I see myself as a generalist quantitative researcher.
You can give me feedback here (anonymous or not). You are welcome to answer any of the following:
Feel free to check my posts, and see if we can collaborate to contribute to a better world. I am open to part-time volunteering and paid work. In this case, I typically ask for 20 $/h, which is roughly equal to 2 times the global real GDP per capita.
The supposed health benefits of replacing red with white meat are also questionable.
I have looked more into this, and now believe than chicken meat is healthier than red meat. So I updated the last 2 paragraphs of the post to:
I believe the major drawback of replacing chicken meat with beef or pork is that these may well be worse for your health.
You can always replace chicken meat with legumes to improve your health, save money, or if you are very concerned about GHG emissions (I am not). I have been following a plant-based diet for 5 years. However, know that replacing chicken meat with beef or pork significantly decreases suffering.
I strongly updated your comment now because it prompted me to look into the health aspect of the replacement, which I think is important, and was previously missing from the post.
Thanks for the comment! I have added the following to the post, before the last paragraph:
The supposed health benefits of replacing red with white meat are also questionable.
@core_admiral , I follow these recommendations on supplementation.
Thanks for sharing, Caroline, and welcome to the EA Forum!
Every $1 you donate to Sinergia Animal impacts*:
- Freeing approximately 53 hens from cages, or
- Liberating 21 mother pigs (or 354 piglets) from brutal confinement and painful procedures, or
- Replacing three animal-based meals with plant-based options.
*source: ACE
Trusting these numbers, your cage-free campaigns are very cost-effective. Each hen lives for "60 to 80 weeks", i.e. 1.34 years (= (60 + 80)/2*7/365.25), so your cage-free campaigns improve 71.0 hen-yeas per $ (= 53*1.34). This is 6.57 (= 71.0/10.8) times the 10.8 hen-years per $ implied by Open Philanthropy's adjustment of Saulius Šimčikas’ estimate, and respects a cost-effectiveness of 24.2 DALY/$ (= 6.57*3.69).
The above implies your cage-free campaigns are hugely more cost-effective than your meal replacement program, as I would have expected. Assuming all replaced meals had 1 portion of chicken meat from broilers in a conventional scenario, which I think overestimates the cost-effectiveness of the program, this would avert 4.18 chicken-days per replaced meal. Consequently, the program would eliminate 0.0343 chicken-years per $ (= 3*4.18/365.25). I estimate eliminating 1 chicken-year of broilers in a conventional scenario is as good as averting 0.754 DALYs. So the cost-effectiveness of the program would be 0.0259 DALY/$ (= 0.0343*0.754), i.e. 0.107 % (= 0.0259/24.2) of that of your cage-free program.
In contrast, it is unclear to me whether your program to help mother pigs is more/less cost-effective than your cage-free campaigns. Mother pigs have a breeding lifetime of about 3 years, so your program to help mother pigs improves 63 pig-years per $ (= 21*3). This is 88.7 % (= 63/71.0) as many animal-year per $ as your cage-program, so there would not a major difference in cost-effectiveness between them assuming the improvement per animal-year is similar.
Have you considered moving funding from your meal replacement program to your cage-free campaigns and program helping mother pigs?
Another point to emphasise though - it's my sense that the intervention should be modelled as electrical stunning replaces air asphyxiation, rather than (perfectly implemented) ice slurry.
Do you think it would be best for me to assume than 100 % of the shrimp helped are originally being slaughtered via air asphyxiation? I am currently assuming 62.5 % are originally being slaughtered via air asphyxiation, and the other 37.5 % via perfectly implemented ice slurry, but this seems way too high considering you have not seen it happen.
Thanks for sharing, Pablo. I had listened to that podcast discussing The Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT), but what I take from this is that there is huge dispersion in the extinction risk predictions.
In addition, many forecasters predicted a probability of human extinction from 2023 to 2100 of exactly 0:
A risk of exactly 0 is obviously wrong, but goes to show there are superforecasters and domain experts guessing the risk of human extinction is negligible. You can also qualitatively appreciate this from some comments in Appendix 7 of the report. Here are some I collected about the risk of nuclear extinction (emphasis mine):
Thanks for the question, Kaleem.
The Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH) estimated policy advocacy to increase resilience to global agricultural crises is 30 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities. I adjusted their estimate, and concluded it is 4.08 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
CEARCH estimated lobbying for nuclear arsenal limitation is 5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities. I guess the actual cost-effectiveness is more like 10 times that of GiveWell's top charities.
I estimated epidemic/pandemic preparedness is 24.3 % (= 1/4.12) as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.
I think the best animal welfare interventions are way more cost-effective than the best in global health and development:
Thanks, Toby and Allan.
However when I read that Toby Ord and other experts believed there was a 1 in 6 chance of complete extinction of human life in the next 100 years I was shocked and decided that I should give almost all my donations to longtermist funds.
@Allan_Saldanha, I encourage you to check David Thorstad’s series exaggerating the risks. I think Toby's and other experts' guesses for the risk of human extinction are unreasonably high. For example, I estimated a nearterm annual extinction risk from nuclear war of 5.93*10^-12, which is only 1.19*10^-6 (= 5.93*10^-12/(5*10^-6)) of the 5*10^-6 that I understand Toby Ord assumed in The Precipice.
Thanks for the comment, Alex! I strongly upvoted it because I like that you tried to think about how to increase welfare assuming farmed animal end up with positive lives, instead of dismissing this as impossible, or arguing that factory-farming is intrinsically bad.
I agree humans are capable of more positive experiences that animals, but not that much more. I also agree plant-based foods would enable supporting more humans. However, to maximise welfare, one should look for interventions which increase welfare the most per $. At least now, I think these are ones helping animals, not humans (i.e. not the species whose individuals are capable of experiecing the most welfare). I estimate:
I expect helping animals will continue to be more cost-effective than helping humans longerterm, at least given humans' current form, because animals have a higher ratio between welfare range and calorie consumption[1].
The welfare range is the difference between the welfare per time of a practically maximally happy and unhappy life.