Thanks for the follow-up!
We already have more jobs in absolute numbers in Global Health & Development—as this is a major area of focus for us and for a large portion of our audience.
I wonder whether 80 k would be open to adding the positions in global health and development which they are missing and you are listing. I have also noticed AAC’s job board has around 83 positions listed, which is more than the 51 in 80 k’s board, so I have encouraged them to consider adding the missing positions.
Fair. I was not clear above, but, by “in the same way that one can currently activate a feature to hide the names of users”, I meant that karma could be invisible by defaul if the feature is activated, but then show up once one hovers over the karma placeholder.
Thanks for the update!
Help people find more promising job opportunities, including in cause areas that aren’t as thoroughly covered by other impact-focused boards such as 80,000 Hours and Animal Advocacy Careers.
Could you elaborate on which opportunities would be on your board, but not on 80,000 Hours’ or Animal Advocacy Careers’? 80,000 Hours has opportunities in many areas in their job board. Do you think they would not be open to including the ones you think they are missing? For reference, here are the opportunities they are currently listing by area:
Great analysis, Hauke! Strongly upvoted.
One note. Higher real GDP per capita is associated with greater human welfare as you point out, but I think the impact on animal welfare is unclear due to the meat eater problem. I believe boosting economic growth leads to more animal suffering nearterm, as there is a correlation between meat supply per capita and real GDP per capita:
I suspect boosting economic growth decreases animal suffering longterm via making it peak earlier, and therefore decrease faster. Relatedly, many countries have decoupled economic growth from CO2 emissions.
However, I think greater economic growth would lead to a greater relative decrease in the cost-effectiveness of human welfare interventions than in that of animal welfare interventions. Humans currently prioritise human welfare over animal welfare, so increases in purchasing power are mostly spent on human welfare, which makes them become relatively less neglected. In any case, this does not affect my prioritisation much, as I already consider the best animal welfare interventions to be 1.44 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
I see, although I think one can argue it should not be possible to hide users’ names based on the same argument.
Thanks for the follow-up! It prompted me to think about relevant topics.
Do you have a sense of what “advocacy multiplier” this implies? Is this >1000x of helping animals directly?
By helping animals directly, are you talking about rescuing animals from factory-farms, and then supporting them in animal sanctuaries? I am not aware of cost-effectiveness analyses of these, but here is a quick estimate. I speculate it would take 2 h to save one broiler. In this case, for 20 $/h, the cost to save a broiler would be 40 $ (= 2*20). Broilers in a conventional scenario live for 42 days, so saving one at a random time would in expectation avoid 21 days (= 42⁄2) of life in a conventional scenario, and contribute to perhaps 7.5 years of life in a sanctuary[1], such that the remaining life expectancy would become 130 (= 7.5*365.25/21) times as long. Based on my assumptions here, and supposing the welfare of a broiler in a sanctuary as a fraction of chickens’ welfare range is similar to the welfare of a typical human as a fraction of humans’ welfare range, I estimate going from a conventional scenario to a sanctuary is 22.8 (= (3.33*10^-6*130 + 2.59*10^-5)/(-5.77*10^-6 + 2.59*10^-5)) times as good as going from a conventional scenario to a reformed scenario. So the rescue would have a benefit equivalent to changing 479 days (= 21*22.8) of a broiler in a conventional scenario to one in a reformed scenario. Assuming the cost of maintaining the broiler in the sanctuary is much smaller than the cost of the rescue, which may be optimistic, the cost-effectiveness would be 0.0328 chicken-years/$ (= 479⁄365.25/40). If so, corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be 250 (= 8.20/0.0328) times as cost-effective.
Relatedly, I have a draft where I Fermi estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 112 times as cost-effective as School Plates (note I more or less made up the cost; I am waiting from feedback from someone from School Plates). This is an organisation in the United Kingdom which aims to increase the number of plant-based meals at schools and universities, and is seemingly regarded as having been successful in advancing their intervention. It makes sense to me their cost-effectiveness is higher than that I estimated for rescuing broilers, but lower than that of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare. A direct rescue operations targets a single animal, School Plates presumably targets a university or schools in a given small region, and corporate campaigns target companies, which intuitively affect even more animals than the latter.
The 2 shallow analyses above seem qualitatively in agreement with what Founders Pledge’s approach of focussing on impact multipliers would predict. On the other hand, I would be nice to have more monitoring and evaluation of animal welfare interventions to calibrate heuristics.
I have the suspicion that the relative results between causes are—to a significant degree—not driven by cause-differences but by comfort with risk and the kind of multipliers that are expected to be feasible.
I suspect Ben Todd’s analysis underestimates variations in cost-effectiveness within causes, at least if one excludes indirect effects[2]. At the same time, it still seems like animal welfare interventions are generally more cost-effective than climate and global health and development ones. If corporate campaigns really are in the ballpark of 1.44 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities as I estimated, and Open Philanthropy’s human welfare grants in their Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio, which supposedly takes advantage of multipliers, are 2 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, then corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are around 720 (= 1.44*10^3/2) times as cost-effective as such grants.
FWIW, I also do believe that marginal donations to help farmed animals will do more good than marginal climate donations.
Thanks for sharing!
According to Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries:
Most chickens have a natural lifespan of around 10 years but same may live up to 15 years! Hens rescued from industry sadly may not live this long, even when kept as pets, due to their stressful start in life.
As an example of an indirect effect, rescues of farmed animals can be filmed, and the videos used to pressure companies to sign and fulfill their animal welfare pledges.
Thanks for the comment, Christian!
I think the 80K profile notes (in a footnote) that their $1-10 billion guess includes many different kinds of government spending. I would guess it includes things like nonproliferation programs and fissile materials security, nuclear reactor safety, and probably the maintenance of parts of the nuclear weapons enterprise—much of it at best tangentially related to preventing nuclear war.
Most of these are relevant to preventing nuclear war (even if you do not think they are the best way of doing it):
More countries having nuclear weapons makes nuclear war more likely.
Fissile materials are an input to making nuclear weapons.
Malfunctioning nuclear systems/weapons could result in accidents.
So I think the number is a bit misleading (not unlike adding up AI ethics spending and AI capabilities spending and concluding that AI safety is not neglected). You can look at the single biggest grant under “nuclear issues” in the Peace and Security Funding Index (admittedly an imperfect database): it’s the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (a former government funder) paying for spent nuclear fuel storage in Maryland…
According to the footnote in the 80,000 Hours’ profile following what I quoted, the range is supposed to refer to the spending on preventing nuclear war (which is not to say the values are correct):
The resources dedicated to preventing the risk of a nuclear war globally, including both inside and outside all governments, is probably $10 billion per year or higher. However, we are downgrading that to $1–10 billion per year quality-adjusted, because much of this spending is not focused on lowering the risk of use of nuclear weapons in general, but rather protecting just one country, or giving one country an advantage over another. Much is also spent on anti-proliferation measures unrelated to the most harmful scenarios in which hundreds of warheads are used. It is also notable that spending by nongovernment actors represents only a tiny fraction of this, so they may have some better opportunities to act.
A way to get at a better estimate of non-philanthropic spending might be to go through relevant parts of the State International Affairs Budget, the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence and Stability (ADS, formerly Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance), and some DoD entities (like DTRA), and a small handful of others, add those up, and add some uncertainty around your estimates. You would get a much lower number (Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance budget was only $31.2 million in FY 2013 according to Wikipedia—don’t have time to dive into more recent numbers rn).
For reference, the range mentioned by 80,000 Hours suggests the spending on nuclear risk is 4.87 % (= 4.04/82.9) of the 82.9 billion $ spent on nuclear weapons in 2022.
All of which is to say that I think Ben’s observation that “nuclear security is getting almost no funding” is true in some sense both for funders focused on extreme risks (where Founders Pledge and Longview are the only ones) and for the field in general
I think one had better assess the cost-effectiveness of specific interventions (as GiveWell does) instead of focussing on spending. You estimated doubling the spending on nuclear security would save a life for 1.55 k$, which corresponds to a cost-effectiveness around 3.23 (= 5⁄1.55) times that of GiveWell’s top charities. I think corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.44 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, and therefore 446 (= 1.44*10^3/3.23) times as cost-effective as the cost-effectiveness you got for doubling the spending on nuclear security.
Thanks for clarifying, Johannes. Strongly upvoted.
Note that these are overall quite weak assumptions and, crucially, if you do not buy them you should probably also not buy the cost-effectiveness analyses on corporate campaigns for chicken welfare.
I think estimates of the chicken-years affected per $ spent in corporate campaigns for chicken welfare may be more resilient than ones of the cost-effectiveness of CCF in t/$. According to The Humane League:
Nearly 2,500 corporate cage-free welfare policies, which protect hens from the most intensive forms of confinement, have been secured around the world.
1,157 companies have successfully transitioned away from using battery cages, resulting in meaningful change for millions of animals.
89% of all corporate cage-free commitments with a 2022 deadline (meaning companies promised to completely phase out battery cages by 2022 or earlier) have been fulfilled.
Just 4% of companies that pledged to be cage-free by 2022 are not yet fully cage-free (though they are publicly reporting on their progress), while only 7% are not yet publicly reporting on the status of their transition.
We’ve seen a complete transition to cage-free systems across industry sectors: 509 restaurants, 269 manufacturers, 174 retailers, 118 foodservice and caterers, 95 hospitality companies, 53 producers, and 19 distributors
As a side note:
Saulius estimated campaigns for broiler welfare are 27.8 % (= 15⁄54) as cost-effective as the cage-free campaigns concerning the above.
OP thinks “the marginal FAW [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis”.
However, I accounted for both of these effects in my analysis.
Thanks, Abby. I knew MacArthur had left the space, but not that Carnegie Endowment had recently decreased funding. In any case, I feel like discussions about nuclear risk funding often implicitly assume that a large relative decrease in philanthropic funding means a large increase in marginal cost-effectiveness, but this is unclear to me given it is only a small fraction of total funding. According to Founders Pledge’s report on nuclear risk, “total philanthropic nuclear security funding stood at about $47 million per year [“between 2014 and 2020″]”. So a 100 % reduction in philantropic funding would only be a 1.16 % (= 0.047/4.04) relative reduction in total funding, assuming this is 4.04 G$, which I got from the mean of a lognormal distribution with 5th and 95th percentile equal to 1 and 10 G$, corresponding to the lower and upper bound guessed in 80,000 Hours’ profile on nuclear war.
Thanks for the comment, Matthew.
This [3.41 tCO2eq/$] is not a credible number, and Founders Pledge as of several years ago said they no longer stand behind the cost-effectiveness calculation you link to in your post.
What is your best guess for the expected marginal cost-effectiveness of CCF? For the purpose of this analysis, it does not matter much whether it is 10 % or 10 times that I assumed, because I think in this case the qualitative conclusions would be the same.
You may be right that Founders Pledge no longer stands behind the cost-effectiveness analysis (it would be helpful if you could link to where they say that). However:
Johannes Ackva, who is the manager of CCF, “thinks this [3.41 tCO2eq/$] is in the right ballpark and not worth getting more precise for an analysis like this (where most parameters are much more uncertain)”.
Note the 0.5%/1%/2% assumptions that nuclear will displace coal that are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting in getting the numbers to work out. The percentages are far lower than that.
Interesting. In that case, GiveWell’s interventions would be better than CCF, and corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be many orders of magnitude more cost-effective than CCF.
Be careful of arbitrary bounding your analysis in whole numbers between 1-100%.
Great point! I do think this is a major source of error in cost-effectiveness analysis, and quantitive analyses more broadly:
In general, I suspect there is a tendency to give probabilities between 1 % and 99 % for events whose mechanics we do not understand well [unlike e.g. lotteries], given this range encompasses the vast majority (98 %) of the available linear space (from 0 to 1), and events in everyday life one cares about are not that extreme. However, the available logarithmic space is infinitely vast, so there is margin for such guesses to be major overestimates.
The supposed climate benefits of nuclear advocacy are contested, and far more credible and sophisticated modeling shows the possibility that there are some zero-sum trade-offs in scaling that mean more nuclear power could result in higher cumulative emissions.
Note the goal is decreasing cumulative deaths rather than GHG emissions. I think there is no difference if one conditions on a given emissions trajectory, but the goals may come apart accounting for uncertainty in the emissions trajectory. It is more valuable to decrease emissions in scenarios where emissions and temperature are higher, and nuclear power may be specially valuable here if those are scenarios where renewables did not scale as much as is currently anticipated.
The lesson is to be careful with BOTECs—use probability distributions instead of single-point numbers, and have several people red-team the analysis both in the numbers and the structure of the calculation.
I agree all of these are useful. Just one note. I often use probability distributions in my analyses, but at the end of the day one has to compare interventions by boiling down their cost-effectiveness distributions to a single number corresponding to the expected cost-effectiveness. If one decides to fund A over B, one is implictly saying the expected cost-effectiveness of A is higher than or equal to that of B.
Another issue is you are taking values derived from speculation and comparing them to measured cost-effectiveness from RCTs with a strong evidentiary basis.
This is one reason I do not conclude CCF is better than TCF even though I estimated the cost-effectiveness of CCF is 3.28 times as high. However, I think one can robustly conclude that corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are more cost-effective than TCF because I calculated their cost-effectiveness is 1.44 k times as high, which is a lot (similar to the ratio between the cost-effectiveness of TCF and unconditional cash transfer in high income countries, as TCF is 10 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers to people in extreme poverty, and people in high income countries earn around 100 times as much as people in extreme poverty, which leads to a multiplier of around 1 k).
Thanks for the update, Cullen! Relatedly, you may want to check my post on Nuclear war tail risk has been exaggerated?.
Summary
I calculated a nearterm annual risk of human extinction from nuclear war of 5.93*10^-12 (more).
I consider grantmakers and donors interested in decreasing extinction risk had better focus on artificial intelligence (AI) instead of nuclear war (more).
I would say the case for sometimes prioritising nuclear extinction risk over AI extinction risk is much weaker than the case for sometimes prioritising natural extinction risk over nuclear extinction risk (more).
I get a sense the extinction risk from nuclear war was massively overestimated in The Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT) (more).
I have the impression Toby Ord greatly overestimated tail risk in The Precipice (more).
I believe interventions to decrease deaths from nuclear war should be assessed based on standard cost-benefit analysis (more).
I think increasing calorie production via new food sectors is less cost-effective to save lives than measures targeting distribution (more).
I see. I think it is better to consider spending from other sources because these also contribute towards decreasing risk. In addition, I would not weight spending by cost-effectiveness (and much less give 0 weight to non-EA spending), as this is what one is trying to figure out when using spending/neglectedness as an heuristic.
Thanks for the update, Ben.
You mean almost no philanthropic funding? According to 80,000 Hours’ profile on nuclear war:
This issue is not as neglected as most other issues we prioritise. Current spending is between $1 billion and $10 billion per year (quality-adjusted).
I estimated the nearterm annual extinction risk per annual spending for AI risk is 59.8 M times that for nuclear risk. However, I have come to prefer expected annual deaths per annual spending as a better proxy for the cost-effectiveness of interventions which aim to save lives (relatedly). From this perspective, it is unclear to me whether AI risk is more pressing than nuclear risk.
Thanks, Pat. Readers interested in air pollution may want to check Founders Pledge’s report on it. They do not have cost-effectiveness estimates, but I guess the best marginal interventions to decrease air pollution are less than 10 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, whereas I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.44 k times as cost-effective as those. So I think it is quite safe to say that the best marginal animal welfare interventions are more cost-effective than the best marginal air pollution interventions.
If you do this, consider reaching out to us to ensure it isn’t completely broken.
I have published a post without karma visibility in the comments, and everything seems to be working fine. I thought the karma would only become invisible to me, but I see now it becomes invisible for everyone, so I can see why you implemented the feature such that one could not turn the visibility back on.
To clarify, my suggestion was about making karma invisible to the person activating the feature, in the same way that one can currently activate a feature to hide the names of users. In this case, I think it would make sense to make the karma invisible in all posts (not just in the ones published by the user activating the feature), and for it to be possible to turn on/off the feature whenever.
Love a good cost-effectiveness calculation.
Thanks! Me too.
Has anyone done a calculation of the (wild) animal welfare effects of climate change? Or is this so ungodly intractable that no one has dared attempt it.
I am not aware of estimates of the impact of climate change on wild animal welfare. However, Brian Tomasik discussed many relevant factors qualitatively, and summarised his positition as follows. “On balance, I’m extremely uncertain about the net impact of climate change on wild-animal suffering; my probabilities are basically 50% net good vs. 50% net bad when just considering animal suffering on Earth in the next few centuries (ignoring side effects on humanity’s very long-term future)”.
Brian also has many estimates of the years of wild animal lives affected by changing land use (e.g. a change from rainforest to crops). These can be converted to human years using welfare ranges, but then there is the super hard question about what is the level of welfare of wild animals relative to their welfare range. I have calculated the impact of saving lives on wild animal welfare assuming the lives of wild insects are as intense as those of broilers relative to their respective welfare ranges. “All in all, I can see the impact on wild animals being anything from negligible to all that matters in the nearterm”. Despite this, I believe there is lots of uncertainty about whether wild animal welfare is positive or negative, so I did not include impacts on wild animals in my post.
In any case, if one thinks the impacts of climate change on humans may well be dominated by those on wild animals, interventions to help these will look better than ones to decrease GHG emissions. Likewise, if one thinks the impacts of saving human lives may be dominated by impacts on farmed animals, interventions to help these will look better than ones to decrease GHG emissions. So I believe interventions to help animals are better than ones to decrease GHG emissions under any worldview.
Nice post, Bob!
So what can explain this strange behavior? Well here’s my hypothesis: Far-right parties don’t really care about animals; it’s just an indirect way to screw over Muslims, and when they’re in power, they will not focus on expanding animal rights.
My impression is that far-right parties are more populist and willing to change their goals depending on what is useful to gain/keep power. So I wonder whether in your case far-right parties simply supported animals to gain power, and not so much because of Muslims. There is still the question of why such parties not support animal welfare afterwards, but maybe there was no longer much room to gain power once they were the largest party.
Hi JP,
I imported this Doc to the EA Forum editor, and noted the 2nd to 4th bullets of the section “Cost-effectiveness of the Climate Change Fund” were not imported.
Nick Bostrom on his new book Deep Utopia, and/or his extensive other work.
My estimation of the cost-effectiveness of rescuing a broiler had an error which I have now corrected. I was assuming the rescue would not change the lifespan of the broiler, but it would live longer in a sanctuary. Assuming 7.5 years (see 1st footnote above), corporate campaigns are just hundreds of times as cost-effective as the rescue (instead of thousands).