Thanks for the post, Jeff!

At a floated $300B valuation and many EAs among their early employees, the amount of additional funding could be in the billions. [...]

One way to get a sense of the impact of donating sooner is to imagine that others will donate $1M to my preferred charity this year, and $10M next year.

EA-related funding is around 900 M$/year. So thinking about donations to one's top organisationg becoming 10 (= 10*10^6/(1*10^6)) times as large would make sense for expected EA-related funding in 2026 of 9 billion $ (= 10*900*10^6), 3 % (= 9*10^9/(300*10^9)) of the valuation you mention above.

Ideally, the largest funders, mainly Coefficient Giving (CG) and GiveWell, would have moved money from the years with the lowest marginal cost-effectiveness to the ones with the highest until there were no significant changes in marginal cost-effectiveness across time. I can see their predictions about the funding from Anthropic's employees not having been accurate. However, it would be a bit surprising if they were completely off to the point of marginal cost-effectiveness significantly decreasing from 2025 to 2026.

Thanks for the relevant post, Nathan!

Come on folks, what are we doing? How is our wannabe philanthropist meant to know whether they ought to donate to AI, shrimp welfare or GiveWell. Vibes? ^[2]

I am in the process of building such a thing, but this seems like an oversight. 

Feel free to get in touch if you think I may be able to help with something.

Hi Elliot and Nathan. 

I [Nathan] think that shrimp QALYs and human QALYs have some exchange rate, we just don't have a good handle on it yet.

I think being able to compare the welfare of shrimps and humans is far enough. I do not know about any interventions which robustly increase welfare in expectation due to dominant uncertain effects on soil animals. I would be curious to know your thoughts on these.

Oh, this [the point from Nathan quoted above] is nice to read as I agree that we might be able to get some reasonable enough answers about Shrimp Welfare Project vs AMF (e.g. RP's moral weights project). 

I believe there is a very long way to robust results from Rethink Priorities' (RP's) moral weight project, and Bob Fischer's book about comparing welfare across species, which contains what RP stands behind now. For example, the estimate in Bob's book for the welfare range of shrimps is 8.0 % that of humans, but I would say it would be quite reasonable for someone to have a best guess of 10^-6, the ratio between the number of neurons of shrimps and humans.

Thanks for asking, JD! It is also good to know Nick played a role in your interest!

I would like to see more research informing how to i) increase the welfare of soil animals, and ii) compare hedonistic welfare across species. Rethink Priorities (RP) has a research agenda covering the latter.

I am planning to donate 3 k$ over the next few months to a project on the welfare of springtails, mites, or nematodes. It is not public, but it will most likely start next year. I hope there will be more related projects in the future. People interested in funding research informing how to increase the welfare of soil animals are welcome to fill this very short form.

My last substantial donations went to the Arthropoda Foundation. Here is their case for funding them. As I commented there, I would like them to focus more on soil animals. They have so far only made grants targeting farmed arthropods. However, I still think funding Arthropoda is the best publicly available opportunity to increase the welfare of soil animals.

Agreed, titotal! As I commented, "technological development requires coordination, and coordination often requires technological develoment, so they cannot be analysed separately".

Thanks for the post, Whitney and Lily, and welcome to the EA Forum! I did not know there were lots of broilers in cages.

Scale: China raises ~15 billion broiler chickens annually, and ~10 billion (60–70%) spend their lives in cramped cages with even less space than battery-caged layers. This is 2x the total number of caged laying hens worldwide, with severe welfare implications.

What are your sources for this? I only found 2 links to the Lever Foundation across the whole post.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), only 11.6 billion chickens were slaughtered for meat in China in 2023. This includes broilers and laying hens, and is 77.3 % (= 11.6*10^9/(15*10^9)) of your number for broilers.

FAO says there were 8.44 billion laying hens alive globally in 2023. Your numbers above imply 5 billion (= 10*10^9/2) laying hens alive in cages globally, which would mean 59.2 % (= 5*10^9/(8.44*10^9)) of laying hens globally in cages. I think the actual fraction of laying hens in cages is much higher. Even in the European Union (EU), there is still 38.1 % of hens in cages.

Maybe you meant 5 billion laying hens raised in cages are slaughtered per year globally, as you made a comparison with the number of broilers raised in cages in China that are slaughtered per year. However, as far as I know, the FAO does not provide data for the number of laying hens slaughtered per year.

I think the number of animals alive is a better proxy for the scale of the problem than the number of animals slaughtered. All else equal, the scale is larger for animals living longer, and only the number of animals alive accounts for this. This means using the number of animals alive underestimates the suffering of laying hens relative to broilers, which live shorter lives. The Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) assumes laying hens live for "60 to 80 weeks" (including the pre-laying phase), and says the "average slaughter weight of broilers in the EU [European Union] and the US [United States] is, respectively, 2.5 Kg and 2.9 Kg, reached at 42 and 47 days".

Ideally, one would also account for different welfare per animal-year. I estimate that broilers in a conventional scenario have a (negative) welfare per animal-year equal to 1.34 (= -2.40/(-1.79)) times that of laying hens in conventional cages. In other words, only accounting for effects on chickens (not on soil animals), I believe 1 conventional-broiler-year less is as good as 1.34 conventional-layer-years less. Accounting for different conditions and population size, I calculate the total (negative) welfare of broilers globally is 2.99 (= -2.16*10^9/(-7.23*10^8)) times that of laying hens globally.

Agreed, Emre! In addition, I have little idea about whether veganism increases or decreases animal welfare due to effects on soil animals. I would be curious to know your thoughts on this.

Agreed!

Thanks for the fair point, Johannes. I am not aware of a systematic analysis. I have quickly asked Gemini, but did not find the answer satisfying. In any case, technological development requires coordination, and coordination often requires technological develoment, so they cannot be analysed separately. I believe what plays the least role in solving externalities is changes in personal consumption, although the 1st adopters of a new technology still play an important role in driving their cost down (in agreement with Wrigh's Law).

Thanks for the update, Toby! I continue to prefer donating to Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) instead of the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) to incentivise this to be more transparent. ACE publishes comprehensive reviews of the charities they recommend. AWF's last payout report described in more detail 3 grants, but there were just a few paragraphs on each one. I understand publishing a detailed review for each grant would not be feasible. However, I think it would be possible to publish some grant applications (as in Manifund), and I would like to see some longer assessments, including some cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs).