Yeah, more research on questions like whether beef reduces net suffering would be extremely useful, both for my personal donation decisions and more importantly for potentially shifting the priorities of the animal movement overall. My worries about funging here ultimately derive from my thinking that the movement is missing some crucial considerations (or else just has different values from me), and the best way to fix that would be for more people to highlight those considerations.

I'm unsure how more research on the welfare of populous wild animals would shift people's views. I guess relative to mainstream animal-rights ideology that says more wildlife is good, there's only really room to move in a more pessimistic direction. But for people already thinking about wild-animal welfare, it's less clear. To me it's obvious that I would be horrified to be born as a random wild animal, but I'm often surprised by how little some classical utilitarians care about suffering relative to happiness.

This is one reason I'm more inclined these days to promote suffering-focused philosophy rather than generic antispeciesism. However, there aren't that many ways to donate to suffering-focused philosophy at the moment, and depending on who is funded, that approach has its own possible downside risks. For example, I've considered whether the antinatalism movement could benefit from funding (because it's people-rich and money-poor), but a lot of antinatalists are abrasive and may give suffering-focused ethics a bad name. Picking the right antinatalists (and other advocates of suffering-focused ethics) to fund would be a lot of work (but might be worth it). Also, this philosophy work doesn't scratch my itch to have some amount of concrete suffering-reduction impact in the near term.

Your question is fairly relevant to the discussion because if I thought there was net positive value in the lives of wild animals, then I would have a lot fewer concerns about non-welfare-reform animal charities.

I've had it on my todo list to check out that video and paper, but I probably won't get to it any time soon, so for now I'll just reply to the slides you asked about. :)

Personally I would not want to live even as the two surviving adult fish, because they probably experience a number of moments of extreme suffering, at least during death if not earlier. They may be fearful of predators, they face unpleasant temperatures or other bad environmental conditions without being able to control them the way humans do with air conditioning and heating, they may face long periods of low food, there might be intraspecific aggression and sexual harassment (I don't know if those behaviors apply to Atlantic cod, but they are common in some fish species), and there would be many other hardships. Most of these moments of suffering probably wouldn't feel that bad, but a few of them might be unbearably awful.

I said that I "personally" wouldn't want to live as one of these surviving fish, but you might say that the real question is whether they would want to have these lives rather than not existing. We can't ask fish that question, but if we imagine humans having similar lives as these fish, we could ask such humans that question. Maybe many of those humans would say during many moments of their lives that they were on balance glad to exist. However, I suspect that during some moments, such as the peak pain of dying, they would often change their minds and wish they hadn't existed. Therefore, there's no single individual whom we can ask whether his/her life was net positive; there are multiple "individuals" within the animal's life, some of whom are glad to exist and some of whom are horrified to exist. How we weigh up these conflicting opinions is ultimately a judgment call, and no amount of further empirical data on wild-animal welfare will resolve it. I take a suffering-focused approach to this dilemma and say that it's not acceptable for the happier moments of the animal's life to impose unbearable suffering on some other moments of the animal's life. So for any animal that has moments of unmitigated, unbearable agony (as most animals do, if only when dying), its life is net negative in my view.

But most people don't take this suffering-focused approach. Many people think enough happy moments of life can outweigh something as awful as being eaten alive. So next I'll discuss the specific numbers in those slides.

If a baby fish is only enduring 10 seconds of agony when dying, as the first slide suggests, then it's presumably dying from predation (or maybe a severe physical injury like being crushed or something). The next slide suggests that maybe the pain of predation is 100/100, compared against a presumed positive welfare of 0.1/100 for ordinary life. So getting eaten alive is only 1000 times worse than the goodness of a typical moment of life. That might seem plausible if we only glance at the numbers, but it's not at all plausible if we actually think about what it implies. Imagine that you endure getting eaten alive for 1 minute. These numbers say that a mere 1000 minutes of ordinary life could compensate for that. 1000 minutes is 16.7 hours, slightly more than the amount of time a typical person is awake in a day. So this ratio says that even if you spend a minute every day experiencing what it's like to be eaten alive, then your life can still be welfare-neutral. I wonder if anyone would actually sign up for that. One of the least suffering-averse trade ratios I've heard someone endorse was that he'd be willing to experience being eaten alive for an extra week of life (IIRC; that conversation was a long time ago). (I guess there are also a few people who say even more extreme things like "I'd rather be alive and tortured forever than not exist", though I expect they'd change their minds pretty quickly when the torture started.)

One possible argument is that it's illegitimate to rely on our human intuitions about this tradeoff, because r-strategists may have evolved different pain-pleasure trade ratios based on the situation they face. For example, almost all fish babies will die by default, so if there's an opportunity to take a dangerous risk in order to gain some slight advantage, they should probably take it, since they have almost no chance of winning otherwise. Therefore, maybe they need to be less averse to suffering (or at least less afraid of suffering) than we would be. This might be the case, but it's a very theoretical argument, so I'm wary of putting too much stock in it. Of course, any estimate we have of how much suffering and pleasure exist in nature will be very speculative, so if I were a classical utilitarian who thought a minute of extreme suffering might be outweighable by a few days, weeks, or months of ordinary life in the wild, then I would have some uncertainty about the net hedonic balance of nature. But in my own case, I don't think it's ok to force extreme suffering on one for the pleasure of another -- much less imposing extreme suffering on 1,999,998 for the pleasure of 2. (If we assume a 10% hatch rate and a 10% chance of sentience, then this comparison is actually 19,999.98 vs 2. And if we look at individual organism-moments of experience, the 2 surviving fish have a lot of organism-moments.)

As I mentioned, the slides seem to be assuming deaths by predation given how short the duration of suffering is. Death by almost anything else would probably take hours, days, weeks, etc, although the intensity of pain during that time would usually be a lot lower than the intensity of pain during predation. This article says:

A new study has uncovered the reason why 90 percent of fish larvae are biologically doomed to die mere days after hatching. This understanding of the mechanism that kills off the majority of the world's fish larvae may help find a solution to the looming fish crisis in the world. The research suggests that "hydrodynamic starvation," or the physical inability to feed due to environmental incompatibility, is the reason so many fish larvae perish.

So maybe rather than 10 seconds, the period of pain while dying should be measured in hours or days? 1 day = 86,400 seconds. Of course, the badness of most of those seconds would be a lot less than 100/100.

See also: "Is There More Suffering Than Happiness in Nature? A Reply to Michael Plant".

Great point! Michael said something similar:

the funders may have specific total funding targets below filling their near term RFMF, and the closer to those targets, the less they give.

For example, the funders might aim for a marginal utility of 6 utilons per dollar, so using your example numbers, they would only want to fund the org up to $800K. And if someone else is already giving $100K, they would only want to give $700K.

My guess would be that in practice, funders probably aren't thinking too much about a curve of marginal utility per dollar but are more thinking something like: Is this org working on an important problem? Do they need more money to continue/expand this particular work? What percent of that funding gap do we want to fill?

But this is just my speculation about how I imagine people would make grants when they have lots of charities to review and lots of money to disburse, with limited time to investigate each one in depth. If they have time to review more detailed plans about what each incremental chunk of money would be spent on, they might get closer to the marginal-utility approach you mention.

But I suppose there could still be funging; the funders may have specific total funding targets below filling their near term RFMF, and the closer to those targets, the less they give.

Yeah. Or it could work in reverse: if they commit to giving only, say, 50% of an org's budget, then if individual donors give more, this "unlocks" the ability for the big donors to give more also. However, Karnofsky says it's a myth that Open Phil has a hard rule like this. Also, as I noted in the post, I wouldn't want them to have a hard rule like this, because it could leave really valuable orgs significantly underfunded, which seems bad.

Probably the answer of how it actually works varies depending on the specific case. For example, I imagine that an org that everything thinks is outstanding would be more likely to get fully topped up, while an org that seems average wouldn't be. But as an outsider, I can only speculate about how these decisions are made, which is why I posted this question.

THL also regrants through the Open Wing Alliance to small orgs that the EA Animal Welfare Fund and ACE Movement Grants sometimes support, and is expanding internationally to neglected regions where it might (speculating here) crowd out other small charities, so there might be some funging there, too. But they're still doing substantial corporate welfare work concentrated in specific countries, like the US and the UK. I would guess other large charities working on corporate animal welfare reform are more concentrated in a few regions, so would funge less this way.

I suppose there could also be some funging on the corporate animal welfare work, because the next targets could be relatively less important and orgs would shift to other work, now or in the future. But this seems much less important as a concern.

Thanks! That's encouraging to hear (although it would be better for animals if the charities did fill their funding gaps).

There could still be some funging if a smaller remaining funding gap discourages other donors, such as the Animal Welfare Fund, from giving more, but at least the effect is probably less drastic than if the org hits its target RFMF fully.