Nitpick (that works in favor of your thesis): The cited estimate for the effectiveness of improving chicken welfare is far on the pessimistic end by assuming moral weight is proportional to neuron count. A behavioral argument would suggest that, since chickens respond to the suffering caused by factory farms in basically the same ways humans would, that they have roughly equally moral weight in the ways that matter in this case. It’s not clear how to combine these estimates due to the two envelopes problem, but the proportional-to-neurons estimate is basically the most pessimistic plausible estimate, and I think an all-things-considered estimate would make chicken welfare interventions look much more cost-effective.
This supports your thesis in that if you don’t care about future people, factory farming interventions are plausibly 10x to 1000x more cost-effective than x-risk.
(It’s possible that the cited estimate is wrong about the difficulty of improving chicken welfare, but I didn’t look at that.)
Nitpick (that works in favor of your thesis): The cited estimate for the effectiveness of improving chicken welfare is far on the pessimistic end by assuming moral weight is proportional to neuron count. A behavioral argument would suggest that, since chickens respond to the suffering caused by factory farms in basically the same ways humans would, that they have roughly equally moral weight in the ways that matter in this case. It’s not clear how to combine these estimates due to the two envelopes problem, but the proportional-to-neurons estimate is basically the most pessimistic plausible estimate, and I think an all-things-considered estimate would make chicken welfare interventions look much more cost-effective.
This supports your thesis in that if you don’t care about future people, factory farming interventions are plausibly 10x to 1000x more cost-effective than x-risk.
(It’s possible that the cited estimate is wrong about the difficulty of improving chicken welfare, but I didn’t look at that.)