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GIVING SEASON 2024
by Toby Tremlett🔹
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Animal welfareCause prioritizationGlobal health & developmentOpen threadAnimal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week
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Aaron Bergman68
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A few theses that may turn into a proper post:
 

1. Marginal animal welfare cost effectiveness seems to robustly beat global health interventions. It may look more like 5x or 1000x but it is very hard indeed to get that number below 1 (I do think both are probably in fact good ex ante at least, so think the number is positive).

To quote myself from this comment: 


@Laura Duffy's (for Rethink Priorities) recently published risk aversion analysis basically does a lot of the heavy lifting here (bolding mine):

Spending on corporate cage-free campaigns for egg-laying hens is robustly[8] cost-effective under nearly all reasonable types and levels of risk aversion considered here. 

  1. "Using welfare ranges based roughly on Rethink Priorities’ results, spending on corporate cage-free campaigns averts over an order of magnitude more suffering than the most robust global health and development intervention, Against Malaria Foundation. This result holds for almost any level of risk aversion and under any model of risk aversion."

2. The difference in magnitude of cost effectiveness (under any plausible understanding of what that means) between MakeAWish (or personal consumption spendi... (read more)

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Jeff Kaufman 🔸27
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Marginal animal welfare cost effectiveness seems to robustly beat global health interventions. ... Using welfare ranges based roughly on Rethink Priorities’ results

I don't think this is as robust as it seems. One could easily have moral weights many orders of magnitude away from RP's. For example, if you value one human more than the population of one beehive that's three orders of magnitude lower than what RP gives (more)

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CB🔸
The question is, how do you generate these weights otherwise ? The issue is, the way I seen most people do it is basically go "the conclusion that animals have a similar capacity for pain than humans feels wrong, so, hm, let's say that they morally weight 1000 or 10000 times less". It's often conveniently in the range where people don't have to change their behavior about the topic. I'm skeptical of that. For most people, the beehive example invokes a response close to 'oh this feels wrong so the conclusion must be wrong'. They don't consider the option 'wow, despite being small, maybe bees have a capacity to feel love, and pleasure when they find flowers and make honey and danse, and feel pain when their organs are destroyed by pesticides', which may be also likely. RP's work is the most complete work I've seen on this topic, comparatively.
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David Mathers🔸
Bees feel like an easy case for thinking RP might be wildly wrong in a way that doesn't generalise to all animal interventions, since bees might not be conscious at all, whereas it's much less likely that pigs or even chickens aren't. (I'm actually a bit more sympathetic to pigs not being conscious than most people are, but I still think its >50% likely that they are conscious enough to count as moral patients.) 
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Angelina Li
"So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF." I hadn't considered this idea before, am interested in you writing something up here! I'm a bit confused how tractable it is to shift donors from AMF -> AW fund versus [Other charity] -> AMF, but my intuition is the first might be fairly tractable.
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Ariel Simnegar 🔸
I've run into a similar dilemma before, where I'm trying to convince non-EAs to direct some of their charity to AMF rather than their favorite local charity. I believe animal welfare charities are orders of magnitude more cost-effective than AMF, so it's probably higher EV to try to convince them to direct that charity to e.g. THL rather than AMF. But that request is much less likely to succeed, and could also alienate them (because animal welfare is "weird") from making more effective donations in the future. Curious about your thoughts about the best way to approach that.
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Jason
I have a sense that there could be a mutually beneficial trade between cause areas lurking in this kind of situation, but it would be tricky to pull off as a practical manner.  One could envision animal-welfare EAs nudging non-EA donors toward GiveWell-style charities when they feel that is the highest-EV option with a reasonable probability of success, and EA global-health donors paying them a "commission" of sorts by counterfactually switching some smaller sum of their own donations from GH to AW.   In addition to challenges with implementation, there would be a potential concern that not as much net money is going to GH as the non-EA donor thinks. On the other hand, funging seems to be almost an inevitable part of the charitable landscape whether it is being done deliberately or not.
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Ben Millwood🔸
Yeah, this seems a little... sneaky, for want of a better word. It might be useful to imagine how you think the non-EA donors would feel if the "commission" were proactively disclosed. (Not necessarily terribly! After all, fundraising is often a paid job. Just seems like a useful intuition prompt.)
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CB🔸
Another option, if they're sensible to the environment, is to redirect them to charities that are also impactful for sustainability, such as The Good Food Institute. According to the best guess by Giving Green, they can avoid 17 tons of CO2eq for 50$. This way, they can make a positive contribution for the environment (not to mention the positive impact on human health pandemics). I've done it for a charity that does similar stuff in my country and at the very least people didn't give any pushback and seemed comprehensive. You can mention concrete stuff about the progress of alternative proteins like they're the default choice at burger king.
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Stijn
"So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF." More generally, I think it is more important to convince an EA human health and development supporter to diversify and donate say 50% of the donation budget to the most effective animal welfare causes, than to convince a non-EA human charity supporter to diversify and donate say 50% of the donation budget to AMF or similar high-impact human-focused charities.
emre kaplan🔸64
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Disclaimer: I'm funded by EA for animal welfare work.

Some thoughts:

a. So much of the debate feels like a debate on identities and values. I'd really love to see people nitpicking into technical details of cost-effectiveness estimates instead.

b. I think it's worth reminding that animal welfare interventions are less cost-effective than they were when Simcikas conducted his analysis.

c. I generally feel much more comfortable standing behind Givewell's estimates but Givewell doesn't analyse cost-effectiveness of advocacy work. My biggest misgivings about cost-effectiveness estimates are due to the difficulty of assessing advocacy work. I think we should make a lot more progress on this.

d. People seem to keep forgetting that uncertainty cuts both ways. If the moral worth of animals is too uncertain, that is also a reason against confidently dismissing them.

e. I don't think we have made much progress on the question of "How much important is cage to cage-free transition for a chicken in terms of human welfare?". I don't think Rethink Priorities Welfare ranges answer that question. In general I'm confused about the approach of trying to find overall welfare capacities of different species... (read more)

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Vasco Grilo🔸
Nice points, Emre! Uncertainty also means a higher cost-effectiveness of animal welfare research which tries to decrease the uncertainty, given the high value of information.
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Mo Putera
Admittedly I haven't been following work on animal welfare cost-effectiveness analysis closely, but this is news to me; can you point me to further readings on this? I agree with the need for the latter; I'm thinking in particular of Animal Ask's systematic review finding "insufficient evidence to break down overall policy success into the baseline rate of success and the counterfactual impact of lobbying". I default to the evaluative framework in Founders Pledge's guide to evaluating policy advocacy organisations but would be keen to learn how to improve upon it.  re: the former, here are some GiveWell policy advocacy-related CEAs: * 2017 CEA of the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention (grant writeup, 2018 blog post where they explained their reasoning in considering policy advocacy orgs in general), and 2021 skeleton BOTEC of the same org (grant writeup) * 2021 BOTEC of Vital Strategies (grant writeup) to reduce harms of excessive alcohol consumption in LMICs.  For both BOTECs GiveWell explicitly mentioned that they rely"on a number of difficult best-guess assumptions and judgment calls about modeling structure. It therefore contains less information value than cost-effectiveness estimates for our top charities, which limits its comparability", so I'm not sure you'd feel as comfortable standing behind these estimates as with the top charity CEAs. And none of the models address the counterfactual estimation issue Animal Ask identified, again at a quick skim—correct me if I'm wrong on this. (None of this changes my general sense that funding top animal welfare interventions are more cost-effective on the margin than GHW.)
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emre kaplan🔸
This seems to be a representative publicly available estimate from 4 years ago by Lewis Bollard: "This is a major question for us, and one we continue to research. Our current very rough estimate is that our average $ spent on corporate campaigns and all supporting work (which is ~40% of our total animal grant-making) achieves the equivalent of ~7 animals spared a year of complete suffering. We use this a rough benchmark for BOTECs on  new grants, and my best guess is this reflects roughly the range we should hope for the last pro-animal dollar. " I think several more up to date estimates will be available soon. For advocacy evaluation, a concrete area for improvement is the following. Saulius's analysis has a really nice section titled "Ways this estimate could be misleading". Other advocates cite concerns similar to those when they argue against corporate welfare campaigns. They usually don't have empirical evidence, but I don't have super strong evidence to show them wrong either. I'm not very happy about that.
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Mo Putera
Thanks for the pointers, much appreciated.  What did you think of the GiveWell policy advocacy CEAs & BOTECs I linked? I shared them in response to your "...but Givewell doesn't analyse cost-effectiveness of advocacy work" so I wondered if you had a different take.
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emre kaplan🔸
I appreciate the correction. When I said "I generally feel much more comfortable standing behind Givewell's estimates" that was for their main page recommendations. I currently won't prioritise reviewing these BOTECS in detail in the short term but as a future exercise I will look into the linked analyses and compare them to animal welfare ones.
abrahamrowe40
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In the abstract I think this would be good, but I'm skeptical that there are great opportunities in the animal space that can absorb this much funding right now! This is like, doubling the EA funds going to animal welfare stuff. I think I would strongly agree with claims like:

  • Conditional on there being several years of capacity build up, animal welfare would use the funds more effectively.
  • From a pure EA lens, some animal welfare spending is many times more cost-effective than the most effect global health interventions.
  • The current most effective $100M spent on animal welfare is more cost-effective than the current most effective $100M spend on global health.

I think something that would be closer to 50/50 for me (or I haven't thought about it actually, but on its face seem closer to a midpoint):

  • It would be better to invest an extra $100M to spend on animal welfare in the future than spending it on global health now.

I'd strongly disagree with a claim like:

  • It would be better to spend an extra $100M in the next two years on animal welfare than on global health

So I listed myself as strongly agreeing, but with all these caveats.

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CB🔸18
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The footnote says that the money can be spent "over any time period", so I think this would allow for several years of more capacity buildup and research to spend this effectively. 

Given this precision, I think the claim should be close to something you agree on, if I understood correctly. 

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abrahamrowe
Yep, I voted strongly agree from seeing that, though I wouldn't necessarily agree with the non-footnoted version, and without all these caveats.
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MichaelStJules
What do you mean by "invest" here? Like financially, or capacity building or anything? If investing includes capacity building, shouldn't you strongly favour animal welfare (away from 50/50), consistent with the following claim? (There's also the issue of spending $100M on global health now vs spending it on global health over time or in the future, but I don't expect this to change the marginal cost-effectiveness of grants to GiveWell recommendations by >10x, unless we're going way out. Maybe there are better global health interventions that can absorb $100M over time than GiveWell recommendations, though.)
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abrahamrowe
I meant more literally, put $100M in an investment account to save for good future animal opportunities vs spending on the best global health interventions today. I'm not certain it's actually a 50/50 item, but was trying to find a mid point.   I don't really know enough about global health work to say - but I'd guess there are some novel medical things seem plausibly able to: * Appear over the next few decades * Require a lot of cash to scale up * Could be really cost-effective
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Mo Putera
Do any of these megaproject suggestions change your mind? Some of them could absorb amounts of funding potentially nearing or exceeding that $100M bar just by themselves, e.g. the advance market commitments for alt proteins idea (cf. the $925M carbon removal AMC Stripe led), or subsidizing alternatives to conventionally produced meat, or funding think tanks to do policy research at scale for which we (quote) "could spend £100m+ easily on this", or funding "10+ very large RCTs/population-wide studies, especially in Asia" (many ideas in the list), or "Healthier Hens x1000" as one example of many in the list of "GiveDirectly for animals: reasonably cost-effective, massively scalable, very strong evidence-base, and almost guaranteed impact", etc. 
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abrahamrowe
Not really, primarily because I don't think the animal welfare world currently has the organizational competency to do any of them successfully at that scale, and not shoot itself in the foot while doing so, with the potential exception of the advance market commitments. I don't think the existing groups have the organizational competency to handle the ~$200M they already receive well, and think the majority that money is already being spent in expectedly worse ways than giving to GiveWell top charities, even if the best animal stuff is incredibly cost-effective. I think that the movement could get there at some point. But if I imagine that much money going to any existing group to be spent in the next 2 years I think it would mostly be wasted. I think many of these ideas seem feasible in the longrun, and are viable candidates for what to try, though I just generally think that farmed animal welfare is significantly less tractable than wild animal welfare or invertebrate welfare in the longrun, so would rather the funds went to scaling those fields instead of farmed animal welfare. Also, it is not obvious to me that lots of these ideas will beat out global health charities, though I think blue sky thinking is good. Also just generally, most of those ideas are ones that don't need to be implemented at scale? E.g. Healthier Hens doesn't seem like it has been able to demonstrate that it is cost-effective to donors at a small scale. Why would scaling it up 1000x go better? It seems like if these ideas could absorb $100M, many could be tried now. The one that hasn't been tried at that scale is advance market commitments, but I think the track record for alternative proteins doesn't look great in general right now, and it isn't obvious to me that R&D is the main barrier — see the margarine issues.  I also generally think lots of untried ideas look good on paper, but will probably not end up being effective if tried. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try them, but I think
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MichaelStJules
FWIW, I thought some interventions they were exploring looked potentially pretty cost-effective, near the bar for marginal animal welfare work, and with a ratio of 7 years of disabling chicken pain prevented per year of waking human life saved by GiveWell recommendations. See here. Healthier Hens has since shut down, though, and CE/AIM is looking to start a keel bone fracture charity with a different and much higher leverage strategy: certifier outreach. This probably can't absorb nearly as much funding, though.
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abrahamrowe
Nice - that's good to know - I was under the impression that it was a good idea, but didn't get much traction. 
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MichaelStJules
Ah, FWIW, the ideas that looked cost-effective were not related to keel bone fractures or based on feed fortification. Their feed trial ended up going badly for the hens.
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Stijn
I think there is much room for more funding of alternative protein R&D, and that is very cost-effective to reduce farmed animal suffering
Will Howard🔹37
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Non-moderator nudge: Given that most of the comments here are created via voting on the banner, I'd like to discourage people from downvoting comments below zero just for being low effort. I think it's still useful to leave a quick note in this case, so people can see them when browsing the banner. Hopefully positive karma will still do the job of sorting really good ones to the top.

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Nathan Young
I didn't realise the comments were from that initially. Thanks.
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nathanhb
Also, reminder to use the agree/disagree voting for whether or not you agree with a statement. Save karma voting for whether or not you believe the comment is contributing something meaningful / unique to the overall dialogue. Don't just karma upvote a bunch of similar statements you vaguely agree with, or karma downvote things you disagree with.
Jackson Wagner33
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The animal welfare side of things feels less truthseeking, more activist, than other parts of EA.  Talk of "speciesim" that implies animals' and humans' lives are of ~equal value, seems farfetched to me.  People frequently do things like taking Rethink's moral weights project (which kinda skips over a lot of hard philosophical problems about measurement and what we can learn from animal behavior, and goes all-in on a simple perspective of total hedonic utilitarianism which I think is useful but not ultimately correct), and just treat the numbers as if they are unvarnished truth.

If I considered only the immediate, direct effects of $100m spent on animal welfare versus global health, I would probably side with animal welfare despite the concerns above.  But I'm also worried about the relative lack of ripple / flow-through effects from animal welfare work versus global health interventions -- both positive longer-term effects on the future of civilization generally, and more near-term effects on the sustainability of the EA movement and social perceptions of EA.  Going all-in on animal welfare at the expense of global development seems bad for the movement.

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David Mathers🔸18
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That's not what "speciesism" means. Speciesim isn't the view that an individual human matters more than animals, it's the view that humans matter more because they are human, and not because of some objectively important capacity. Singer who popularized the term speciesism (though he didn't invent it) has never denied that a (typical, non-infant) human should be saved over a single animal. 

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Jackson Wagner16
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Good to know!  I haven't actually read "Animal Liberation" or etc; I've just seen the word a lot and assumed (by the seemingly intentional analogy to racism, sexism, etc) that it meant "thinking humans are superior to animals (which is bad and wrong)", in the same way that racism is often used to mean "thinking europeans are superior to other groups (which is bad and wrong)", and sexism about men > women. Thus it always felt to me like a weird, unlikely attempt to shoehorn a niche philosophical position (Are nonhuman animals' lives of equal worth to humans?) into the same kind of socially-enforced consensus whereby things like racism are near-universally condemend.

I guess your definition of speciesism means that it's fine to think humans matter more than other animals, but only if there's a reason for it (like that we have special quality X, or we have Y percent greater capacity for something, therefore we're Y percent more valuable, or because the strong are destined to rule, or whatever).  Versus it would be speciesist to say that humans matter more than other animals "because they're human, and I'm human, and I'm sticking with my tribe".

Wikipedia's page on "speciesi... (read more)

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abrahamrowe
I've definitely heard speciesism used both ways, but I think it's usually used without much reference to an exact view, but as a general "vibe" (which IMO makes it a not particularly useful word). But, I think people in the EA-side of the animal advocacy world tend to lean more toward the "it's discriminatory to devalue animals purely because they aren't a member of the human species" definition. I'd guess that most times its used, especially outside of EA, it's something more like the "it's discriminatory to not view all animals including humans as being of equal value" view but with a lot of fuzziness around it. So I'd guess it is somewhat context dependent on the speaker?
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David Mathers🔸
Ok, maybe I was too fast to take the definition I remember from undergrad 20 years ago as the only one in use! 
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AndrewDoris
I share your impression that it's often used differently in broader society and mainstream animal rights groups than it is by technical philosophers and in the EA space. I think the average person would still hear the word as akin to racism or sexism or some other -ism. By criticizing those isms, we DO in fact mean to imply that individual human beings are of equal moral value regardless of their race or sex. And by that standard, I'd be a proud speciesist, because I do think individual beings of some species are innately more valuable than others. We can split hairs about why that is - capacity for love or pain or knowledge or neuron count or whatever else we find valuable about a life - but it will still require you to come out with a multiplier for how much more valuable a healthy "normal" human is relative to a healthy normal member of other species, which would be absolutely anathema in the racial or sexual context.
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akash 🔸
A few quick pushbacks/questions: 1. I don't think the perceived epistemic strength of the animal welfare folks in EA should have any bearing on this debate unless you think that nearly everyone running prominent organizations like Good Food Institute, Faunalytics, the Humane League, and others is not truth-seeking (i.e., animal welfare organizations are culturally not truth-seeking and consequently have shoddy interventions and goals). 2. To what extent do you think EA funding be allocated based on broader social perception? I think we should near-completely discount broader social perceptions in most cases. 1. The social perception point, which has been brought up by others, is confusing because animal welfare has broad social support. The public is negatively primed towards veganism but overwhelmingly positively so towards the general idea of not being unkind to (euphemism) farm animals. 3. "Going all-in on animal welfare at the expense of global development seems bad for the movement." —  I don't think this is being debated here though. Could you elaborate on why you think if an additional $100 million were allocated to Animal Welfare, it would be at the expense of Global Health & Development (GHD)? Isn't $100 million a mere fraction of the yearly GHD budget?
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Jackson Wagner
1. Yup, agreed that the arguments for animal welfare should be judged by their best proponents, and that probably the top EA animal-welfare organizations have much better views than the median random person I've talked to about this stuff.  However: 1. I don't have a great sense of the space, though (for better or worse, I most enjoy learning about weird stuff like stable totalitarianism, charter cities, prediction markets, etc, which doesn't overlap much with animal welfare), so to some extent I am forced to just go off the vibes of what I've run into personally. 2. In my complaint about truthseekingness, I was kinda confusedly mashing together two distinct complaints -- one is "animal-welfare EA sometimes seems too 'activist' in a non-truthseeking way", and another is more like "I disagree with these folks about philosophical questions".  That sounds really dumb since those are two very different complaints, but from the outside they can kinda shade into each other... who's tossing around wacky (IMO) welfare-range numbers because they just want an argument-as-soldier to use in favor of veganism, versus who's doing it because they disagree with me about something akin to "experience size", or the importance  of sapience, or how good of an approximation it is to linearly "add up" positive experiences when the experiences are near-identical[1].  Among those who disagree with me about those philosophical questions, who is really being a True Philosopher and following their reason wherever it leads (and just ended up in a different place than me), versus whose philosophical reasoning is a little biased by their activist commitments?  (Of course one could also accuse me of being subconsciously biased in the opposite direction!  Philosophy is hard...) 1. All that is to say, that I would probably consider the top EA animal-welfare orgs to be pretty truthseeking (although it's hard for me to tell for sure from the outside), but I would probably still have i
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Ben Millwood🔸
This seems like a pretty natural thing to believe, but I'm not sure I hear coverage of EA talk about the global health work a lot. Are you sure it happens? (One interesting aspect of this is that I get the impression EA GH work is often not explicitly tied to EA, or is about supporting existing organisations that aren't themselves explicitly EA. The charities incubated by Charity Entrepeneurship are perhaps an exception, but I'm not sure how celebrated they are, though I'm sure they deserve it.)
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OscarD🔸
I think philosophically it could be interesting whether if we were at 90% of neartermist EA funding going to animals whether we should move it all the way to 100%, but since this is very far from reality, I think practically we don't need to think/worry much about 'going all-in on animal welfare'. I think the Rethink people were suitably circumspect about their conclusions and the assumptions they made, but yes probably others have taken some claims out of context.
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Jackson Wagner
Yeah, I wish they had clarified how many years the $100m is spread out over.  See my point 3 in reply to akash above.
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Arepo
Fwiw I think total hedonic utilitarianism is 'ultimately correct' (inasmuch as that statement means anything), but nonetheless strongly agree with everything else you say.
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Jackson Wagner
Excerpting from and expanding on a bit of point 1 of my reply to akash above.  Here are four philosophical areas where I feel like total hedonic utilitarianism (as reflected in common animal-welfare calculations) might be missing the mark: 1. Something akin to "experience size" (very well-described by that recent blog post!) 2. The importance of sapience -- if an experience of suffering is happening "all on its own", floating adrift in the universe with nobody to think "I am suffering", "I hope this will end soon", etc, does this make the suffering experience worse-than, or not-as-bad-as, human suffering where the experience is tied together with a rich tapestry of other conscious experiences?  Maybe it's incoherent to ask questions like this, or I am thinking about this in totally the wrong way?  But it seems like an important question to me.  The similiarities between layers of "neurons" in image-classifying AIs, and the actual layouts of literal neurons in the human retina + optical cortex (both humans and AIs have a layer for initial inputs, then for edge-detection, then for corners and curves, then simple shapes and textures, then eventually for higher concepts and whole objects) makes me think that possibly image-classifiers are having a genuine "experience of vision" (ie qualia), but an experience that is disconnected (of course) from any sense of self or sense of wellbeing-vs-suffering or wider understanding of its situation.  I think many animals might have experiences that are intermediate in various ways between humans and this hypothetical isolated-experience-of-vision that might be happening in an AI image classifier. 3. How good of an approximation is it to linearly "add up" positive experiences when the experiences are near-identical?  ie, there are two identical computer simulations of a suffering emulated mind, any worse than one simulation?  what about a single simulation on a computer with double-thick wires?  what about a simulation identical
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Arepo
I don't have time to reply to all of these, but I think it's worth saying re point 1, that inasmuch as hedonism 'struggles' with this, it's because it's basically the only axiology to commit to addressing it at all. I don't consider that a weakness, since there clearly is some level of comparability between my stubbing my toe and my watching a firework.  Preference utilitarianism sort of ducks around this by equivocating between whether determining a preference requires understanding the happiness its satisfaction brings (in which case it has the same problem) or whether preferences rely on some even more mysterious forces with even weirder implications. I wrote much more on this equivocation here. Also re size specifically, he literally says size 'is closely analogous to the sense in which (if welfare is aggregable at all) one population can have more welfare than another due to its size. It's common to joke about 'hedons', but I see no reason one should both be materialist and not expect to find some minimum physical unit of happiness in conscious entities. Then the more hedons an entity has, the sizier its happiness would be. It's also possible that that we find multiple indivisible hedon-like objects, in which case the philosophy gets harder again gets harder (and at the very least, it's going to be tough to have an objective weighting between hedons and antihedons, since there's no a priori reason to assume it should be 1-to-1). But I don't think hedonists should have to assume the latter, or prove that it's not true.
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Rían O.M
Can you point to specific cases of that happening? I haven't seen this happen before. My sense is that most people who quote Rethinks moral weights project are familiar with the limitations.  Can you say more on this? 
Jackson Wagner11
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Rethink's weights unhedged in the wild: the most recent time I remember seeing this was when somebody pointed me towards this website: https://foodimpacts.org/, which uses Rethink's numbers to set the moral importance of different animals. They only link to where they got the weights in a tiny footnote on a secondary page about methods, and they don't mention any other ways that people try to calculate reference weights, or anything about what it means to "assume hedonism" or etc. Instead, we're told these weights are authoritative and scientific because they're "based on the most elaborate research to date".

IMO it would be cool to be able to swap between Rethink, versus squared neuron count or something, versus everything-is-100%. As is, they do let you edit the numbers yourself, and also give a checkbox that makes everything equal 100%. Which (perhaps unintentionally) is a pretty extreme framing of the discussion!! "Are shrimp 3% as important as a human life (30 shrimp = 1 person)! Or 100%? Or maybe you want to edit the numbers to something in-between?"

I think the foodimpacts calculator is a cool idea, and I don't begrudge anyone an attempt to make estimates using a bunch ... (read more)

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Jason
<<My sense is that most people who quote Rethinks moral weights project is familiar with the limitations.>> Do you think that the people doing the quoting also fairly put the average Forum reader on notice of the limitations? That's a different thing than being aware of the limitations themselves. I'd have to go back and do a bunch of reading of past posts to have a firm sense on this.
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Raph
I have yet to hear someone defend that. So far, everytime I have heard this idea, it was from a speciesist person who failed to understand the implication of rejecting speciesism. Basically just as a strawman argument.
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Jackson Wagner
David Mathers makes a similar comment, and I respond, here.  Seems like there are multiple definitions of the word, and EA folks are using the narrower definition that's preferred by smart philosophers.  Wheras I had just picked up the word based on vibes, and assumed the definition by analogy to racism and sexism, which does indeed seem to be a common real-world usage of the term (eg, supported by top google results in dictionaries, wikipedia, etc).  It's unclear to me whether the original intended meaning of the word was closer to what modern smart philosophers prefer (and everybody else has been misinterpreting it since then), or closer to the definition preferred by activists and dictionaries (and it's since been somewhat "sanewashed" by philosophers), or if (as I suspect ) it was mushy and unclear from the very start -- invented by savvy people who maybe deliberately intended to link the two possible interpretations of the word.
lilly32
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Despite working in global health myself, I tend to moderately favor devoting additional funding to animal welfare vs. global health. There are two main reasons for this:

  1. Neglectedness: global health receives vastly more funding than animal welfare. 

  2. Importance: The level of suffering and cruelty that we inflict on non-human animals is simply unfathomable. 

    I think the countervailing reason to instead fund global health is:

  3.  Tractability: my sense is that, due in part to the far fewer resources that have gone into investigating animal welfare interventions and policy initiatives, it could be difficult to spend $100m in highly impactful ways. (Whereas in global health, there would be obviously good ways to use this funding.) That said, this perhaps just suggests that a substantial portion of additional funding should go towards research (e.g., creating fellowships to incentivize graduate students to work on animal welfare). 
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Mo Putera
I shared your sense in #3 initially, but 2 things changed my mind: the fact that Open Phil has already granted ~$100M/yr in 2021 and 2022 (h/t MichaelStJules' comment for bringing this to my attention), and Megaprojects for animals, a longlist of "projects that further research might reveal would cost-effectively absorb $10M+/year", your idea re: funding research included, which seems to promise shovel-ready opportunities for scale-up beyond $100M/yr (let alone $100M granted over an arbitrary period of time, as the problem statement asks).
Joseph_Chu30
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This is probably going to be downvoted to oblivion, but I feel it's worth stating anyway, if nothing else to express my frustration with and alienation from EA.

On a meta level, I somewhat worry that the degree to which the animal welfare choice is dominating the global health one kinda shows how seemingly out-of-touch many EAs have become from mainstream common sense morality views.

In particular, I'm reminded of that quote from the Analects of Confucius:

When the stables were burnt down, on returning from court Confucius said, "Was anyone hurt?" He did not ask about the horses.

You can counter with a lot of math that checks out and arguments that make logical sense, but the average person on the street is likely to view the idea that you could ever elevate the suffering of any number of chickens above that of even one human child to be abhorrent.

Maybe the EAs are still technically right and other people are just speciesist, but to me this does not bode well for the movement gaining traction or popular support.

Just wanted to get that out of my system.

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Jason
What is the most effective and appropriate relationship with "mainstream common sense morality views" in your opinion? At one extreme, if we just parrot them, then we can just cut out the expensive meta middlemen and give directly to whatever mainstream opinion says we should. I do think the skew would be meaningfully different but for the significant discrepancy in GW vs AW funding in both EA and more generally.
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Joseph_Chu
I don't know. Certainly just parroting them is wrong. I just think we should give some weight to majority opinion, as it represents an aggregate of many different human experiences that seem to have aligned together and found common ground. Also, a lot of my worry is not so much that EAs might be wrong, so much as that if our views diverge too strongly from popular opinion, we run the risk of things like negative media coverage ("oh look, those EA cultists are misanthropic too"), and we also are less likely to have successful outreach to people outside of the EA filter bubble. In particular, we already have a hard time with outreach in China, and this animal welfare emphasis is just going to further alienate them due to cultural differences, as you can probably tell from my Confucius quote. The Analects are taught in school in both China and Taiwan and are a significant influence in Asian societies. It's also partly a concern that groupthink dynamics might be at play within EA. I noticed that there are many more comments from the animal welfare crowd, and I fear that many of the global health people might be too intellectually intimidated to voice their views at this point, which would be bad for the debate.
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CB🔸
The issue with majority opinion is that 500 years ago, the majority would have thought that most of what we do today is crazy.  I mean, even when I was 17, my opinion was close to the majority opinion (in my country), and I certainly wouldn't trust it today, because it was simply uninformed.  The risk of alienating other people is a valid concern. I'd be glad to see research to determine the threshold which would allow to maximise for both reach and impactful donations. Beyond what percentage of donations going to animal welfare will the movement get less traction ? 1% ? 90% ? Will people just not care about the raw numbers and maybe more about something else ?  For the groupthink point, I'm not sure if anything can be done. I'd be glad to read from people who think more donations should go to GHD (they can do it with an anonymous account as well). But your initial post got 21 karma, which makes it in the top 5 comments of the page, so I think there is potential for civil discussion here. 
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Joseph_Chu
It's fair to point out that the majority has been wrong historically many times. I'm not saying this should be our final decision procedure and to lock in those values. But we need some kind of decision procedure for things, and I find when I'm uncertain, that "asking the audience" or democracy seem like a good way to use the "wisdom of crowds" effect to get a relatively good prior. I'm actually quite surprised by how quickly and how much that post has been upvoted. This definitely makes me update my priors positively about how receptive the forums are to contrarian viewpoints and civil debate. At least, I'm feeling less negativity than when I wrote that post.
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Jason
One could also consider the general EA / EA-adjacent sentiment over time as a cross-check on the risk of current groupthink. Of course, later EAs could be responding to better evidence not available to earlier EAs. But I would also consider the possibility of changes in other factors (like perceived status, available funding for EAs, perceived lack of novel opportunities in a mature cause area that has strong interventions with near-limitless room for more funding) playing a major role.
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CB🔸
Regarding the majority vote, I think "asking the audience" is not a good recipe when the audience is not very informed, which seems to be the case here (where would they get the information without much personal research?) I understand trusting the wisdom of the crowds in situations where people reasonably understand the situation (to take a classic example, guessing the weight of a pig). However, most people here likely have little information about all the different ways animals are suffering, the scale, research about sentience, knowledge about scope insensitivity, and arguments in favour of things like speciesm. Which makes sense! Not everybody is looking at it deeply.  But this doesn't provide a very good context for relying on the wisdom of the crowd.
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Stijn
That seems like saying: "Let's not donate to animal charities because there are people who would donate to the most effective human charities but decide to donate to the less effective human charities when they see people who donate to the most effective human charities switch their donations to animal charities." Probably I'm not following the logic... Also: if donating to the top-effective animal charities is +100 times as cost-effective as donating to the top-effective human charities, that backfire effect (people donating to the less effective human charities instead of the top effective human charities) should be very strong: more than 100 people should show this backfire effect (i.e. remain non-EA) per effective altruist who donates to top-effective animal charities. That seems very unlikely to me. 
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Kenneth_Diao
 I I think this is an interesting dilemma, and I am sympathetic to some extent (even as an animal rights activist). At the heart of your concern are 3 things: 1. Being too radical risks losing popular support 2. Being too radical risks being wrong and causing more harm than good 3. How do we decide what ethical system is right or preferable without resorting to power or arbitrariness? I think in this case, 2) is of lesser concern. It does seem like adults tend to give far more weight to humans than animals (a majority of a sample would save 1 human over 100 dogs), though interestingly children seem to be much less speciesist (Wilks et al., 2020). But I think we have good reasons to give substantial moral weight to animals. Given that animals have central nervous systems and nociceptors like we do, and given that we evolved from a long lineage of animals, we should assume that we inherited our ability to suffer from our evolutionary ancestors rather than uniquely developing it ourselves. Then there's evidence, such as (if I remember correctly) that animals will trade off material benefits for analgesics. And I believe the scientific consensus has consistently and overwhelmingly been that animals feel pain. Animals are also in the present and the harms are concrete, so animal rights is not beset by some of the concerns that, say, long-termist causes are. So I think the probability that we will be wrong about animal rights is negligible. I sympathize with the idea that being too radical risks losing support. I've definitely had that feeling myself in the past when I saw animal rights activists who preferred harder tactics, and I still have my disagreements with some of their tactics and ideas. But I've come to see the value in taking a bolder stance as well. From my experience (yes, on a college campus, but still), many people are surprisingly willing to engage with discussions about animal rights and about personally going vegan. Some are even thankful or later
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quila
the average animal in a factory farm is likely to view the idea that you could ever elevate the suffering of one human over that of an unbounded amount of animal children to be abhorrent, too. [note: i only swapped the order of humans/animals. my mind predicts that, at least without this text, this statement, but not the quoted one, would elicit negative reactions or be perceived as uncivil, despite the symmetry, because this kind of rhetoric is only normal/socially acceptable in the original case.] if giving epistemic weight to to popular morality (as you wrote you favor)[1], you'd still need to justify excluding from that the moralities of members of non-dominant species, otherwise you end up unjustly giving all that epistemic weight to whatever might-makes-right coalition takes over the planet / excludes others from 'the public' (such as by locking the outgroup in factory slaughter facilities, or extermination camps, or enslaving them), because only their dominant morality is being perceived. otherwise, said weight would be distributed in a way which is inclusive of animals (or nazi-targeted groups, or enslaved people, in the case of those aforementioned moral catastrophes).  this seems to characterize the split as: supporting humans comes from empathy, supporting animal minds comes from 'cold logic and math'. but (1) the EA case for either would involve math/logic, and (2) many feel empathy for animals too. 1. ^ (to be clear, i don't agree, this is just a separate point)
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Joseph_Chu
Yes, of course. My point isn't that they are right though. Chickens can't become EAs. Only humans can. My point was that from the perspective of convincing humans to become EAs, choosing to emphasize animal welfare is going to make the job more difficult, because currently many non-EA humans are less sympathetic to animal suffering than human suffering. Giving more epistemic weight to popular morality is in the light that we need popular support to get things done, and is a compromise with reality, rather than an ideal, abstract goal. To the extent that I think it should inform our priors, we cannot actually canvas the opinions of chickens or other species to get their moralities. We could infer it, but this would be us imagining what they would think, and speculative. I agree that ideally, if we could, we should also get those other preferences taken into consideration. I'm just using the idea of human democracy as a starting point for establishing basic priors in a way that is tractable. Yes, many feel empathy for animals, myself included. I should point out that I am not advocating for ignoring animal suffering. If it were up to me, I'd probably allocate the funds by splitting them evenly between global health and animal welfare, as a kind of diversified portfolio strategy of cause areas. I consider that the more principled way of handling the grave uncertainty that suffering estimates without clear confidence intervals entails to me. Note that even this would be a significant increase in relative allocation to animal welfare compared to the current situation.
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quila
That's not the position I was responding to. Here is what you wrote: That seems like you're proposing actually giving epistemic weight to the beliefs of the public, not just { pretending to have the views of normal humans, possibly only during outreach }. My response is to that. From your current comment: Epistemic (and related terms you used, like priors) are about how you form beliefs about what is true. They are not about how you should act, so there cannot be an 'epistemic compromise with the human public' in the sense you wrote - that would instead be called, 'pretending to have beliefs closer to theirs, to persuade them to join our cause'. To say you meant the latter thing by 'epistemic weight' seems like a definitional retreat to me: changing the definition of some term to make it seem like one meant something different all along. (Some humans perform definitional retreats without knowing it, typically when their real position is not actually pinned down internally and they're coming up with arguments on the spot that are a compromise between some internal sentiment and what others appear to want them to believe. But in the intentional case, this would be dishonest.) There's not actually any impractical 'ideal-ness' to it. We already can factor in animal preferences, because we already know them, because they reactively express their preference to not be in factory farms. (Restating your position as this also seems dishonest to me; you've displayed awareness of animals' preferences from the start, so you can't believe that it's intractable to consider them.)
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Joseph_Chu
I do think we should establish our priors based on what other people think and teach us. This is how all humans normally learn anything that is outside their direct experience. A way to do this is to democratically canvas everyone to get their knowledge. That establishes our initial priors about things, given that people can be wrong, but many people are less likely to all be wrong about the same thing. False beliefs tend to be uncorrelated, while true beliefs align with some underlying reality and correlate more strongly. We can then modify our priors based on further evidence from things like direct experience or scientific experiments and analysis or whatever other sources you find informative. I should clarify, I am not saying we should pretend to have beliefs closer to theirs. I am saying that having such divergent views will make it harder to recruit them as EAs. It would therefore be better for EA as a movement if our views didn't diverge as much. I'm not saying to lie about what we believe to recruit them. That would obviously fail as soon as they figured out what we actually believe, and is also dishonest and lacks integrity. And I think there can be epistemic compromise. You give the benefit of the doubt to other views by admitting your uncertainty and allowing the possibility that you're wrong, or they're wrong, and we could all be wrong and the truth is some secret third thing. It's basic epistemic humility to agree that we all have working but probably wrong models of the world. And I apologize for the confusion. I am, as you suggested, still trying to figure out my real position, and coming up with arguments on the spot that mix my internal sentiments with external pressures in ways that may seem incoherent. I shouldn't have made it sound like I was suggesting compromising by deception. Calling things less than ideal and a compromise with reality was a mistake on my part. I think the most probable reason I worded it that way was that I felt that it
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quila
Thank you for acknowledging that. Considering or trying on different arguments is good, but I'd suggest doing it explicitly. For example, instead of "I meant X, not Y" (unless that's true), "How about new-argument X?" is a totally valid thing to say, even if having (or appearing to have) pinned-down beliefs might be higher status or something.   Some object-level responses: This sounds like it's saying: "to make it easier to recruit others, our beliefs should genuinely be closer to theirs." I agree that would not entail lying about one's beliefs to the public, but I think that would require EAs lying to themselves[1] to make their beliefs genuinely closer to what's popular. For one's beliefs about what is true to be influenced by anything other than evidence it might be or not be true, is an influence which will tend to diverge from what is true, by definition. I don't think EAs should (somehow subtly) lie to themselves. If I imagine the EA which does this, it's actually really scary, in ways I find hard to articulate. Sure, there can be epistemic compromise in that other sense, where you know there's some probability of your reasoning being incorrect, or where you have no reason to expect yourself to be correct over someone who is as good at reasoning and also trying to form correct beliefs. But it's not something done because 'we need popular support to get things done'.  1. ^ this reminded me of this: If we can’t lie to others, we will lie to ourselves by Paul Christiano.
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Joseph_Chu
Yeah, I should probably retract the "we need popular support to get things done" line of reasoning. I think lying to myself is probably, on reflection, something I do to avoid actually lying to others, as described in that link in the footnote. I kind of decide that a belief is "plausible" and then give it some conditional weight, a kind of "humour the idea and give it the benefit of the doubt". It's kind of a technicality thing that I do because I'm personally very against outright lying, so I've developed a kind of alternative way of fudging to avoid hurt feelings and such. This is likely related to the "spin" concept that I adopted from political debates. The idea of "spin" to me is to tell the truth from an angle that encourages a perception that is favourable to the argument I am trying to make. It's something of a habit, and most probably epistemically highly questionable and something I should stop doing. I think I also use these things to try to take an intentionally more optimistic outlook and be more positive in order to ensure best performance at tasks at hand. If you think you can succeed, you will try harder and often succeed where if you'd been pessimistic you'd have failed due to lack of resolve. This is an adaptive response, but it admittedly sacrifices some accuracy about the actual situation. Though, what if I consider the fact that many people have independently reached a certain belief to itself be evidence that that belief might be true?
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quila
that is a form of evidence. if people's beliefs all had some truly-independent probability of being correct, then in a large society it would become extreme evidence for any belief that >50% of people have, but it's not actually true that people's beliefs are independent. human minds are similar, and human cultural environments are similar. often people's conclusions aren't actually independent, and often they're not actually conclusions but are unquestioned beliefs internalized from their environment (parents, peers, etc). often people make the same logical mistakes, because they are similar entities (humans). you still have to reason about that premise, "peoples conclusions about <subject> are independent", as you would any other belief. and there are known ways large groups of humans can internalize the same beliefs, with detectable signs like 'becoming angry when the idea is questioned'. (maybe usually humans will be right, because most beliefs are about low level mundane things like 'it will be day tomorrow'. but the cases where we'd like to have such a prior are exactly those non-mundane special cases where human consensus can easily be wrong.)
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CB🔸
This answer feels like a very honest reflection on oneself, I like it.
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Joseph_Chu
Oh, you edited your comment while I was writing my initial response to it. We can infer their preferences not to suffer, but we can't know what their "morality" is. I suspect chickens and most animals in general are very speciesist and probably selfish egoists who are partial to next-of-kin, but I don't pretend to know this. It's getting late in my time zone, and I'm getting sleepy, so I may not reply right away to future comments.
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quila
Agreed, I mean that just for this subject of factory farming, it's tractable to know their preferences.
David_Moss25
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A couple of survey results which may be interesting in light of this debate:

  • When we surveyed the community on what portion of the community's resources they believed should be allocated to these two cause areas, the average allocation to GHD was higher. This was true among both low/high engagement EAs, though the gap was smaller for highly engaged EAs.
  • However, if we compare this to actual allocations (in 2019, since these were the most up to date we had at the time), we see that the average preferred allocations are higher for AW and lower for GHD.

This is in line with the debate week results showing a strong preference for an additional $100mn going to AW, but the continued preference for a larger total percentage going to GHD seems worth noting.

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emre kaplan🔸24
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Some other factors not mentioned here but I sometimes think about:

-PETA used to do welfare campaigns and proudly own up their work on welfare campaigns when they talk about their history. But they stopped doing welfare campaigns around 10 years ago and even published public statements against some of the initiatives. I keep wondering whether that has anything to do with EA entering into space, refusing to fund PETA, and PETA withdrawing from welfare work to differentiate itself from welfare campaigning organisations in response. That would reduce cost-effectiveness of welfare campaigns significantly.

-One part I often see missing from human-animal comparisons is that animal welfare work prevents very extreme types suffering that would be classified as torture in human contexts. If I were to choose between extending a human life for 50 years versus preventing a person from suffering for one full year in a wire coffin, I would choose the latter. Similarly choosing between preventing 20.000 years of non-stop chicken torture vs. saving a human life is a lot different from saving the lives of 20.000 chickens versus saving the life of a human being. I think $5000 is currently able to fund... (read more)

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Peter Wildeford24
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I basically endorse this post, as well as the use of the tools created by Rethink Priorities that collectively point to quite strong but not overwhelming confidence in the marginal value of farmed animal welfare.

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Catherine Low🔸23
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I'm a bit of a Benthamite "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'"

For any plausible (to me) guess about which non-human animals are capable of suffering, there are far far more non-human animals living in terrible conditions than humans in similarly bad conditions, and there just seems to be so many underfunded and underexplored ways we could help reduce that suffering. I've also seen some cost-effectiveness estimations that indicate you can help thousands of animals a lot for the same cost as helping one person a lot. ("a lot" being very vague!)

The only reason why I'm not at 100% agree is because helping humans become healthier might cause larger positive flow on effects, and this might add up to more impact in the long run. That's super tentative and could go either way - e.g. it seems possible that helping animals now could lead to our species being more ethical towards sentient beings in the long run too.  

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Will Howard🔹23
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  1. The basic case for chickens is very strong, even under views that are sceptical of small animals having a high chance/degree of sentience, because it's so easy to affect their lives cheaply compared to humans, and their lives seem v easy to improve by a lot
  2. $100m in total is not a huge amount (equiv to $5-10m/yr, against a background of ~$200m). I think concern about scaling spending is a bit of a red herring and this could probably be usefully absorbed just by current interventions
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Jeff Kaufman 🔸21
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I don't think most animals are moral patients, and so see work on global health as much more valuable. This isn't as deeply a considered view as I'd like (though I think there's an unfortunate pattern where people who think animals are more likely to matter a lot are more likely to go into attempting to weigh the worth of animals) and people shouldn't put as much weight on this as my other EA-related views.

More in this direction: Weighing Animal Worth, Why I'm Not Vegan.

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JackM14
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Can you expand on why you don't think most animals are moral patients?

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Jeff Kaufman 🔸11
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Roughly, pleasure and suffering matter to the extent that there's an entity experiencing them. I think animals very likely don't have that kind of experience. I also think some humans don't, but I think the consequences of trying to draw distinctions among humans in this way would be pretty terrible and we shouldn't go in that direction. More: The Argument From Marginal Cases.

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Lorenzo Buonanno🔸17
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I would also be curious to hear more about why/if you are >~95% confident that pigs are not entities that experience suffering, while most humans are.[1]

Is it about the ability to have second-order beliefs, the ability to have complex language and certain kinds of social structures, or something else entirely?

  1. ^

    I think pigs are much more similar to humans than broiler chickens, so are a better species to examine the difference

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JackM13
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I think animals very likely don't have that kind of experience

Why?

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Vasco Grilo🔸21
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I think the cost-effectiveness of additional spending on animal welfare interventions is much higher than that on global health and development:

  • Buying organic instead of barn eggs, which is supposed to be a proxy for an animal welfare intervention with very low cost-effectiveness, is 2.11 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
  • School Plates, which is a program aiming to increase the consumption of plant-based foods at schools and universities in the United Kingdom, is 60.2 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
  • Corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
  • Shrimp Welfare Project's Humane Slaughter Initiative is 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.

I believe animals are much more neglected than humans. I calculated the annual philanthropic spending on farmed animals is 0.0514 % of that on animals plus humans, whereas I determined that the annual disability of farmed animals is 97.2 % that of animals plus humans.

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Mjreard19
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You'd have to value animals at ~millionths of humans for scale and neglectedness not to be dispositive. Only countervailing considerations are things around cooperativeness, positive feedback loops, and civilizational stability, all of which are speculative and even sign uncertain

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titotal
Can I ask how you arrived at the "millionths" number?
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Mjreard
Not thinking very hard. I think it's more likely to be an overestimate of the necessary disparity than an underestimate.  There are about 500m humans in tractably dire straits, so if there were 500t animals in an equivalently bad situation, you might be very naïvely indifferent between intervening on one vs the other at a million to one. 500t is probably an oom too high if we're not counting insects and several ooms too low if we are.  I think the delta for helping animals (life of intense suffering -> non-existence) is probably higher (they are in a worse situation), tractability is lower, but neglectedness is way higher such that careful interventions might create compounding benefits in the future in a way I don't think is very likely in global health given how established the field is. 
akash 🔸18
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  1. Causing unnecessary suffering is morally bad. Causing intense unnecessary suffering is morally worse.
  2. Non-humans have the capacity to physically and psychologically suffer. The intensity of suffering they can experience is non-negligible, and plausibly, not that far off from that of humans. Non-humans have a dispreference towards being in such states of agony.
  3. Non-human individuals are in constant and often intense states of agony in farmed settings. They also live short lives, sometimes less than 1/10th of their natural lifespan, which leads to loss of welfare they would have experienced if they were allowed to live till old age.
  4. The scale of farmed animal suffering is enormous beyond comprehension; if we only consider land animals, it is around 100 billion; if crustaceans and fish are included, the number is close to 1000 billion; if insects are accounted for, then the number is in several 1000s of billions. Nearly all of these animals have lives not worth living.
  5. The total dollar spent per unit of suffering experienced is arguably more than a thousand times lower for non-humans compared to humans. This seems unreasonable given the vast number of individuals who suffer in farmed sett
... (read more)
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Richard Y Chappell🔸18
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Animal suffering is larger-scale and more neglected. As explained in my post on 'Seeking Ripple Effects', I'm especially moved by the possibility of transformative innovations (e.g. economical lab-grown meat) improving human values at a key juncture in history, even though I think it's very unlikely.

OTOH, I'm a big fan of global health & development on more general and robust 'ripple effect' grounds, which is why I'm close to the center on this one.

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tobiasleenaert15
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99% yes for me.
This is like 50% of the yearly global budget for farmed animals. A lot can be done with this money, and it's not too outrageous an amount that it wouldn't be absorbed efficiently. Speciecism aside, the bang for these bucks could be incredible. 
Moreover, if among the spillover effects of this was lower consumption of animal products, this would be an additional win for public health (at least in countries where too much animal products are eaten). 

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Arepo16
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I'm philosophically a longtermist, but suspect better evidenced short termist interventions are comparable to if not much greater than 'direct longtermism' in expectation. 

In the long run I think a thriving human descendant-line with better cooperation norms is going to lead to better total phenomenal states than reduced factory farming will.

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JackM
At a risk of getting off topic from the core question, which interventions do you think are most effective in ensuring we thrive in the future with better cooperative norms? I don't think it's clear that this would be EA global health interventions. I would think boosting innovation and improving institutions are more effective. Also boosting economic growth would probably be better than so-called randomista interventions from a long-term perspective.
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Arepo
I reviewed the piece you linked and fwiw strongly disagreed that the case it made was as clear cut as the authors conclude (in particular IIRC they observe a limited historical upside from RCT-backed interventions, but didn't seem to account for the far smaller amount of money that had been put into them; they also gave a number of priors that I didn't necessarily strongly disagree with, but seemed like they could be an order of magnitude off in either direction, and the end result was quite sensitive to these). That's not to say I think global health interventions are clearly better - just that I think the case is open (but also that, given the much smaller global investment in RCTs, there's probably more exploratory value in those). I could imagine any of the following turning out to be the best safeguard of the long term (and others):   * Health and development interventions * Economic growth work * Differential focus on interplanetary settlement * Preventing ecological collapse * AI safety work * e/acc (their principles taken seriously, not the memes) * AI capabilities work (because of e/acc) * Work on any subset of global catastrophes (including seemingly minor ones like Kessler syndrome, which in itself has the potential to destabilise civilisation) My best guess is the last one, but I'm wary of any blanket dismissal of any subset of the above.
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JackM
What is the argument for Health and development interventions being best from a long-term perspective?  I think animal welfare work is underrated from a long-term perspective. There is a risk that we lock-in values that don't give adequate consideration to non-human sentience which could enable mass suffering to persist for a very long time. E.g. we spread to the stars while factory farming is still widespread and so end up spreading factory farming too. Or we create digital sentience while we still don't really care about non-human sentience and so end up creating vast amounts of digital suffering. I think working to end factory farming is one way to widen the moral circle and prevent these moral catastrophes from occurring.   
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Arepo
Fwiw I don't disagree that , and should have put it on my list. I would nonetheless guess it's lower EV than global health.  That's a pretty large question, since I have to defend it against all alternatives (and per my previous comment I would guess some subset of GCR risk reduction work is better overall) But some views that make me think it could at least be competitive: * I am highly sceptical of both the historical track record and, relatedly, the incentives/(lack of) feedback loops in longtermist-focused work in improving the far future * I find the classic 'beware surprising convergence' class of argument for why we should try to optimise directly for longtermism is unconvincing theoretically, since it ignores the greater chance of finding the best longtermist-affecting neartermist intervention due to the tighter neartermist feedback loops * I think per my discussion here that prioritising events according to their probability of wiping out the last human is a potentially major miscalculation of long term expectation * the main mechanism you describe having longtermist value is somewhat present in GHD (expanding moral circle) * It just being much less controversial (and relatedly, less-based on somewhat subjective moral weight judgements) means it's an easier norm to spread - so while it might not expand the moral circle as much in the long term, it probably expands it faster in the short term (and we can always switch to something more ambitious when the low hanging moral-circle-fruit are picked) * related to lack of controversy, it is much more amenable to empirical study than either longtermist or animal welfare work (the latter having active antagonists who try to hide information and prevent key interventions) * I find the economic arguments for animal welfare moral circle expansion naturally coming from in vitro meat compelling. I don't think historical examples of sort-of-related things not happening are a strong counterargument. I don't
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CB🔸
My understanding is that Founder's Pledge (I think it was them) tried to look at impactful donation opportunities to boost economic growth and didn't find anything that had a good evidence base and that was neglected. So I'm a bit skeptical on that. Even then, it seems unlikely that more economic growth will lead to better treatment of animals. Right now, countries getting richer is strongly correlated with more factory farming. Innovation and improvements in AI are currently used by companies to increase density in farms. We can make a point that more research will automatically lead to alternative proteins replacing everything but it's very speculative.
MichaelDickens15
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1

Animal welfare has much higher EV even under conservative assumptions. IMO only plausible argument against is that the evidence base for animal welfare interventions is much worse, so if you are very skeptical of unproven interventions, you might vote the other way. But you'd have to be very skeptical.

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Ben Millwood🔸
I think of GiveWell as being pretty skeptical of the average global health intervention. Curious if you agree, and if you have a sense of how that level of skepticism would play out on animal welfare interventions.
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MichaelDickens
I get the sense that GiveWell would not recommend any animal welfare intervention (nor would they recommend any x-risk or policy intervention). But I don't think that's because they think any intervention that doesn't meet their standards isn't worth funding—they fund a lot of more speculative interventions thru Open Philanthropy. I think GiveWell wants to be viewed as a reliable source for high-quality charities, so they don't want to recommend more speculative charities even if the all-things-considered EV is good. (I'm just speculating here.)