I think this is more sensible.

While I appreciate your concern for animal welfare, I think it is dubious with a large backfire risk to suggest this. Getting accidental benefits might be expedient in the short term (by accident) but at the risk of not making the requisite advances to get these benefits. I would see it as equivalent to guessing the correct answer to a math question. While it may be correct, you didn't develop the tools to get there and thus are not likely to get good answers in the future.

As an example, I could imagine Givewell finding that charities that limit human births to be the most cost effective and this would backfire against you.

I think a few decades ago, many would have similar objections to trans rights stuff. A few more decades ago and the same would be said about gay marriage. A few more ago, the same would be said about civil rights/women's suffrage.

Even then though, in small corners of society, these ideas were discussed. 

It is, of course, hard to disambiguate between the ideas that eventually became moral progress and those that died off. But it was hard to know those at the time.

I strongly disagree with this.  Lots of ideas that are currently widely accepted in EA were considered absurd at the time, are considered absurd by some/much of the outside world, etc.

Many people find the idea of trans people or gay marriage to be absurd.

I wouldn't put much weight on the number of applicants. The job that received 1200+ applicants, I assure you that over 800 and perhaps over 10000 of them were complete nonsense/very low effort applications that have no chance. This is because you get a lot of automated fill outs/copy paste to anything/sites that do this for you. 

I generally recommend against a common "come one, come all" hiring round since I think you get a lot more signal from people you know/their recommendations. I think they seem more meritocratic, but you are often filtering for the skill of resume writing.

Job searches are notoriously difficult for many reasons but I would expect to need to fill out >100 to land a job. That's pretty common in the non-EA world. Don't get discouraged.

Despite my criticisms/thoughts below, how has no organization (RP, ACE, AWF, etc.) hired @Vasco Grilo yet? He's published extremely detailed good quality stuff just in his spare time and with a little bit of guidance/directional thought, I think he would be a great addition to many, many organizations out there.

Sorry, it's taken me so long to comment, I've been busy. (I'm also writing this quickly)

I am the "anonymous" funder for this review. I never asked or intended to be anonymous and generally think that anonymity has a lot of costs on the community and thus I think it should be used sparingly and only when there are great benefits.

I originally requested this review ~2.5 months ago because I had intended to make a donation to SPI that I had promised, but I had been advised not to do so due to concerns that I wasn't being informed about. I was already talking with VettedCauses and just offhand asked him to look into them since I was busy and this was taking up a lot of my time and that I would be happy to pay for it. I didn't ask for a full review, but I'm happy for a full review to be made of any charity.

I eventually found out about what these concerns were, found them to be minor/false and proceeded with the donation about a month and a half ago. I'm fairly happy with my decision.

I'm fairly disappointed in this review and the follow-up. I think the review didn't engage with the charity in a way that would elicit the effectiveness of what they do, didn't dive into any concerns people had with the charity, and generally was just lazy. Any effective review will have to talk to the charity, figure out what they do, and go beyond merely publicly available information. I think this kind of review tries to hold charities to the standard of a billion-dollar public company as opposed to a tiny charity. I saw similar patterns with other reviews, and the more these kinds of bad-faith engagement occur with charities, the less I want to trust VettedCauses.

Note that I am, of course, going to follow through on paying for the review as agreed upon but I won't be further asking for reviews from VettedCauses .

I agree that we should be thinking at the margin.

I suppose I'm saying that I think your beliefs suggest we should try to annihilate the world or try to extinguish all life. 

I think hidden in a lot of your analysis is one of the following

1. Negative utilitarianism. I think this is a fine belief to hold but I think it should be stated outright.
2. An assumption that the lives of many/most/all animals is net negative by default and we need evidence that they are positive for them not to be considered net negative.

I think 2 is more likely but I think a lot of the people that think along your lines (maybe someone like Bentham's Bulldog too), seem to assume that life is likely to be negative and I just don't see why this assumption should be expected. We don't really see any animals committing suicide, they clearly show desire/preference to live (they try to escape death at many costs), a lot of life for humans who we consider to usually be net positive is spent on things where we "struggle" to maintain existence and yet most people are fairly happy with their life.

I also agree that we should be highly uncertain about whether soil creatures live positive or negative lives but your analysis more or less assumes that the sign is negative and everything else follows from there.

On death, most of the life of a creature is usually not spent during it's death. I'm happy for interventions for farmed animals to reduce pain during death (and humans too!) but I think basing a lot of calculations on this doesn't capture most of the animal's life.

Last, I think your analysis ignores something I consider to be extremely important and in fact, the main reason I'm (and I think others should be) vegan. Namely, a ~daily reminder that animals matter and a reduction in cognitive dissonance and the effect it has on others. I think my (and any other) individual diet's direct harm is uncertain, has a lot of crucial considerations, etc. but, I think a lot of rationalists like to pretend they are above usual human thoughts/instincts on this matter. I discuss this more here.

Strongly upvoted. I think APRI is doing this at least in the sense of developing species that feel less pain. I think this is a promising direction

I'm supportive of doing this kind of thinking, but I think taking your beliefs to their logical conclusion suggests we should be looking to found charities that will end all life on earth; nuclear PROLIFERATION charities, perhaps charities that seek to make and release bioweapons that will kill of small animals, insects, etc. and maybe just charities that start wildfires. Have you given much thought to this?

Also, why does everyone assume that small organisms necessarily live net negative lives?