I see myself as a generalist quantitative researcher.
Vasco Grilođ¸
Karma: 7,413
If you had to choose between the best candidate for AWFâs fund manager open position, and the 2nd best plus X $/âyear in donations to AWF, and both these candidates had the same impact if they did not join AWF, and were only available for full-time work, how large would X have to be for you to be indifferent between the 2 options?
Hi LChamberlain,
You may be interested in my quick analysis of the estimates you mentioned from Animal Charity Evaluators. I estimate your cage-free program is more than 935 times (= 0.00107) as cost-effective as your meal replacement program.
Thanks, Mo! I had actually made that comparison, but had not yet seen LChamberlainâs answer.
Trusting these [Animal Charity Evaluatorâs] numbers, your [Sinergiaâs] cage-free campaigns are very cost-effective. Each hen lives for â60 to 80 weeksâ, i.e. 1.34 years (= (60 + 80)/â2*7/â365.25), so your cage-free campaigns improve 71.0 hen-yeas per $ (= 53*1.34). This is 6.57 (= 71.0/â10.8) times the 10.8 hen-years per $ implied by Open Philanthropyâs adjustment of Saulius Ĺ imÄikasâ estimate, and respects a cost-effectiveness of 24.2 DALY/â$ (= 6.57*3.69).
Do you have ideas for cost-effectively moving funding from the best interventions helping humans to the best ones helping animals? Relatedly, do you think the following increase, even if not cost-effectively, the funding going to the best interventions to help animals?
Arguing the best interventions to help animals are much more cost-effective than the best to help humans.
Discussing the meat-eater problem. I have heard this may decrease support for animal welfare by associating it with the controversial view that saving human lives may be bad due to increasing animal suffering.
Would you fund interventions decreasing the number of factory-farmed animals with positive lives? I would not, as they would decrease welfare. For context:
I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free corporate campaigns increase welfare per living time by 92.9 % and 80.4 %, which are not far from the increase of 100 % that would be obtained for improved conditions respecting neutral lives.
Based on Ambitious Impactâs pain intensities, assuming hurtful pain is as intense as a practically maximally happy life, both broilers in a reformed scenario and hens in cage-free aviaries have slightly positive lives.
Do you estimate cost-effectiveness based on guesses for the intensity of the 4 categories of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP), as I do, and Ambitious Impact (AIM) does? If so, which values are you using?
I think AIMâs values greatly underestimate the intensity of severe pain. Feel free to ask Vicky Cox for the doc with my suggestions for improvement.
How do you handle welfare comparisons across species? Do you basically use Rethink Prioritiesâ median welfare ranges as I do, assuming that 1 year of a practically maximally happy life in animals of a given species is as good as N years of a practically maximally happy life in humans, where N is the welfare range?
What are your best guess for the expected impact of donating 100 k$ to AWF as a fraction of the expected impact of donating 100 k$ to GiveWellâs top charities? It would be great if you could give a quantitative answer, and explain how you got it. I would also be curious to know about disagreements you may have with my estimates that:
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-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
What are your best guesses for the cost-effectiveness of the 3 interventions above? Why?
How do your answers to my questions above change if you assume expected total hedonistic utilitarianism?
Thanks for doing this! As I asked a few weeks ago, do you have any thoughts on whether it is better to donate to the AWF or the Shrimp Welfare Project? I estimate this is 412 and 173 times as cost-effective as broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns.
Thanks for sharing!
The results of this analysis have led us to believe that the BSFL sector will:
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end up much smaller by 2030 than many previous industry forecasts;
It looks like there is one bullet missing.
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Hi Pablo. Cause neutrality is âthe view that causes should be prioritized based on impartial assessments of impact rather than on other considerations, such as saliency or personal attachmentâ. As far as I can tell, the best AW interventions are way more cost-effective than the best in GHD, so I would say cause neutrality would imply recommending the best AW interventions over the best ones in GHD.
Thanks, Grace. I think this is the most relevant section of the page explaining your areas relevant to my question:
How do the high-impact cause areas we recommend differ from each other in terms of scale, neglectedness, and tractability?
Importantly, none of the high-impact cause areas we recommend above rank highest on all three attributes of the scale, neglectedness, tractability framework. Each of them excel on various of these attributes that â when taken together â lead to them being impactful options. For example:
Global health and wellbeing is large in scale compared to other causes, but is small in scale compared to animal welfare and global catastrophic risk reduction. However, global health and wellbeing is likely the most tractable of the three cause areas â there are proven, concrete interventions that we know save lives.
Animal welfare is much larger in scale and much more neglected than global health and wellbeing, but much smaller in scale than global catastrophic risk reduction. On the flip side, it is less tractable than global health and wellbeing but more tractable than global catastrophic risk reduction.
Global catastrophic risk reduction is by far the largest in scale of the three cause areas, as mitigating a threat like rogue AI could affect not just those living today but the entire future of humanity (and other species too)! However, while highly neglected relative to its potential consequences, it is much less tractable than the other two cause areas.
The bullets do not really justify the bolded claim at the top because it is unclear which effects (of scale, tractability or neglectedness) dominate, and whether they are as you described (there are no sources in the bullets). Moreover, the product between scale, tractability and neglectedness as usually defined is equal to the cost-effectiveness, and I estimate the best animal welfare (AW) interventions are way more cost-effective than the best ones in global health and development (GHD).
I think prioritising the most cost-effective causes is what distinguishes effective giving initiatives. So I would say it would be good for you (GWWC) to analyse the question in more detail instead of defaulting to recommending with the same strength the 3 cause areas linked to the founding of effective altruism.
Great reaction, Eduardo! I wish I got more of those talking to people.
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 did 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 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 question, Michael! Yes, roughly so. With the caveat that pleasure and hurtful pain can be experienced simulataneously, in which case the positive experiences may be less intense (holding the total welfare from positive experiences costant) than hurtful pain (because they could be experienced for longer).
This is based on my guess that the pleasure during the non-neutral time outside that in hurtful, disabling or excruciating pain is as intense as a practically maximally happy life, which I assume to be as intense as hurtful pain.
Ideally, the Welfare Footprint Project would measure the cumulative time in each of their 4 categories of pleasure, and then one could determine the welfare from pleasure by guessing their intensity as a fraction of that of a practically maximally happy life (as I did for pain in my post).