an important side effect of global-health funding is that it buys us a lot of goodwill and mainstream legibility

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.)

Sadly, it looks like the debate week will end without many of the stronger arguments[1] for Global Health being raised, at least at the post level.

1. Defined roughly as 'the points I'm most likely to hear and give most weight to when discussing this with longtime EAs in person'.

I had some hope that the week would help me on this issue. Maybe the comments will, otherwise 'see you next time' I guess?

Sorry to distract from the object level a bit, but I had a reaction to the parts I quoted above as feeling pretty unfriendly and indirectly disparaging to the things other people have written on the forum.

I realise that you said (to paraphrase) "there are many strong arguments that were not raised", and not "the arguments that were raised were not strong". Maybe you meant that there had been good arguments already, but more were missing. (Maybe you meant not enough had been posted about GH at all.) But I don't think it's too surprising that I felt the second thing in the air, even if you didn't say it, and I imagine that if I had written a pro-GH argument in the last week, I might feel kind of attacked.

I'm surprised by how much of this post is in the future tense and framed as imagining what will happen if we do animal welfare reform. Animal welfare reform has been a part of EA for around as long as EA has existed, and there's now more than a decade of track record to look at. So when you say things like:

Where the intervention is imposed, there will be resistance and that will limit progress.

Discussions of banning cage eggs or regulations for shrimp welfare will quickly turn into conspiracies [...]

The argument that human welfare pales in comparison to chicken [...] will come across to many as cold, out-of-touch, privileged, classist. This will generate resistance to the animal welfare movement and EA more broadly.

[...] there will be accusations of cultural insensitivity [...]

my response is, well, we already did all this stuff, did we see these negative side effects or not?

Yeah, I didn't intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the "intensity of experience" ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more "total experience" than wild animals.

I don't think whether animals or humans are interchangeable (within each group) is the right question. If a human dies and another human is born, the latter does not replace the former in terms of their unique characteristics as an individual, their relationships, etc. But they both have lives worth living, and I don't think it's obviously the case that one long life is better than two half-long lives -- sure, there are some advantages to longer lives in terms of accumulation of knowledge, memories, relationships etc, but I think these effects are relatively minor among reasons why a life is good or rich or well-lived (e.g. I think children have rich and valuable lives -- although they miss some things about the adult experience, it's not so much to make them dramatically different).

I haven't thought too much whether all animal rights interventions also improve global health, but I think even if I believed that were true, it wouldn't tell me whether they improved global health a comparable amount to working on global health directly, so it doesn't feel like the right question for deciding what the highest priority project is, IMO.

(In fact I agree with your conclusion for other reasons, just wanted to flag why this argument didn't feel convincing to me.)

Given that there are way more wild animals than farmed animals,

This is surely true by number but I'm not sure it would be true on all reasonable weightings? See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)#/media/File:Terrestrial_biomass.jpg

I wonder if we'd rather capture something like "how strongly this is true" (e.g. would $100m be much better spent on animals...) which captures both confidence and importance.

Given these biases, I tend to weigh much more heavily interventions like bednets that save lives that would otherwise not be lived, over things that only improve lives like most animal welfare interventions.

Huh? Even if you weigh moments of happiness much more, that doesn't always support maximising the number of lives. To use a somewhat farcical model that I hope is nevertheless illustrative, wouldn't you prefer to add two moments of happiness to someone's life than to create a new life that only experienced one moment of happiness? If so, I don't see why you'd conclude that bednets are better than welfare reforms under these assumptions.

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.)