Hi Nathan,

I wonder whether it may be better to frame the discussion around personal donations. Open Philanthropy accounts for the vast majority of what I guess you are calling EA funding, and my impression is that they are not very amenable to changing the allocation across their 3 major areas (global catastrophic risks, farmed animal welfare, and human global health and wellbeing) based on EA Forum discussions.

Thanks for suggesting that, Nathan! For context:

I arrived at a cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare of 15.0 DALY/$ (= 8.20*2.10*0.870), assuming:

• Campaigns affect 8.20 chicken-years per $ (= 41*1/5), multiplying:
  • Saulius Šimčikas’ estimate of 41 chicken-years per $.
  • An adjustment factor of 1/5, since OP [Open Philanthropy] thinks “the marginal FAW [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis [which is linked just above]”.

• An improvement in chicken welfare per time of 2.10 times the intensity of the mean human experience, as I estimated for moving broilers from a conventional to a reformed scenario based on Rethink Priorities’ median welfare range for chickens of 0.332^[6].

• A ratio between humans’ healthy and total life expectancy at birth in 2016 of 87.0 % (= 63.1/72.5).

In light of the above, corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.51 k (= 15.0/0.00994) times as cost-effective as TCF [GiveWell's Top Charities Fund].

Thanks for actually tagging Mathias, Oscar!

Also, probably no harm, but I feel like ~everyone on EAF would already know about GWWC so there is somewhat less marketing value?

I agree most people on EAF know about GWWC, but I guess seeing the yellow diamonds could still be a nice prompt to consider taking the 10 % Pledge. There is the potential for causing harm if EAF users overtake the pledge due to social pressure to conform, but I guess it is good to promote activities which are generally good. Posts about effective giving and kidney donations could lead to too much donations or kidney donations, but such posts seem to be generally considered good.

I also feel like it would be strange to promote the yellow diamonds to the outside world, but not on EA Forum on the basis that its users are already optimally considering taking or not the 10 % Pledge, such that adding yellow diamonds to the names of pledgers would make people overtake the pledge.

Thanks for the update, Alana! @MathiasKB, I noticed you added the yellow diamond to your EA Forum user name. How did you update it?

Thanks for your work on this, Mathias!

Interesting points!

• So, to me, the main question for knowing if work on AI safety is net positive is whether the intermediary scenario where AI is aligned with current humanity values, but not with 'Great values', is better than the scenario where AI is not aligned at all

AI not being aligned at all is not exactly a live option? The pre-training relies on lots of human data, so it alone leads to some alignment with humanity. Then I would say that current frontier models post-alignment already have better values than a random human, so I assume alignment techniques will be enough to at least end up with better than typical human values, even if not great values.

I suppose that, for most the vast majority of cases, trying to make a technology safer does in fact make it safer. So I believe there should be a strong prior for working on AI safety being good. However, I still think corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are more cost-effective.

Thanks for the relevant question, Dhruvin!

Below is the relevant section from Bernstein et. al 2022. I have bolded the 6 measures included in the annual cost of 20 G$.

THE COSTS OF PRIMARY PREVENTION

Previously, we provided preliminary estimates of how much primary prevention might cost (9). We presented six estimates of annual costs. We estimated $19 billion to close down China’s wildlife farming industry, based on a Chinese report (76). A total of $476 million to $842 million were needed to reduce spillover from livestock based on (77) and the World Bank One World One Health farm biosecurity intervention program (78). The report provided the cost of implementing enhanced biosecurity for zoonoses around farming systems in low to middle income countries, and we extrapolated those data to the 31 countries with high risk of wildlife viral spillover risk from (65, 66).

The other four were our estimates for viral discovery ($120 million to $340 million), early detection and control ($217 million to $279 million), wildlife trade surveillance ($250 million to $750 million), and programs to reduce spillover from livestock ($476 million to $852 million). The most complicated estimate was reducing deforestation by half ($1.53 billion to $9.59 billion). These broad-brush estimates provide essential insights into the relative magnitude of each task. Here, we provide more details of the underlying issues determining costs and the challenges of implementation.

Thanks for the comment, Joshua!

I'd caution that, as far as I can tell, the World Bank and Bernstein et al. numbers are basically made up.

Because we do not know the relative reduction in the expected annual deaths caused by their proposed measures, right? I guess their values are optimistic, such that GiveWell's top charities are more than 4.12 times as cost-effective.

Thanks for the post, Stijn!

Just one note. I think you assume wild animal welfare is negative, but this is unclear, so it is arguably better to avoid pursuing actions which assume it is negative/positive. People may get attached to the horse fields, and converting these to dense forests could be good if they turn out to have higher wild animal welfare per area. Besides improving farmed animal welfare, I would focus on understanding wild animal welfare and building a movement around it, as Wild Animal Initiative (WAI) as been doing.

In any case, I believe it is good to have a vision of what to do conditional on wild animal welfare being negative/positive.