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 think humans are capable of much more positive lives than farmed animals, so in the long term future it would be best to have as much biomass in the form of humans (and possibly pets) as possible. A world where humans eat predominantly plants and cultivated meat would be able to support more humans, and these extra humans would have much better lives than farmed animals.

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:

• Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns (helping chickens) are 156 and 371 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
• Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative is 43.4 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.

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].

1. ^{^}

   The welfare range is the difference between the welfare per time of a practically maximally happy and unhappy life.

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.

Hello.

Does this include wild shrimp?

Nitpick. I think it would be good to include "Logarithm of" in the titles of the axes, or just keep the titles you used, but display values in kg and $ instead of their logarithms, and have the axes in a logarithmic instead of linear scale.

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:

• For extinction, 3.18 % (5/157).
• For AI extinction, 4.29 % (7/163).
• For nuclear extinction, 6.21 % (10/161).
• Non-anthropogenic extinction excluding non-anthropogenic pathogens, 5.66 % (9/159).

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):

• “Most forecasters whose probabilities were near the median factored in a range of possible risks, including world wars, nuclear winters, and even artificial-intelligence-driven NERs [nuclear extinction risks], but concluded that even under worst case scenarios, the extinction of humanity (give or take 5000 people) would be near impossible...even if an NER [nuclear existential risk] had set humanity on a path that made eventual extinction a foregone conclusion, existing resources on earth would allow at least 5000 survivors to hang on for seventy-eight years”.
• “For many, the thought of getting to less than 5000 humans alive was simply too far fetched an outcome and they couldn't be persuaded otherwise in what they saw as credible scenarios”.
• “[T]he set of circumstances required for this to happen are quite low, though obviously not impossible. These circumstances are that there will be a nuclear conflict between 2 nations both capable and willing to fire at everyone everywhere between the two of them: 'very bad case scenarios' where India and Pakistan, or the US and Russia, or China and anyone else, fired everything they had at just each other, or even at each other and each other's close allies, would likely not cause extinction…it requires some of the big nuclear powers to decide to try to take literally everyone down with them, and that they actually succeed”.
• “So we think that the probabilities in this question are dominated by scenarios of total nuclear war before 2050 which cause civilizational and climate collapse to the point where long-term survival becomes impossible to save for very well-prepared shelters. But even pessimistic scenarios seem unlikely to lead to a collapse that is fast enough to reduce the global population to below 5000 by 2100”.
• “There aren't compelling arguments on the higher end for this question again due to the fact that this is a very high bar to achieve”.
• “The team predicts that there will be pockets of people who survive in various regions of the world. Their survival may be at Neolithic standards, but there will be tribes of people who band together and restart mankind. After all, many mammals survived the asteroid and ice age that killed the dinosaurs”.
• “[A] certain number of team members feel that even if there was a full strategic exchange and usage of all of the world's nuclear arsenal still humanity would be able to keep its numbers over 5000. The argument for this is the number [a]nd population of uncontacted tribes, or isolated human populations like the Easter island population pre-contact, that have managed to hold numbers of over 5000 in extremely harsh conditions”.
• “[A]lmost certainly some people would survive on islands or in caves given even the worst of worst cases”.
• “Southern Hemisphere likely to be less impacted – New Zealand, Madagascar, Pacific Islands, Highlands of Papua New Guinea, unlikely to be targeted and include areas with little global and technology dependence…Just the population of Antarctica in its summer is ~5000 people. Even small islands surviving could easily mean more than 5k people”.
• “[There are s]everal regions in the world that would not be affected by nuclear conflict directly and have decent climatic conditions to support 100 of millions even in a NW [nuclear winter]”.

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.