Instead of undermining pro-animal cost-effectiveness analyses with a human-favoring philosophical theory (namely, Conscious Subsystems itself), Conscious Subsystems appears to support the conclusion that there are scalable nonhuman animal-targeting interventions that are far more cost-effective than GiveWell’s recommended charities.
This isn’t a situation where it makes sense to maximize expected utility at any given moment. Instead, we should acknowledge our uncertainty, explore related hypotheses and try to figure out whether there’s a way to make the questions empirically tractable.
Great post!
I estimate cage-free corporate campaigns, buying beef, broiler welfare corporate campaigns, GiveWell’s top charities, Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research’s (CEARCH’s) High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF), and Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) increase the welfare of their target beneficiaries roughly as cost-effectively for individual welfare per animal-year proportional to the number of neurons. This is illustrated for an exponent of the number of neurons of 1 in the graph below.
Agreed.