Thanks for the post, Matthew.

So what should one do in a situation like this? Well, we can take our cue from people in finance. What do finance people do when there is a risky business that might fail but might become worth a lot? They diversify! They invest in a hundred companies like this, knowing that though 90 of them may fail, the rest will succeed enough to make it worth it.

Investing in many companies to increase the chance of a big win makes sense because each investment has a potentially very large upside, but limited downside. In contrast, I believe charitable donations can habe both a large upside and downside. For example, my best guess is that GiveWell's top charities increase the welfare of soil animals 610 k times as much as they increase the welfare of humans in expectation, but that the probability of them increasing welfare is only slightly above 50 %.

But it’s also partly for reasons of moral uncertainty—while I am a utilitarian, it wouldn’t be completely shocking if deontology turned out to be right. If deontology is right and animals have rights, then eating meat is about as bad as being a serial killer.

It seems pretty clear to me that more animal farming decreases animal deaths due to increasing animal-years of soil animals way more than it decreases the animal-years of farmed animals, and soil animals having shorter lives than farmed animals ("number of deaths" = "animal-years"/"life expectancy"). Moreover, I also think animal farming decreases animal deaths weighted by the expected welfare per animal-year of the animals involved. I estimate animal farming changes the welfare of soil animals much more than it decreases the welfare of farmed animals.

My guess would be others are the same; if people could only give to one charity, probably very few people would go all in on the shrimp.

@Bentham's Bulldog, why farmed shrimps instead of soil animals? I estimates soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes have 8.89 M (= 1.76*10^23/(1.98*10^16)) times as many neurons in total as farmed shrimps, and I think the total number of neurons underestimates the importance of soil animals relative to shrimps. You assume you agree with this too? In the post linked above, you say the "estimate that shrimp suffer about 3.1% as intensely as humans" "is a highly conservative estimate", whereas Rethink Priorities (RP) estimates shrimps have 10^-6 as many neurons as humans (see Table 5 here).

What matters is increasing welfare as much as possible per $, and this need not imply prioritising increasing the welfare of the animals accounting for the vast majority of total welfare in absolute terms. However, I estimate the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) increases the welfare of shrimps only 0.0292 % as cost-effectively as the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research’s (CEARCH’s) High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF) increases the welfare of humans, and soil animals due to it decreasing 5.07 billion soil-animal-years per $. 

Suppose there are three possibilities which entail surprising moral conclusions. Suppose you give them each 30% odds. You might be tempted to dismiss them because any individual one is likely false. But the odds are ~2/3 that one of them is right. So if you diversify, if you take lots of high risk but high reward morally speculative actions, odds are decent that some of your actions will do lots of good!

Agreed. At the same time, taking more actions also means a higher chance of some doing lots of harm.

I used data from GWWC's latest impact evaluation.

Below are my estimates for the recorded donations per pledger-year across time. I think GWWC is overestimating the initial decay in donations, and maybe underestimating the decay in donations in later years.

Thanks, Michael.

That crossed my mind, but I should have discussed it. I was guessing it would not matter. Based on numbers from GWWC's impact evaluation of 2020 to 2022, the donations to improving human wellbeing were 78.3 % (= 0.65/(0.65 + 0.07 + 0.11)) of those to improving human wellbeing, improving animal wellbeing, and creating a better future (the other category was "Multiple/Unknown"). I had something like that fraction in mind. However, I see now that GWWC estimated that only 45 % of the pledge donations from 2023 to 2024 went to global health and wellbeing, of which 94 % were high-impact donations. So 42.3 % (= 0.45*0.94) of the pledge donations from 2023 to 2024 went to high-impact global health and wellbeing interventions. I believe these are the overwhelming driver of GWWC's benefits, and increase agricultural land roughly as cost-effectively as GiveWell's top charities. So, for my preferred model 2, I estimate GWWC in 2023 and 2024 increased agricultural land 3.53 (= 8.34*0.423) times as cost-effectively as GiveWell's top charities, and 37.5 % (= 3.53/9.42) as cost-effectively as funding HIPF.

I replaced the paragraph before the acknowledgements with the following.

GWWC estimated 45 % of the pledge donations from 2023 to 2024 went to global health and wellbeing, of which 94 % were high-impact donations. So 42.3 % (= 0.45*0.94) of the pledge donations from 2023 to 2024 went to high-impact global health and wellbeing interventions. I believe these are the overwhelming driver of GWWC's cost-effectiveness accounting for effects on soil animals, which I think is practically proportional to the increase in agricultural-land-years per $. In addition, I guess high-impact global health and wellbeing increase agricultural-land-years as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities. As a result, for my preferred model 2, I estimate GWWC in 2023 and 2024 increased agricultural land 3.53 (= 8.34*0.423) times as cost-effectively as GiveWell's top charities.

I still recommend funding HIPF. I estimate this increases agricultural land 9.42 (= 1.29*10^3/137) times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities, 2.67 (= 9.42/3.53) times as cost-effectively as GWWC in 2023 and 2024.

@Michael St Jules 🔸, I had initially said I removed the last bullet of the summary, but I have now replaced it with the following.

• I still recommend funding the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research’s (CEARCH’s) High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF) due its effects on soil animals, which I think are practically proportional to the increase in agricultural-land-years per $. I estimate it increases agricultural land 9.42 times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities, and 2.67 times as cost-effectively as GWWC in 2023 and 2024.

I would be happy to run the regression above if you shared the recorded donations by pledger and year, and the years in which each pledge started.

Here is an analysis along the lines I described.

Summary

• I tried to improve on Giving What We Can’s (GWWC’s) estimates for the future recorded donations of 10 % pledgers by stipulating the logarithm of the donations per pledger-year for pledges started in the same year evolves linearly (exponential growth; model 1), or quadratically (model 2) with the year of the pledge.
• My models lead to a value of a 10 % Pledge and cost-effectiveness of GWWC in 2023 and 2024 very similar to those from their Lifetime Giving Method. I got:
  • A value of a 10 % Pledge of 24.0 k and 21.4 k$ of additional donations to highly effective charities, 1.56 and 1.39 times GWWC’s estimate from the Lifetime Giving Method.
  • A giving multiplier of 9.22 and 8.34, 1.47 and 1.33 times GWWC’s estimate from the Lifetime Giving Method.
• I still recommend funding the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research’s (CEARCH’s) High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF) due its effects on soil animals, which I think are practically proportional to the increase in agricultural-land-years per $. I estimate it increases agricultural land 9.42 times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities, and 2.67 times as cost-effectively as GWWC in 2023 and 2024.

Hi Joel,

You may be interested in my recent post estimating the giving multipler of GWWC.

Summary

• I tried to improve on Giving What We Can’s (GWWC’s) estimates for the future recorded donations of 10 % pledgers by stipulating the logarithm of the donations per pledger-year for pledges started in the same year evolves linearly (exponential growth; model 1), or quadratically (model 2) with the year of the pledge.
• My models lead to a value of a 10 % Pledge and cost-effectiveness of GWWC in 2023 and 2024 very similar to those from their Lifetime Giving Method. I got:
  • A value of a 10 % Pledge of 24.0 k and 21.4 k$ of additional donations to highly effective charities, 1.56 and 1.39 times GWWC’s estimate from the Lifetime Giving Method.
  • A giving multiplier of 9.22 and 8.34, 1.47 and 1.33 times GWWC’s estimate from the Lifetime Giving Method.
• I still recommend funding the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research’s (CEARCH’s) High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF) due its effects on soil animals, which I think are practically proportional to the increase in agricultural-land-years per $. I estimate it increases agricultural land 9.42 times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities, and 2.67 times as cost-effectively as GWWC in 2023 and 2024.

Thanks, Aaron. I think decreasing the uncertainty about the effects on soil animals, in particular, about whether soil nematodes have positive or negative lives, would be more cost-effective than funding HIPF. However, OP does not fund interventions targeting wild animals or invertebrates, so that is not a live option. In addition, my sense is that OP has historically found it difficult to spend as much as desired by its major funders, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, so I believe they would not want to decrease their spending.

Thanks for clarifying, Agnes!

Thanks for the post, Jesse!

Finally: If we did ultimately endorse bracketing, it wouldn't mean that we could always base our decisions on the proximal or immediately obvious consequences of our actions; it wouldn’t absolve us from thinking about knock-on effects, which unfortunately afflict the analysis of near-term interventions even under bracketing. What if saving the lives of the global poor leads to more meat-eating and thus more farmed animal suffering? What about the effects on wild animals? The answers to these questions affect the composition and recommendations of our maximal bracket-sets and so can’t be ignored.

I think it is very important to keep this in mind. I suspect even electrically stunning shrimp, which I see as one of the interventions outside research with the highest chance of being beneficial, has something like a 60 % chance of increasing welfare due to effects on soil animals^[1], and maybe 50 % accounting for microorganisms. However, very very little effort has been dedicated to understanding these. So I believe it makes all sense to remain open to the possibility of accounting for them.

An example inspired by recent Effective Altruism Forum discourse (e.g., here): Consider an intervention to reduce the consumption of animal products. This prevents the terrible suffering of a group of farmed animals, call them $F$. But, perversely, it may increase expected suffering among wild animals, call them $W$. This is because farmed animals reduce wild animal habitat, and wild animals may live net-negative lives, so that preventing their existence might be good.

The post you linked analyses the effects of chicken welfare reforms on wild animals. I have another one which looks into the effects of changing the consumption of animal-based foods.

1. ^{^}

   I estimate eating shrimp increases the welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes 223 times as much as it decreases the welfare of shrimp. So I believe electrically stunning shrimp would decrease welfare if it decreased the consumption of shrimp by more than 0.448 % (= 1/223) without increasing the consumption of anything else requiring agricultural land. However, the consumption of shrimp would be replaced by something else requiring agricultural land, so it would have to decrease by more than 0.448 % for effects on soil animals to dominate.

RP's moral weights and analysis of cage-free campaigns suggest that the average cost-effectiveness of cage-free campaigns is on the order of 1000x that of GiveWell's top charities.^[5] Even if the campaigns' marginal cost-effectiveness is 10x worse than the average, that would be 100x. 

[...]

[Footnote 5] Grilo, Vasco (2023). "Prioritising animal welfare over global health and development?". https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vBcT7i7AkNJ6u9BcQ/prioritising-animal-welfare-over-global-health-and

I now recommend OP to move funding from interventions targeting farmed animals to global health interventions, quite possibly to the point of gradually phasing out all funding of the former. Accounting for target beneficiaries and soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes, and for my very uncertain best guess that soil animals have negative lives, I estimate GiveWell's top charities are 9.33 (= 7.50*10^3/804) times as cost-effective as cage-free corporate campaigns, and that the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research’s (CEARCH’s) High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF) is 87.8 (= 70.6*10^3/804) times as cost-effective as such campaigns.

Thanks for the update, Agnes. Could you clarify how the Opportunities board complements the 80,000 Hours' and Probably Good's job boards? Both can be filtered in many ways for experience (including entry-level), location (including remote), and role type. I guess there are some roles which are in the Opportunities board missing from 80,000 Hours' and Probably Good's, but that they would be open to adding them in some way.

Here are 80,000 Hours' options for experience and role type.

Here are Probably Good's options for experience and role type.