Strongly, strongly, strongly agree. I was in the process of writing essentially this exact post, but am very glad someone else got to it first. The more I thought about it and researched, the more it seemed like convincingly making this case would probably be the most important thing I would ever have done. Kudos to you.
A few points to add
Under standard EA “on the margin” reasoning, this shouldn’t really matter, but I analyzed OP’s grants data and found that human GCR has been consistently funded 6-7x more than animal welfare (here’s my tweet thread this is from)
Spending on corporate cage-free campaigns for egg-laying hens is robustly[8] cost-effective under nearly all reasonable types and levels of risk aversion considered here.
Using welfare ranges based roughly on Rethink Priorities’ results, spending on corporate cage-free campaigns averts over an order of magnitude more suffering than the most robust global health and development intervention, Against Malaria Foundation. This result holds for almost any level of risk aversion and under any model of risk aversion.
I also want to emphasize this part, because it’s the kind of serious engagement with suffering that EA still fails to to do enough of
I experienced “disabling”-level pain for a couple of hours, by choice and with the freedom to stop whenever I want. This was a horrible experience that made everything else seem to not matter at all.
A single laying hen experiences hundreds of hours of this level of pain during their lifespan, which lasts perhaps a year and a half—and there are as many laying hens alive at any one time as there are humans. How would I feel if every single human were experiencing hundreds of hours of disabling pain?
A single broiler chicken experiences fifty hours of this level of pain during their lifespan, which lasts 4-6 weeks. There are 69 billion broilers slaughtered each year. That is so many hours of pain that if you divided those hours among humanity, each human would experience about 400 hours (2.5 weeks) of disabling pain every year. Can you imagine if instead of getting, say, your regular fortnight vacation from work or study, you experienced disabling-level pain for a whole 2.5 weeks? And if every human on the planet—me, you, my friends and family and colleagues and the people living in every single country—had that same experience every year? How hard would I work in order to avert suffering that urgent?
Every single one of those chickens are experiencing pain as awful and all-consuming as I did for tens or hundreds of hours, without choice or the freedom to stop. They are also experiencing often minutes of ‘excruciating’-level pain, which is an intensity that I literally cannot imagine. Billions upon billions of animals. The numbers would be even more immense if you consider farmed fish, or farmed shrimp, or farmed insects, or wild animals.
If there were a political regime or law responsible for this level of pain—which indeed there is—how hard would I work to overturn it? Surely that would tower well above my other priorities (equality, democracy, freedom, self-expression, and so on), which seem trivial and even borderline ridiculous in comparison.
FYI, I made a spreadsheet a while ago which automatically pulls the latest OP grants data and constructs summaries and pivot tables to make this type of analysis easier.
I also made these interactive plots which summarise all EA funding:
Thanks! Small correction: Animal Welfare YTD is labeled as $53M, when it looks like the underlying data point is $17M (source and 2023 full-year projections here)
Strongly, strongly, strongly agree. I was in the process of writing essentially this exact post, but am very glad someone else got to it first. The more I thought about it and researched, the more it seemed like convincingly making this case would probably be the most important thing I would ever have done. Kudos to you.
A few points to add
Under standard EA “on the margin” reasoning, this shouldn’t really matter, but I analyzed OP’s grants data and found that human GCR has been consistently funded 6-7x more than animal welfare (here’s my tweet thread this is from)
@Laura Duffy’s (for Rethink Priorities) recently published risk aversion analysis basically does a lot of the heavy lifting here (bolding mine):
I also want to emphasize this part, because it’s the kind of serious engagement with suffering that EA still fails to to do enough of
FYI, I made a spreadsheet a while ago which automatically pulls the latest OP grants data and constructs summaries and pivot tables to make this type of analysis easier.
I also made these interactive plots which summarise all EA funding:
Thanks! Small correction: Animal Welfare YTD is labeled as $53M, when it looks like the underlying data point is $17M (source and 2023 full-year projections here)