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.
Thanks for the response Vasco and apologies for the tardy reply :)
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.
I agree on the first part. But it appears OP is perfectly transparent about their reasoning. They acknowledge that the level of uncertainty permits differences of opinion, that they believe a portfolio allocation approach incorporating different views on utilities and moral priorities and risk tolerance is better than adopting a single set of weights and fanatically optimising for them, and that the implicit moral weights are therefore a residual resulting from preference heterogenity of people whose decision making OP/Dustin/Cari value rather than an unjustifiable knowledge claim about the absolute intensity of animals’ experiences which others must prove wrong if they are to consider allocating budget in any other way.
It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to disagree with any/all individuals in OP’s preferences and the net result of that funding allocation, and there are many individual funding decisions OP have made which can be improved upon (including for relatively non-contentious reasons like “they didn’t achieve their aims”). But I don’t tend to think that polemical arguments with suspicious convergence like “donating to most things in cause area X is many times more effective than everything in cause area Y” are particularly helpful in moving things forward, particularly when they’re based not on spotting a glaring error or possible conflict of interest but upon a preference for the moral weights proposed by another organization OP are certainly aware of.
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?
Honestly, I have no idea whether it would be more uncomfortable to die on an electric chair or in a freezer, and I’m actually pretty familiar with the experience of human discomfort and descriptions of electrical shocks and hypothermia written from human perspectives. I’m not volunteering to test it experimentally either! Needless to say I have even less knowledge about the experience of a cold blooded, water dwelling creature with completely different physiology and nervous system and plausibly no conscious experience at all
A consequence of this is that I don’t think transferring all the money currently spent on eradicating malaria to funding campaigns of indeterminate efficacy to promote an alternative slaughter method which has an indeterminate impact on the final moments of fish can be stated with a high degree of certainty to be a net positive use of resources.
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 ration lower than 1.
This is a good question, and my honest answer is probably all of them, and the fundamental premise. I’ve discussed how lobbying organizations’ funding isn’t well measured at the margin and doesn’t scale well in my previous post, I don’t think the evidence base for ice slurry being a particularly painful slaughter method is particularly robust,[1] I don’t think RP’s numbers or your upward revisions of the pain scales they use are particularly authoritative, and above all I’m not sure it’s appropriate to use DALYs to trade human lives for thousand-point-scale estimates of the fleeting suffering of organisms where there isn’t even a scientific consensus they have any conscious experience at all. Titotal’s post does a much better job than I could of explaining how easily it is to end up with orders of magnitude difference in outcomes even if one accepts the basic premises, and there’s no particular reason to believe that premises like “researchers have made some observations about aversion to what is assumed to be pain stimuli amidst an absence of evidence of other traits associated with consciousness, and attached a number to it” are robust.
For related reasons, I don’t think fanaticism is the best approach to budget allocation.
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.
There’s a reason why I used the word universal. Yes, it is entirely reasonable to believe that a couple of causes from one area are clearly and obviously better than the best known in another area, though shrimp welfare certainly isn’t the one I’d pick. But that’s not the framing of the debate (which is the debate week’s, not yours specifically) is on Cause Area X vs Cause Area Y, not “is Charity Z the most effective charity overall”.
And if I did believe your numbers were a fairly accurate representation of reality and that fanaticism was better for budget allocation than a portfolio strategy, I’d be concerned that chicken charities were using money specifically allocated to AW despite being ~28x worse than shrimp,[2] There’s more money in the GHW buckets, but the chicken ⇒ shrimp reallocation decision is more easily made.
though I’ll happily concede it’s a longer process than electrical stunning
Isn’t this pretty key? If “Electrical stunning reliably renders fish unconscious in less than one second” as Vasco says, I don’t see how you can get much better than that in terms of humane slaughter.
Or are you saying that electrical stunning is plausibly so bad even in that split second so as to make it potentially worse than a much slower death from freezing?
It’s well within the bounds of possibility the electric shock is excruciating and the cold numbing, yes. Or indeed that they’re both neutral, compared with slaughter methods that produce clear physiological stress indicators like asyphxiation in carbon-dioxide rich water. or that they’re different for different types of water dwelling species depending on their natural hardiness to icy water, which also seems to be a popular theory. Rightly or wrongly, ice cold slurry is sometimes recommended as the humane option, although obviously the fish farming industry is more concerned with its ability to preserve the fish marginally better than kiliing prior to insertion into the slurry...
I was trying to question you on the duration aspect specifically. If electric shock lasts a split second is it really credible that it could be worse than a slow death through some other method?
If the slow death involves no pain, of course it’s credible. (The electric shock is, incidentally, generally insufficient to kill. They generally solve the problem of the fish reviving with immersion in ice slurry....). It’s also credible that neither are remotely as painful as a two week malaria infection or a few years of malaria infection which is (much of) what sits on the other side of the trade here.
This is less clear for shrimp, though. I don’t know if they find the cold painful at all, and it might sedate them or even render them unconscious. But I imagine that takes time, and they’re being crushed by each other and ice with ice slurry.
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.
Thanks for the response Vasco and apologies for the tardy reply :)
I agree on the first part. But it appears OP is perfectly transparent about their reasoning. They acknowledge that the level of uncertainty permits differences of opinion, that they believe a portfolio allocation approach incorporating different views on utilities and moral priorities and risk tolerance is better than adopting a single set of weights and fanatically optimising for them, and that the implicit moral weights are therefore a residual resulting from preference heterogenity of people whose decision making OP/Dustin/Cari value rather than an unjustifiable knowledge claim about the absolute intensity of animals’ experiences which others must prove wrong if they are to consider allocating budget in any other way.
It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to disagree with any/all individuals in OP’s preferences and the net result of that funding allocation, and there are many individual funding decisions OP have made which can be improved upon (including for relatively non-contentious reasons like “they didn’t achieve their aims”). But I don’t tend to think that polemical arguments with suspicious convergence like “donating to most things in cause area X is many times more effective than everything in cause area Y” are particularly helpful in moving things forward, particularly when they’re based not on spotting a glaring error or possible conflict of interest but upon a preference for the moral weights proposed by another organization OP are certainly aware of.
Honestly, I have no idea whether it would be more uncomfortable to die on an electric chair or in a freezer, and I’m actually pretty familiar with the experience of human discomfort and descriptions of electrical shocks and hypothermia written from human perspectives. I’m not volunteering to test it experimentally either! Needless to say I have even less knowledge about the experience of a cold blooded, water dwelling creature with completely different physiology and nervous system and plausibly no conscious experience at all
A consequence of this is that I don’t think transferring all the money currently spent on eradicating malaria to funding campaigns of indeterminate efficacy to promote an alternative slaughter method which has an indeterminate impact on the final moments of fish can be stated with a high degree of certainty to be a net positive use of resources.
This is a good question, and my honest answer is probably all of them, and the fundamental premise. I’ve discussed how lobbying organizations’ funding isn’t well measured at the margin and doesn’t scale well in my previous post, I don’t think the evidence base for ice slurry being a particularly painful slaughter method is particularly robust,[1] I don’t think RP’s numbers or your upward revisions of the pain scales they use are particularly authoritative, and above all I’m not sure it’s appropriate to use DALYs to trade human lives for thousand-point-scale estimates of the fleeting suffering of organisms where there isn’t even a scientific consensus they have any conscious experience at all. Titotal’s post does a much better job than I could of explaining how easily it is to end up with orders of magnitude difference in outcomes even if one accepts the basic premises, and there’s no particular reason to believe that premises like “researchers have made some observations about aversion to what is assumed to be pain stimuli amidst an absence of evidence of other traits associated with consciousness, and attached a number to it” are robust.
For related reasons, I don’t think fanaticism is the best approach to budget allocation.
There’s a reason why I used the word universal. Yes, it is entirely reasonable to believe that a couple of causes from one area are clearly and obviously better than the best known in another area, though shrimp welfare certainly isn’t the one I’d pick. But that’s not the framing of the debate (which is the debate week’s, not yours specifically) is on Cause Area X vs Cause Area Y, not “is Charity Z the most effective charity overall”.
And if I did believe your numbers were a fairly accurate representation of reality and that fanaticism was better for budget allocation than a portfolio strategy, I’d be concerned that chicken charities were using money specifically allocated to AW despite being ~28x worse than shrimp,[2] There’s more money in the GHW buckets, but the chicken ⇒ shrimp reallocation decision is more easily made.
though I’ll happily concede it’s a longer process than electrical stunning
though personally I’d attach higher confidence to the chicken campaigns being significantly net positive...
Thanks for elaborating, David. Strongly upvoted.
Isn’t this pretty key? If “Electrical stunning reliably renders fish unconscious in less than one second” as Vasco says, I don’t see how you can get much better than that in terms of humane slaughter.
Or are you saying that electrical stunning is plausibly so bad even in that split second so as to make it potentially worse than a much slower death from freezing?
It’s well within the bounds of possibility the electric shock is excruciating and the cold numbing, yes. Or indeed that they’re both neutral, compared with slaughter methods that produce clear physiological stress indicators like asyphxiation in carbon-dioxide rich water. or that they’re different for different types of water dwelling species depending on their natural hardiness to icy water, which also seems to be a popular theory. Rightly or wrongly, ice cold slurry is sometimes recommended as the humane option, although obviously the fish farming industry is more concerned with its ability to preserve the fish marginally better than kiliing prior to insertion into the slurry...
I was trying to question you on the duration aspect specifically. If electric shock lasts a split second is it really credible that it could be worse than a slow death through some other method?
If the slow death involves no pain, of course it’s credible. (The electric shock is, incidentally, generally insufficient to kill. They generally solve the problem of the fish reviving with immersion in ice slurry....). It’s also credible that neither are remotely as painful as a two week malaria infection or a few years of malaria infection which is (much of) what sits on the other side of the trade here.
My understanding from conversation with SWP is that for shrimp, the electric stunning also just kills the shrimp, and it’s all over very quickly.
It might be different for fish.
Conditional on fish actually being able to feel pain, it seems a bit far-fetched to me that a slow death in ice wouldn’t be painful.
This is less clear for shrimp, though. I don’t know if they find the cold painful at all, and it might sedate them or even render them unconscious. But I imagine that takes time, and they’re being crushed by each other and ice with ice slurry.