Epistemic status: possibly born as a misreading of some other post.

Shrimp are extremely cute^[1]. I expect this to be an obvious truth on the EA Forum, so I won't elaborate or bother checking any sources. Maybe I'll ask an LLM later.

Proximity to cute animals makes humans happier. My new org uses this for a new intervention with huge potential impact.

Background

While interaction between humans and animals has been used by various organisations in the past, the animals used for this are usually inefficient and low potential animals like horses and dogs. These take a long time to breed and the estimated worldwide population of dogs, for example, is less than 1 billion^[2] - not nearly enough for a future-scalable intervention. We propose using a much more abundant animal - shrimp.

Potential Impact

The global population of shrimp caught per year is estimated to be 25 trillion^[3]. If every such shrimp made just a single person happy, that means a total of 25 trillion happy people - while current interventions are capped at just 9 billion^[4]. Our intervention is thus 1,000x as impactful as top GiveWell charities.

Pilot

We partnered with the Lives Institute who agreed to evaluate our draft of a pilot project suggestion we sent them by email. Upon opening the file and just pondering our idea, they immediately became so profoundly happier that they decided to change the name of their organisation to the Happier Lives Institute - the change is already apparent on their website.

Work Plan for 2026

Since all our employees are vegan, getting one of them to bring us some live shrimp has proven difficult. Thus our current activity is limited to brand building and fundraising.

To that effect, we are announcing the newly available shrimp plushies on our website.

Future Work

Our path to impact is clearly laid out:

1. Establish a shadowy cabal to take over the global shrimp industry. Funding and connections to be supplied by Peter Thiel. Possible collaboration with our sister organisation, the Welfare Fish Initiative.
2. Use gain-of-function biological methods to enhance shrimp to make them more mobile and increase radiative happiness.
3. ???
4. Happy, wonderful utopia.

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=cute+shrimp ↩︎
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog ↩︎
3. https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/shrimp-the-animals-most-commonly-used-and-killed-for-food-production/ ↩︎
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population ↩︎