have minor effects on human- and animal-years. In contrast, saving human lives may well increase the animal-years with negative lives, thus potentially being harmful.
That might be true by your lights Vasco, but we are discussing a specific issue here (GiveWell vs. Animal Welfare confidence intervals) and I think its a bit disingenuous to bring adjacent arguments like the meat eating problem into this here.