Interesting question, Aidan! Relatedly, I liked 80,000 Hours' podcast Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it’s so often abrupt & unpredictable. One of the topics they discuss is whether the way the world treats farmed animals could abruptly change.

Thanks, Lewis!

On your specific question, the raising of OP’s GHW cost-effectiveness bar did not affect animal welfare interventions.

In this case:

• How does OP decide on the amount of funding to allocate to farm animal welfare? If it is set to a given fraction of the total funding, how does OP decide on this fraction?
• Does OP's farm animal welfare area have other explicit cost-effectiveness bar?

Side note. OP's GHW portfolio includes the focus area farm animal welfare. If interventions in this area are not affected by OP's GHW bar, I think it would be better to say in posts like the one I linked above that the bar being discussed only applies to human welfare interventions. Maybe OP could call it OP's GHW human welfare bar.

Thanks, Lewis!

For now, I think the costs to longer write-ups outweigh the benefits.

Instead of writing write-ups with a main text longer than 1 paragraph, have you considered asking prospective grantees to share a version of their application which you could publish? By default, the public application could be the same as the private one to save time, but some parts of this could be anonymised or removed at grantees discretion. Manifund does this, and I think it is a nice way of minimising costs while keeping much of the benefits.

The benefit also feels limited given my sense is that few people would read these write-ups, and most wouldn't have the ability to move significant funding or org decision making based on them.

Do you think GiveWell should also share much less information about their grants? If not, why?

Thanks, Lewis!

(1) One factor limiting our funding for THL and other groups is how much of their budget we're both comfortable with OP being.

How often is this the limiting factor? If quite often, then I agree funging would be small.

(2) Room for more funding / neglect is only one consideration in our grant sizing for groups, including THL

I think my point holds as long as all the considerations boil down to you setting a given target funding in $.

(3) Our grant sizing for big grantees like THL is quite coarse: we only consider it once every three years and are unlikely to be swayed by small fluctuations in their funding.

In general, I do not think the consideration above matters much. The situation seems analogous to one eating 100 g less chicken leading in expectation to a decrease in chicken production by something close to 100 g (a little lower because the elasticity is lower than 1), despite the very low probability of eating less 100 g of chicken affecting the number of batches of chicken (which I guess respect at least tens of kg). Likewise for funding? The probability of my donation affecting the funding THL receives from Open Philanthropy could be low, but in expectation the decrease in funding could still be meaningful. To illustrate, if you only adjust your funding to THL in intervals of 100 k$, and set the target funding to THL in $ (instead of as a fraction of THL's total expenditure), a donation of 1 k$ to THL would have something like a 1 % (= 1/100) chance of decreasing your funding by 100 k$ (given a uniform prior about how far away you are from updating you target funding), so the donation would in expectation decrease your funding by 1 k$.

Second, will donating to THL mean that OP gives less to farm animal welfare? Answer: almost certainly not.

I appreciate a donation of 1 k$ is super unlikely of changing your animal welfare funding, but this does not necessarily imply the expected change in your animal welfare funding caused by a small donation is neglegible. For example, if you update your targer animal welfare funding in intervals of 100 M$, a 1 k$ donation to THL could have something like a 0.001 % (= 0.001/100) chance of updating your funding by 100 M$ (given a uniform prior about how far away you are from updating you target funding), thus decreasing your animal welfare funding in expectation by 1 k$. Am I missing something?

Thanks, Lewis!

OP currently uses the welfare ranges that Luke Muehlhauser produced as part of his 2018 moral patienthood report. He lists species’ ranges here, though we use point estimates he produced internally. Luke’s numbers are steeper / more hierarchical than Rethink’s.

I actually fitted distributions to the moral weights conditional on moral patienthood Luke shared in that post, and multiplied them by Luke's probabilities of moral patienthood given in his 2017 report, and got expected moral weights pretty close to 1 (i.e. similar to that of humans):

Would it be possibe to share the specific point estimates you are using, and how Luke (@lukeprog) obtained them?

We sometimes test the sensitivity of species-specific grants to using Luke or Rethink’s welfare ranges. So far this hasn’t often been action-guiding, since we’re already primarily funding work focused on the most numerous farmed vertebrates (chicken and fish) and our funding on invertebrate welfare is more limited by other factors.

I see. That being said, welfare ranges can still affect cause prioritisation?

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).

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.