Thanks Lauren! Lots of good suggestions here. I hope we'll be able to give approaches that haven't worked out yet more shots with increased funding in the space! 

Thanks Siobhan! On your points:

7. Agreed. Though I'd note "more efficient" doesn't mean "cheaper," as it could make more much more efficient use of much costlier ingredients.

23. I'm skeptical that funding wildlife rehab could ever be cost-effective -- my understanding is it costs >$50/animal, or >1,000X worse than farm animal interventions. I think it's a tricky balance between research and interventions, given I doubt most of the ones we could do today would be cost-effective. (More humane rodent control may be an exception.)

34. Yes, totally agree we should focus disproportionately on the shots most likely to score.

Thanks for engaging -- appreciate your contribution to the debate. I just wanted to clarify that I didn't intend to characterize all animal liberation activity as "liberationist activists chanting that cage-free is evil." Instead I meant to refer just to liberationist anti-cage-free activism, of the kind that PETA and others have engaged in. 

I appreciate that liberationist activism is much broader than that. And as noted up top, I have immense respect for liberation-focused activists like Wayne Hsiung who are pursuing creative new approaches. For example, I thought both the Smithfield investigation / trial and Ridglan rescue were courageous acts of self-sacrifice that attracted international attention to the plight of animals.  

Thanks Bruce! Appreciate the engagement at length here. Thanks too for all you're doing to advance alternative proteins -- a strategy I'm much more optimistic about :)

Thanks for the post. I think this is an important strategic debate to have, so I'll reply in more length than usual.

I agree with you that we should be honest about what we believe, pursue a variety of strategies, and try to expand the moral circle. I also think you're right that animal liberation played an important role in recruiting many of the movement's current leaders. And I have immense respect for liberation-focused activists like Wayne Hsiung who do courageous work to help animals. None of the following is intended as a criticism of their work. That said, I disagree with you on a number of other points:

1. EA didn't just ignore diet change -- it deprioritized it based on evidence it wasn't working. You write that in EA, "there appears to be scant (and in many cases zero) room for diet change advocacy." But the EA Forum has a whole section on diet change with 198 posts. It includes numerous posts by EAs going deep into the evidence on dietary change -- and finding little evidence of impact. A post arguing for more resources to go to dietary change should at least engage with the evidence that suggests it doesn't work.
2. We've tried many versions of diet change. You write, "A failed attempt does not test an idea for all time. It tests one version of that idea..." But we've tested many versions of the idea! EAs have tested -- and funded the testing of -- leafletting, online ads, documentaries, institutional meat reduction, pledges, and just about every dietary change idea produced. Other funders have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into diet change with limited effects. We should keep testing new approaches to diet change. But, until we find one that works, I don't think we should invest dramatically more in an approach that has repeatedly failed.
3. It's not clear to me why AI and more resources will change the relative cost-effectiveness of dietary change vs. other strategies. You write, "Animal liberation and diet change advocacy have never operated at the scale that may soon be possible with 1) AI and 2) dramatically more resources." This is true. It's also true of all other interventions. What matters is not whether AI or vastly more resources could increase animal liberation / diet change's impact -- I'm sure they could -- but whether they will make those interventions relatively more impactful than the other interventions we could deploy AI and those resources toward. Again, the post doesn't explain why they would.
4. I'm skeptical that animal liberation activism made farm animal welfare improvements possible. You suggest that "It seems to me quite possible that advocacy on behalf of animal liberation is what shifted the Overton Window with regard to farm animal welfare." But you don't point to evidence for that claim, so consider some evidence to the contrary. All federal US farm animal welfare improvements (the 28 Hour Law, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act) preceded any liberation activism, as did critical UK, Swiss, Scandinavian, German, and EU reforms. All the recent corporate animal welfare wins came after the movement pivoted away from vegan outreach (2015 onward) and toward focusing on welfare wins. Animal liberation activists largely opposed these campaigns. It's not clear to me how liberationist activists chanting that cage-free is evil encouraged corporations to go cage-free.
5. The justice movement analogy points to the challenge with dietary change. You ask "Are there other justice movements that ignored the fact that they were justice movements?" To which I reply: "Are there other justice movements that succeeded through individual behavioral change as dietary change seeks to?" I can't think of any. (Also, as Elliot notes in the comments, there are lots of social movements that have succeeded without the liberation / justice frame.)
6. I think the talent section presents a false choice. You write, "If we don’t tell the world why animals matter ... will we attract people with the passion and focus on maximum impact that comes with knowing you’re in a liberation struggle?" But EAs are constantly telling the world why animals matter, and constantly attracting people who are passionate and focused on maximum impact. I think EA in general is a rebuttal to the idea that you can only attract passionate and impactful people to doing good by framing things as a liberation struggle. AI safety doesn't, global health doesn't, and it's not clear why animals should be the exception.
7. This is a good case for some funding of animal liberation / diet change, but not a good case for spending more at the current margin. If you include PETA's $80M annual budget, and the ~$50M annually spent on diet change globally, animal liberation and diet change currently account for over a third of the animal movement's funding. So the question is not "should animal liberation and diet change get any funding," but rather "at the margin, will increasing animal liberation / diet change advocacy from ~$130M to $X do more to help animals than the alternatives?" I think we should keep assessing that on the merits of each opportunity.

Thanks again for this thoughtful post, which I think makes an important point. 

Good clarification, thanks for adding that Nick! 

Thanks Nick. I'm really glad to see that Cynthia Shuck of the Welfare Footprint Project has just commented around the specifics on cage-free, so I'll defer to her on that. I'll just add a few quick thoughts on your comments here.

"If there had been 50 studies which compared mortality between two global health intervention and overall results was unequivocal, we would probably conclude that there was no major difference between the two ... Mortality in hens seems pretty easy and likely inexpensive to measure."

• To clarify: the results are not unequivocal. Different studies point to very different results. This is both due to study design, but also due to lots of variation in actual conditions (lab vs on-farm, small farms vs. big farms, experienced farmers vs. inexperienced, healthy pullets vs. unhealthy, etc).
• Mortality on-farm is indeed easy and cheap to measure, but very few farmers will allow researchers on-farm to measure this or publicly share their own results. So a lot of these studies end up being in unrepresentative lab conditions or on individual farms that may not be representative.
• That said, I think the on-farm data that Cynthia cites (the "database from a breeder for countries around the world") is probably the best data we have. And it does indeed conclude there isn't a major difference between the two systems.

"Before this post I thought it was super obvious that cage free was way better and it was just a magnitude-of-good question. After this post, I would appreciate a post on the forum actually laying out why there is a "high likelihood of cage free bring robustly net positive"."

• I don't think this post should be a major update for you on whether cage-free is better than caged. It's just not clear that mortality is that good a proxy for total welfare. E.g. everyone agrees that mortality is highest in free-range and pasture-based farming, but few conclude from that that these systems are worse for total welfare than intensive confinement.
• Given how hard it is to measure animals' actual subjective wellbeing, I think we should look to lots of different sources of evidence and reasoning, not just the few indicators we can objectively measure. My personal view that cage-free is better is probably based on something like: ~40% priors that pretty much all animals like to move around and have more space, ~30% preference studies showing that hens really value the things they can only access in cage-free (nesting boxes, perches, dustbathing, etc), ~10% my sense that pretty much all independent animal welfare scientists agree it's better, ~10% my experience with rescued battery cage hens who have a very strong preference to stay out of cages, ~10% that mortality is pretty much the only indicator suggesting it could be worse and actually that data is very messy. (TBC: not an official CG view, and it's possible I'd change those numbers a bunch on reflection. I share them just to suggest that resolving the mortality debate wouldn't be transformative for my views.)

Thanks for writing this post! Thanks too for sharing it in advance, and sorry I didn't have time to review it. For the same reason, I won't have time now to go into the detail that I'd love to on your specific claims. (It's great to see such a vibrant discussion in the comments! I'd love to see more critical discussion of the evidence like this in the EA animal welfare space.) So I just wanted to share three high-level reflections.

First, I agree with you on the need for more evidence collection on the animal welfare outcomes of popular interventions. We've funded >$20M of such evidence collection work (e.g. the Welfare Footprint Institute, Rethink Priority's review of evidence across multiple areas, the shrimp slaughter study you cite, a Guelph study on broiler genetics welfare outcomes, and a dozen other studies and meta-analyses). We've also done a ton of internal analysis on this, e.g. we have a complicated model of estimated rates of factory farm meat displaced by alt protein in various scenarios. And yet we need to do a lot more! I'm really excited that the likely inflow of more animal welfare funding will enable a lot more high-quality evidence generation. And I completely agree we should prioritize it.

Second, I think we need to be realistic about how much certainty that evidence collection will create -- and how quickly. I think your cage-free example is a good one. There have been 50+ studies and large-scale data collection efforts on relative mortality in caged vs. cage-free housing systems and we still don't have a clear answer on it. And yet mortality is just one of 20+ metrics we could look to as partial proxies for what we really care about: "what is the relative overall welfare of caged vs. cage-free birds?" I think we should also fund studies and commercial data collection on all those other metrics (or at least the ones current tech allows us to measure). But that will take many years and, even then, people will reasonably debate the relevant importance of each of those 20+ metrics to the welfare of birds. 

(I should note that I really admire the work you're doing to try to significantly accelerate the pace of this kind of research, starting with shrimp slaughter. I think I agree with you on everything you think should be funded to accelerate it further, and am confident we will fund that full agenda -- please tell me if there's something we're not covering. And I hope that advances in AI can accelerate the evaluation and syntheses of existing evidence too.)

Third, I think we need to continue to act to alleviate suffering even in the face of significant uncertainty. I'm jealous of global health direct service provision (e.g. anti-malarial bednets, cash payments) where I think you can have perhaps the closest to total certainty of positive impact of any areas. But I think for basically any advocacy intervention in EA (whether in AI safety, bio, farm animal welfare, or even global aid advocacy) you have to accept significant uncertainty not just about the immediate impacts but also about second, third, etc. order effects. That's not an excuse for ignoring the uncertainty. But I think when a cluster of evidence points to a high likelihood that something is robustly net positive -- as I believe it does for cage-free (sorry I don't have time to go into all the specifics here!) -- than we should move forward on it. I think the opportunity costs of waiting for a higher confidence level of evidence are too high.

Thanks again for writing this! One of the things I love most about EA is the application of critical thinking and evidence to disrupt commonly accepted wisdom, and I think this is a good example of this. I disagree on some of the specifics -- wish I had the time to explain more -- but I'm really glad you wrote and published this.

I'm afraid I can't think of much beyond publicizing this effort and its importance

I agree that's the best solution, but I think it's unfortunately much less tractable in most places than corporate campaigns. In the one large producer where it is right now, the EU, we're investing heavily in legislative work.