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.

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.) 

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.

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.

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.

Yep, I voted strongly agree from seeing that, though I wouldn't necessarily agree with the non-footnoted version, and without all these caveats.

What do you mean by "invest" here?

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.

 Maybe there are better global health interventions that can absorb $100M over time than GiveWell recommendations, though.)

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

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 the bar has to be higher than "beats GiveWell in expectation from current evidence," because the uncertainty is also a lot higher.

I think that if I were allocating this funding, there is a very low chance I'd choose to allocate any significant portion of it to farmed animal welfare, given that it isn't nearly as neglected as other larger scale animal issues, and I don't think there are good opportunities on the horizon at scales larger than OpenPhil's animal welfare budget. If OpenPhil stopped funding animal welfare entirely, I'd likely want to see something like $50M going to farmed animal welfare, and almost entirely to corporate campaigns for shrimp as well as some cage-free clean up work, and maybe something in the near future on fish that no one has figured out yet.

If I had to guess at "the fastest way we could spend $100M on animals extremely effectively", I'm think it will be something like putting some research into insecticide interventions and scaling them a lot, and definitely nothing implemented by existing farmed animal groups. If there was anything in the farmed animal space, it would be research, but again - I'm skeptical there are good opportunities beyond what OpenPhil can already fund.

I feel pretty disappointed by a lot of the above - I spent several years professionally working on corporate campaigns, and am as animal friendly as they come, but I've just heavily decreased my confidence in the actual scale of tractable opportunities to improve farmed animal welfare as a whole over the last few years — in large part because it seems like very little has worked despite lots of money being poured into the space.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

but (1) the EA case for either would involve math/logic, and (2) many feel empathy for animals too.

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.

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 "speciesism" (first result when I googled the word) is kind of confusing and suggests that people use the word in different ways, with some people using it the way I assumed, and others the way you outlined, or perhaps in yet other ways:

The term has several different definitions.[1] Some specifically define speciesism as discrimination or unjustified treatment based on an individual's species membership,[2][3][4] while others define it as differential treatment without regard to whether the treatment is justified or not.[5][6] Richard D. Ryder, who coined the term, defined it as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species".[7] Speciesism results in the belief that humans have the right to use non-human animals in exploitative ways which is pervasive in the modern society.[8][9][10] Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to have intersectional bias that encapsulates and endorses racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.

The 2nd result on a google search for the word, this Britannica article, sounds to me like it is supporting "my" definition:

Speciesism, in applied ethics and the philosophy of animal rights, the practice of treating members of one species as morally more important than members of other species; also, the belief that this practice is justified.

That makes it sound like anybody who thinks a human is more morally important than a shrimp, by definition is speciesist, regardless of their reasons.  (Later on the article talks about something called Singer's "principle of equal consideration of interests".  It's unclear to me if this thought experiment is supposed to imply humans == shrimps, or if it's supposed to be saying the IMO much more plausible idea that a given amount of pain-qualia is of equal badness whether it's in a human or a shrimp.  (So you could say something like -- humans might have much more capacity for pain, making them morally more important overall, but every individual teaspoon of pain is the same badness, regardless of where it is.)

Third google result: this 2019 philosophy paper debating different definitions of the term -- I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but its existence certainly suggests that people disagree.  Looks like it ends up preferring to use your definition of speciesism, and uses the term "species-egalitarianists" for the hardline humans == shrimp position.

Fourth: Merriam-Webster, which has no time for all this philosophical BS (lol) -- speciesism is simply "prejudice or discrimination based on species", and that's that, apparently!

Fifth: this animal-ethics.org website -- long page, and maybe it's written in a sneaky way that actually permits multiple definitions?  But at least based on skimming it, it seems to endorse the hardline position that not giving equal consideration to animals is like sexism or racism: "How can we oppose racism and sexism but accept speciesism?" -- "A common form of speciesism that often goes unnoticed is the discrimination against very small animals." -- "But if intelligence cannot be a reason to justify treating some humans worse than others, it cannot be a reason to justify treating nonhuman animals worse than humans either."

Sixth google result is PETA, who says "Speciesism is the human-held belief that all other animal species are inferior... It’s a bias rooted in denying others their own agency, interests, and self-worth, often for personal gain."  I actually expected PETA to be the most zealously hard-line here, but this page definitely seems to be written in a sneaky way that makes it sound like they are endorsing the humans == shrimp position, while actually being compatible with your more philosophically well-grounded definition.  Eg, the website quickly backs off from the topic of humans-vs-animals moral worth, moving on to make IMO much more sympathetic points, like that it's ridiculous to think farmed animals like pigs are less deserving of moral concern than pet animals like dogs.  And they talk about how animals aren't ours to simply do absolutely whatever we please with zero moral consideration of their interests (which is compatible with thinking that animals deserve some-but-not-equal consideration).

Anyways.  Overall it seems like philosophers and other careful thinkers (such as the editors of the the EA Forum wiki) would like a minimal definition, wheras perhaps the more common real-world usage is the ill-considered maximal definition that I initially assumed it had.  It's unclear to me what the intention was behind the original meaning of the term -- were early users of the word speciesism trying to imply that humans == shrimp and you're a bad person if you disagree?  Or were they making a more careful philosophical distinction, and then, presumably for activist purposes, just deliberately chose a word that was destined to lead to this confusion?

No offense meant to you, or to any of these (non-EA) animal activist sources that I just googled, but something about this messy situation is not giving me the best "truthseeking" vibes...

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 important philosophical disagreements with them.
2. Maybe I am making a slightly different point as from most commenters -- I wasn't primarily thinking "man, this animal-welfare stuff is gonna tank EA's reputation", but rather "hey, an important side effect of global-health funding is that it buys us a lot of goodwill and mainstream legibility; it would be a shame to lose that if we converted all the global-health money to animal-welfare, or even if the EA movement just became primarily known for nothing but 'weird' causes like AI safety and chicken wellbeing."
   1. I get that the question is only asking about $100m, which seems like it wouldn't shift the overall balance much.  But see section 3 below.
   2. To directly answer your question about social perception: I wish we could completely discount broader social perception when allocating funding (and indeed, I'm glad that the EA movement can pull off as much disregarding-of-broader-social-perception as it already manages to do!), but I think in practice this is an important constraint that we should take seriously.  Eg, personally I think that funding research into human intelligence augmentation (via iterated embryo selection or germline engineering) seems like it perhaps should a very high-priority cause area... if it weren't for the pesky problem that it's massively taboo and would risk doing lots of damage to the rest of the EA movement.  I also feel like there are a lot of explicitly political topics that might otherwise be worth some EA funding (for example, advocating Georgist land value taxes), but which would pose similar risk of politicizing the movement or whatever.
   3. I'm not sure whether the public would look positively or negatively on the EA farmed-animal-welfare movement.  As you said, veganism seems to be percieved negatively and treating animals well seems to be percieved positively.  Some political campaigns (eg for cage-free ballot propositions), admittedly designed to optimize positive perception, have passed with big margins.  (But other movements, like for improving the lives of broiler chickens, have been less successful?)  My impression is that the public would be pretty hostile to anything in the wild-animal-welfare space (which is a shame because I, a lover of weird niche EA stuff, am a big fan of wild animal welfare).  Alternative proteins have become politicized enough that Florida was trying to ban cultured meat?  It seems like a mixed bag overall; roughly neutral or maybe slightly negative, but definitely not like intelligence augmentation which is guaranteed-hugely-negative perception.  But if you're trading off against global health, then you're losing something strongly positive.
3. "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)?" -- well, the question was about shifting $100m from animal welfare to GHD, so it does quite literally come at the expense (namely, a $100m expense) of GHD!  As for whether this is a big shift or a tiny drop in the bucket, depends on a couple things:
   - Does this hypothetical $100m get spent all at once, and then we hold another vote next year?  Or do we spend like $5m per year over the next 20 years?
   - Is this the one-and-only final vote on redistributing the EA portfolio?  Or maybe there is an emerging "pro-animal-welfare, anti-GHD" coalition who will return for next year's question, "Should we shift $500m from GHD to animal welfare?", and the question the year after that...
   I would probably endorse a moderate shift of funding, but not an extreme one that left GHD hollowed out.  Based on this chart from 2020 (idk what the situation looks like now in 2024), taking $100m per year from GHD would probably be pretty devastating to GHD, and AW might not even have the capacity to absorb the flood of money.  But moving $10m each year over 10 years would be a big boost to AW without changing the overall portfolio hugely, so I'd be more amenable to it.
   

1. ^{^}

   (ie, 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 in every respect except one?  I haven't thought super hard about this, but I feel like these questions might have important real-world consequences for simple creatures like blackflies or shrimp, whose experiences might not add linearly across billions/trillions of creatures, because at some point the experiences become pretty similar to each other and you'd be "double-counting".)

Yeah, I wish they had clarified how many years the $100m is spread out over.  See my point 3 in reply to akash above.

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 in every respect except one?  I haven't thought super hard about this, but I feel like these questions might have important real-world consequences for simple creatures like blackflies or shrimp, whose experiences might not add linearly across billions/trillions of creatures, because at some point the experiences become pretty similar to each other and you'd be "double-counting".
4. Something about "higher pleasures", or Neitzcheanism, or the complexity of value, that maybe there's more to life than just adding up positive and negative valence??  Personally, if I got to decide right now what happens to the future of human civilization, I would definitely want to try and end suffering (insomuch as this is feasible), but I wouldn't want to try and max out happiness, and certainly not via any kind of rats-on-heroin style approach.  I would rather take the opposite tack, and construct a smaller number of god-like superhuman minds, who might not even be very "happy" in any of the usual senses (ie, perhaps they are meditating on the nature of existence with great equanimity), but who in some sense are able to like... maximize the potential of the universe to know itself and explore the possibilities of consciousness.  Or something...

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 of made-up numbers (see the ACX post on this subject) -- indeed, I wish the calculator went more out on a limb by trying to include the human health impacts of various foods (despite the difficulties / uncertainties they mention on the "methods" page). But this is the kind of thing that I was talking about re: the weights.

Animal welfare feeling more activist & less truth-seeking:

• This post is specifically about vegan EA activists, and makes much stronger accusations of non-truthseeking-ness than I am making here against the broader animal welfare movement in general: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qF4yhMMuavCFrLqfz/ea-vegan-advocacy-is-not-truthseeking-and-it-s-everyone-s
• But I think that post is probably accurate in the specific claims that it makes, and indeed vegan EA activism is part of overall animal welfare EA activism, so perhaps I could rest my case there.
• I also think that the broader animal welfare space has a much milder version of a similar ailment. I am pretty "rationalist" and think that rationalist virtues (as expounded in Yudkowsky's Sequences, or Slate Star Codex blog posts, or Secular Solstice celebrations, or just sites like OurWorldInData) are important. I think that global health places like Givewell do a pretty great job embodying these virtues, that longtermist stuff does a medium-good job (they're trying! but it's harder since the whole space is just more speculative), and animal welfare does a worse job (but still better than almost all mainstream institutions, eg way better than either US political party). Mostly I think this is just because a lot of people get into animal EA without ever first reading rationalist blogs (which is fine, not everybody has to be just like me); instead they sometimes find EA via Peter Singer's more activist-y "Animal Liberation", or via the yet-more-activist mainstream vegan movement or climate movements. And in stuff like climate protest movements (greta thurnberg, just stop oil, sunrise, etc), being maximally truthseeking and evenhanded just isn't a top priority like it is in EA! Of course the people that come to EA from those movements are often coming specifically because they recognize that, and they prefer EA's more rigorous / rationalist vibe. (Kinda like how when Californians move to Texas, they actually make Texas more republican and not more democrat, because California is very blue but Californians-who-choose-to-move-to-Texas are red.) But I still think that (unlike the CA/TX example?) the long-time overlap with those other activist movements makes animal welfare less rationalist and thereby less truthseeking than I like.
• (Just to further caveat... Not scoring 100/100 on truthseekingness isn't the end of the world. I love the idea of Charter Cities and support that movement, despite that some charter city advocates are pretty hype-y and use exaggerated rhetoric, and a few, like Balajis, regularly misrepresent things and feel like outright hustlers at times. As I said, I'd support animal welfare over GHD despite truthseeky concerns if that was my only beef; my bigger worries are some philosophical disagreements and concern about the relative lack of long-term / ripple effects.)

<<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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.)

I also read sections of your link and skimmed through the rest, but I don't see any justification that relates to the idea that helping animals is misguided.

The argument of the link is that moral progress has sometimes meant correctly regarding some previous moral concern as unnecessary or based on false belief. I think the relevance here is to resist the idea that moral concern for animals must be correct by a "more moral concern is always better" heuristic.

(I think it's a useful argument to have in mind, but I think we have much better reasons to be morally concerned about animals.)

I'm not sure I understand: on one side, we have a stronger obligation to those close to us, but on another side, it is good to help strangers that are thousands of kilometers away

I don't see how this is contradictory? For example, you might prefer saving 10 American lives to saving 11 non-American lives, but prefer saving 100 non-American lives to 5 American lives.

That and the anti-expanding moral circle argument suggests that it's OK (and in fact, in my opinion, good) to assign different weights to different entities.

Thanks for this. I wonder roughly how many hours of "disabling pain" or "hurtful pain" we estimate are diverted by saving 1 DALY. That would help me get a better sense of the tradeoff.

Anyone have a better sense? @NickLaing ?