Strong upvote - too many people see CEA as an authority source on everything EA, rather than a bunch of staff the EA community pays for to do the safe, repeatable stuff.

I'm excited to see this happen! Some welfare tech ideas seem really promising, and I think this is clearly a promising project — it's great that it's happening.

My biggest areas of uncertainty about welfare tech (which overlap with some you flagged and some of which apply to only some technologies):

• I think that these kinds of projects risk distracting donors because of the double appeal of impact + returns on investment.
  • I think cultivated meat and alternative proteins did this for the last decade, and a lot of money that might otherwise have been more effectively deployed was invested in unpromising companies and on an unpromising theory of change (and I think I am on record saying this at the time so am not just trying to claim retrospective credit!).
  • I think this was doubly true because if these companies were especially promising, they would (and did, at first) attract non-counterfactually valuable funding (e.g. non-EA venture capital, etc). I'd be very excited about welfare tech funded by non-EA money, and am moderately less excited about it when funded by EAs (though given that there is plausibly more funding coming online than can be spent effectively, this is less of an issue).
• Jevons paradox just does seem challenging for this work — I think there are probably many technologies where it will be less relevant, but it seems plausible that most things impacting pre-slaughter mortality on farms will face it enough that it could be a significant concern for many interventions. Unfortunately, these might often be the best targets for welfare tech on fisheries and farms. I'm much more excited about slaughter-focused welfare tech for this reason, and am excited projects in this space are on your radar. But, slaughter tech seems less ripe for for-profits because there is less reason for producers to pay for it.
• Animal welfare science is advancing at a pace far behind what we might need to make lots of welfare improvements. E.g. shrimp stunning evidence is incredibly thin, and the best, most recent evidence suggests that correct implementation really matters for whether or not we're stunning or just electrocuting shrimp. I worry that accelerating tech before the science is settled in many cases risks just cementing further bad practices, and we'll realize it too late. The companies being for-profits, because they can't be reined in by funders if they are making a mistake, could make this worse (and I'm not sure of ways to design for-profits with strong mission-lock, outside of having their ownership run through a non-profit (which sometimes fails), and benefit corporations don't really seem to work).
• The best examples we have of welfare tech so far (shrimp stunning and in-ovo sexing) seem like they were driven by advocacy (or direct delivery), not for-profits. E.g. shrimp stunner deployment seems mostly driven via SWP just buying them for farms and then ICAW, etc. getting corporate commitments, not farms buying them themselves (even if later advocacy pressure started shifting that). Similarly, it seems like retailer commitments and policy were the initial major drivers in getting in-ovo sexing off the ground. I could imagine much of this work will be most effective when paired with appropriate advocacy to advance it.

Thanks so much for doing this! Seems like a great thing to try, and exciting to see the technology that will come out of it!

Hi James! There's actually a variety of EA-aligned charities in those areas. Some that come to mind:

• Teaching at the Right Level (Education)
• NOVAH No Violence At Home (women's domestic abuse prevention)
• ACTRA (reducing criminality in Central America)
• Africa Jobs Fund (economic growth)
• Lafiyah Nigeria (contraceptives provision, so women's empowerment)

They all have their own theories as to why they might be unusually effective.

As for why:

• The differing moral priorities about saving a life versus improving a life. You sound like you'd be more on board with the moral prioritisation of the Happier Lives Institute rather than GiveWell, so do check them and their recommendations out.
• Global health really has a huge funding gap. So it's quite easily to find something that works effectively - you take a working preventative (e.g. malaria nets, chemoprevention, vaccines, vitamin supplements) and you put cash towards incentivising it / tackle supply-side issues. There's just a lot that can be done in this space in ways that replicate. It's quite easy to get into. A lot of other intervention types are just a lot fiddlier.
• The richer a country is, the more arguments there are that effective interventions helping citizens within it should be funded by its government. To be clear, EAs still definitely work on this stuff! But they tend to bid for government funding pots, not for effective giving money, so you hear about them less.