I work as an engineer, donate 10% of my income, and occasionally enjoy doing independent research. I'm most interested in farmed animal welfare and the nitty-gritty details of global health and development work. In 2022, I was a co-winner of the GiveWell Change Our Mind Contest.
A couple things to add to this very good comment:
In general, the landscape of charity evaluation for animal charities is less mature and quite a bit more uncertain than the landscape for global health and development charities. Any cost-effectiveness estimates are going to be coarse and debatable.
ACE has a partially qualitative cost-effectiveness scoring system. Their ratings (higher = better) for their recommended charities are:
@Laura Duffy wrote a report at Rethink Priorities in which she estimated that corporate hen welfare campaigns avert 1.13 DALYs/$ and shrimp stunning interventions avert 0.038 DAYLYs/$. Both of these estimates were quite uncertain and depended on a lot of debatable assumptions (including possibly underrating the potential for shrimp stunning interventions to catalyze industry-wide changes), but I think this is one of the best estimates currently out there.
My personal advice would be that I think the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund is probably the expected value maximizing option, while The Humane League is probably the best option if you're somewhat risk-averse.
Some data from open phil and EA funds grants:
Shrimp Welfare Project :
Insect Institute:
Arthropoda Foundation:
Aquatic Life Institute:
Crustacean Compassion:
Thanks so much for your response, that all makes sense!
You're understanding question 3 correctly - GiveWell's moral weights look like the following, which is fairly different from valuing every year of life equally.
Thanks so much for going on the podcast and for the incredible work that you and everyone involved in r.i.c.e. are doing! It's amazing that you've been able to save so many lives so cost-effectively. I did have a few questions I was curious about though:
Good information!