It feels fairly alarming to me that this post didn’t get more pushback here and is so highly upvoted.
I think it makes a couple interesting points, but then makes extremely crazy sounding claims, taking the Rethink Priorities 7 − 15% numbers at face value, when the arguments for those AFAICT don’t even have particular models behind them. This is a pretty crazy sounding number that needs way better argumentation than “a poll of people said so”, and here it’s just asserted without much commentary at all.
(In addition to things other people have mentioned here, like the 97% number being very sus, and “why are we assuming they have net negative lives?”, describing “10% as bad as a chicken” as a “conservative assumption” that’s like basically made up. Also, it has some random political potshots that aren’t really affecting the core claim but also seem bad for EA Forum culture)
This feels like sort of the central example of why EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem needed to get written. (disclaimer: I am close with the author of that post)
(By contrast it has negative karma on LessWrong. I have weak disagreement with Oliver there about whether it should be more like −9 karma or more like “-2 to 10”, but it was at 85 karma when I found it here before me and a couple people strong downvoted and that seems like EA forum basically has no filter for poorly argued claims)
A sort of central paradox of EA as a movement/community is “you’d think, writing up cost-benefit analysis of donation targets would be like a core community activity”, but, also, there’s big professional orgs evaluating all the charities, and also the a lot of charities feel very fuzzy / difficult to evaluate.
I think it’d be cool if “attempt to make a BOTEC calculation evaluating donation targets” was like the sort of thing people did at EA meetups on-the-regular. (seems more grounding than “spend most of the time recruiting more people to EA”).