Your initial post claimed that RP thought AW was 1000x more effective than GHD. I just thought I’d flag that in their subsequent analyses, they have reported much lower numbers. In this report, (if i’m reading it right), they put a chicken campaign at ~1200 and AMF at ~20, a factor of 60, much lower than 1000x, disagreeing greatly with Vasco’s analysis which you linked. (ALl of these are using Saulius numbers and RP’s moral weights).
If you go into their cross cause calculator, the givewell bar is ~20 while the generic chicken campaign gives ~700 with default parameters, making AW only 35 times as effective as GHD.
I’ve been attempting replicating the results in the comments of this post, and my number comes up higher as ~2100 vs ~20, making AW 100 times as effective. Again, these are all using Saulius report and RP’s moral weights: if you disagree with these substantially GHD might come out ahead.
Hi! As you point out, the 1000x multiplier I quoted comes from Vasco’s analysis, which also uses Saulius’s numbers and Rethink’s moral weights.
The cross cause calculator came out about two weeks before I published my initial post. By then, I’d been working on that post for about seven months. Though it would have been a good idea, given my urge to get the post published, I didn’t consider checking the cross cause calculator’s implied multiplier before posting.
I’ve just spent some time trying to figure out where the discrepancy between Vasco’s multiplier and the cross cause calculator’s multiplier comes from:
They roughly agree on the GHD bar of ~20 DALYs per $1000.
Fixing a constant welfare range versus a probablistic range doesn’t seem to make a huge difference for the calculator’s result.
The main difference seems to be that the cross cause calculator assumes corporate campaigns avert between 160 and 3.6k chicken suffering-years per dollar. I don’t know the precise definition of that unit, and Vasco’s analysis doesn’t place intermediate values in terms of that unit, so I don’t know exactly where the discrepancy breaks down from there. However, there’s probably at least an order of magnitude difference between Vasco’s implied chicken suffering-years per dollar and the cross cause calculator’s.
My very tentative guess is that this may be coming from Vasco’s very high weightings of excruciating and disabling-level pain, which some commenters found unintuitive, and could be driving that result. (I personally found these weightings quite intuitive after thinking about how I’d take time tradeoffs between these types of pains, but reasonable people may disagree.)
It could also be that Rethink is using a lower Saulius number to give a more precise marginal cost-effectiveness estimate, even if the historical cost-effectiveness was much higher. That would be consistent with Open Phil’s statement that they think the marginal cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns is much lower than the historical average.
I think this is a great find, and I’m very open to updating on what I personally think the animal welfare vs GHD multiplier is, depending on how that discrepancy breaks down. I do think it’s worth noting that every one of these comparisons still found animal welfare orders of magnitude better than GHD, which is the headline result I think is most important for this debate. But your findings do illustrate that there’s still a ton of uncertainty in these numbers.
(@Vasco Grilo🔸 I’d love to hear your perspective on all of this!)
I have played around with Rethink Priorities’ (RP’s) cross-cause cost-effectiveness model (CCM), but I have not been relying on its results. The app does not provide any justification for the default parameters, so I do not trust these.
titotal, I would be curious to know which changes you would make to my cost-effectiveness estimates of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare (1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities) and Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI; 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities) to make them worse than that of GiveWell’s top charities.
They roughly agree on the GHD bar of ~20 DALYs per $1000.
The CCM says GiveWell’s bar is 0.02 DALY/$ (as above), but I think it is around 0.01 DALY/$. According to Open Philanthropy, “GiveWell uses moral weights for child deaths that would be consistent with assuming 51 years of foregone life in the DALY framework (though that is not how they reach the conclusion)”. GiveWell’s top charities save a life for around 5 k$, so their cost-effectiveness is around 0.01 DALY/$ ( = 51/(5*10^3)). Am I missing something, @Derek Shiller?
My very tentative guess is that this may be coming from Vasco’s very high weightings of excruciating and disabling-level pain, which some commenters found unintuitive, and could be driving that result. (I personally found these weightings quite intuitive after thinking about how I’d take time tradeoffs between these types of pains, but reasonable people may disagree.)
Using the geometric mean of each of the ranges, I conclude HSI is 48.8 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, i.e. 0.112 % (= 48.8/(43.5*10^3)) as high as originally. I think RP’s assumptions underestimate the badness of severe pain. If 1 year of excruciating pain is equivalent to 94.9 DALY (= (60*150)^0.5), 15.2 min (= 24*60/94.9) of excruciating pain neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life, whereas I would say adding this much pain to a fully healthy life would make it clearly negative. Here is how the Welfare Footprint Project defines excruciating pain (emphasis mine):
All conditions and events associated with extreme levels of pain that are not normally tolerated even if only for a few seconds. In humans, it would mark the threshold of pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the pain. This is the case, for example, of scalding and severe burning events. Behavioral patterns associated with experiences in this category may include loud screaming, involuntary shaking, extreme muscle tension, or extreme restlessness. Another criterion is the manifestation of behaviors that individuals would strongly refrain from displaying under normal circumstances, as they threaten body integrity (e.g. running into hazardous areas or exposing oneself to sources of danger, such as predators, as a result of pain or of attempts to alleviate it). The attribution of conditions to this level must therefore be done cautiously. Concealment of pain is not possible.
The global healthy life expectancy in 2021 was 62.2 years, so maybe one can roughly say that a child taking their live due to excruciating pain would loose 50 years of fully healthy life. Under my assumptions, 0.864 s of excruciating pain neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life, so 4.38 h (= 0.864*50*365.25/60^2) of excruciating pain neutralise 50 years of fully healthy life. However, I guess many people take their lives (if they can) after a few seconds (not hours) of excruciating pain. So, even if people should hold excruciating pain a few orders of magnitude longer to maximise their own welfare, my numbers could still make sense. 4.38 h is 5.26 k (= 4.38*60^2/3) times as long as 3 s (a few seconds). One complication is that people may be maximising their welfare in taking their lives because excruciating pain quickly decreases their remaining healthy life expectancy, such that there is a decreased opportunity cost of taking their lives.
I think this is a great find, and I’m very open to updating on what I personally think the animal welfare vs GHD multiplier is, depending on how that discrepancy breaks down. I do think it’s worth noting that every one of these comparisons still found animal welfare orders of magnitude better than GHD, which is the headline result I think is most important for this debate. But your findings do illustrate that there’s still a ton of uncertainty in these numbers.
Your initial post claimed that RP thought AW was 1000x more effective than GHD. I just thought I’d flag that in their subsequent analyses, they have reported much lower numbers. In this report, (if i’m reading it right), they put a chicken campaign at ~1200 and AMF at ~20, a factor of 60, much lower than 1000x, disagreeing greatly with Vasco’s analysis which you linked. (ALl of these are using Saulius numbers and RP’s moral weights).
If you go into their cross cause calculator, the givewell bar is ~20 while the generic chicken campaign gives ~700 with default parameters, making AW only 35 times as effective as GHD.
I’ve been attempting replicating the results in the comments of this post, and my number comes up higher as ~2100 vs ~20, making AW 100 times as effective. Again, these are all using Saulius report and RP’s moral weights: if you disagree with these substantially GHD might come out ahead.
Hi! As you point out, the 1000x multiplier I quoted comes from Vasco’s analysis, which also uses Saulius’s numbers and Rethink’s moral weights.
The cross cause calculator came out about two weeks before I published my initial post. By then, I’d been working on that post for about seven months. Though it would have been a good idea, given my urge to get the post published, I didn’t consider checking the cross cause calculator’s implied multiplier before posting.
I’ve just spent some time trying to figure out where the discrepancy between Vasco’s multiplier and the cross cause calculator’s multiplier comes from:
They roughly agree on the GHD bar of ~20 DALYs per $1000.
Fixing a constant welfare range versus a probablistic range doesn’t seem to make a huge difference for the calculator’s result.
The main difference seems to be that the cross cause calculator assumes corporate campaigns avert between 160 and 3.6k chicken suffering-years per dollar. I don’t know the precise definition of that unit, and Vasco’s analysis doesn’t place intermediate values in terms of that unit, so I don’t know exactly where the discrepancy breaks down from there. However, there’s probably at least an order of magnitude difference between Vasco’s implied chicken suffering-years per dollar and the cross cause calculator’s.
My very tentative guess is that this may be coming from Vasco’s very high weightings of excruciating and disabling-level pain, which some commenters found unintuitive, and could be driving that result. (I personally found these weightings quite intuitive after thinking about how I’d take time tradeoffs between these types of pains, but reasonable people may disagree.)
It could also be that Rethink is using a lower Saulius number to give a more precise marginal cost-effectiveness estimate, even if the historical cost-effectiveness was much higher. That would be consistent with Open Phil’s statement that they think the marginal cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns is much lower than the historical average.
I think this is a great find, and I’m very open to updating on what I personally think the animal welfare vs GHD multiplier is, depending on how that discrepancy breaks down. I do think it’s worth noting that every one of these comparisons still found animal welfare orders of magnitude better than GHD, which is the headline result I think is most important for this debate. But your findings do illustrate that there’s still a ton of uncertainty in these numbers.
(@Vasco Grilo🔸 I’d love to hear your perspective on all of this!)
Thanks for the discussion, titotal and Ariel!
I have played around with Rethink Priorities’ (RP’s) cross-cause cost-effectiveness model (CCM), but I have not been relying on its results. The app does not provide any justification for the default parameters, so I do not trust these.
titotal, I would be curious to know which changes you would make to my cost-effectiveness estimates of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare (1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities) and Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI; 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities) to make them worse than that of GiveWell’s top charities.
The CCM says GiveWell’s bar is 0.02 DALY/$ (as above), but I think it is around 0.01 DALY/$. According to Open Philanthropy, “GiveWell uses moral weights for child deaths that would be consistent with assuming 51 years of foregone life in the DALY framework (though that is not how they reach the conclusion)”. GiveWell’s top charities save a life for around 5 k$, so their cost-effectiveness is around 0.01 DALY/$ ( = 51/(5*10^3)). Am I missing something, @Derek Shiller?
Yes, I think this is a big part of it. From RP’s report on How Can Risk Aversion Affect Your Cause Prioritization? (published in November 2023):
Using the geometric mean of each of the ranges, I conclude HSI is 48.8 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, i.e. 0.112 % (= 48.8/(43.5*10^3)) as high as originally. I think RP’s assumptions underestimate the badness of severe pain. If 1 year of excruciating pain is equivalent to 94.9 DALY (= (60*150)^0.5), 15.2 min (= 24*60/94.9) of excruciating pain neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life, whereas I would say adding this much pain to a fully healthy life would make it clearly negative. Here is how the Welfare Footprint Project defines excruciating pain (emphasis mine):
The global healthy life expectancy in 2021 was 62.2 years, so maybe one can roughly say that a child taking their live due to excruciating pain would loose 50 years of fully healthy life. Under my assumptions, 0.864 s of excruciating pain neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life, so 4.38 h (= 0.864*50*365.25/60^2) of excruciating pain neutralise 50 years of fully healthy life. However, I guess many people take their lives (if they can) after a few seconds (not hours) of excruciating pain. So, even if people should hold excruciating pain a few orders of magnitude longer to maximise their own welfare, my numbers could still make sense. 4.38 h is 5.26 k (= 4.38*60^2/3) times as long as 3 s (a few seconds). One complication is that people may be maximising their welfare in taking their lives because excruciating pain quickly decreases their remaining healthy life expectancy, such that there is a decreased opportunity cost of taking their lives.
Agreed!