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I am having a hard time following this. We aren't, to my knowledge, asking people whose loved ones are at significant risk of dying of malaria and TB for money. AFAIK, we're not asking them to prioritize animal welfare over their loved ones in non-finamcial ways either. Could you explain what specifically we're asking of this class of people?

1. I feel like animal welfare is based on incorrect philosophical arguments. I do not think that animals (sentient) suffer in the same sense that humans (sapient) suffer. I do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering. They are non-commensurate. For more detail, see here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Htu55gzoiYHS6TREB/sentience-matters?commentId=wusCgxN9qK8HzLAiw  In accordance with this view, I argue that not a single dollar should be spent on animal suffering while there is still a single human at risk of dying from malnourishment or preventable disease.
2. Aside from this argument, I believe there is a separate argument from urgency. I think that the immediate concerns of AI outweigh any possible impact from any spending on animal suffering. The continued existence of humanity and the prevention of suffering of sapient digital beings are both at a hinge in history, where the effort put into these causes now matters far more than the non-urgent cause of animal suffering. Animal suffering is increasing only relatively slowly, whereas these other causes may explode in importance in a matter of a few months. No sense in reupholstering the backseat of your car while your car is speeding down a steep mountain road with no one at the wheel...

1. I feel like animal welfare is based on incorrect philosophical arguments. I do not think that animals (sentient) suffer in the same sense that humans (sapient) suffer. I do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering. They are non-commensurate. For more detail, see here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Htu55gzoiYHS6TREB/sentience-matters?commentId=wusCgxN9qK8HzLAiw  In accordance with this view, I argue that not a single dollar should be spent on animal suffering while there is still a single human at risk of dying from malnourishment or preventable disease.
2. Aside from this argument, I believe there is a separate argument from urgency. I think that the immediate concerns of AI outweigh any possible impact from any spending on animal suffering. The continued existence of humanity and the prevention of suffering of sapient digital beings are both at a hinge in history, where the effort put into these causes now matters far more than the non-urgent cause of animal suffering. Animal suffering is increasing only relatively slowly, whereas these other causes may explode in importance in a matter of a few months. No sense in reupholstering the backseat of your car while your car is speeding down a steep mountain road with no one at the wheel...

Laura Duffy's analyses of this comes close to my view. On the margin, the question between global health charity and animal charity is something like GiveWell top charities *e.g. AMF) vs. ACE top charity (e.g. The Humane League), which is something like "Would you rather save 1 DALY or 40 years of hens from cages to cage-free.

I'm pretty split between the two and my donation habits reflect this; however, I don't think we know how to scale effective animal interventions past the current funding gaps in the low $10ms. For Global health, we do.

Edit: Learned that Laura has posted more on this since we last talked! Her posts seem to use RP's human:animal welfare moral weight comparisons, which place less compariative weight to human suffering than I do!

Can I ask how you arrived at the "millionths" number?

I think of this question mostly in terms of the trajectory I think this nudges us towards. It feels like there's something of a hierarchy of needs for humanity as a whole, and getting out of the zone where we have extreme poverty feels like the right first step, in a way that makes me feel more optimistic about wise decision processes being able to rise to the top thereafter.

I'm not certain what current spending looks like; that might make me change my mind here. (I think it's definitely right to start ramping up spending on animal welfare at some point before poverty is entirely eliminated.)

It's fair to point out that the majority has been wrong historically many times. I'm not saying this should be our final decision procedure and to lock in those values. But we need some kind of decision procedure for things, and I find when I'm uncertain, that "asking the audience" or democracy seem like a good way to use the "wisdom of crowds" effect to get a relatively good prior.

I'm actually quite surprised by how quickly and how much that post has been upvoted. This definitely makes me update my priors positively about how receptive the forums are to contrarian viewpoints and civil debate. At least, I'm feeling less negativity than when I wrote that post.

Animal welfare space needs considerably more rigorous research (which should be done, but will cost much less than $100m) before knowing if it includes better investments than the top ones in global health.

The issue with majority opinion is that 500 years ago, the majority would have thought that most of what we do today is crazy. 

I mean, even when I was 17, my opinion was close to the majority opinion (in my country), and I certainly wouldn't trust it today, because it was simply uninformed. 

The risk of alienating other people is a valid concern. I'd be glad to see research to determine the threshold which would allow to maximise for both reach and impactful donations. Beyond what percentage of donations going to animal welfare will the movement get less traction ? 1% ? 90% ? Will people just not care about the raw numbers and maybe more about something else ? 

For the groupthink point, I'm not sure if anything can be done. I'd be glad to read from people who think more donations should go to GHD (they can do it with an anonymous account as well). But your initial post got 21 karma, which makes it in the top 5 comments of the page, so I think there is potential for civil discussion here. 

What do you think of RP's work (mostly) against using neuron counts? From the summary:

• in regards to intelligence, we can question both the extent to which more neurons are correlated with intelligence and whether more intelligence in fact predicts greater moral weight;
• many ways of arguing that more neurons results in more valenced consciousness seem incompatible with our current understanding of how the brain is likely to work; and
• there is no straightforward empirical evidence or compelling conceptual arguments indicating that relative differences in neuron counts within or between species reliably predicts welfare relevant functional capacities.

(Also this more specific hypothesis.)

Hi Joey,

It’s worth noting that CE does consider cross-cause effects in all the interventions we consider/recommend, including possible animal effects and WAS effects.

I have searched for "animal" in all the 16 reports of CE's global health and development recommendations, and I did not find any discussion that extending human lives would increase the consumption of animals. In contrast, decreasing the birth rate is highlighted as being a positive externality in terms of animal welfare in 3 of the 16 reports:

• "A lower birth rate is also associated with fewer CO2 emissions and a gain of welfare
  points due to averted consumption of animal products" (here).
• "Finally we believe this intervention could have important positive externalities on animal welfare. Increasing uptake for contraception and preventing unintended births would reduce family sizes and their overall consumption in animal products.
  A lifetime of consumption of these products leads to an considerable amount of suffering for animals raised in factory farms. Preventing unintended births therefore indirectly decreases demand for these products, thereby decreasing the number of animals raised for food. We have modeled these effects using CE̗s welfare points system in our CEA" (here).
• "We found that this intervention has two kinds of externalities. It positively affects climate change, with three tonnes of CO2 emissions per dollar spent. It also positively affects animal welfare, with 377 welfare points gained per dollar spent" (here).

I think CE's reports should mention the negative externalities on farmed animals due to extending human lives, considering CE's reports on family planning discuss the positive externalities on farmed animals due to decreasing fertility.

The last bullet above also illustrates your global health and development recommendations could be net harmful based on your own numbers. I think 100 welfare points (WPs) are roughly as good as averting 1 DALY (because 100 WPs is the maximum total welfare possible), so 377 WP/$ of positive externalities respect around 3.77 DALY/$. This is 379 (= 3.77/0.00994) times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities of 0.00994 DALY/$, i.e. the effects on animals are way larger than those on humans according to CE's report. This claims the effects on animals are positive due to decreasing population size, so it directly follows that saving lives (increasing population size) has negative effects on animals, and the negative effects on animals would be much larger than those on humans (trusting the numbers of the report).

Re "pivotal questions"...

Some thoughts on what The Unjournal (unjournal.org) can offer, cf existing EA-aligned research orgs (naturally, there are pros and cons)

... both in terms of defining and assessing the 'pivotal questions/claims', and in evaluating specific research findings that most inform these.

1. Non-EA-aligned expertise and engagement: We can offer mainstream (not-EA aligned) feedback and evaluation, consulting experts who might not normally come into this orbit. We can help engage non-EA academics in the priorities and considerations relevant to EAs and EA-adjacent orgs. This can leverage the tremendous academic/government infrastructure to increase the relevant research base. Our processes can provide 'outside the EA bubble' feedback and perhaps measure/build the credibility of EA-aligned work.

2. Depth and focus on specific research and research findings: Many EA ~research orgs focus on shallow research and comms. Some build models of value and cost-effectiveness targeted to EA priorities and 'axiology'. In contrast, Unjournal expert evaluations can dig deeply into the credibility of specific findings/claims that may be pivotal to these models.

3. Publicity, fostering public feedback and communication: The Unjournal is building systems for publishing and promoting our evaluations. We work to link these to the scholarly/bibliometric tools and measures people are familiar with. We hope this generates further feedback, public discussion, research, and application of this research.

I think that data ethics and drug ethics together or as separate social functions can save humanity at large.

I don't know. Certainly just parroting them is wrong. I just think we should give some weight to majority opinion, as it represents an aggregate of many different human experiences that seem to have aligned together and found common ground.

Also, a lot of my worry is not so much that EAs might be wrong, so much as that if our views diverge too strongly from popular opinion, we run the risk of things like negative media coverage ("oh look, those EA cultists are misanthropic too"), and we also are less likely to have successful outreach to people outside of the EA filter bubble.

In particular, we already have a hard time with outreach in China, and this animal welfare emphasis is just going to further alienate them due to cultural differences, as you can probably tell from my Confucius quote. The Analects are taught in school in both China and Taiwan and are a significant influence in Asian societies.

It's also partly a concern that groupthink dynamics might be at play within EA. I noticed that there are many more comments from the animal welfare crowd, and I fear that many of the global health people might be too intellectually intimidated to voice their views at this point, which would be bad for the debate.

If I drop the lower bound by 4 orders of magnitude, to "between 0.0000002 and 0.87 times", I get a result of 709 Dalys/1000$, which is basically unchanged. Do sufficiently low bounds basically do nothing here?

This parameter is set to a normal distribution (which, unfortunately you can't control) and the normal distribution doesn't change much when you lower the lower bound. A normal distribution between 0.002 and 0.87 is about the same as a normal distribution between 0 and 0.87. (Incidentally, if the distribution were a lognormal distribution with the same range, then the average result would fall halfway between the bounds in terms of orders of magnitude. This would mean cutting the lower bound would have a significant effect. However, the effect would actually raise the effectiveness estimate because it would raise the uncertainty about the precise order of magnitude. The increase of scale outside the 90% confidence range represented by the distribution would more than make up for the lowering of the median.)

Also, this default (if you set it to "constant") is saying that a chicken has around half the capacity weight of humans. Am I right in interpreting this as saying that if you see three chickens who are set to be imprisoned in a cage for a year, and also see a human who is set to be imprisoned in a similarly bad cage for a year, then you should preferentially free the former? Because if so, it might be worth mentioning that the intuitions of the average person is many, many orders of magnitudes lower than these estimates, not just 1-2.

The welfare capacity is supposed to describe the range between the worst and best possible experiences of a species and the numbers we provide are intended to be used as a tool for comparing harms and benefits across species. Still, it is hard to draw direct action-relevant comparisons of the sort that you describe because there are many potential side effects that would need to be considered. You may want to prioritize humans in the same way that you prioritize your family over others, or citizens of the same country over others. The capacities values are not in tension with that. You may also prefer to help humans because of their capacity for art, friendship, etc. 

To grasp the concept, I think a better example application would be: if you had to give a human or three chickens a headache for an hour (which they would otherwise spend unproductively) which choice would introduce less harm into the world? Estimating the chickens' range as half that of the human would suggest that it is less bad overall from the perspective of total suffering to give the headache to the human.

The numbers are indeed unintuitive for many people but they were not selected by intuition. We have a fairly complex and thought-out methodology. However, we would love to see alternative principled ways of arriving at less animal-friendly estimates of welfare capacities (or moral weights).

There's not much to add beyond what everyone else has said. I think we would need to be exceedingly confident in particular views about sentience and moral patienthood and capacity for suffering for non-humans to think GHD was better. I very much wish I had written down more of my reasoning from years ago when I was mainly donating to GiveWell, I think I just hadn't thought it over much!

Thanks Vasco, I did vote for animal welfare, so on net I agree with most of your points. On some specific things:

You could donate to organisations improving instead of decreasing the lives of animals

This seems right, and is why I support chicken corporate campaigns which tend to increase welfare. Some reasons this is not quite satisfactory:

1. It feels a bit like a "helping slaves to live happier lives" intervention rather than "freeing the slaves"
2. I'm overall uncertain about whether animals lives are generally net positive, rather than strongly thinking they are
3. I'd still be worried about donations to these things generally growing the AW ecosystem as a side effect (e.g. due to fungibility of donations, training up people who then do work with more suffering-focused assumptions)

But these are just concerns and not deal breakers.

Rethink Priorities' median welfare range for shrimps of 0.031 is 31 k (= 0.031/10^-6) times their welfare range based on neurons of 10^-6. For you to get to this super low welfare range, you would have to justify putting a very low weight in all the other 11 models considered by Rethink Priorities.

I am sufficiently sceptical to put a low weight on the other 11 models (or at least withhold judgement until I've thought it through more). As I mentioned I'm writing a post I'm hoping to publish this week with at least one argument related to this.

The gist of that post will be: it's double counting to consider the 11 other models as separate lines of evidence, and similarly double counting to consider all the individual proxies (e.g. "anxiety-like behaviour" and "fear-like behaviour") as independent evidence within the models.

Many of the proxies (I claim most) collapse to the single factor of "does it behave as though it contains some kind of reinforcement learning system?". This itself may be predictive of sentience, because this is true of humans, but I consider this to be more like one factor, rather than many independent lines of evidence that are counted strongly under many different models.

Because of this (a lot of the proxies looking like side effects of some kind of reinforcement learning system), I would expect we will continue to see these proxies as we look at smaller and smaller animals, and this wouldn't be a big update. I would expect that if you look at a nematode worm for instance, it might show:

1. "Taste-aversion behaviour": Moving away from a noxious stimulus, or learning that a particular location contains a noxious stimulus
2. "Depression-like behaviour": Giving up/putting less energy into exploring after repeatedly failing
3. "Anxiety-like behaviour": Being put on edge or moving more quickly if you expose it to a stimulus which has previously preceded some kind of punishment
4. "Curiosity-like behaviour": Exploring things even when it has some clearly exploitable resource

It might not show all of these (maybe a nematode is in fact too small, I don't know much about them), but hopefully you get the point that these look like manifestations of the same underlying thing such that observing more of them becomes weak evidence once you have seen a few.

Even if you didn't accept that they were all exactly side effects of "a reinforcement learning type system" (which seems reasonable), still I believe this idea of there being common explanatory factors for different proxies which are not necessarily sentience related should be factored in.

(RP's model does do some non-linear weighting of proxies at various points, but not exactly accounting for this thing... hopefully my longer post will address this).

On the side of neuron counts, I don't think this is particularly strong evidence either. But I see it as evidence on the side of a factor like "their brain looks structurally similar to a human's", vs the factor of "they behave somewhat similarly to a human" for which the proxies are evidence.

To me neither of these lines of evidence ("brain structural similarity" and "behavioural similarity") seems obviously deserving of more weight.

Farmed animals are neglected, so I do not think worldview diversidication would be at risk due to moving 100 M$ to animal welfare

I definitely agree with this, I would only be concerned if we moved almost all funding to animal welfare.

>developing plant-based alternatives

This too can be useful, but less so.

My model here is there would be transition to lab grown meat, and moving this transition few years / months / days into the earlier time is the thing that matters most

And also in general, I have really cautious stance on population ethics with respect to animals. And i think most utilitarian approaches handle it by not handling it, just refusing to think about it. And that's really weird. Like, if i donate to animals welfare of chickens? I bet the beneficiaries is next generation of chickens from the one currently existing. I want to donate in such a way as to prevent their existence, not supply them with band aids. I think causing creation of 20% less tortured chicken instead is like insane goal for my donation. 
 

I think of this question mostly in terms of the trajectory I think this nudges us towards. It feels like there's something of a hierarchy of needs for humanity as a whole, and getting out of the zone where we have extreme poverty feels like the right first step, in a way that makes me feel more optimistic about wise decision processes being able to rise to the top thereafter.

I'm not certain what current spending looks like; that might make me change my mind here. (I think it's definitely right to start ramping up spending on animal welfare at some point before poverty is entirely eliminated.)

[trigger warning: allusions to pending US electoral candidate who identified as a Nazi and posted anti-trans content...]

Could you say more about why you think the challenges "largely stem from insufficient communication"? I don't disagree that a better comms strategy would be helpful and probably a prudent use for some of the additional $100MM. But I'm struggling to see how it would be a game-changer for most of the challenges Henry describes.

E.g.,: companies and consumers resist things that cost them money, and they use the political system to seek relief from those things. And no communication strategy is going to convince agricultural industries that EA AW wouldn't be at least a near-existential threat to many of their business lines if it achieved its hopes and dreams. Moreover, changing hearts and minds on such an emotionally laden topic as food would be a massive undertaking -- to give a vaguely relevant data point, PepsiCo spent ~$2B on advertising in the US alone in 2022. And getting people to believe things they don't want to believe on a mass scale is hard even when those things are scientifically true (yes the vaccines work, no they will not improve your 5G reception).

Also, the upside of an affirmative comms strategy is limited when you have provided a determined opponent a bunch of open goals to score on. For instance, right now there's a major candidate for governor of a US state who made a bunch of disturbing comments on an adult entertainment discussion board (e.g., calling himself a Nazi). For a significant portion of the US population, some of the things that are said on this Forum register as more offensive than that (e.g., meat-eater problem, implications that a human life is morally worth less than giving a few thousand shrimps a more humane death).^[1] 

I don't see how throwing money at developing and executing a better comms plan helps much with those kinds of vulnerabilities. I wouldn't be interested in engaging any more with content about the Nazi-identifying governor; it just wouldn't be worth my time on the very very slim chance further information would update my vote. I expect many people would have a similar reaction when opponents successfully tied EA AW to the meat-eater problem.

1. ^{^}

   I am reporting, not endorsing, this view! I'm using it as an example because I think it's easy for people in/adjacent to the EA bubble to not understand how certain positions may play in (e.g.) the deep South where I grew up.

Right, I take this to be an implication of our best economic and demographic models (respectively).

I don't know what you mean by "a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions". Whether an intervention has a noticeable short-term effect on these targets? That would seem to address a different question.

I wouldn't expect to be able to identify the particular ripple that occurred in any given case, if that's what you mean. So I wouldn't take the failure to identify a particular ripple as evidence that there are no ripple effects. If there are good reasons to reject the standard models, I'd expect that to emerge in the debates over those macro models, not through micro evidence from RCTs or the like.

We need to make sure that job applications are assessed blindly at most stages in the application to avoid bias.

My understanding is that several places that have tried blinding found that this decreased the diversity of their hiring. Something to be cautious about!

Thanks so much for this excellent list Henry. Although I only agree with some as being make issues personally I think it's the best collection of well structured arguments of problems with a potential shift towards animal welfare that I've seen.

Things I really agree are big issues

• approximations are too approximate
• slippery slope argument moving towards pasc as lls mugging type scenarios
• the weirdest stuff can put people off the more moderate stuff, I've seen this already while introducing people to EA. It's a tricky issue to manage though as I think we need to be researching and working on the weird regardless if the impact is enough.

Things I personally don't think are a big issue

• Resistance, as many critically important stuff transformative movements in our time and before met huge resistance. Even things like giving it HIV drugs in Africa
• outcomes harder to measure. Often animal welfare has great success feedback loops, often better than global health. Think shrimp stunners or battery farmed hens. I agree the benefits are hard to measure with huge error bars lije you say, but as a global health guy I'm actually quite envious of animal welfare feedback loops at times.
• from a Ugandan perspective at least I don't think there's much risk of being called "culturally insensitive", that's more of a Western liberal framework I think. People here just laugh at me or give me weird looks when taking about animal welfare. I haven't yet met someone who cares but I'm also not going to be accused of being insensitive in a serious way.

I agree with many of the points made in the above comment but do not plan to change my vote.  When one looks at current expenditures on public health (in the many $trillions of dollars) versus on animal welfare (around $9 billion in revenues annually in the USA), the marginal increase in the utility of grants in the animal welfare space are likely to be greater than those in public health.  Open Philanthropy's history project comments on the challenge of producing positive impact in the health space given the large amounts currently devoted annually to support biomedical research let alone the much larger amounts devoted to health treatment, disease surveillance, and prevention.  

There's not much to add beyond what everyone else has said. I think we would need to be exceedingly confident in particular views about sentience and moral patienthood and capacity for suffering for non-humans to think GHD was better. I very much wish I had written down more of my reasoning from years ago when I was mainly donating to GiveWell, I think I just hadn't thought it over much!

Sophia, I can't believe I didn't see this post until today. I've been interested in inclusion and accessibility-type topics for years, so I have no idea how I didn't see it when you first posted it. Things seem to have improved in some ways since August 2022, but there is still plenty of progress to be made.

Has anybody created a "Top Ten EA Jargon Words Explained"-type post? That seems like something that a person could create fairly easily, and I actually already have a comical version of it as a draft for an April Fool's post. I could easily create a post that could serve as a sort of reference page, so that people can easily link to it to explain jargon.

The challenges you've identified regarding the shift from global health to animal welfare—such as resistance, politicization, and cultural insensitivity—largely stem from insufficient communication, which can be significantly improved with more funding. By investing in effective messaging strategies, we can make animal welfare interventions more relatable and acceptable to the broader public, thereby increasing their popularity and impact. Moreover, the Effective Altruism community risks reputational damage by advocating for animal welfare without adequately investing in public communication; without a strong messaging system, we may alienate potential supporters and undermine our efforts. Therefore, allocating more resources to both animal welfare initiatives and their communication is crucial—not only to address these concerns but also to enhance the movement's credibility and ensure our interventions are both effective and well-received.

The marginal effect of increased spending (say $1 billion) on animal welfare is likely to be far greater than the marginal impact of an extra $1 billion on global health. Granted that public health challenges in low and middle-income countries can at times be substantially lessened with relatively small inputs (e.g., niacin enrichment of corn meal), overall, the impact of relatively small amounts of strategically invested money can have a significant impact on the animal space. For example, I believe the support ($1-2 million) Open Philanthropy has provided to Compassion in World Farming to support Compassion's End the Cage Age" citizen's initiative in Europe is going to have substantial global ramifications for how farmed animals are raised and treated down the road. The EU has temporarily stepped back on its commitment to end caged animal farming. Still, the recent Strategic Dialogue on Agriculture in Europe has again emphasized the importance of ending farmed animal cages. I would also refer readers to the recent papers on the impact of the vulture decline in India. The bat decline in the USA (look for documents by Eyal Frank and colleagues), which concluded that the loss of those wild animals has led to substantial increases in all cause human mortality in India and infant mortality in the USA. Calculating the economic impact of biodiversity decline is a significant challenge, but Frank has provided two fascinating and valuable examples of how animal welfare, human welfare and planetary well-being are connected!

I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following:
1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments

2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)

3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high

I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.

I weigh moral worth by degree of sentience based on neuron count as a rough proxy, which naturally tends to weigh helping an equal number of humans more than an equivalent number of any other currently known species.

Although I know many EAs will agree with you, I think second order concerns such as image and reference on the movement are valid considerations, although usually less important than first order.

This post is mostly about how animal welfare is less popular than global health but I don't really see the tie-in for how this (probably correct) claim translates to it being less effective. Taking the first argument at face value, that some people won't like being in some ways forced to pay more or change their habits, does not seem to translate to "it is not cost effective to do successfully force them (and one hopes eventually change their hearts and minds) anyway." This was precisely the case for a lot of social movements (abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights, worker's rights, the environmental movement, etc.) but all these movements were to various degrees successful.

It seems to me that in order for any of these popularity based arguments to hold water, you need a follow-on of "and therefore it is not cost effective to invest in them, and here is the evidence." However, I think we have a lot of evidence for cost-effectiveness in investing animal interventions. See cage-free egg campaigns for example. I similarly don't understand the relevance of other popularity-based concerns, such as being accused of being culturally insensitive. What is the implication for effectiveness if such accusations are made? Why does that matter?

There are more sentient beings affected by factory farming and the problem is more neglected.

Yeah, I didn't intend to suggest that biomass is actually the metric, but more like, if you believe that the "intensity of experience" ratio is at least as large as the mass ratio (not because of the mass, but because the larger creatures tend to also have more complex brains and behaviour and so on), then actually farmed animals may have at least comparable if not more "total experience" than wild animals.

I reviewed the piece you linked and fwiw strongly disagreed that the case it made was as clear cut as the authors conclude (in particular IIRC they observe a limited historical upside from RCT-backed interventions, but didn't seem to account for the far smaller amount of money that had been put into them; they also gave a number of priors that I didn't necessarily strongly disagree with, but seemed like they could be an order of magnitude off in either direction, and the end result was quite sensitive to these).

That's not to say I think global health interventions are clearly better - just that I think the case is open (but also that, given the much smaller global investment in RCTs, there's probably more exploratory value in those).

I could imagine any of the following turning out to be the best safeguard of the long term (and others):
 

• Health and development interventions
• Economic growth work
• Differential focus on interplanetary settlement
• Preventing ecological collapse
• AI safety work
• e/acc (their principles taken seriously, not the memes)
• AI capabilities work (because of e/acc)
• Work on any subset of global catastrophes (including seemingly minor ones like Kessler syndrome, which in itself has the potential to destabilise civilisation)

My best guess is the last one, but I'm wary of any blanket dismissal of any subset of the above.

Animal welfare is much more neglected than global human health

I agree with most of these points, but many of them don’t really argue against the forum question as posed. (Not that you were saying they do.).

The “should” in the question, in my mind, seems to rule out these second order image concerns, difficulty of garnering support, etc.

Hi! As well as these roles, there are some remote international roles listed on the Palisade Notion site - are these still open, and if so, how should one apply to them? 

Malaria Consortium: 12,000 children protected, 24 lives saved.

New incentives: 1,200 children vaccinated, 2 lives saved

Hellen Keller : 109,000 children supplied with Vitamin A supplements, 40 lives saved

B.

With a $120,000 I will donate to Hellen Keller because of its high effectiveness.

2. Too socially acceptable to dismiss

Saving children from malaria, diarrheal disease, lead poisoning, or treating cataracts and obstetric fistula is hard to argue against without sounding like a bad person.

I think this is also true for some of the more moderate/less weird animal welfare reforms we ask for:

1. not keeping birds or mammals in cages or crates their whole lives,
2. not using breeds of chickens that grow so fast they have chronic pain, and
3. humane slaughter.

But this may be less true for plant-based advocacy, invertebrate welfare and wild animal welfare. Open Phil has stopped funding work in the last two.

8. Will be called culturally insensitive

Animal products are a core part of many cultures. EA Funds directs "grants to advocacy organizations working in 26 countries". Most of these are in Western countries currently. As time goes on (maybe already?) the majority of animals will be raised/killed/consumed in India, Southeast Asia and Africa.

Global health is less burdened with accusations of imposed Western Values because not dying of diarrhea, measles or lead poisoning and not having cataracts are mostly universal cultural traits

Plenty of work has been done outside the West, e.g. through the Open Wing Alliance. Several ACE recommendations work primarily outside the West. AFAIK, we aren't really being called culturally insensitive so far. So, this doesn't seem to be materializing, or at least not in a way that's seriously hindering us.

And costly welfare reforms will only go through where they are reasonably aligned with the values of the producers or consumers (possibly sometimes aligned only with end consumers in the West, not with the non-Western producers for imported products). I think EAA grantmakers and the EAA orgs they support are basically as sensitive to cultural values as they need to be. Outreach is usually carried out mostly by local advocates. Consideration of cultural values also affects organizational strategies, like what kind of outreach is done, e.g. less antagonistic in East Asia, if I recall correctly.

The challenges you've identified regarding the shift from global health to animal welfare—such as resistance, politicization, and cultural insensitivity—largely stem from insufficient communication, which can be significantly improved with more funding. By investing in effective messaging strategies, we can make animal welfare interventions more relatable and acceptable to the broader public, thereby increasing their popularity and impact. Moreover, the Effective Altruism community risks reputational damage by advocating for animal welfare without adequately investing in public communication; without a strong messaging system, we may alienate potential supporters and undermine our efforts. Therefore, allocating more resources to both animal welfare initiatives and their communication is crucial—not only to address these concerns but also to enhance the movement's credibility and ensure our interventions are both effective and well-received.

The attempts by the Rethink Priorities Welfare Range Estimates project to create a framework for comparing animal suffering is necessary for doing the cost-benefit analyses we would need to decide whether the cost to humans of an intervention is worth the benefit to animals. Unfortunately these ranges have such wide confidence intervals that, putting aside the question of whether the methodology and ranges are even valid, it doesn't seem to get us any closer to doing the necessary cost-benefit analyses.

we have no objective way to measure animal suffering and compare it to our intuitive feelings about human welfare

This can also cut the other way if we're trying to ensure we have a positive impact (difference-making risk averse or difference-making ambiguity averse). We have no objective way to measure how much potential harm saving humans or improving their incomes does to nonhuman animals through the meat eater problem or wild animal effects.

9. Outcomes will be harder to measure, we won't get feedback on progress

My understanding is that no one is seriously verifying how many deaths or disease cases GiveWell-recommended charities have prevented. Rather, studies of the effectiveness of the types of interventions these charities use are generalized, with adjustments for context. There's a risk that we're just missing something, say that the program isn't implemented as expected, or we've made the wrong adjustments for context. As far as I can tell, we're only tracking inputs, and then we're estimating the outputs. The cost-effectiveness analyses are effectively ex ante or prospective. (Maybe except for GiveDirectly, for which there have been RCTs.)

Animal welfare intervention cost-effectiveness analyses seem more ex post or retrospective. For corporate outreach, we track which companies have made commitments, and we track progress on those commitments, e.g. % of their eggs cage-free with EggTrack.

There is still the problem of assessing causal impact, of course, and there's been some formal (observational/non-RCT) research on this (Mendez & Peacock, 2022) and some more informal analyses, including fact-checking accomplishments and what the industry had otherwise planned.

We also do have analyses of the welfare effects of some major animal welfare reforms in terms of duration and intensity of suffering reduced through Welfare Footprint Project, and some other similar projects. But these are not specific to the work of specific non-profits, so not really ex post/retrospective.

"There seems to be movement towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions."

What is this based on? I don't believe this tracks with e.g. distribution of EA-associated donations.

A couple of survey results which may be interesting in light of this debate:

• When we surveyed the community on what portion of the community's resources they believed should be allocated to these two cause areas, the average allocation to GHD was higher. This was true among both low/high engagement EAs, though the gap was smaller for highly engaged EAs.
• However, if we compare this to actual allocations (in 2019, since these were the most up to date we had at the time), we see that the average preferred allocations are higher for AW and lower for GHD.

This is in line with the debate week results showing a strong preference for an additional $100mn going to AW, but the continued preference for a larger total percentage going to GHD seems worth noting.

Economic growth and population size both seem to have persisting effects.

Could you elaborate? Are you saying that increasing the economy or population size today will make the economy and population size larger for at least centuries? Would you consider a decreasing effect size of fertility- and income-boosting interventions evidence against that?

I agree with most of these points, but many of them don’t really argue against the forum question as posed. (Not that you were saying they do.).

The “should” in the question, in my mind, seems to rule out these second order image concerns, difficulty of garnering support, etc.

I think this post is overall great, even though I favour animal over global health stuff right now, but doing stuff just for the optics feels really sleazy and naive utilitarian to me. 

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Will!

I am sceptical of suffering focused utilitarianism^[2], and am worried that animal welfare interventions tend to lean strongly in favour of things that reduce the number of animals, on the assumption that their lives are net negative.

You could donate to organisations improving instead of decreasing the lives of animals. I estimated a past cost-effectiveness of Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) of 43.5 k times the marginal cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities.

I'm sceptical of Rethink's moral weight numbers^[1], and am more convinced of something closer to anchoring on neuron counts (and even more convinced by extreme uncertainty). This puts animal charities more like 10x ahead rather than 1000 or 1 million times. I'm also sceptical of very small animals (insects) having a meaningful probability/degree of sentience.

I agree with the last sentence. Using Rethink Priorities' welfare range for chickens based on neurons, I would conclude corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 11.1 (= 1.51*10^3*0.00244/0.332) times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.

Rethink Priorities' median welfare range for shrimps of 0.031 is 31 k (= 0.031/10^-6) times their welfare range based on neurons of 10^-6. For you to get to this super low welfare range, you would have to justify putting a very low weight in all the other 11 models considered by Rethink Priorities. In general, justifying a best guess so many orders of magnitude away from that coming out of the most in-depth research on the matter seems very hard.

2) I am sceptical of the intensity of pain and pleasure being logarithmically distributed (severe pain ~100x worse than moderate pain), and especially of this being biased in the negative direction. One reason for this is that I find the "first story" for interpreting Weber's law in this post much more intuitive, i.e. that logarithmically distributed stimuli get compressed to a more linear range of experience

Assuming in my cost-effectiveness analysis of HSI that disabling and excruciating pain are as intense as hurtful pain (setting B2 and B3 of tab "Types of pain" to 1), and maintaining the other assumptions, 1 day of e.g. "scalding and severe burning" would be neutralised by 1 day of fully healthy life. I think this massively underestimates the badness of severe suffering. Yet, even then, I conclude the past cost-effectiveness of HSI is 2.17 times the marginal cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities.

I think something like worldview diversification is essentially a reasonable idea, for reasons of risk aversion and optimising under expected future information.

Farmed animals are neglected, so I do not think worldview diversidication would be at risk due to moving 100 M$ to animal welfare instead of global health and development. I calculated 99.9 % of the annual philanthropic spending is on humans.

In contrast, based on Rethink Priorities' median welfare ranges, the annual disability of farmed animals is much larger than that of humans.

We can do better than argmax

I agree one should not put all resources into the best option, but we are very far from this (see 1st graph above).

I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following:
1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments

2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)

3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high

I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.

Hey Vasco,

Love the post; I think it is super valuable to have these sorts of important conversations, directly thinking about cross-cause comparison. It’s worth noting that CE does consider cross-cause effects in all the interventions we consider/recommend, including possible animal effects and WAS effects. Despite this, CE does not come to the same conclusion as this post; here are a couple of notes on why:

Strength of evidence discounting: CEAs are not all equal when they are based on very different strengths of evidence, and I think we weight this factor a lot heavier. It's quite common for the impact of any given intervention to regress fairly heavily as more research/work is put into it. We have found this in CE’s, GW’s and other EAs’ research. This can be seen in even more depth in the GiveWell and EA forum writings on deworming and how to deal with speculative effects that possibly have very high upsides. For example, I would expect a five-hour CEA to be constantly off (almost always in a positive direction) compared to a 50-hour CEA. A calculation made at two different levels of rigor should not be directly compared. (This does not mean shorter-form CEAs are not worth doing, but I think we have to take their cons and likely regressions a lot more seriously than this post currently does.) This discounting should be even more heavily applied to flow-through effects, as the evidence for them is way lighter than the direct effects. We tend to use something akin to the weighted quantitative modeling used here.

Marginal funding and reliability in effects: Here’s a good example of how a CEA can regress really quickly; GiveWell typically does CEAs on marginal donations made, whereas many other CEAs - including the one you use from Saulius - do not consider marginal funding. I currently think that the marginal dollar to corporate campaigns is way less impactful when compared to the average dollar of spending pre-2018. This can affect a CEA quite drastically. Another example is the funding of numerous animal interventions through corporate campaigns, which have become the “hit” of the animal movement. However, these campaigns often are seen as cost-effectiveness without clear before hand knowledge of the impact an additional dollar of funding would have accomplished. It is a bit like measuring CE’s cost effectiveness by looking at the top charity we incubated and assuming future charities will be equal to that. Variance is a real pain, and it’s not even clear if other corporate campaigns will be equally cost-effective to cage-free. On the other hand, top GW charities have this built in; they are not estimating the average EV of AMF’s top three historical campaigns, they are estimating the impact of marginal average future funding.

Variable animal effects dependent on intervention: You touch on this, but I think there is an important point missed. The effects on animals vary quite a lot, depending on the intervention. Interventions that primarily affect mortality in Africa, for instance, end up looking like how you describe. But morbidity-focused interventions, mental health focused interventions, and family planning interventions are all significantly less affected by this consideration. Same goes for any intervention that operates in contexts where there is lower meat consumption (such as in India). I think if you remodeled this for an organization like Fortify Health (Iron fortification in India), it would result in rather different outcomes.

If you combine these factors and look at a marginal dollar to FH vs a marginal dollar to THL (both of them with similarly rigorous CEAs and flow-through effects that are discounted based on certainty), I think the outcomes would be different enough to change your endline conclusion.
The non-epistemic difference I have is to do with ecosystem limitations, and is more specific to CE itself vs. general EA organizations. When we launch a charity, we need 1) founders 2) ideas, and 3) funding. Each of these are fairly cause area limited (and I think limiting factors are often more important than total scale). For example, if we aimed to found 10 animal charities a year (vs 10 charities across all the cause areas we currently focus on) I do not think the weakest two would be anywhere near as impactful as the top two, and only a small minority of them would get long-term funding. In fact, with animal charities making up around a third of those we have launched, I think we already run close to those limitations. This means that even if we thought that animal charities were more impactful than human ones on average, the difference would have to be pretty large for us to think that adding a 9th or 10th animal charity into the animal ecosystem would be more impactful than adding the first or second human-focused charity. I expect a version of this consideration can apply to other actors too. In general, I believe that given the current ecosystem, more than ~three-five charities founded per year within a given area would start to result in cannibalization between charities.

Thanks again for the consideration of this; I do think people should do a lot more cross-cause thinking, and I expect there are some really neglected areas that have significant intercausal impact.

Pressuring people and entities to do things they would rather not do (like incurring business expenses to improve animal welfare) can be a powerful mechanism of action (MOA), both because of leverage and because certain objectives may be hard to accomplish otherwise.

But it has some important limitations as well, several of which relate to your points. The reliance on consumer, social, or political pressure limits the range of viable targets, likely requires pulling some punches to maintain the public support needed for the MOA to work, invites countermeasures by opponents who can appeal to (e.g.) a higher power like the legislature, and so on.

Thus, it doesn't generally play well with (e.g.) an attitude of truthseeking-and-damn-the-torpedoes or something that looks like an epistemic precommitment to not caring what outsiders think. Those stances may work with bednets and conducting certain types of research where little third-party support/cooperation is needed, but I'd note how those interventions are not nearly as leveraged.

Mostly the meat-eater problem, also cost-effectiveness analyses. Also higher neglectedness on priors.

Industrialised animal farming is the single biggest cause of suffering, the most neglected / under-reported and under-funded and therefore deserves all the funding it can possibly source. Moreover, reducing animal agriculture would also reduce risks (zoonoses / pandemics); environmental harms and improve human health outcomes. It would be a win-win for multiple cause areas.

Animals ought not be fungible to humans!

You'd have to value animals at ~millionths of humans for scale and neglectedness not to be dispositive. Only countervailing considerations are things around cooperativeness, positive feedback loops, and civilizational stability, all of which are speculative and even sign uncertain

Hey Squeezy! I'm really sorry, but we're not going to be able to do this right now as we don't have the data from these organisations or it would take too long to categorise it at this point. Here you can find out more information about Open Philanthropy and Manifund's allocations. Unfortunately we don't have the data on other organisations. 

The neglectedness and intensity of animal suffering would, in a triaging scenario, see me prioritizing it over many global health interventions. I am open to the idea that many animals do not indeed live lives not worth living; but personally I would rather avoid life than live as an industrially farmed chicken or fish.

I am sensitive to the idea that animal welfare work may not be able to productively absorb $100 million. At the same time, I would like to see more experimentation in the animal advocacy movement.

What is the most effective and appropriate relationship with "mainstream common sense morality views" in your opinion? At one extreme, if we just parrot them, then we can just cut out the expensive meta middlemen and give directly to whatever mainstream opinion says we should.

I do think the skew would be meaningfully different but for the significant discrepancy in GW vs AW funding in both EA and more generally.

Executive summary: The shift from global health to animal welfare interventions in effective altruism may backfire due to various challenges, including resistance to imposed changes, social dismissal, politicization, and difficulties in measuring outcomes.

Key points:

1. Animal welfare interventions often involve imposed regulations, leading to resistance from farmers and consumers.
2. Animal welfare arguments are more easily dismissed socially compared to global health initiatives.
3. Animal welfare is more politicized, potentially generating conspiracies and opposition.
4. Extreme animal welfare arguments may alienate people from supporting more moderate positions.
5. Research on animal welfare faces significant measurement challenges and may yield few actionable results.
6. Expanding moral circles to include more animals risks slippery slope arguments and accusations of valuing animals over humans.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

Executive summary: The "Otherness and control in the age of AGI" essay series explores how deep atheism and moral anti-realism in AI risk discourse can lead to problematic "yang" impulses for control, and proposes incorporating more balanced "yin" and "green" perspectives while still acknowledging key truths about AI risk.

Key points:

1. Deep atheism and moral anti-realism in AI risk discourse can promote an impulse for extreme control ("yang") over the future.
2. This yang impulse has concerning failure modes, like violating ethical boundaries and tyrannically shaping others' values.
3. We should incorporate more cooperative, liberal norms and "green" perspectives of humility and attunement.
4. However, we must balance this with acknowledging real risks from potentially alien AI systems.
5. A nuanced "humanism" is proposed that allows for improving the world while respecting ethical limits.
6. Our choices shape reality, so we have responsibility to choose wisely in steering the future.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following:
1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments

2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)

3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high

I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.

Executive summary: Subgame-perfect Nash Equilibrium in extensive-form games requires rational best responses at each decision point, but real-world behavior often deviates due to fairness considerations and social preferences.

Key points:

1. Normal-form games involve simultaneous decisions, while extensive-form games have sequential decisions represented by game trees.
2. Subgame-perfect Nash Equilibrium occurs when each decision point (subgame) represents a Nash Equilibrium.
3. The Ultimatum Game illustrates subgame perfection, with a theoretical optimal strategy of offering the smallest amount possible.
4. Behavioral studies show people often reject unfair offers, contradicting purely rational self-interest assumptions.
5. In repeated games, considering opponents' interests becomes part of rational self-interest, leading to fairer offers.
6. Understanding subgame perfection requires viewing payoffs in absolute rather than relative terms.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

Last time I checked, improving the lives of animals was much cheaper than improving human lives; and I don't think that arguments saying that humans have more moral weight are enough to compensate.

Can you expand on why other animal interventions seem useless? For instance, developing plant-based alternatives, getting chickens out of cramped cages, stunning animals before slaughter... 
I'm not sure to see how these interventions do not improve the lives of other beings?

under neartermism, which is not my view but which may be the spirit of the question, animal welfare seems obviously better because non-human animals are extremely neglected by human civilization, either left to die in the wild or cut up in mechanized torture facilities.

under longtermism, it's basically a question of which could positively effect the values of the first agent superintelligence. probably neither would have a strong effect, but conditional on an effect being had, i'd guess it would route through the increased moral progress caused by animal welfare advocacy, somehow leading to a less human-centric forever-value.

(100% under neartermism, ~80% under longtermism in recognition of uncertainty)

Hi all,

Thanks to all for taking the time to discuss our paper. I don’t have time to read and comment on everything I’ve seen discussed in the forum, but I thought it would be worthwhile to comment on a few misunderstanding (some of which others have already pointed to):

 

1. Although our main focus is on strong longtermism, many things we say are relevant for weaker views as well.
2. Many of our arguments are related in the sense that if you bite the bullet on one, you end up in another problem.
3. I think there are good reason to think that the psychological constraints for distance in space and distance is time are different because distance is space can be overcome, and arguably the distance of “caring” is less today than it was in the past because distance can be reduced in so many ways, but the distance to far future individuals is for obvious reasons very different.
4. The difference-maker argument is not saying that we cannot do things that are good for the future, but that we don’t need to think about the far future to know that these things are good. I think this is important to keep in mind when one addresses the problem of predicting far future consequences and evaluating value weights for the far future.

Speaking for both me and Karolina, we’d be super happy if a longtermist would take the time to respond to our paper.

I would advise being careful with RP's Cross-cause effectiveness tool as it currently stands, especially with regards to the chicken campaign. There appears to be a very clear conversion error which I've detailed in the edit to my comment here. I was also unable to replicate their default values from their source data, but I may be missing something. 

I think this post is overall great, even though I favour animal over global health stuff right now, but doing stuff just for the optics feels really sleazy and naive utilitarian to me. 

I am having a hard time following this. We aren't, to my knowledge, asking people whose loved ones are at significant risk of dying of malaria and TB for money. AFAIK, we're not asking them to prioritize animal welfare over their loved ones in non-finamcial ways either. Could you explain what specifically we're asking of this class of people?

I'm not sure this metric is relevant : biomass weight is massively dominated by the largest mammals just for the reason that they are big.

Going by this metric, it would mean that having one super obese 400kg individual, or one small cow, counts the same as having 100 human babies (not to talk about elephants).

I think number of individuals is much more relevant here. And there just happens to be a lot of smaller individuals.

I support lab grown meat research / production, other interventions seem useless. I support "global health" more broadly and strongly, you have less ways to burn money in ways i find useless

Reading RP's work in the last months and the posts for debate week has made me more inclined towards AW funding. 

This post asks a similar question! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pZT9FjRehCouvrRXz/seeking-ripple-effects

I personally think that we shouldn't weigh the ripple effects too highly in our decisions - if you care about reducing short term suffering and long term expanding the moral circle, I would be skeptical that a single intervention would better accomplish both of those objectives than two separate interventions tailored to each.

Anyone know any Earn-To-Givers who might be interested in participating in an AMA during Giving Season? If a few are interested, it might be fun to experiment with an AMA panel, where Forum users ask questions, and any of the AMA co-authors can respond/ co-authors can disagree.

Why? Giving Season is, in my opinion, a really great time to highlight the earn-to-give work which is ongoing all year, but is generally under-celebrated by the EA community. + Earn-to-givers might have good insights on how to pick donation targets during the donation election, and Giving Season more generally. 
 

If I drop the lower bound by 4 orders of magnitude, to "between 0.0000002 and 0.87 times", I get a result of 709 Dalys/1000$, which is basically unchanged. Do sufficiently low bounds basically do nothing here?

This parameter is set to a normal distribution (which, unfortunately you can't control) and the normal distribution doesn't change much when you lower the lower bound. A normal distribution between 0.002 and 0.87 is about the same as a normal distribution between 0 and 0.87. (Incidentally, if the distribution were a lognormal distribution with the same range, then the average result would fall halfway between the bounds in terms of orders of magnitude. This would mean cutting the lower bound would have a significant effect. However, the effect would actually raise the effectiveness estimate because it would raise the uncertainty about the precise order of magnitude. The increase of scale outside the 90% confidence range represented by the distribution would more than make up for the lowering of the median.)

Also, this default (if you set it to "constant") is saying that a chicken has around half the capacity weight of humans. Am I right in interpreting this as saying that if you see three chickens who are set to be imprisoned in a cage for a year, and also see a human who is set to be imprisoned in a similarly bad cage for a year, then you should preferentially free the former? Because if so, it might be worth mentioning that the intuitions of the average person is many, many orders of magnitudes lower than these estimates, not just 1-2.

The welfare capacity is supposed to describe the range between the worst and best possible experiences of a species and the numbers we provide are intended to be used as a tool for comparing harms and benefits across species. Still, it is hard to draw direct action-relevant comparisons of the sort that you describe because there are many potential side effects that would need to be considered. You may want to prioritize humans in the same way that you prioritize your family over others, or citizens of the same country over others. The capacities values are not in tension with that. You may also prefer to help humans because of their capacity for art, friendship, etc. 

To grasp the concept, I think a better example application would be: if you had to give a human or three chickens a headache for an hour (which they would otherwise spend unproductively) which choice would introduce less harm into the world? Estimating the chickens' range as half that of the human would suggest that it is less bad overall from the perspective of total suffering to give the headache to the human.

The numbers are indeed unintuitive for many people but they were not selected by intuition. We have a fairly complex and thought-out methodology. However, we would love to see alternative principled ways of arriving at less animal-friendly estimates of welfare capacities (or moral weights).

Our estimate uses Saulius's years/$ estimates. To convert to DALYs/$, we weighted by the amount of pain experienced by chickens per year. The details can be found in Laura Dufffy's report here. The key bit:

I estimated the DALY equivalent of a year spent in each type of pain assessed by the Welfare Footprint Project by looking at the descriptions of and disability weights assigned to various conditions assessed by the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019 and comparing these to the descriptions of each type of pain tracked by the Welfare Footprint Project.

These intensity-to-DALY conversion factors are: 

• 1 year of annoying pain = 0.01 to 0.02 DALYs
• 1 year of hurtful pain = 0.1 to 0.25 DALYs
• 1 year of disabling pain = 2 to 10 DALYs
• 1 year of excruciating pain = 60 to 150 DALYs

With my temperament and personality im a "direct work" kind of guy. As much as I might like to think otherwise, I don't think I'm likely any time soon to have the temperament or drive to work well in Meta or earn-to-give.

Given that, if my mind was changed here all it might mean is that I would give a small amount more to animal welfare orgs (given my very low salary by most people here's standards). I doubt given my stage of life (ancient), emotional biases and competitive advantage it is likely to make sense for me to do direct work for animal welfare orgs even if I believed it was quite a lot more cost effective, although if my mind was changed a lot this wouldnt be out of the question.

The question of capacity seems unrelated to the crux to me. I'm pretty confident that if it were known that there was 100mn to spend then people would spin up orgs. I guess there is a question whether all those would be more effective on the margin than global health, but I dunno, it seems to be missing the bit that I care about most. 

I support lab grown meat research / production, other interventions seem useless. I support "global health" more broadly and strongly, you have less ways to burn money in ways i find useless

Given that there are way more wild animals than farmed animals,

This is surely true by number but I'm not sure it would be true on all reasonable weightings? See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)#/media/File:Terrestrial_biomass.jpg

Economic growth and population size both seem to have persisting effects. If you limit attention to just what can be "accurately measured" (by some narrow conception that rules out the above), your final judgment will be badly distorted by measurability bias.

I also read sections of your link and skimmed through the rest, but I don't see any justification that relates to the idea that helping animals is misguided.

The argument of the link is that moral progress has sometimes meant correctly regarding some previous moral concern as unnecessary or based on false belief. I think the relevance here is to resist the idea that moral concern for animals must be correct by a "more moral concern is always better" heuristic.

(I think it's a useful argument to have in mind, but I think we have much better reasons to be morally concerned about animals.)

Great to go through this post again. Thanks, Saulius!

Fungibility. If a charity does multiple programs, donating to it could fail to increase spending on the program you want to support, even if you restrict your donation. Suppose a charity was planning to spend $1 million of its unrestricted funds on a program. If you donate $1,000 and restrict it to that program, the charity could still spend exactly $1 million on the program and use an additional $1,000 of unrestricted funds on other programs.

Here is a model of the cost-effectiveness of restricted donations.

Great and thought provoking post, thank you very much Moritz!
I especially liked the Evolutionary Perspectives on Happiness and Dissatisfaction part.

Would you like to expand on this a bit?

Great piece. I really connected with the part about the vastness of the possibility of conscious experience.

That said, I’m inclined to think that Utopia, however weird, would also be, in a certain sense, recognizable — that if we really understood and experienced it, we would see in it the same thing that made us sit bolt upright, long ago, when we first touched love, joy, beauty; that we would feel, in front of the bonfire, the heat of the ember from which it was lit. There would be, I think, a kind of remembering. As Lewis puts it: “The gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange.” Utopia would be weird and alien and incomprehensible, yes; but it would still, I think, be our Utopia; still the Utopia that gives the fullest available expression to what we would actually seek, if we really understood. 

It sounds a little bit like you're saying that utopia would be recognisable to modern day humans. If you are saying that, i'm not sure I would agree. Can a great ape have a revelatory experience that a human can have when taking in a piece of art? There exists art that can create the relevant experience, but I highly doubt if you showed every piece of art to any great ape that it would have such an experience. Therefore how can we expect the experiences available in utopia to be recognisable to a modern day human?

Many individuals and organizations are already concerned with global health and actively working to improve it. However, animal welfare requires a significant initial effort to elevate this pressing ethical issue in the public's priorities.

I don't think whether animals or humans are interchangeable (within each group) is the right question. If a human dies and another human is born, the latter does not replace the former in terms of their unique characteristics as an individual, their relationships, etc. But they both have lives worth living, and I don't think it's obviously the case that one long life is better than two half-long lives -- sure, there are some advantages to longer lives in terms of accumulation of knowledge, memories, relationships etc, but I think these effects are relatively minor among reasons why a life is good or rich or well-lived (e.g. I think children have rich and valuable lives -- although they miss some things about the adult experience, it's not so much to make them dramatically different).

At a risk of getting off topic from the core question, which interventions do you think are most effective in ensuring we thrive in the future with better cooperative norms? I don't think it's clear that this would be EA global health interventions. I would think boosting innovation and improving institutions are more effective.

Also boosting economic growth would probably be better than so-called randomista interventions from a long-term perspective.

The 80,000 Hours team just published that "We now rank factory farming among the top problems in the world." I wonder if this is a coincidence or if this planned to coincide with the EA Forum's debate week? Combined with the current debate week's votes on where an extra $100 should be spent, these seem like nice data points to show to anyone that claims EA doesn't care about animals.

Farmed animals are neglected, so I do not think worldview diversidication would be at risk due to moving 100 M$ to animal welfare instead of global health and development. I calculated 99.9 % of the annual philanthropic spending is on humans.

I think it would be more appropriate to use something like human welfare spending for low-income countries rather than counting ~all charitable activity as in a broad "human" bucket. That is to maintain parity with the way you've sliced off a particularly effective part of the animal-welfare pie (farmed animal welfare). E.g., some quick Google work suggests animal shelters brought in 3.5B in 2023 in just the US (although a fair portion of of that may be government contracts). 

Companion animal shelters may be the animal-welfare equivalent of opera for human-focused charities (spending lots on relatively few individuals who are relatively privileged in a sense). While deciding not to give to farmed-animal charities because of dog shelter spending doesn't make much sense, I would submit that not giving to bednets because of opera spending poses much the same problem.

I don't think that changes your underlying point much at all, though!

Thanks for the thoughtful write-up! A few things came to mind while reading:

• Part of the post felt like a false equivalency - to my knowledge $100M spent on animal welfare would actually net virtually no funds to conservation, as opposed to other approaches. Indeed as CB pointed out, many of the ideas people are pursuing are anti-conservation (I admit I am biased against funding wild animal suffering programs) - they actually openly advocate for further manipulating ecosystems.

• One particular section also caught my eye: "Zoonotic diseases, such as Ebola, SARS, and COVID-19, often emerge when ecosystems are disrupted, forcing animals and humans into closer contact. The loss of biodiversity weakens natural barriers that prevent the spread of these diseases. A diverse ecosystem can act as a buffer, reducing the chances of pathogens jumping from animals to humans." I am not sure how these two points flow from one another. I think it's perfectly possible to have biodiversity and still zoonotic diseases - as you correctly note zoonotic diseases primarily emerge from our interactions with wildlife, which feels independent of the biodiversity - the 2009 Swine flu epidemic is a good example of regular factory farming causing outbreaks of zoonotic disease. Many additional epidemics like SARS and Covid-19 appear to point to wet markets as their source - in other words its our eating of animals that is causing zoonotic disease - unrelated to the biodiversity of ecosystems.

• One thing that I appreciate about this post is the difficulty noted in weighing diffuse benefits from specific ones. I have no doubt that conservation of land and biodiversity has positive impacts for animal and human lives (e.g. preserving floodplains for water/flood management). Diffuse benefits in better temperature management, improved likelihood to identify antibiotics, etc., are difficult to quantify but 'feel' right. However 'feel' right is also what EA would counter in avoiding ineffective charities. I think there is more to be done in trying to quantify potential benefits. I wonder if there are opportunities to more quantifiably learn from projects like the Gorongosa Restoration Project that you cite.

I was surprised to find that I felt slightly uncomfortable positioning myself on the 'animal welfare' side of the debate week scale. I guess I generally think of myself as more of a 'global health & development' person, and might have subconscious concerns about this as an implicit affiliational exercise (even though I very much like and respect a lot of AW folks, I guess I probably feel more "at home" with GHD)? Obviously those kinds of personal factors shouldn't influence our judgments about an objective question like the debate week question is asking. But I guess they inevitably do.

I don't know if this observation is even worth sharing, but there it is, fwiw. I guess I'd just like to encourage folks to be aware of their personal biases and try to bracket them as best they can. (I'd like to think of all EAs as ultimately "on the same side" even when we disagree about particular questions of cause prioritization, so I feel kind of bad that I evidently have separate mental categories of "GHD folks" and "AW folks" as though it were some kind of political/coalitional competition.)

This is probably going to be downvoted to oblivion, but I feel it's worth stating anyway, if nothing else to express my frustration with and alienation from EA.

On a meta level, I somewhat worry that the degree to which the animal welfare choice is dominating the global health one kinda shows how seemingly out-of-touch many EAs have become from mainstream common sense morality views.

In particular, I'm reminded of that quote from the Analects of Confucius:

When the stables were burnt down, on returning from court Confucius said, "Was anyone hurt?" He did not ask about the horses.

You can counter with a lot of math that checks out and arguments that make logical sense, but the average person on the street is likely to view the idea that you could ever elevate the suffering of any number of chickens above that of even one human child to be abhorrent.

Maybe the EAs are still technically right and other people are just speciesist, but to me this does not bode well for the movement gaining traction or popular support.

Just wanted to get that out of my system.

I'm confused about the theory of impact for "free vegan meals in the Bay Area" idea. A few recipients might work in AI, but I don't see the link between eating a vegan meal offered for free and making more animal-friendly AI development choices.

There is the meat eater problem where more animal lives would likely be lost by increasing the human population. It also seems much more cost effective per dollar to suffering spared to help animals and factory farming is spreading rapidly through Asia and Africa, making this a hingey time.