Interestingly the EA wikipedia page gets an average of 9000 pageviews a month. Curious where most of these people first hear about it before googling, maybe Doing Good Better?
utilitarian01
I don’t think its enough to say they’re net negative because of r-selection though. Insect larvae probably have like 2 orders of magnitude less neurons and they might not even be conscious in the first place. Also I saw those welfare reports but really didn’t like them because they left out the duration of suffering which is a huge factor in how bad something is. A broiler chicken experiencing a moderate amount of stress for it’s entire life could be much much worse than it being boiled alive for a few seconds.
This is my welfare spreadsheet but I didn’t intend to share it so if you want citations for the numbers I can try to link them.
>Leverage: It seems empirically evident to me that meta EA activity is influencing both the amount and the direction of funding at a ratio of at least £10 influenced £1 inputted.
How? Skimming through the page I see no evidence of that, it’s literally just a random hypothetical that they throw out.
If you make the definition of EA “anyone who donates to an EA charity” then the movement is much bigger, there’s more than 20K people in the world donating to effective charities. The Humane League alone has 1.1M followers on facebook, assuming only 200K of those donate, that’s still the same as the double every year number. I’d say anyone that donates would be considered an EA in my book, even if they don’t self-identify as one.
The first impression though is that animal charities should be accepted as more effective until proven otherwise by some large positive AMF flow-through effect that outweighs saving a life (maybe reducing insect populations?) Until then it seems much more straightforward to donate to ACE charities, specifically the cage-free ones.
> How cost-effective could they be compared to other animal welfare interventions?
This is a hard one, but I’ll take a (crude) stab at it. Currently the best charity working on fish welfare is Albert Schweitzer (ace top charity). This 2016 guesstimate model of Albert Schweitzer shows a figure of 57 animals spared per dollar, but ~75% of these are chicks being spared from debeaking, which I think is too easy of a policy to implement compared to the oxygen/food problems that arise with fish welfare. The other 25% are cage-free hens which is probably closer to what we’re dealing with here, so I’ll assume it’s 14 animals per $. Albert Schweitzer chiefly works in Germany, where 34 million laying hens are killed annually, of which ~1 million were spared, or 3%. Before factoring in for the 10% welfare increase, this is 11 million hens annually that are cage-free because of them.
According to this graph, german fish production totals 313,000 metric tons per year, or about ~400 million Alaskan pollocks (most popular fish). With all the same variables as the hen campaign, that’s 4e8*.33*.1*5.5 (years of impact) = 7.3e7 or 73 million Pollocks spared over the course of 5 years. Assuming a a fish has the same worth of a chicken (less neurons but they also endure suffering for much longer on farms), that’s 73⁄11 = 6.6*14 = 92 fish spared per $. This pretty much blows every other animal charity out of the water (heh).
I could still see a sizable impact coming from the consumer skipping a meal of chicken that they otherwise would have ate and substituting it with beyond meat. It doesn’t have to be an exact substitute.
>In the case of C. elegans, despite being a widely studied animal, evidence of their being conscious is weak and their behavioral reactions are simple and highly stereotyped.
What do you mean by simple? Having nociceptors is a good indicator of pain, right? Surely more than a 1% chance, that just seems like crazy overconfidence.
I know I’m like 1 year late, but do you have the raw data still?
Hm, my intuition goes the other way. I would assume being in a relationship increases your chances of convincing your gf/wife to donate at least a little, perhaps 10%, to your choice charity. I’ve never been in a relationship though so who knows.
Where would starvation fall under in the juvenile mortality pie chart? Or is that something r-selected species don’t typically go through.
Donating is much more effective than the increase in demand though, especially when you consider the elasticity factor. So in that case you should just buy whatever food is cheaper and donate the excess, tofu is about 3x cheaper ($2 per pound) vs grass-fed beef ($6 per pound). I guess if you truly hate tofu you could have an excuse but there’s always soy sauce to make it tastier.
True, I still believe that making a toy model with made-up numbers is still better than not doing it at all.
Has there been any explicit calculation actually done on whether wild animal lives are net positive or negative? Because I’ve done some myself and it seems to be positive, at least for microorganisms and insects which are the most populous by a large margin.
Might be irrelevant, but have you considered moving to the US for the increased salary?
Fantastic post, I’ll be looking forward to the next one about insects as a cause area. I suggest researching the effects of buying beef to reduce springtail and nematode populations on grazing lands. See this post and this one as well. I could also pm you my spreadsheet that tried to compare it to other causes to give you a starting point.
Watching cricket makes you a better altruist
Off-topic but what do broiler chicken campaigns look like typically? I know for hens it’s cage-free, is it just more space per chicken for broilers?
I think it’s cause of the cheese line. Most of us here are vegans and we don’t like hearing that kind of thing.
Even at worst that’s still 4 years of suffering averted per $, insane cost-effectiveness.