1. Marginal animal welfare cost effectiveness seems to robustly beat global health interventions. It may look more like 5x or 1000x but it is very hard indeed to get that number below 1 (I do think both are probably in fact good ex ante at least, so think the number is positive).
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.”
2. The difference in magnitude of cost effectiveness (under any plausible understanding of what that means) between MakeAWish (or personal consumption spending for that matter) and AMF is smaller than between AMF (or pick your favorite) and The Humane League or AWF.
So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.
At least to me, this seems counterintuitive, contrary to vibes and social/signaling effects, and also robustly true.
3. What people intuitively think of as the “certainty” that comes along with AMF et al doesn’t really exist. To quote my own tweet:
Yes, you can get robust estimates for “E[short run human deaths by malaria prevented per marginal dollar]” but the 2nd, …,nth order effects don’t disappear (or cancel out by default!) just bc u choose not to try to model them
4. The tractability of the two cause areas is similar...
5. But animal welfare receives way less funding. From the same comment as above:
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)
Marginal animal welfare cost effectiveness seems to robustly beat global health interventions. … Using welfare ranges based roughly on Rethink Priorities’ results
I don’t think this is as robust as it seems. One could easily have moral weights many orders of magnitude away from RP’s. For example, if you value one human more than the population of one beehive that’s three orders of magnitude lower than what RP gives (more)
The question is, how do you generate these weights otherwise ?
The issue is, the way I seen most people do it is basically go “the conclusion that animals have a similar capacity for pain than humans feels wrong, so, hm, let’s say that they morally weight 1000 or 10000 times less”.
It’s often conveniently in the range where people don’t have to change their behavior about the topic. I’m skeptical of that.
For most people, the beehive example invokes a response close to ‘oh this feels wrong so the conclusion must be wrong’. They don’t consider the option ‘wow, despite being small, maybe bees have a capacity to feel love, and pleasure when they find flowers and make honey and danse, and feel pain when their organs are destroyed by pesticides’, which may be also likely.
RP’s work is the most complete work I’ve seen on this topic, comparatively.
Bees feel like an easy case for thinking RP might be wildly wrong in a way that doesn’t generalise to all animal interventions, since bees might not be conscious at all, whereas it’s much less likely that pigs or even chickens aren’t. (I’m actually a bit more sympathetic to pigs not being conscious than most people are, but I still think its >50% likely that they are conscious enough to count as moral patients.)
“So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.”
I hadn’t considered this idea before, am interested in you writing something up here! I’m a bit confused how tractable it is to shift donors from AMF → AW fund versus [Other charity] → AMF, but my intuition is the first might be fairly tractable.
So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.
I’ve run into a similar dilemma before, where I’m trying to convince non-EAs to direct some of their charity to AMF rather than their favorite local charity. I believe animal welfare charities are orders of magnitude more cost-effective than AMF, so it’s probably higher EV to try to convince them to direct that charity to e.g. THL rather than AMF. But that request is much less likely to succeed, and could also alienate them (because animal welfare is “weird”) from making more effective donations in the future. Curious about your thoughts about the best way to approach that.
I have a sense that there could be a mutually beneficial trade between cause areas lurking in this kind of situation, but it would be tricky to pull off as a practical manner.
One could envision animal-welfare EAs nudging non-EA donors toward GiveWell-style charities when they feel that is the highest-EV option with a reasonable probability of success, and EA global-health donors paying them a “commission” of sorts by counterfactually switching some smaller sum of their own donations from GH to AW.
In addition to challenges with implementation, there would be a potential concern that not as much net money is going to GH as the non-EA donor thinks. On the other hand, funging seems to be almost an inevitable part of the charitable landscape whether it is being done deliberately or not.
Yeah, this seems a little… sneaky, for want of a better word. It might be useful to imagine how you think the non-EA donors would feel if the “commission” were proactively disclosed. (Not necessarily terribly! After all, fundraising is often a paid job. Just seems like a useful intuition prompt.)
Another option, if they’re sensible to the environment, is to redirect them to charities that are also impactful for sustainability, such as The Good Food Institute. According to the best guess by Giving Green, they can avoid 17 tons of CO2eq for 50$.
This way, they can make a positive contribution for the environment (not to mention the positive impact on human health pandemics).
I’ve done it for a charity that does similar stuff in my country and at the very least people didn’t give any pushback and seemed comprehensive. You can mention concrete stuff about the progress of alternative proteins like they’re the default choice at burger king.
“So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.” More generally, I think it is more important to convince an EA human health and development supporter to diversify and donate say 50% of the donation budget to the most effective animal welfare causes, than to convince a non-EA human charity supporter to diversify and donate say 50% of the donation budget to AMF or similar high-impact human-focused charities.
A few theses that may turn into a proper post:
1. Marginal animal welfare cost effectiveness seems to robustly beat global health interventions. It may look more like 5x or 1000x but it is very hard indeed to get that number below 1 (I do think both are probably in fact good ex ante at least, so think the number is positive).
To quote myself from this comment:
2. The difference in magnitude of cost effectiveness (under any plausible understanding of what that means) between MakeAWish (or personal consumption spending for that matter) and AMF is smaller than between AMF (or pick your favorite) and The Humane League or AWF.
So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.
At least to me, this seems counterintuitive, contrary to vibes and social/signaling effects, and also robustly true.
3. What people intuitively think of as the “certainty” that comes along with AMF et al doesn’t really exist. To quote my own tweet:
4. The tractability of the two cause areas is similar...
5. But animal welfare receives way less funding. From the same comment as above:
I don’t think this is as robust as it seems. One could easily have moral weights many orders of magnitude away from RP’s. For example, if you value one human more than the population of one beehive that’s three orders of magnitude lower than what RP gives (more)
The question is, how do you generate these weights otherwise ?
The issue is, the way I seen most people do it is basically go “the conclusion that animals have a similar capacity for pain than humans feels wrong, so, hm, let’s say that they morally weight 1000 or 10000 times less”.
It’s often conveniently in the range where people don’t have to change their behavior about the topic. I’m skeptical of that.
For most people, the beehive example invokes a response close to ‘oh this feels wrong so the conclusion must be wrong’. They don’t consider the option ‘wow, despite being small, maybe bees have a capacity to feel love, and pleasure when they find flowers and make honey and danse, and feel pain when their organs are destroyed by pesticides’, which may be also likely.
RP’s work is the most complete work I’ve seen on this topic, comparatively.
Bees feel like an easy case for thinking RP might be wildly wrong in a way that doesn’t generalise to all animal interventions, since bees might not be conscious at all, whereas it’s much less likely that pigs or even chickens aren’t. (I’m actually a bit more sympathetic to pigs not being conscious than most people are, but I still think its >50% likely that they are conscious enough to count as moral patients.)
“So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.”
I hadn’t considered this idea before, am interested in you writing something up here! I’m a bit confused how tractable it is to shift donors from AMF → AW fund versus [Other charity] → AMF, but my intuition is the first might be fairly tractable.
I’ve run into a similar dilemma before, where I’m trying to convince non-EAs to direct some of their charity to AMF rather than their favorite local charity. I believe animal welfare charities are orders of magnitude more cost-effective than AMF, so it’s probably higher EV to try to convince them to direct that charity to e.g. THL rather than AMF. But that request is much less likely to succeed, and could also alienate them (because animal welfare is “weird”) from making more effective donations in the future. Curious about your thoughts about the best way to approach that.
I have a sense that there could be a mutually beneficial trade between cause areas lurking in this kind of situation, but it would be tricky to pull off as a practical manner.
One could envision animal-welfare EAs nudging non-EA donors toward GiveWell-style charities when they feel that is the highest-EV option with a reasonable probability of success, and EA global-health donors paying them a “commission” of sorts by counterfactually switching some smaller sum of their own donations from GH to AW.
In addition to challenges with implementation, there would be a potential concern that not as much net money is going to GH as the non-EA donor thinks. On the other hand, funging seems to be almost an inevitable part of the charitable landscape whether it is being done deliberately or not.
Yeah, this seems a little… sneaky, for want of a better word. It might be useful to imagine how you think the non-EA donors would feel if the “commission” were proactively disclosed. (Not necessarily terribly! After all, fundraising is often a paid job. Just seems like a useful intuition prompt.)
Another option, if they’re sensible to the environment, is to redirect them to charities that are also impactful for sustainability, such as The Good Food Institute. According to the best guess by Giving Green, they can avoid 17 tons of CO2eq for 50$.
This way, they can make a positive contribution for the environment (not to mention the positive impact on human health pandemics).
I’ve done it for a charity that does similar stuff in my country and at the very least people didn’t give any pushback and seemed comprehensive. You can mention concrete stuff about the progress of alternative proteins like they’re the default choice at burger king.
“So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.” More generally, I think it is more important to convince an EA human health and development supporter to diversify and donate say 50% of the donation budget to the most effective animal welfare causes, than to convince a non-EA human charity supporter to diversify and donate say 50% of the donation budget to AMF or similar high-impact human-focused charities.