I see myself as a generalist quantitative researcher.
Vasco Grilođ¸
Karma: 7,398
For reference, I estimated based on Sauliusâ numbers and Open Philâs adjustment that broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities, averting the equivalent of 1.67 and 4.59 DALYs per $.
Thanks for the post, Mathias! Do you know whether the increase in welfare of the infected wild animals would be larger than the decrease in welfare of the eradicated screwworms assuming these have positive lives?
Thanks, Grace. Have you (GWWC) considered highlighting your animal welfare recommendations as more cost-effective than your recommendations in other areas? From GWWCâs recommendations page:
What do we mean by âeffectiveâ?
Not all charities are equal. Your choice of where to donate can lead to significant differences in impact.
Our research team estimates that you can often do 100x more good with your dollar by donating to the best charities, and sometimes this multiplier is even greater.
If this comes as a surprise, youâre not alone. Many donors vastly underestimate the difference between âgoodâ and âgreatâ charities, which explains why many of the best charities to donate to remain underfunded.
I believe the same applies to GWWCâs recommendations, in the sense I think your animal welfare recommendations are over 100 times as cost-effective as your recommendations in other areas. I estimate:
Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
The Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) is 64.3 k times as cost-effectivene as GiveWellâs top charities.
I also have a sense that people working on cause prioritisation would agree that the best interventions in animal welfare are more cost-effective than the best ones in global health and development. For example, Ambitious Impactâs estimates suggest this, and so does the votes in Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week.
I understand people supporting global health and development may be a little distanced by GWWC highlighting animal welfare as more cost-effective. However, people donating to local organisations helping which are 1 % as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities (e.g. supporting people with low income in high income countries) are way more distanced by not even having their preferred options on GWWCâs platform, and I believe the cost-effectiveness gap between such organisations and GiveWellâs top charities may well be smaller than that between the best animal welfare organisations and GiveWellâs top charities.
Thanks, Grace. Fair enough. My comment mostly applies to the direct effects of the donations, but I agree donating to multiple organisations/âfunds will tend to be more appealing to attract new donors. Likewise, I think people at GWWC opting into a lower salary is more cost-effective than donating to the best global health and development organisations/âfunds, but this is again more appealing to attract new donors. In any case, I assume one should be open with potential new donors about why one is donating to multiple organisations/âfunds even if this decreases the direct impact of oneâs donations.
Thanks for the comment, Miquel.
Although this post provides some very good calculations and information, it misses the key pointâit is 100% value-dependentâand the post is plain advocacy.
I think most people would prefer decreasing human healthy life by a few minutes across billions of humans over roughly a century over soon causing to one pet tens of hours more of annoying pain, tens of hours more of hurtful pain, a few hours more of disabling pain, and a few seconds more of excruciating pain.
Compare the paragraph âDo you feel like the above negative effects (...) justify (...)? I do notâ to âBased on my values the results of these quick calculations do not seem to justify (...)â. It reads very different.
I understand you think I am overconfident about my views, but I want the post to represent these, and I worry the updates you suggested would made it sound like I am less confident than what I actually am.
Thanks for the reply, Maya!
On the mission statement: Ultimately, yes, our goal is to end farmed animal suffering, and while we support interventions that improve animal welfare (and I personally am a THL donor), our own research focus is on displacing demand that necessitates CAFOs in the first place.
It would be nice if research on changing the consumption of animal-based foods estimated not only the changes by type of animal-based food, but also by living conditions. I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns increase welfare per living time by 92.9 % and 80.4 %. So I think shifting from eating chicken meat from broilers in a conventional scenario to ones in a reformed scenario, and from eating eggs from hens in conventional cages to ones in cage-free aviaries is much better approximated by a 100 % reduction in the consumption of chicken meat and eggs than by no change, which is what may be naively inferred by observing no changes in the consumption of eggs or chicken meat. My sense is that the research is at an early stage, where changes in consumption mostly refer to the total consumption of animal-based foods, or not even this.
I do, however, think that estimating the threshold between a net-positive and net-negative life seems really hard even for humans (and maybe even for oneself!), let alone other species, so I would be very wary of entrenching CAFOs on the assumption that the lives are net-positive.
Greater uncertainty about whether the lives of farmed animals are positive or negative implies a stronger case for improving their conditions (which is always good) instead of decreasing their population (which decreases welfare if their lives are positive).
I am also not personally sold on total utilitarianism, so I am not sure that I want a repugnant-conclusion situation with CAFOs, even if we were certain the lives were minimally net-positive.
I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns increase welfare per living time by 92.9 % and 80.4 %. So I think we are already close to having many chickens with minimally positive lives, and can have many with significantly positive ones in the next few decades.
Improving conditions increases both total and per capita welfare (holding population constant), whereas reducing population decreases total welfare if lives are positive (holding conditions constant).
On the animal-welfare modeling: What you suggest would be the gold-standard approach, but we need to strike a balance between complexity and comprehensibility/âcredibility for implementation at Stanford and other universities.
Makes sense!
Thanks for the update, Maya!
The Humane and Sustainable Food Lab is on a mission to use rigorous research to find the most cost-effective interventions to end factory farming.
Would it be better to have âend animal sufferingâ as the goal, considering factory-farmed animalsâ lives may become positive?
They will then model the animal welfare impacts of each scenario via a measure of aggregate animal welfare, similar to disability-adjusted life years.
Will you base this on the cumulative time in pain from the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP), guesses for the intensity of pain as a fraction of that of fully healthy life, and Rethink Prioritiesâ median welfare ranges (as I do)?
Thanks for the interesting post, Jan.
Truly impartial philanthropy represents the rarest and perhaps most ambitious form of charityâattempting to benefit all others, regardless of their connection to the donor.
As far as I know, only two major movements have seriously pursued this ideal: some forms of Buddhism, focusing on reducing suffering for all sentient beings in all worlds and all times, and more radical forms of longtermism, taking seriously topics like possible vast populations of digital minds, acausal trade, acausal moral norms, and so on. [...]
I strongly endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarianism, and therefore impartiality, but still do not care much about longtermism, as I think the effect of my actions is practically 0 after at most 100 years or so.
Thanks for sharing! I find it interesting that so many of you donate to multiple organisations/âfunds. For small donations, I think it makes sense to overwhelmingly donate to the organisation/âfund with the highest marginal cost-effectiveness, such that the current global allocation is updated as efficiently as possible towards oneâs optimal allocation (where the marginal cost-effectiveness of all donation opportunities would be the same).
Thanks for sharing.
SalaryâWe offer a competitive salary, which will depend on experience and location.
I think it would be better for you to include a salary range.
AdÂvoÂcacy for egg reÂplaceÂment solutions
Hi Omnizoid,
I have recently posted a cost-effectiveness analysis on corporate campaigns for chicken welfare. I used Saulius Ĺ imÄikasâ estimates from 2019, Open Philanthropyâs adjustment from 2023, and some others I added in my own analysis. I conclude broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are:
168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities, i.e., way more.
0.261 % and 0.718 % as cost-effective as Shrimp Welfare Projectâs Humane Slaughter Initiative, i.e., way less.
Thanks, Alex. For roles in organisations supported by impact-focussed funders like Open Philanthropy or EA Funds, do you have guesses for the difference between hired and best rejected candidates in $/âyear donated to the organisation hiring? I understand this depends on the organisation and role, but any thoughts are welcome.
Abraham Rowe said:
[...] If you forced me to in some hypothetical Iâd guess X [the aforementioned difference] is quite low for many junior roles (<$10k), but higher for more mid/âsenior roles (>$50k?). [...]
Joey Savoi said:
Taking all of this into account, I think a reasonable proxy would be around $1M per year donated to mid-stage/âAIM charities, which would be worthwhile versus one additional founder. However, I think the variance across cause areas is substantial (it could be half this for animals/âmental health and double for global health, or even four times higher for EA meta). I also think personal variance changes things a lot. For example, a top-third founder, I would say, would be twice as expensive as an average one.
Thanks for sharing, Greg. For readersâ reference, I am open to more bets like this one against high global catastrophic risk.
ReÂlaÂtionÂship beÂtween the numÂber of cage-free comÂmitÂments and orÂganiÂsaÂtions adÂvoÂcatÂing for them
All of the shrimps helped transition to electrical stunning, 95 % from air asphyxiation, and 5 % (= 1 â 0.95) from ice slurry. These fractions are informed by Aaronâs comment at the end of this section, here and here.
I was previously assuming 67.5 % for air asphyxiation, and 37.5 % for ice slurry. I have updated to the above based on Aaronâs comments linked just above. The cost-effectiveness is now 1.48 (= 639â431) times as high as before.
Thanks. I will update the analysis using 95 % (= (0.9 + 1)/â2), which results in the same expected cost-effectiveness as using a uniform distribution ranging from 90 % to 100 %.
Thanks for the comment, Alex! I strongly upvoted it because I like that you tried to think about how to increase welfare assuming farmed animal end up with positive lives, instead of dismissing this as impossible, or arguing that factory-farming is intrinsically bad.
I think humans are capable of much more positive lives than farmed animals, so in the long term future it would be best to have as much biomass in the form of humans (and possibly pets) as possible. A world where humans eat predominantly plants and cultivated meat would be able to support more humans, and these extra humans would have much better lives than farmed animals.
I agree humans are capable of more positive experiences that animals, but not that much more. I also agree plant-based foods would enable supporting more humans. However, to maximise welfare, one should look for interventions which increase welfare the most per $. At least now, I think these are ones helping animals, not humans (i.e. not the species whose individuals are capable of experiecing the most welfare). I estimate:
Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns (helping chickens) are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
Shrimp Welfare Projectâs Humane Slaughter Initiative is 64.3 k times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
I expect helping animals will continue to be more cost-effective than helping humans longerterm, at least given humansâ current form, because animals have a higher ratio between welfare range and calorie consumption[1].
Species 5th percentile welfare range per calorie consumption as a fraction of that of humans Median welfare range per calorie consumption as a fraction of that of humans 95th percentile welfare range per calorie consumption as a fraction of that of humans Bees 0 4.88 k 31.7 k Shrimp 0 83.9 3.11 k Crayfish 0 17.5 226 Salmon 0 3.61 33.1 Chickens 1.50 % 2.49 6.52 Humans 1.00 1.00 1.00 Pigs 0.459 % 47.3 % 94.7 % - ^
The welfare range is the difference between the welfare per time of a practically maximally happy and unhappy life.
The supposed health benefits of replacing red with white meat are also questionable.
I have looked more into this, and now believe than chicken meat is healthier than red meat. So I updated the last 2 paragraphs of the post to:
I believe the major drawback of replacing chicken meat with beef or pork is that these may well be worse for your health.
You can always replace chicken meat with legumes to improve your health, save money, or if you are very concerned about GHG emissions (I am not). I have been following a plant-based diet for 5 years. However, know that replacing chicken meat with beef or pork significantly decreases suffering.
I strongly updated your comment now because it prompted me to look into the health aspect of the replacement, which I think is important, and was previously missing from the post.
Great reaction, Eduardo! I wish I got more of those talking to people.