Effective giving initiatives should not assume the best animal and human welfare interventions are equally cost-effective?

While this is true, I also think it's worth considering that this is often a criticism of any CEA, period. To the average person, the suggestion that a GiveWell top-recommended charity is more cost-effective than, say, a local food kitchen similarly requires estimates with error bars. 

Yes, there are more assumptions when dealing with animals given welfare ranges, but I am reluctant to dismiss the analysis entirely because of that. 

It is not immediately intuitive to me on what grounds one should value a human life more than that of a cow or pig. The moral weights project tries to put a number to something difficult to quantify. It's not perfect, but it is better than nothing. (To be clear, I do value the human life more, but it seems unfair and speciest to do so.)

NickLaing @ 2025-02-19T06:22 (+3)

Jesse I don't think your example is correct because did the GiveWell error bars don't overlap with food kitchen ones. We can be 99+ percent sure malaria nets are more cost effective than soup kitchens. That just isn't the case here. Comparing the certainly of human intervention effectiveness vs. animals is like chalk and cheese

I don't agree with Henry that the huge error bars make RPs welfare ranges useless, probably because I value certainty a bit less than him. But I do think if we value certainly to any degree that can reasonably make us de-value animal welfare point estimates as RP demonstrate themselves in their moral parliament tool.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-02-19T07:30 (+2)

Thanks, Jesse.

To be clear, I do value the human life more, but it seems unfair and speciest to do so.

I think it is fair to value human welfare more. Rethink priorities' median welfare ranges are still lower than 1.

Henry Howard🔸 @ 2025-02-19T01:13 (+2)

The Rethink Priorities Welfare Ranges have absurdly wide confidence intervals. So wide that I would argue they're almost worthless.

MichaelDickens @ 2025-02-19T04:51 (+14)

I think it's very relevant that animal welfare interventions look better than global health interventions almost everywhere within the RP intervals.

Henry Howard🔸 @ 2025-02-20T09:17 (+6)

Alternative response: If someone told me that there was somewhere between a 0.00001 and 0.5 chance that I was to be struck by lightning tomorrow, it would not be reasonable for me to say “well almost everywhere within that confidence interval I have a >1% chance of being hit by lightning tomorrow”

Henry Howard🔸 @ 2025-02-19T21:34 (+6)

Almost everywhere within

Most of these CIs start at zero and they can't go below zero so shouldn't we consider these on a log scale? In which case the scale goes back to negative infinity and "almost everywhere within" is meaningless.
 

MichaelDickens @ 2025-02-20T01:25 (+7)

I don't know of any reasonable justification for caring about expected log-welfare rather than expected welfare. For a welfare range estimate, the thing that matters is the expected value.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-02-20T10:18 (+4)

Agreed, Michael!

For a welfare range estimate, the thing that matters is the expected value.

Right. I have been using Rethink Priorities' (RP's) median welfare ranges, but I care about expected welfare. RP thinks their median welfare ranges are a better proxy for the actual means than the means of the distributions they got, and I tend to agree.

I think it's very relevant that animal welfare interventions look better than global health interventions almost everywhere within the RP intervals.

I think this point is stronger than inferred from the graph because the 90 % confidence interval of the median is narrower than the range from the 5th to the 95th percentile.

David T @ 2025-02-19T22:44 (+2)

Even if one takes the midpoint of the RP intervals as established fact, there are a lot of other assumptions Vasco's arguments depend on, like the magnitude and duration of suffering a particular creature experiences with pain scales with thousands of points to cancel out the RP weights, and the cost-effectiveness of brand new charities in a field (campaigning) where marginal cost-effectiveness is relatively difficult to measure. 

Unlike for RP we don't have published estimates of distributions or confidence intervals for these, but if we did they'd also be extremely wide and I'm not sure that animal welfare interventions would look better across most of the distribution for them.

NickLaing @ 2025-02-19T06:23 (+1)

That argument is weak to me because you could take any intervention we are clueless about and it would look better than global health interventions within most of the interval. If our interval spans zero to close to infinity  then global health interventions are going to be a speck near the bottom of that interval. 

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-02-19T07:16 (+7)

Hi Nick.

That argument is weak to me because you could take any intervention we are clueless about and it would look better than global health interventions within most of the interval.

The overall effect of global health and development (GHD) interventions depends on effects of animals due to the meat-eating problem. So I think clueless about the benefits of helping animals implies cluelessness about whether GHD interventions are beneficial or harmful.

Besides not touching on all of these considerations, many of my modelled inputs are highly uncertain too. However, this means extending human lives globally, and in China, India and Nigeria may be, in the nearterm, not only beneficial, but also hugely harmful. Using RP’s [Rethink Priorities'] 5th and 95th percentile welfare range of shrimp of 0 and 1.15, and maintaining all the other inputs, the harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals as a fraction of the direct benefits of human life in 2022 would be:

• Globally, 5.61 to 372.
• In China, 12.3 and 841.
• In India, 1.70 and 131.
• In Nigeria, 1.12 and 45.3.

---

If our interval spans zero to close to infinity  then global health interventions are going to be a speck near the bottom of that interval.

The cluelessness for GHD interventions would in that case be way more severe. It would go from minus to plus infinity instead of 0 to infinity. Less abstractly, one can be much more confident that humane slaughter interventions are beneficial than that saving human lives is beneficial. Humane slaughter interventions may have negligible benefits if the animals helped turn out to have a negligible welfare range, but it is very hard for them to be harmful in expectation, because they have minor effects on human- and animal-years. In contrast, saving human lives may well increase the animal-years with negative lives, thus potentially being harmful. 

MichaelDickens @ 2025-02-19T18:15 (+4)

If you're clueless about an intervention and you use a fat-tailed prior, then the expected value might be very large but the median value will be very small, and most of the probability mass will be close to 0. For the RP welfare estimates, the median values make animal welfare interventions look highly effective.

Laura Duffy @ 2025-02-19T20:25 (+5)

Hi Henry! The reason why the intervals are so wide is because they're mixing together several models. I've explained more about this modeling choice and result here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rLLRo9C4efeJMYWFM/welfare-ranges-per-calorie-consumption?commentId=Wc2xksAF3Ctmi4cXY

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-02-19T07:27 (+2)

Hi Henry. That graph represents the welfare range distributions (minimum, 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile, and maximum), not the confidence intervals of the medians. I think these are what matters, and that they would be much narrower.

Hi Henry,

The evaluations of human welfare interventions neglect the uncertainty of welfare ranges too. By not considering effects on animals, they are implicitly assuming all non-human welfare ranges are equal to 0. For plausible welfare ranges, some grants from GiveWell (GW), and organisations incubated by Ambitious Impact (AIM) may be harmful. Lots of uncertainty about the benefits of helping animals translates into lots of uncertainty about whether saving human lives, which tends to increase the population of animals nearterm, is beneficial or harmful.

I strongly endorse expectational total hedonistic utilitarianism (increasing happiness, and decreasing suffering), but I think the takeaways are basically the same under desire theories, as beings want to be happy, and not suffer. For my conclusions to change significantly, I believe one has to strongly reject impartiality, or consider Rethink Priorities’ median welfare ranges dramatically overestimate animals’ capacity for welfare.

Thanks, Nuño.

In particular, it seems likely to me that how much you should value animals is not an objective fact of life but a factor that values across people.

I think it is both an objective fact of life, and also a factor that varies across people. Similarly, for valuations of human welfare as a function of e.g. country of birth, there are objective biological differences between humans born in different countries (which I think have a negligible impact on their capacity for welfare), and also different levels of nationalism.

Thanks for the substantive answer, Jason.

Rather, it seems that you think OP et al. are implicitly deferring to judgments made of the end users of EGIs?

Yes, I would agree OP and EGIs are effectively deferring too much to donors at the level of cause prioritisation. EGIs could have recommendations in many areas, but still present their views about which are more cost-effective, as 80,000 Hours does with respect to areas and careers.

And I think there are some pretty powerful structural reasons we would want OP et al. to broadly defer to EGI customers rather than attempt to use its influence over EGIs to shape the ecosystem in furtherance of any particular non-consensus cause prio.

There is significant agreement among people who have worked on cause prioritisation that the most cost-effective animal welfare organisations are more cost-effective at the margin than the most cost-effective human welfare organisations. I undersand this is far from consensual among the whole population, but the same applies to other considerations, although possibly less significantly. It is common for people to value local organisations way more than what would be justified to increase impact by tax benefits, because they value human welfare in their home country way more than in others. However, EGIs in high income countries mostly do not recommend organisations helping people there outside global catastrophic risk mitigation.

More substantively: What is your model of potential EGI end users? My assumption is that most people are coming in with a cause area they are interested in, and need to feel that the EGI aligns fairly closely with their values in order to trust it.

I agree that is a fair description of most people influenced by EGIs.

I am guessing the number of prospects who wish to offload their cause prio and moral judgment to an EGI is much lower.

I agree, but I still think influencing that small fraction is relevant.

If the best animal welfare interventions are over 100 times as cost-effective as the best in human welfare, moving 1 $ to the former is more impactful than moving 100 $ to the latter, and therefore an EGI only has to increase donations to the former 1 % (= 1/100) as much as to the latter for animal welfare to be responsible for most of their impact.

To the extent that an EGI was heavily promoting AW opportunities over others, I submit that it needs to be upfront about being an AW EGI. Anything else is going to come off as a bait-and-switch to most potential end users.

I agree EGIs should specialise more, and mostly across areas instead of countries. However, I would still like to see EGIs experimenting with ranking their areas, as 80,000 Hours does. As far as I know, none has tried, so there is high value of information. To minimise the risk of losing current donors, they could simply run surveys of potential future donors, or the general population, or just change the website for a small number of random visitors. Have you considered this, @David_Moss and @Luke Moore 🔸?

Anything else is going to come off as a bait-and-switch to most potential end users.

Animal welfare could be highlighted in subbtle ways. For example, GWWC lists recommendations in global health and development before ones in animal welfare, but these could appear 1st, which would be in agreement with ordering areas alphabetically.