Hi Michael,
You’re right that the Faunalytics report didn’t include Taiwan, but we used the results from Eastern China as a proxy to the attitudes in Taiwan as this was the best option available to us.
vicky_cox
Karma: 492
I’m unsure what FIAPO do for enforcement, but HSI/India try to improve enforcement by doing workshops with police departments in various states and districts to help them to understand and learn animal welfare laws and how they can implement them as they think that one of the big barriers to poor enforcement is that it is common for enforcement officers to not be aware of new policies.
I’m unsure about the impact of lobbying the government to spend more on enforcement, but I would be more excited about a charity which focuses on enforcement or giving money to existing orgs so that they can do more work on enforcement as you suggested, but again because of the poor enforcement and how difficult it could be to improve this, I would still probably lean towards this not being the best thing we could do.
I think that both feed fortification and dissolved oxygen will increase costs for farmers as they will need to pay for the nutrients to supplement feed with or for the aeration equipment, so this could decrease supply and demand.
I do agree, though, that these interventions will improve yields, which as you say could increase supply and demand.
The problem is that I am unsure of the magnitudes of both of these effects so I don’t know what the overall sign for the intervention would be. I think I would still lean towards it decreasing supply and demand overall, though, as I’m unsure of how much yields would improve but I am quite confident that costs of production will increase.
Yeah this report was split between me doing research into feed fortification in India and George doing research into DO in Taiwan.
That’s a good question, I don’t think it was intentional—probably just the way we both went about modelling things. But I will leave George to answer that properly as to why he used log-normal.
Hi Michael, sorry for the belated response.
You make a lot of interesting points in your comments, some of which I hadn’t considered. As a general point before replying to any specifics, I found it really difficult to model a CEA for a for-profit company so this is definitely by no means perfect as I had to make a lot of weird assumptions to try and make it work, such as assuming that all of the funding would be donated by EA funds rather than met by investors etc. and that we wouldn’t own any shares in the company.
I think you make a good point, though, that financial returns probably should be included in this. Also, again I think you’re right that we could have taken a more in-depth look at the counterfactuals of the co-founders as they definitely could earn-to-give in this position, though as you said they would likely take much lower salaries than the average start-up founder. Both of these factors would make this intervention more cost effective, though I am unsure by how much. Thinking about this, this just makes me more excited for plant-based start-ups to focus on plant-based seafood! Though I still don’t think that CE would be best placed to help this start-up, I think the market would do a much better job.
1. That is a good point, I did implicitly try and account for the probability of success when estimating the probability of the different potential scenarios (IF launch, we launch, both launch) in this model, but this was never done explicitly as its own factor. To account for this, we could multiply the expected impact by the expected probability of success (the average food start-up has a ~10% probability of success).
2. Yeah I agree that this would be more realistic, we just assumed that all funding would be donated to make the CEA simpler.
As mentioned in comments above, yeah I agree with this but just assumed that all costs would be funded by donations to try and keep the CEA simple (modelling the cost effectiveness of a for-profit company ended up being more difficult than I thought it would be).
Apologies for the belated response, I missed this!
The pitch for shrimp welfare would be similar to the pitch of invertebrate welfare in general where even if the case for shrimp sentience is weaker than the case for mammal, bird, and fish sentience, the expected value of helping shrimp might be higher than the expected value of helping mammals, birds, and fish due to the large scale of their suffering. For example, fishcount estimate that 51-167 billion fish were slaughtered in 2017, and 210-530 billion shrimps and prawns were slaughtered.
I think the case for working to end the practice of eyestalk ablation is particularly strong as it is such a horrific practice that it could be seen as low hanging fruit. This could then be a good ‘foot-in-the-door’ for other shrimp welfare issues.
Yeah, welfare points are a per-animal metric, but they are discounted by our best guess at the likelihood of sentience of each animal so we have estimated that shrimp have a 10% likelihood of sentience and cows, to use your example, have a 75% likelihood of sentience. So an intervention that affects shrimp would have to affect sufficiently more welfare points than an intervention that affects cow to be considered cost-effective. I hope this makes sense!
To add to what Sam said—we are also planning on publishing the other health and development policy ideas that we did full, deep-dive reports on but didn’t end up recommending on our website and at least one of these, our report on air quality, will also be published on the forum!
Hi Clare—thanks for your response! Yeah, I do think enforcement really is the main concern for this intervention, and the experts we spoke with also mentioned that bribes are common in the areas where they have worked (mainly Sub-Saharan Africa).
As mentioned in the report we have tried to somewhat get around this issue in our country selection by selecting countries that seem to have good enforcement of other road traffic safety laws (either from eg. the percentage seat-belt or helmet wearing rate or from the average rating given to the enforcement mechanisms of that country by different stakeholders of that country). This definitely isn’t totally bypassing the issue, though, and these numbers can only tell us so much. This is definitely the limitation of the desktop research we do and we will stress the importance of country scoping visits to the founders of this charity so they can better get a sense of what things are like on the ground and hope that they can find a country where these enforcement issues seem surmountable.Re the motorcycle helmet law: That’s interesting! We did consider motorcycle helmet laws but ultimately ruled them out in favour of speed limits and seat belt laws as they seemed more scalable (a bigger issue in more countries).
Hi, thanks for your comment and apologies for the somewhat belated response!
On increasing travel times—yeah I think this is a really interesting point and something that we didn’t consider when modeling the CEA. I think it may be best to discount the income effects of this intervention as a result of this. After a quick Google search, I have found some data on this from the UK—“Each 1 mph reduction in average traffic speed costs the UK economy in excess of £1Bn in lost productivity through extended journey times” (https://www.abd.org.uk/press-release-hes-proposed-motorway-speed-limit-reduction-to-60mph-borders-on-economic-vandalism/). This suggests the impact could be quite significant, though as the World Health Organization found that the economic impact of road traffic injuries is approximately 3% of GDP, I think the economic impacts would still be net-positive.
Clare’s point on traffic jams is an important consideration here, both for your point and for the promise of this intervention—if drivers are never getting up to the speed limit, then decreasing them looks less promising. This was a concern we were aware of, but we felt unable to address from our desktop research, but this is something we will highlight to the founders of this organization, and it is something that they will be able to assess when doing country scoping visits.
Perhaps these considerations make advocacy on seat-belt legislation look more promising than advocacy to reduce speed limits. This would be good to pass on to the potential founders so that they can weigh up these considerations.
On the stress of getting pulled over by the police, I am not sure I can comment usefully on this as I don’t know too much about it, but thanks for raising the concern, and thanks Clare for the insight from Sierra Leone.
Hey Devon, thanks for your comment!
As you can see above, Larks raised a similar concern in their comment. After a quick Google search, I have found some data on this from the UK—“Each 1 mph reduction in average traffic speed costs the UK economy in excess of £1Bn in lost productivity through extended journey times” (https://www.abd.org.uk/press-release-hes-proposed-motorway-speed-limit-reduction-to-60mph-borders-on-economic-vandalism/). This suggests the impact could be quite significant and could give us reason to reduce the economic impacts that are currently being modeled to account for this lost productivity. However, as the World Health Organization found that the economic impact of road traffic injuries is approximately 3% of GDP, I think the economic impacts would still be net-positive.
Hi Peter, thanks for your comment!
I must admit I have not really thought about this before, but intuitively it still seems important to have appropriate road safety legislation like speed limits in place even if it is robocars following them rather than human drivers. In fact, I could see it as important to have appropriate speed limits in place before the introduction of robocars in case robocars are programmed to drive faster than is safe as a reflection of a too high speed limit.
I think the use of seat belts is still a good norm to have, even if robocars will drive safer than human drivers.
I’m not sure whether this would affect the timing of the transition, but if the robocar was going to be programmed with a speed limit anyway then lowering the speed limit doesn’t seem like it would slow down the transition (not sure on this though).
Hi! Maybe I’m missing it but I can’t seem to find the venue for this—where will it be? Thanks :)
Hi—sorry for the belated response!
For policy obviously the overall scale of the number of people/animals you can help is much bigger, but then we have to discount this based on the expected enforcement rate and also by the fact that we expect the overall probability of success of policy advocacy to be lower on average.For the expected enforcement rate we look at existing enforcement rates of the policy in similar/neighbouring countries (if applicable) and the existing enforcement rates of similar policies (eg. when estimating the enforcement rate of seatbelt legislation we may look at the enforcement rates of speed limit legislation by looking at that % of people stick to the speed limit). This can be easier or more difficult to do depending on the intervention and the availability of information. In cases where there is less relevant information we might use proxies such as the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index.
For the probability of success we usually try to do a case study analysis of advocacy efforts by other organisations in other countries and take the average success rate of these campaigns, with a note that we are more likely to find information on successful campaigns so this might be somewhat of an overestimate on the overall probability of success.
It is definitely difficult to do research into these areas where there is so much suffering involved, and as you mentioned it is often the areas of suffering that you just had no idea about that are the worst—learning a new way that animals suffer. It’s also important, of course, to make sure that these emotions don’t bias us towards interventions that are more horrific but less tractable etc.
For me the most difficult thing I have had to research is the use of glue traps for rodents as I just didn’t know glue traps existed before doing this research and the photos and descriptions of their use were particularly horrible, this was without a doubt the saddest I had felt whilst doing research. The way I console myself is that I know that I am doing this research because we are trying to help these animals, or the most animals we can, and that definitely feels worthwhile.
Hi Pat—We’re currently coordinating on which comments will receive prizes and will let Manifold and the commenters know soon.
The fish idea would resolve the Fish welfare policy advocacy market as a YES. Thank you!
Hi – thanks for your comment.
You’re correct in that we are prioritizing for the greatest number of fish on farms rather than the total tonnage produced. Our claim that Greece is the largest producer in the EU (and the 15th largest in the world) is based on estimates (using the FAO data linked) of the number of fish alive on farms in each country at any given time. This has to do with the total farmed as well as their lifespans and expected mortality rates on farms pre-slaughter.
We generally prioritize farmed fish as you can impact their whole lives, whereas for wild-caught fish, you can only impact the end of their lives. However, if the new charity chooses to focus on humane slaughter, then there could be scope to focus on both farmed and wild-caught fish. Note, however, that protections for wild-caught fish, to the best of my knowledge, don’t exist in legislation anywhere yet, so we might not expect this to be very tractable. Overall, at least in the short-term, we would recommend that a new org should focus on farmed fish and should try to push for the inclusion of stocking density and water quality parameters as well as humane slaughter in any ask where possible. Still, we could see that the new org chooses to only focus on slaughter – at least at first – as this seems to be what the rest of the movement is likely to focus on, and there could be benefits from all being on the same page and asking for the same thing.
Hi Michael, thanks for your comment!
These are interesting ideas that could be worth considering, but you’re definitely right that any interventions that work on a state-wide/nation-wide scale will be very difficult to enforce and this poor enforcement will likely be the limiting factor to the success of any intervention like this. I will make a note of these ideas, though, to have a look into when I next have the chance, thanks!