Thanks for clarifying! Should your aversion to variance in possible outcomes be a reason for not recommending the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP)? The probability of shrimps being sentient presented in Bob Fischer's book about comparising welfare across species is 40 %. For a 75 % chance that SWP benefits shrimps conditional on their sentience, the probability of SWP benefiting shrimps is 30 % (= 0.40*0.75). However, the benefits to shrimp could be negligible even if they are sentient. For a probability of significant benefits conditional on their sentience lower than 1/3, the probability of SWP significantly benefiting shrimp would be lower than 10 % (= 0.3*1/3). I would also say the probability of SWP significantly benefiting shrimps is very uncertain, and you mentioned an aversion to unknown probabilities.

Thanks for sharing!

Because I believe the opportunities to reduce severe suffering of animals through effective animal advocacy are really extraordinary, I expect the majority of my donations this year to go to the two funds that GWWC recommends to donors in our animal welfare cause area: EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund and ACE’s Movement Grants Fund.

@Aidan Whitfield🔸, I would be curious to know your thoughts on effects on soil animals. I do not know about any interventions which robustly increase animal welfare due to potentially dominant uncertain effects on them.

• Animal Charity Evaluators Recommended Charity Fund and EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund: Highly-rated funds for animal welfare.
• Anima International: Since many of the corporate cage-free pledges have 2025 as a deadline, this has seemed like an important year to fund high impact charities working on these commitments.

@Amalie Farestvedt 🔸, I wonder why you decided to donate to Anima International considering the above funds supporting animals also have the information that many cage-free commitments have the end of 2025 as deadline.

[Casey.] I'm still on a learning journey with my giving! My background is in public health, so global health has always felt like natural territory which is why roughly 70% of my giving this year has landed in global health, including through GiveWell's Top Charities and All Grants Fund and to some of Giving What We Can’s recommended programmes including the Against Malaria Foundation, Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller and New Incentives. I was also excited to begin supporting Ansh, (which was recently onboarded to Giving What We Can) and which supports the delivery of Kangaroo care for at-risk newborns in India.

[...]

[...] [James Rayton.] That said, you’ll still see my instincts coming through: a larger share goes to global health, which has long been where my motivation and experience run deepest.

@Casey Yates and @James Rayton 🔸, have you considered donating to GWWC, or earning less instead of donating to global health and development? GWWC's "best-guess estimate of GWWC’s giving multiplier for 2023–2024 was 6x, implying that for the average $1 we spent on our operations, we caused $6 of value to go to highly effective charities or funds".

Thanks for the post, Cam and Cat.

Culling via anticoagulant poisons is a widespread cause of intense, prolonged suffering for wild rodents. Replacing lethal control with fertility control has the potential to be a highly scalable way to reduce wild animal suffering with minimal ecological risk.

I worry the effects on non-target animals may well be larger than those on the rodents. I estimated electrically stunning farmed shrimp changes the welfare of soil animals more than it increases the welfare of shrimps if it results in the replacement of more than 0.0374 % of the consumption of the affected farmed shrimp by farmed fish, and individual animal welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year is proportional to "number of neurons"^0.5. I can easily see this happening for even a slight increase in the cost of shrimp.

I see. Thanks for clarifying.

Hi titotal. This website "presents the AI Futures Model (Dec 2025 version), following up on the timelines and takeoff models we [AI Futures Project] published alongside AI 2027". I am sure many would be interested in a post with your thoughts, myself included! As expected based on your analysis, the parameter defining "How much easier/harder each coding time horizon doubling gets" is crucial. If I set it to 1 to make the time horizon increase exponentially with the effective training compute, as it arguably has trended recently, the automated coder only comes in 2042.

Hi Bob.

In addition, we’d like to adapt the work we’ve been doing on our Digital Consciousness Model for the MWP, which uses a Bayesian approach.

I do not see much value in improving the estimates for the probability of sentience presented in your book. I believe it is more important to decrease the uncertainty in the (expected hedonistic) welfare per unit time conditional on sentience, which I think is much larger than that in the probability of sentience.

I also worry about analysing just the probability of consciousness/sentience due to this not being independent from the welfare per unit time conditional on consciousness/sentience. Less strict operationalisations of the probability of consciousness/sentience will tend to result in a lower welfare per unit time conditional on consciousness/sentience.

Funding is, and long has been, the bottleneck

Have large funders explained their lack of interest? If not, what is your best guess?

Great point, Jeff. I agree initially assuming (expected hedonistic) welfare per unit time proportional to the number of atoms, cells, or neurons is much more reasonable than supposing it is the same for all organisms.

I estimated the total welfare of animal populations assuming individual welfare per fully-happy-animal-year is proportional to "number of neurons"^"exponent of the number of neurons". Phil, I had already shared the post with you. I am linking it here because it is related to your post.

Hi Cat and Yulia.

I am pessimistic about using data about suicides at the outreached schools to estimate the effect of the school awareness packages. For Yulia's estimate that this program reached 10,875 students (which I believe is too high), and suicide rate of 7.26*10^-5 suicides per student-year, one should expect 0.790 suicides per year (= 10.875*10^3*7.26*10^-5) in the outreached schools. For Yulia's guess that the program decreases suicides by 25 %, one should expect 0.592 suicides per year (= 0.790*(1 - 0.25)). I think it is going to be quite hard to distinguish between uncertain distributions whose means are 0.790 and 0.592 suicides per year. I suspect one may easily have to wait 10 years to know about whether there is an effect of 25 %.

To get more data quicker, I would track not only the number of suicides, but also outcomes that are known to predict suicides. For example, there may be many suicide attempts per suicide, and I guess the number of suicides is roughly proportional to the number of suicide attempts. One could also try to track attitudes towards suicide, some of which may be a good predictor of suicides, for instance, planning a suicide. At the most distant level from tracking the number of suicides, one could simply ask the students in the outreached schools to which extent they have engaged with the awareness packages.

Hi Lorenzo.

@Vasco Grilo🔸 given that your name is on the https://www.forgetveganuary.com/ campaign and you're active on this forum, I'm curious what you think about this. Were you informed?

Edit: they will remove that section from the page

I was not informed.