Quick takes

One happy news for the world - Poland just banned fur farming. The legislative battle is over, the president of the country signed the bill, which is the last chapter of the process.

I built an interactive chicken welfare experience - try it and let me know what you think Ever wondered what "cage-free" actually means versus "free-range"? I just launched A Chicken's World - a 5-minute interactive game where you experience four different farming systems from an egg-laying hen's perspective, then guess which one you just lived through and how common that system is. Reading "67 square inches per hen" is one thing, but actually trying to move around in that space is another. My hope is that the interactive format makes welfare conditions visceral in a way that statistics don't capture. The experience includes: * Walking through battery cage, cage-free, free-range, and pasture-raised systems * Cost-effectiveness data based on Rethink Priorities' research on corporate campaigns * A willingness-to-pay element leading to an optional donation to THL via Farmkind I'd welcome feedback: * Any factual errors I should correct? (The comparative advantage of early adopters here! Most of the fact-finding and red-teaming was done by LLMs.) * What would make it more useful to you personally? (You'll probably give me more useful feedback this way than if you try to model other users.) * What would make it work better as an outreach tool? (I built this with non-EA audiences in mind.) Try it: https://achickens.world/. (Backup link here if that doesn't work.) PS thanks Claude for the code, plus THL, RP, Farmkind for doing the actual important work; I'm just making a fun tool. This was a misc personal project, nothing to do with my employer.

An informal research agenda on robust animal welfare interventions and adjacent cause prioritization questions Context: As I started filling out this expression of interest form to be a mentor for Sentient Futures' project incubator program, I came up with the following list of topics I might be interested in mentoring. And I thought it was worth sharing here. :) (Feedback welcome!) Animal-welfare-related research/work: 1. What are the safest (i.e., most backfire-proof)[1] consensual EAA interventions? (overlaps with #3.c and may require #6.) 1. How should we compare their cost-effectiveness to that of interventions that require something like spotlighting or bracketing (or more thereof) to be considered positive?[2] (may require A.) 2. Robust ways to reduce wild animal suffering 1. New/underrated arguments regarding whether reducing some wild animal populations is good for wild animals (a brief overview of the academic debate so far here). 2. Consensual ways of affecting the size of some wild animal populations (contingent planning that might become relevant depending on results from the above kind of research). 1. How do these and the safest consensual EAA interventions (see 1) interact? 3. Preventing the off-Earth replication of wild ecosystems. 3. Uncertainty on moral weights (some relevant context in this comment thread). 1. Red-teaming of different moral weights that have been explicitly proposed and defended (by Rethink Priorities, Vaso Grilo, ...). 2. How and how much do cluelessness arguments apply to moral weights and inter-species tradeoffs? 3. What actions are robust to severe uncertainty about inter-species tradeoffs? (overlaps with #1.) 4. Considerations regarding the impact of saving human lives (c.f. top-GiveWell charities) on farmed and wild animals. (may require 3 and 5.) 5. The impact of agriculture on soil nematodes and other numerous soil animals, in terms of total population. 6. Evaluating the backfir

Quick math: In terms of total expected suffering averted, inviting a group of friends to a barbecue where the main meat is beef is probably more impactful than eating a vegan meal by yourself. According to Faunalytics' Animal Product Impact Scales, a serving of chicken requires approximately 10 times as many days of animal life to produce as a serving of beef (not adjusted for quality of life or moral weights). Additionally, most seafood is much, much worse than this. If this meal prevents your friends from going and eating those other foods, tricking them into eating beef will likely do more good than eating a vegan meal by yourself.  Still, this may not be as impactful as saving your money and donating it directly to impactful charities. Saving a single dollar on food and donating it to the SWP will probably do more to reduce suffering than hosting a barbecue.  Also, you might expose yourself to various forms of value drift by hosting a barbecue, but I could see this happening in a net positive (hosting more barbecues in the future) or a net negative (giving up on veganism entirely/permanently failing to convince any of your friends to give up meat) direction.

Potential opportunity to influence the World Bank away from financing factory farms: The UK Parliament is currently holding an open consultation on the future of UK aid and development assistance, closing on November 14, 2025. It includes the question, "Where is reform needed in multilateral agencies and development banks the UK is a member of, and funds?". This would include the World Bank, which finances factory farms,[1][2] so could this consultation be a way to push it away from doing that, via the UK government?  Are any organisations planning on submitting responses? If so, should there be an effort to co-ordinate more responses on this? 1. ^  "Why the World Bank Must Stop Funding Factory Farms", 30 Apr 2024 https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/why-the-world-bank-must-stop-funding-factory-farms/  2. ^ "The World Bank has a factory-farm climate problem", 20 Nov 2024 https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/world-bank-development-banks-factory-farm-climate-industrial-agriculture/ 

MrBeast just released a video about “saving 1,000 animals”—a well-intentioned but inefficient intervention (e.g. shooting vaccines at giraffes from a helicopter, relocating wild rhinos before they fight each other to the death, covering bills for people to adopt rescue dogs from shelters, transporting lions via plane, and more). It’s great to see a creator of his scale engaging with animal welfare, but there’s a massive opportunity here to spotlight interventions that are orders of magnitude more impactful. Given that he’s been in touch with people from GiveDirectly for past videos, does anyone know if there’s a line of contact to him or his team? A single video/mention highlighting effective animal charities—like those recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators (e.g. The Humane League, Faunalytics, Good Food Institute)—could reach tens of millions and (potentially) meaningfully shift public perception toward impact-focused giving for animals. If anyone’s connected or has thoughts on how to coordinate outreach, this seems like a high-leverage opportunity I really have no idea how this sorta stuff works, but it seemed worth a quick take — feel free to lmk if I’m totally off base here). 

I sometimes think of this idea and haven't found anyone mentioning it with a quick AI search: a tax on suffering. EDIT: there's a paper on this but specific to animal welfare that was shared on the forum earlier this year. A suffering tax would function as a Pigouvian tax on negative externalities—specifically, the suffering imposed on sentient beings. The core logic: activities that cause suffering create costs not borne by the actor, so taxation internalizes these costs and incentivizes reduction. This differs from existing approaches (animal welfare regulations, meat taxes) by: * Making suffering itself the tax base rather than proxies like carbon emissions or product type * Creating a unified framework across different contexts (factory farming, research, entertainment, etc.) * Explicitly quantifying and pricing suffering The main problems are measurement & administration. I would imagine an institute would be tasked with guidelines/a calculation model, which could become pretty complex. Actually administrating it would also be very hard, and there should be a threshold beneath which no tax is required because it wouldn't be worth the overhead. I would imagine that an initial version wouldn't right away be "full EA" taking into account invertebrates. It should start with a narrow scope, but with the infrastructure for moral circle expansion. It's obviously more a theoretical exercise than practical near-term, but here's a couple of considerations:  * it's hard to oppose: it's easier to say that carbon isn't important or animals don't suffer. It's harder to oppose direct taxation of suffering * it's relatively robust in the long-term: it can incorporate new scientific and philosophical insights on wild animal welfare, non-vertebrate sentience, digital sentience, etc. * it's scale sensitive * it focuses the discussion on what matters: who suffers how much? * It incentivizes the private sector to find out ways to reduce suffering

Well done to the Shrimp Welfare Project for contributing to Waitrose's pledge to stun 100% of their warm water shrimps by the end of 2026, and for getting media coverage in a prominent newspaper (this article is currently on the front page of the website): Waitrose to stop selling suffocated farmed prawns, as campaigners say they feel pain