Thanks for the great post, Omnizoid!

This makes them around 30 times better at reducing suffering and promoting well-being than the highly effective animal charities focused on chicken welfare which themselves are hundreds or thousands of times more effective than the best charities helping humans.

I have updated my cost-effectiveness analysis of corportate campaigns for chicken welfare. Now I estimate the Shrimp Welfare Project is 278 and 117 times as cost-effective as broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns (instead of "around 30 times better"), and that these are 156 and 371 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities (i.e. more like "hundreds" instead of "hundreds to thousands" of times more cost-effective than the best charities helping humans).

Thanks, Aidan. For reference, I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 25.1 times as cost-effective as School Plates, which is a program aiming to increase the consumption of plant-based foods at schools and universities in the United Kingdom.

Thanks for the comment, Chris!

Am I thinking about this correctly?

Yes.

And if so, is there a good resource for actual welfare values for farmed animals, rather than the theoretical ranges?

I have estimated the welfare per living time of chickens in various conditions in animal quality-adjusted life years (AQALYs) per chicken-year. 1 AQALY corresponds to 1 year of a practically maximally happy life. As a rough approximation, you can get the welfare in QALYs mutiplying the welfare in AQALYs by Rethink Priorities' median welfare ranges^[1].

I have some estimates for shrimp too (this post has estimates for chickens, but these rely on underestimates of the time they spend in pain, whereas the ones above try to correct for this).

1. ^{^}

   This would only be 100 % correct if the welfare per time of the practically maximally happy life as a fraction of the welfare range is constant across species.

Thanks, Karolina! Do you have any thoughts on whether it is better to donate to the AWF or Shrimp Welfare Project? I estimate this is 278 and 117 times as cost-effective as broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns.

Thanks for clarifying, Daniela! Keep up the good work.

My comparison between HSI and corporate campaigns for chicken welfare now relies on my updated cost-effectiveness analysis of the latter (instead of this one).

Published.

I plan to post an updated cost-effectiveness analysis of chicken welfare campaigns in 1 or 2 weeks.

Published.

I very much agree with your decision of not recommending ACE's RCF, and I think your evaluation was great.

Another example where we think ACE could have engaged more robustly with their CEAs is in cases where ACE did not reach estimates for Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) averted per dollar.

Did you have the chance to look into the pain intensities Ambitious Impact uses to calculate SADs? They are not public, but you can ask Vicky Cox for the sheet. I think they hugely underweight excruciating pain, such that interventions addressing this (like Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative) have their cost-effectiveness underestimated a lot. Feel free to ask Vicky for my comments on the pain intensities.

Nitpick. ACE's additional funds discount for low uncertainty should be higher than 0 % (and lower than 20 %), or there is a typo in the table below?

ACE considers charities’ priorities for additional funds — in other words, how the charity would use unexpected additional funding — and assesses ‘uncertainty about effectiveness and tractability of plans’ — how likely they think each line item in the charity’s plan is to experience diminishing returns or not play out as expected under the charity’s growth plan. ACE assesses each line item in a charity’s proposed future plans on a scale from very low uncertainty to very high uncertainty, with a corresponding discount applied to the cost of the line item.

Category	Discount
Very low uncertainty	0%
Low uncertainty	0%
Moderate/low uncertainty	20%
Moderate uncertainty	40%
Moderate/high uncertainty	60%
High uncertainty	80%
Very high uncertainty	100%

Welcome to the EA Forum, nailjim!

The website links to the FAQ for info about the calculation method, but I didn't see the info there.

Did you mean to link to Starbucks?