I get the idea here, but I still think this is a dangerous and disturbing line of argument. I think there are so many ways that we can reduce animal suffering while still encouraging  economic growth which lifts people out of poverty.

I just don't buy that "economic growth" in particular causes animal suffering - so I don't agree on that. Its not written in the stars that factory farming has to accompany growth. There are worlds where things could be different. Enlightened High income countries could make aid dependent on no factory farming. Local movements could rise up, passonate about the issue and stopping the factory farming transition. Sure these things are unlikely but far from implausible.

I also think if people really, to maintain integrity here they could consider putting a lot of their money (and perhaps their entire life direction) where their mouth through donating a lot of money towards preventing the transition to factory farming in developing countries, or even moving there and fighting for it themselves.

I'm of the (probably unpopular) school of thought that if any human is willing to basically hurt other worse off humans in order to gain any particular goal (in this case reducing animal suffering), they should be willing to sacrifice a lot themselves in order to achieve that.

Thanks for the response Vasco and apologies for the tardy reply :)

The necessity of making funding decisions means interventions in animal welfare and global health and development are compared at least implicitly. I think it is better to make them explicit for reasoning transparency, and having discussions which could eventually lead to better decisions. Saying there is too much uncertainty, and there is nothing we can do will not move things forward.

I agree on the first part. But it appears OP is perfectly transparent about their reasoning. They acknowledge that the level of uncertainty permits differences of opinion, that they believe a portfolio allocation approach incorporating different views on utilities and moral priorities and risk tolerance is better than adopting a single set of weights and fanatically optimising for them, and that the implicit moral weights are therefore a residual resulting from preference heterogenity of people whose decision making OP/Dustin/Cari value rather than an unjustifiable knowledge claim about the absolute intensity of animals' experiences which others must prove wrong if they are to consider allocating budget in any other way.

It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to disagree with any/all individuals in OP's preferences and the net result of that funding allocation, and there are many individual funding decisions OP have made which can be improved upon (including for relatively non-contentious reasons like "they didn't achieve their aims"). But I don't tend to think that polemical arguments with suspicious convergence like "donating to most things in cause area X is many times more effective than everything in cause area Y"  are particularly helpful in moving things forward, particularly when they're based not on spotting a glaring error or possible conflict of interest but upon a preference for the moral weights proposed by another organization OP are certainly aware of.

What do you think about humane slaughter interventions, such as the electrical stunning interventions promoted by the Centre for Aquaculture Progress? "Most sea bream and sea bass today are killed by being immersed in an ice slurry, a process which is not considered acceptable by the World Organisation for Animal Health". "Electrical stunning reliably renders fish unconscious in less than one second, reducing their suffering". Rough analogy, but a human dying in an electric chair suffers less than one dying in a freezer?

Honestly, I have no idea whether it would be more uncomfortable to die on an electric chair or in a freezer, and I'm actually pretty familiar with the experience of human discomfort and descriptions of electrical shocks and hypothermia written from human perspectives. I'm not volunteering to test it experimentally either! Needless to say I have even less knowledge about the experience of a cold blooded, water dwelling creature with completely different physiology and nervous system and plausibly no conscious experience at all

A consequence of this is that I don't think transferring all the money currently spent on eradicating malaria to funding campaigns of indeterminate efficacy to promote an alternative slaughter method which has an indeterminate impact on the final moments of fish can be stated with a high degree of certainty to be a net positive use of resources.

Relatedly, I estimated the Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative is 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities. I would be curious about which changes to the parameters you would make to render the ration lower than 1.

This is a good question, and my honest answer is probably all of them, and the fundamental premise. I've discussed how lobbying organizations' funding isn't well measured at the margin and doesn't scale well in my previous post, I don't think the evidence base for ice slurry being a particularly painful slaughter method is particularly robust,^[1]  I don't think RP's numbers or your upward revisions of the pain scales they use are particularly authoritative, and above all I'm not sure it's appropriate to use DALYs to trade human lives for thousand-point-scale estimates of the fleeting suffering of organisms where there isn't even a scientific consensus they have any conscious experience at all.  Titotal's post does a much better job than I could of explaining how easily it is to end up with orders of magnitude difference in outcomes even if one accepts the basic premises, and there's no particular reason to believe that premises like "researchers have made some observations about aversion to what is assumed to be pain stimuli amidst an absence of evidence of other traits associated with consciousness, and attached a number to it" are robust.

For related reasons, I don't think fanaticism is the best approach to budget allocation.

One does not need to worry about the meat eater problem to think the best animal welfare interventions are way more cost-effective than the best in global health and development. Neglecting that problem, I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities, and Shrimp Welfare Project's Humane Slaughter Initiative is 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.

There's a reason why I used the word universal. Yes, it is entirely reasonable to believe that a couple of causes from one area are clearly and obviously better than the best known in another area, though shrimp welfare certainly isn't the one I'd pick. But that's not the  framing of the debate (which is the debate week's, not yours specifically) is on Cause Area X vs Cause Area Y, not "is Charity Z the most effective charity overall".  

And if I did believe your numbers were a fairly accurate representation of reality and that fanaticism was better for budget allocation than a portfolio strategy, I'd be concerned that chicken charities were using money specifically allocated to AW despite being ~28x worse than shrimp,^[2] There's more money in the GHW buckets, but the chicken => shrimp reallocation decision is more easily made. 

1. ^{^}

   though I'll happily concede it's a longer process than electrical stunning

2. ^{^}

   though personally I'd attach higher confidence to the chicken campaigns being significantly net positive...

Thanks for the discussion, titotal and Ariel!

I have played around with Rethink Priorities' (RP's) cross-cause cost-effectiveness model (CCM), but I have not been relying on its results. The app does not provide any justification for the default parameters, so I do not trust these.

titotal, I would be curious to know which changes you would make to my cost-effectiveness estimates of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare (1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities) and Shrimp Welfare Project's Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI; 43.5 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities) to make them worse than that of GiveWell's top charities.

They roughly agree on the GHD bar of ~20 DALYs per $1000.

The CCM says GiveWell's bar is 0.02 DALY/$ (as above), but I think it is around 0.01 DALY/$. According to Open Philanthropy, “GiveWell uses moral weights for child deaths that would be consistent with assuming 51 years of foregone life in the DALY framework (though that is not how they reach the conclusion)”. GiveWell's top charities save a life for around 5 k$, so their cost-effectiveness is around 0.01 DALY/$ ( = 51/(5*10^3)). Am I missing something, @Derek Shiller?

My very tentative guess is that this may be coming from Vasco's very high weightings of excruciating and disabling-level pain, which some commenters found unintuitive, and could be driving that result. (I personally found these weightings quite intuitive after thinking about how I'd take time tradeoffs between these types of pains, but reasonable people may disagree.)

Yes, I think this is a big part of it. From RP's report on How Can Risk Aversion Affect Your Cause Prioritization? (published in November 2023):

• 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

Using the geometric mean of each of the ranges, I conclude HSI is 48.8 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities, i.e. 0.112 % (= 48.8/(43.5*10^3)) as high as originally. I think RP's assumptions underestimate the badness of severe pain. If 1 year of excruciating pain is equivalent to 94.9 DALY (= (60*150)^0.5), 15.2 min (= 24*60/94.9) of excruciating pain neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life, whereas I would say adding this much pain to a fully healthy life would make it clearly negative. Here is how the Welfare Footprint Project defines excruciating pain (emphasis mine):

All conditions and events associated with extreme levels of pain that are not normally tolerated even if only for a few seconds. In humans, it would mark the threshold of pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the pain. This is the case, for example, of scalding and severe burning events. Behavioral patterns associated with experiences in this category may include loud screaming, involuntary shaking, extreme muscle tension, or extreme restlessness. Another criterion is the manifestation of behaviors that individuals would strongly refrain from displaying under normal circumstances, as they threaten body integrity (e.g. running into hazardous areas or exposing oneself to sources of danger, such as predators, as a result of pain or of attempts to alleviate it). The attribution of conditions to this level must therefore be done cautiously. Concealment of pain is not possible.

The global healthy life expectancy in 2021 was 62.2 years, so maybe one can roughly say that a child taking their live due to excruciating pain would loose 50 years of fully healthy life. Under my assumptions, 0.864 s of excruciating pain neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life, so 4.38 h (= 0.864*50*365.25/60^2) of excruciating pain neutralise 50 years of fully healthy life. However, I guess many people take their lives (if they can) after a few seconds (not hours) of excruciating pain. So, even if people should hold excruciating pain a few orders of magnitude longer to maximise their own welfare, my numbers could still make sense. 4.38 h is 5.26 k (= 4.38*60^2/3) times as long as 3 s (a few seconds). One complication is that people may be maximising their welfare in taking their lives because excruciating pain quickly decreases their remaining healthy life expectancy, such that there is a decreased opportunity cost of taking their lives.

I think this is a great find, and I'm very open to updating on what I personally think the animal welfare vs GHD multiplier is, depending on how that discrepancy breaks down. I do think it's worth noting that every one of these comparisons still found animal welfare orders of magnitude better than GHD, which is the headline result I think is most important for this debate. But your findings do illustrate that there's still a ton of uncertainty in these numbers.

Agreed!