Thanks for the correction, that is definitely good news for the fish (albeit slightly bad news for my research judgement lol)!

Although another consideration pointing in the other direction is that larger fish probably have larger brains with more neurons, which may render them more morally relevant

Thanks for representing the global dev camp! 

2. Beyond freeing pigs and chooks from cages, animal welfare concern leads to absurd conclusions when you start thinking about wild animal suffering or try to quantify insect suffering.

Eh, I agree the conclusions might be counterintuitive and even weird, but disagree pretty strongly that they're absurd. 

Even granting that only freeing mammals from cages is good and worthy, I'm (subjectively, not super rigorously) quite confident that indeed getting chickens and/or pigs out of cages is both more robustly good and ethically more important than any of the GiveWell charities.  

4. Global development will probably have positive effects on animal welfare anyway and may even be necessary in a lot of cases (richer countries are generally the ones that adopt better animal welfare rules)

Not impossible, but seems very unlikely and would be suspicious if helping humans happened to also be the best way to help animals. I don't think it comes very close, in fact, though I'm unsure what the sign is

5. Global development is more broadly appealing than than fish rights and AI safety. Focus on longtermism and fringe animal welfare issues is part of what makes the EA label and community alienating to people.

I agree with the first sentence, which is why I suspect that most of the ethical value from global dev runs through community building/attracting newcomers and optics, and this effect is plausibly pretty big in magnitude. But I think we should have a very high bar for not doing something morally important because some people might think it's weird or silly, even if some amount of activity optimized for broad appeal is warranted

This seems like a major failure, and FWIW I think you should currently be getting paid to do some sort of longtermism-relevant research (or other knowledge work), and it's a failure that you're not. 🙃 indeed lol

Though I should register that I know Harrison IRL so infer whatever biases you should

I tend to think you’re right, but don’t think it’s wildly overdetermined - mostly because animal suffering reduction seems more robustly good than does preventing extinction (which I realize is not the sole or explicit goal of longtermism, but is sometimes an intermediate goal)

A proper treatment of this should take into account that short-term helping also might have positive effects in lots of simulations to a much greater extent than long-term helping. https://longtermrisk.org/how-the-simulation-argument-dampens-future-fanaticism

Wow thanks so much, super valuable info! Too bad I can't give it more than four karma haha

There is a lot of potential in fish welfare/stunning. In addition to what others have mentioned, IIRC from some reading a few years ago:

• The greatest bottleneck in humane slaughter is research, e.g. determining parameters/designing machines for stunning each major species, as they differ so much. There just aren't many experts in this field, and the leading researchers are mostly very busy (and pretty old), but perhaps financial incentives would persuade some people with the right sort of background to go into this area.
• As well as electrical and percussive stunning, anaesthetising with clove oil/eugenol seems a promising and under-researched method of reducing the pain of slaughter.  Because it may just involve adding a liquid/powder to a tank containing the fish, it may also require less tailoring to each species than than other methods (though it can affect the flavour if "too much" is used). I have some notes on this if anyone is interested.
• Crustastun could be mass-produced and supplied cheaply/freely to places that would otherwise boil crustaceans alive. I seem to recall a French lawyer had invented another machine that was even better (or cheaper) but was too busy to promote it; maybe EAs could buy the patent or something?

One of the reasons it took so long for me to reply is that I kinda fell into a rabbit hole investigating whether buying the Crustastun patent+manufacturing it and giving away would be a good intervention. It all looked good until I finally thought to look into lobsters themselves, and it turns out that they have way fewer neurons - ~100,000 according to an OpenPhil report (lost the link) - which is 2 orders of magnitude lower than even very small fish and ${10}^{-5}$ as many as humans. And crabs are very similar. F

WIW, I was not at all expecting to find this, and had no idea crustaceans had extremely disproportionately small brains. May as well link this Google doc as what I had written before I met some inconvient statistics.

I know not everyone is convinced that linear neuron comparisons are ideal, but they intuitively seem unlikely to be too far off from what "matters". Given this, I'm gonna conclude that Crustastun isn't worth pursuing unless we get more, different info about lobster sentience.

On to the other bullet points!

Agree that this sounds promising. I think this could be an org that collected well-scoped, well-defined research questions that would be useful for important decisions and then provided enough mentorship and supervision to get the work done in a competent way; I might be trying to do this this year, starting at a small scale. E.g., there are tons of tricky questions in AI governance that I suspect could be broken down into lots of difficult but slightly simpler research questions. DM me for a partial list.

You may be able to draw lessons from management consulting firms. One big idea behind these firms is that bright 20-somethings can make big contributions to projects in subject areas they don't have much experience in as long as they are put on teams with the right structure.

Projects at these firms are typically led by a partner and engagement manager who are fairly familiar with the subject area at hand. Actual execution and research is mostly done by lower level consultants, who typically have little background  in the relevant subject area. 

Some high-level points on how these teams work:

• The team leads formulate a structure for what specific tasks need to be done to make progress on the project
• There is a lot of hand-holding and specific direction of lower-level consultants, at least until they prove they can do more substantial tasks on their own
• There are regular check-ins and regular deliverables to ensure people are on the right track and to switch course if necessary

Maybe you're already aware of ikejime and have concluded that it can't be cheaply scaled, but in case you haven't, check it out.

Yeah, I consider that the best case slaughter method and regret that it seems so labor intensive, but seems like there might be other  less bad methods than the current status quo

Is this different from GiveWell because GiveWell doesn't try to estimate, like, the nth-order effects of AMF? I think I'm convinced by the cluelessness explanation that those would cancel out in expectation so we should be fine with first and maybe second-order effects.

Sure, I think 4th+ order effects are likely impossible to model, but 2nd and maybe even 3rd not so much. I'd bet (though far from certain) you could get a well-identified study for the causal effect of e.g. malaria nets on total life years lived/population/pop growth in a certain geographic region, at least for some period of time

(As I responded on Twitter and hope to turn into a forum post) I think aligning intra-EA status with impact is basically the whole point of EA community-building, so this is very important. I would guess that organizational operations is still too low-status and neglected: we need more people who are willing to set up payroll. (Low confidence, willing to be talked out of this, but it seems like the case to me.)

Strong +1 on this, would be a super interesting and productive post IMO!