I work as an engineer, donate 10% of my income, and occasionally enjoy doing independent research. Iâm most interested in farmed animal welfare and the nitty-gritty details of global health and development work. In 2022, I was a co-winner of the GiveWell Change Our Mind Contest.
MHRđ¸
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Looking into this a bit more, from this thread it seems like OPâs grants database may currently be missing as much as half of their 2025 GCR spending.
This is really awesome work, itâs great to have someone put this together!
Hopefully the drop in @GiveWellâs grants is just a timing or reporting issue and not nearly as large as it seems. Maybe theyâll be able to clarify further!
If you wanted to extend this and cover more EA grants, I know Farmkind has a public database of grants from their platform that would be great to add. It also would be awesome if this could capture high-impact donations from Founders Pledge, but Iâm not sure they provide granular enough data to be able to track by year and cause area. Maybe talking to @Matt_Lerner could shed some insight?
This yearâs recommendations have a pretty wide range of methods: institutional meat reduction, policy advocacy, corporate campaigning, producer outreach/âsupport, and academic field building. Was having a wide range of approaches represented among the recommended charities something you were intentionally aiming to have, or just happenstance from the evaluation results?
Thanks so much for all the research and effort that went into this! This is a really exciting group of organizations.
I was, however, curious about one aspect the numeric cost-effectiveness estimates. Itâs great to see these as part of ACEâs process, and I definitely learned a lot from them! But I was surprised to see how narrow the estimates were for the two Shrimp Welfare Project programs, given how radically uncertain I think basically everyone is about some of the key parameters influencing the results. Am I right in understanding that this disconnect is largely coming from ACE using AIMâs suffering-adjusted day estimates per animal impacted, and those estimates not including uncertainty ranges? If so, would ACE consider trying to add uncertainty estimates on those numbers in future years?
Listed cost-effectiveness estimates:
AWO:
ECC: 4-126 SADs/â$
Cage-free: 8-67 SADs/â$
SWP:
HSI: 43â53 SADs/â$
SSFI: 464â840 SADs/â$
SVB:
IMR: 6-14 SADs/â$
THL:
Cage-Free: 17â351 SADs/â$
BCC: 2â89 SADs/â$
WAI: Unknown SADs/â$
Nice post and visualization! You might be interested in a different but related thought experiment from Richard Chappell.
My perspective on this (or more generally on the question of whether the future is likely to involve realizing a large fraction of the possible value it could have, whatever form it turns out âvalueâ takes) is perhaps a bit more hopeful. In my view, the question only makes sense if we are moral realists. If there are no objective facts about morality, then I donât see why we should care whether our own preferences or someone elseâs win out. Furthermore, I think worrying about these questions is probably pointless unless two other things are true: that we have some way of discovering moral facts and that those discoveries have some way of influencing our actions. Unless those two are somehow true, we have no reason to think our efforts can in expectation increase the amount of value realized in the world.
So far this is a somewhat pessimistic take, but Iâm optimistic in a world where all three of these conditions are true, which in some sense is (IMO) the only world where this conversation makes any sense to have. In that world, we should expect that increasing the amount of things like intelligence, time to devote to research/âreflection, and focus on studying moral questions in expectation leads toward getting closer to the true morality. Welfareans (or more broadly whatever target will produce the most true value) may indeed get enough advocates just by virtue of society making more progress on these moral questions. As an example, society today includes lots of advocates for groups like women, LGBT people, people of color etc., when historically the only advocates were a âtiny subset of crazy people.â But of course moral progress is at best an extremely messy and incrementalâfactory-farmed animals are the victims of lots of people being either indifferent or wanting to maximize something other than welfare (profit, tasty food for humans etc.), and the impact of animal advocates has not been sufficient to prevent a massive explosion of suffering.
Still, on net I lean towards thinking that given the opportunity for study and reflection (and given the three conditions described above), we can be optimistic that we will drive toward the things that matter. Therefore, focusing on the efforts to prevent existential catastrophe or value lock-in may be among the best things we could do to ensure that weâre not leaving a huge fraction of the possible value of the future on the table. That may be easier said than done, since preventing value lock-in in practice means preventing people with maximizing ideologies from successfully carrying out that maximization at least for some period of time. But that makes me hopeful that existing EA efforts may not be too far off the mark.
Manifesting
Do you have views on Tradewater as an offset provider? Their claim is that they can offset at $19/âton, and Giving Green seemed to think that was credible a couple years ago.
Great post!
Mill was working as a colonial administrator in the British East India Company at this point in his life, right? Could there have been a role for cognitive dissonance in driving his depression?
You may be interested to read some of MacAskillâs older writing on the subject https://ââwww.lesswrong.com/ââposts/ââFCiMtrsM8mcmBtfTR/ââ?commentId=9abk4EJXMtj72pcQu
Gotcha, that makes sense! Even if producers slaughter at a lower weight, I think the number of chicken-days of life per kg of meat shouldnât change much relative to what goes into the WFP analysis. So I donât think that producers slaughtering earlier changes the quantity of time spent suffering very significantly, just whether itâs distributed among fewer longer-lived chickens or more shorter-lived chickens.
Agreed, this post seems like it goes way against standard forum norms if this is correct
I think itâs worth noting here that (if Iâm understanding it right) the alternative breeds recommended by the better chicken commitment are slower-growing but donât have a lower max weight. And the welfare footprint project numbers on pain durations already account for the longer time to reach full weight.
Thanks for sharing your perspective and experiences here! I think itâs really valuable for EAs with first-hand experience to write about these issues, and Iâm really sorry you went through such a difficult time. You might be interested to read this piece I wrote last year about EA and disability based on my own experiences. It includes some discussion of HALYs, though thatâs focused more on the history and perception of HALYs rather than the issues you touched on.
Reading your piece, I very much agree with you that the current methods of constructing HALY weights generally have methodological issues and would greatly benefit from more focus on actual experiences of people in the health states in question. I also agree that the naive application of HALYs as units of utility or âgoodnessâ can lead to some very dark places (especially in light of the methodological concerns you mentioned, it frustrates me that EAs often slip into using DALYs as units of utility when the post-2010 weights are specifically intended to only be a measure of health status).
I have a slightly different perspective on a couple of the other issues you mention, and Iâd be curious to talk more with you about these.
First, I think that the existence of difficult tradeoffs is inevitable as long as resources are limited, and moving to HALY alternatives wonât necessarily eliminate these challenges. For example, one of the articles you quote mentions NICE guidelines about drugs for dementia. I would really, really like better medications to exist, but my (admittedly not very in-depth) understanding of the field is that the drugs are quite expensive and donât do much to improve symptoms or alter the course of the disease. As long we have limited healthcare resources, itâs not clear that thereâs an alternate weighting strategy that would justifiably recommend allocating limited resources to buying these medications rather than spending on other health interventions that work better. Here, it seems like the problem is much more the paucity of options and limited resources than the particular weighting scheme.
Another item is the role of HALYs in perpetuating healthcare inequalities. I do agree that there is absolutely a straightforward way in which this is true, but Iâve come to think thereâs some more complexity here than I at least initially thought. HALY maximization in some situations encourages improving the wellbeing of people with chronic illnesses/âdisabilities over extending the lives of able-bodied people. For example, the 2021 GBD disability weights give post-viral chronic fatigue syndromes a weight of 0.22. A policymaker trying solely to maximize DALYs averted would, if such a treatment were available for the same cost, choose to invest in curing five people of post-viral chronic fatigue over saving one fully healthy personâs life (if all the individuals were the same age). I absolutely agree that ME/âCFS is underfunded overall, and that there is probably a role for HALYs in that underfunding (in particular, the 2021 GBD disability weights only include values for a small number of recognized post-viral chronic fatigue syndromes, so policymakers may not be able justify investments in broader ME/âCFS research/âtreatment in terms of HALY benefits). I just think the overall picture here is a bit complicated.
The last item is the existence of states worse than death. I very much agree that deciding at a population level that certain peopleâs lives are worse than death, then making policy on that basis, can lead to very dark and wrong places. However, I really do think that some people in some cases experience states worse than death, both from my own experiences and from the testimonies of others. In my own life, I have had experiences that were bad enough that I absolutely would have traded off shortening my own life to avoid them (for example, I would have been happy to lose a week of healthy life to avoid the worst moments of a shoulder dislocation). More broadly, I do think we should listen to ill or disabled individuals such as Gloria Taylor whoâve described their own conditions as worse than death and advocated for the right to access medical assistance in dying. I think it would be wrong to say that for individuals who describe their lived experience as worse than death and express a desire to access medical assistance in dying, they have not benefited by being able to fulfill their desire. And moreover, not having a weighting scheme that allows for states worse than death I think risks underemphasizing the suffering involved for certain people in cases of extreme pain. As a result, I worry that such a scheme could lead to underprioritizing interventions that improve quality of life and alleviate pain in favor of interventions that save lives. Again, I think itâs absolutely wrong to decide based on population-level statistics that an individual personâs life is worse for them than death, but I think thereâs a balance to walk here and I worry that itâs as bad or worse to not listen when people describe their lived experiences as worse than death based on their own values.
Thanks again for writing your piece. I hope these thoughts are useful!
RP is currently #1. EA Animal Welfare Fund is currently #2, and I donât think it the kinds of work it funds are necessarily things OP wonât fund.
I think this is only partially true. Since RP gets significant funding from OP, my understanding based on their communications is that they tend to often use unrestricted funding specifically in areas that canât get funding for from OP. And similarly, AWF has specifically highlighted funding areas that OP wonât as one of their top areas.
Thank you Sjir and Aidan for this excellent work! I think itâs quite valuable for community epistemics to have someone doing this kind of high-quality meta-evaluation. And it seems like your dialogue with ACE has been very productive.
Selfishly as somone who makes a number of donations in the animal welfare space, Iâm also excited by the possibility of some more top animal charities becoming supported programs on the donation platform :)
Thanks Vasco. After thinking about the numbers myself, I agree that allowing for states worse than death canât on its own do a lot to make the numbers comparable between GiveWell and SWP. I do actually think it would move the numbers more than youâre accounting for there, both because the deaths prevented by GiveWell top charities might involve more than 7.5 minutes of excruciating pain and because GiveWell top charities prevent a lot of morbidity among people who end up surviving (and I think theyâre significantly underweighting the value of this, e.g. clean water interventions prevent about 6 person-years of being sick with waterbone illnesses for everyone person who dies, and I would significantly prefer to be in a dreamless sleep than be conscious with a severe enteric infection.[1] But the DALY weight for severe diarrheal illness is 0.247, implying 3/â4ths the wellbeing[2] of being fully healthy). But this is at most going to change the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell top charities by a factor of 2, not 4 OOMs.
As for the 10000x difference in weights between disabling and excruciating pain, I have to admit Iâm pretty confused here. On the one hand, it strikes me as fundamentally implausible that suffocating is 10000x worse than dying of heatstroke. On the other hand, some of my intuitions do lean towards not being willing to endure e.g. burning to death for almost anything else. Iâll need to spend some time reviewing the literature before I try and make further sense of how to best make these tradeoffs.
Thanks again for all your work and engagement here, I think itâs genuinely quite valuable to be having these conversations!
I also ranked Arthropoda first! Iâm quite bullish on the value of information in the animal welfare space, and think that on the current margin they would do extremely valuable work.
RP used to have an AI Governance and Strategy team, and if I understand correctly, that team spun out into IAPS. Can you elaborate on why that team was spun out, and why you think it would now be a good fit to restart that team within RP?