I can’t speak for OP but I thought the whole point of its “worldview diversification buckets” was to discourage this sort of comparison by acknowledging the size of the error bars around these kind of comparisons, and that fundamentally prioritisation decisions between them are influenced more by different worldviews rather than the possibility of acquiring better data or making more accurate predictions around outcomes. This could be interpreted as an argument against the theme of the week and not just this post :-)
But I don’t think neuron counts are by any means the most unfavourable [reasonable] comparison for animal welfare causes: the heuristic that we have a decent understanding of human suffering and gratification whereas the possibility a particular intervention has a positive or negative or neutral impact on the welfare of a fish is guesswork seems very reasonable and very unfavourable to many animal related causes (even granting that fish have significant welfare ranges and that hedonic utiitarianism is the appropriate method for moral resource allocation). And of course there are non-utilitarian moral arguments in favour of one group of philanthropic causes or another (prioritise helping fellow moral beings vs prioritise stopping fellow moral beings from actively causing harm) which feel a little less fuzzy but aren’t any less contentious.
There are also of course error bars wrapped around individual causes within the buckets, which is part of the reason why GHW funds both GiveWell recommended charities and neartermist policy work that might affect more organism life years per dollar than Legal Impact for Chickens (but might actually be more likely to be counterproductive or ineffectual)[1] but that’s another reason why I think blanket comparisons are unhelpful. A related issue is that it’s much more difficult to estimate marginal impacts of research and policy work than dispensing medicine or nets. The marginal impact of $100k more nets is easy to predict; the marginal impact of $100k more to a lobbying organization is not even if you entirely agree with the moral weight they apply to their cause, and average cost-effectiveness is not always a reliable guide to scaling up funding, particularly not if they’re small, scrappy organizations doing an admirable job of prioritising quick wins and also likely to face increase opposition if they scale.[2] Some organizations which fit that bill fit in the GHW category, but it’s much more representative of the typical EA-incubated AW cause. Some of them will run into diminishing returns as they run out of companies actually willing to engage with their welfare initiatives, others may become locked in positional stalemates, some of them are much more capable of absorbing significant extra funding and putting it to good use than others. Past performance really doesn’t guarantee future returns to scale, and some types of organization are much more capable of achieving it than others, which happens to include many of the classic GiveWell type GHW charities, and not many of the AW or speculative “ripple effect” GHW charities[3]
I guess there are sound reasons why people could conclude that AW causes funded by OP were universally more effective than GHW ones or vice versa, but those appear to come more from strong philosophical positions (meat eater problems or disagreement with the moral relevance of animals) than evidence and measurement.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m acknowledging that there’s probably more evidence about negative welfare impacts of practices Legal Impact for Chickens is targeting and their theory of change than of the positive welfare impacts and efficacy of some reforms promoted in the GHW bucket , even given my much higher level of certainty about the significance of the magnitude of human welfare. And by extension pointing out that sometimes comparisons between individual AW and GHW charities run the opposite way from the characteristic “AW helps more organisms but with more uncertainty” comparison.
There are much more likely to be well-funded campaigns to negate the impact of an organization targeting factory farming than ones to negate the impact of campaigns against malaria . Though on the other hand, animal cruelty doesn’t have as many proponents as the other side of virtually any economic or institutional reform debate.
There are diminishing returns to healthcare too: malaria nets’ cost-effectiveness is broadly proportional to malaria prevalence. But that’s rather more predictable than the returns to scale of anti-cruelty lobbying, which aren’t even necessarily positive beyond a certain point if the well-funded meat lobby gets worried enough.
I can’t speak for OP but I thought the whole point of its “worldview diversification buckets” was to discourage this sort of comparison by acknowledging the size of the error bars around these kind of comparisons, and that fundamentally prioritisation decisions between them are influenced more by different worldviews rather than the possibility of acquiring better data or making more accurate predictions around outcomes. This could be interpreted as an argument against the theme of the week and not just this post :-)
The necessity of making funding decisions means interventions in animal welfare and global health and development are compared at least implicitly. I think it is better to make them explicit for reasoning transparency, and having discussions which could eventually lead to better decisions. Saying there is too much uncertainty, and there is nothing we can do will not move things forward.
the possibility a particular intervention has a positive or negative or neutral impact on the welfare of a fish is guesswork seems very reasonable and very unfavourable to many animal related causes
What do you think about humane slaughter interventions, such as the electrical stunning interventions promoted by the Centre for Aquaculture Progress? “Most sea bream and sea bass today are killed by being immersed in an ice slurry, a process which is not considered acceptable by the World Organisation for Animal Health”. “Electrical stunning reliably renders fish unconscious in less than one second, reducing their suffering”. Rough analogy, but a human dying in an electric chair suffers less than one dying in a freezer?
Relatedly, I estimated the Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative is 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities. I would be curious about which changes to the parameters you would make to render the ratio lower than 1.
there are non-utilitarian moral arguments in favour of one group of philanthropic causes or another (prioritise helping fellow moral beings vs prioritise stopping fellow moral beings from actively causing harm) which feel a little less fuzzy but aren’t any less contentious.
Why should one stop at the level of helping people in low income countries (via global health and development interventions)? Family and friends are closer to us, and helping strangers in far away countries is way more contentious than helping family and friends. Does this mean Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna (the funders of Open Philanthropy) should direct most of their resources to helping their families and friends? It is their money, so they decide, but I am glad they are using the money more cost-effectively.
I guess there are sound reasons why people could conclude that AW causes funded by OP were universally more effective than GHW ones or vice versa, but those appear to come more from strong philosophical positions (meat eater problems or disagreement with the moral relevance of animals) than evidence and measurement.
One does not need to worry about the meat eater problem to think the best animal welfare interventions are way more cost-effective than the best in global health and development. Neglecting that problem, I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, and Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative is 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
I can’t speak for OP but I thought the whole point of its “worldview diversification buckets” was to discourage this sort of comparison by acknowledging the size of the error bars around these kind of comparisons, and that fundamentally prioritisation decisions between them are influenced more by different worldviews rather than the possibility of acquiring better data or making more accurate predictions around outcomes. This could be interpreted as an argument against the theme of the week and not just this post :-)
But I don’t think neuron counts are by any means the most unfavourable [reasonable] comparison for animal welfare causes: the heuristic that we have a decent understanding of human suffering and gratification whereas the possibility a particular intervention has a positive or negative or neutral impact on the welfare of a fish is guesswork seems very reasonable and very unfavourable to many animal related causes (even granting that fish have significant welfare ranges and that hedonic utiitarianism is the appropriate method for moral resource allocation). And of course there are non-utilitarian moral arguments in favour of one group of philanthropic causes or another (prioritise helping fellow moral beings vs prioritise stopping fellow moral beings from actively causing harm) which feel a little less fuzzy but aren’t any less contentious.
There are also of course error bars wrapped around individual causes within the buckets, which is part of the reason why GHW funds both GiveWell recommended charities and neartermist policy work that might affect more organism life years per dollar than Legal Impact for Chickens (but might actually be more likely to be counterproductive or ineffectual)[1] but that’s another reason why I think blanket comparisons are unhelpful. A related issue is that it’s much more difficult to estimate marginal impacts of research and policy work than dispensing medicine or nets. The marginal impact of $100k more nets is easy to predict; the marginal impact of $100k more to a lobbying organization is not even if you entirely agree with the moral weight they apply to their cause, and average cost-effectiveness is not always a reliable guide to scaling up funding, particularly not if they’re small, scrappy organizations doing an admirable job of prioritising quick wins and also likely to face increase opposition if they scale.[2] Some organizations which fit that bill fit in the GHW category, but it’s much more representative of the typical EA-incubated AW cause. Some of them will run into diminishing returns as they run out of companies actually willing to engage with their welfare initiatives, others may become locked in positional stalemates, some of them are much more capable of absorbing significant extra funding and putting it to good use than others. Past performance really doesn’t guarantee future returns to scale, and some types of organization are much more capable of achieving it than others, which happens to include many of the classic GiveWell type GHW charities, and not many of the AW or speculative “ripple effect” GHW charities[3]
I guess there are sound reasons why people could conclude that AW causes funded by OP were universally more effective than GHW ones or vice versa, but those appear to come more from strong philosophical positions (meat eater problems or disagreement with the moral relevance of animals) than evidence and measurement.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m acknowledging that there’s probably more evidence about negative welfare impacts of practices Legal Impact for Chickens is targeting and their theory of change than of the positive welfare impacts and efficacy of some reforms promoted in the GHW bucket , even given my much higher level of certainty about the significance of the magnitude of human welfare. And by extension pointing out that sometimes comparisons between individual AW and GHW charities run the opposite way from the characteristic “AW helps more organisms but with more uncertainty” comparison.
There are much more likely to be well-funded campaigns to negate the impact of an organization targeting factory farming than ones to negate the impact of campaigns against malaria . Though on the other hand, animal cruelty doesn’t have as many proponents as the other side of virtually any economic or institutional reform debate.
There are diminishing returns to healthcare too: malaria nets’ cost-effectiveness is broadly proportional to malaria prevalence. But that’s rather more predictable than the returns to scale of anti-cruelty lobbying, which aren’t even necessarily positive beyond a certain point if the well-funded meat lobby gets worried enough.
Thanks for the comment, David.
The necessity of making funding decisions means interventions in animal welfare and global health and development are compared at least implicitly. I think it is better to make them explicit for reasoning transparency, and having discussions which could eventually lead to better decisions. Saying there is too much uncertainty, and there is nothing we can do will not move things forward.
What do you think about humane slaughter interventions, such as the electrical stunning interventions promoted by the Centre for Aquaculture Progress? “Most sea bream and sea bass today are killed by being immersed in an ice slurry, a process which is not considered acceptable by the World Organisation for Animal Health”. “Electrical stunning reliably renders fish unconscious in less than one second, reducing their suffering”. Rough analogy, but a human dying in an electric chair suffers less than one dying in a freezer?
Relatedly, I estimated the Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative is 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities. I would be curious about which changes to the parameters you would make to render the ratio lower than 1.
Why should one stop at the level of helping people in low income countries (via global health and development interventions)? Family and friends are closer to us, and helping strangers in far away countries is way more contentious than helping family and friends. Does this mean Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna (the funders of Open Philanthropy) should direct most of their resources to helping their families and friends? It is their money, so they decide, but I am glad they are using the money more cost-effectively.
One does not need to worry about the meat eater problem to think the best animal welfare interventions are way more cost-effective than the best in global health and development. Neglecting that problem, I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, and Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative is 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.