I am adding here in anonymized form some feedback I received privately and my responses, since I think this may be helpful to others.

First, here is the feedback:

I was recently reminded of how important these considerations around moral uncertainty are when we had a discussion about this with X. Although all of us were interested in global health/development, we ended up having quite different moral intuitions on saving lives vs. the value of improving them. These differences led us to choosing to work on very different projects with very different people than we would have chosen without these conversations.

I wanted to quickly share some reflections that I had on the article based on the thoughts that I have collected on this issue over the last couple of weeks (apologies for this being not super well laid out):

• Before vs. after birth: in the article you seem to be making a distinction between GHD extending lives and AW reducing the number of animals suffering. In theory there are two ways to reduce the number of animals suffering, (a) by killing more of them faster and (b) by preventing them from coming into existence in the first place. Your argument seems mainly based on scenario (a). (a) also feels morally very different from (b) although they end up with the same number of sentient beings alive and suffering. I am wondering if this factor also makes up part of your preference for one over the other in addition to the arguments you are making? Translating this into the GHD space, family planning vs. letting very sick people die faster feels morally very different.
• Non/somewhat-utilitarian perspectives: I would argue that there is quite a bit of moral uncertainty on measuring the value of life in utilitarian terms and what the unit of measurement should be. It also seems like most value systems/religions place quite a large value on saving a life and this seems to push against the general norm which might be an indicator that we are crossing some moral guardrails. I personally place quite a bit of value in my moral parliament on preference utilitarianism. This in turn leads me to believe that in theory people who perceive their lives as net negative could take their own life if they choose to do so (although there is quite a bit of complexity around that of course).
• Letting the same argument lead us to GHD as the answer: One could argue that the unit of suffering could be made up by the following factors: [Sentience of experience x level of suffering of that experience]. The level of suffering for most animals seems a lot higher than the level of suffering for most people. Having said that, regarding sentience, the certainty is higher in humans than in most animals. Potentially, these factors could somewhat cancel themselves out? If you then want to apply the same framework (being uncertain if lives are net positive) to humans, that could lead to cause areas such as family planning and mental health.

Implications/ questions/ takeaways:

• FAW implications: It seems like we are roughly working on the following categories in animal advocacy: (1) bringing less of them into existence and (2) making their lives better while they are in existence. If we have high certainty that their lives are net negative, should we look more into approaches that reduce their lifespan/killing large proportions of them faster?
• GHD implications: If one would apply the same arguments to GHD, maybe focusing on family planning or mental health could be a good place to land? One could also argue that family planning would be the ultimate FAW intervention if it counterfactually reduces the number of people born.

And here is my response:

Thanks for sharing those reflections. Some thoughts/responses:

• In the context of farmed animals, I think that "killing more of them faster" could have quite a few negative flow-through effects. For instance, broiler chickens are bred exactly in a way that makes them grow and gain mass very quickly, which leads to a lot of welfare problems because their bodies cannot handle it. Also, I fear that just making this process more efficient will simply then lead to higher production capacity and even more animals being farmed (rebound effect - if something becomes more efficient, you don't necessarily reduce the effort spent on it (effort in this case being animal life years) but rather increase output). In theory, yes, killing animals faster could be an option. But I think it is better to pursue options that either lead to less animals being farmed or lead to better life quality. There might be some kind of intervention though that avoids the negative externalities I mentioned and I'd be super interested to hear about such ideas.
• Yes, 100% agreed on the non-utilitarian perspectives. I also wrote a post about this a while ago, that we should put some weight on "common sense morality". I think "saving a life is good" is about as common sense as it gets.
• On the point about "people who perceive their lives as net negative could take their own life", I would refer to the sections where I outline that I am unsure whether we can accurately evaluate the value of our own lives. I think we have very basic instincts that lead us to strongly avoid the suicide option, whether that is rational or not. It's also very important to think about the probably extremely negative effects of someone taking their own life on their environment (family, friends, etc.). So I think there are very good reasons that there are strong social norms against this and I wouldn't want to change that.
• Yes, I agree that we should also apply uncertainty to the sentience of animals. But most AW interventions simply have way stronger welfare effects (excluding the uncertainty around their sentience) that you would have to be extremely uncertain about animal sentience. I don't think that is warranted. I think Rethink Priorities' work on this quite clearly favours AW interventions, even if you factor in significant uncertainty about animal sentience (see their post for the debate week here). As I wrote under "Context and epistemic status" this is closer to the actual reason why I prioritise AW over GHD.
• I strongly agree with you about family planning. I think that these interventions often have positive impacts on the lives already lived, they address the meat eater problem, and they also hedge our bets against the uncertainty that we may be unintentionally increasing the amount of net negative lives on the planet. I love the work Family Empowerment Media is doing, for example.

Hope this is helpful!

Thank you Johannes!

Thank you Mo, you are a well of great resources, as always!

1) The neutral point debate is fascinating and something I should have been aware of. I will dig deeper into this! The IDInsight study is also very interesting and relevant. However, I think it doesn't fully address my skepticism about how rationally we as humans can think about the net value of our own and other lives. I realise that this kind of skepticism is hard to address via studies, but I think there are better ways than surveying people due to the reasons I mentioned.

2) I agree that we should put weight on different moral theories and that those will favour saving lives over not doing so to a very large extent (except for maybe antinatalism and a few others). This is a reason why I am very uncertain about the view I outlined.

Overall, these kinds of considerations lead me to think that it is probably better to save lives than not and this is why I am NOT saying that the number of sentient lives should be reduced across the board. But I have significant uncertainty around this, which somewhat move the needle towards (1) welfare-improving interventions that do not have strong population effects (e.g., cage-free egg campaigns or mental health interventions) and interventions that reduce the number of some of the worst lives lived (e.g., diet change campaigns which lead to less animals being farmed (mostly in factory farms)).

Oh, nice, I didn't see that. Thanks so much Sebastian!

Thanks for the initiative Abraham! This seems like an interesting and valuable experiment.

One crucial question I have: Is it somehow possible to make sure that I can make tax deductible donations? I live in Germany and Effektiv Spenden does not cover all of these cause area options, as far as I know / can see. For instance, I don't think I could donate tax-deductibly to any of the EA Community Building options from Germany.

It's a tough question and something I've tried to wrap my head around as well. All of the threads in the comments here are quite helpful!

This point you've made, Sam, is also something I have thought about:

Saving human lives doesn’t just contribute to the problem of animal consumption, I hope it it also accelerates the solutions to factory farming.

Awareness of animal welfare issues tends to increase as people get richer and have more space to think about something other than their immediate needs. Of course, factory farming is worse in richer societies, but I think those societies are also closest to overcoming factory farming / the worst farming practices (veganism is more popular, bans of cages, mandatory pre-slaughter stunning, R&D into alt proteins, etc.). This hinges on a few assumptions, which can be debated, but I tend to find it plausible.

That said, I still exclusively support animal charities at this stage, since I think they are anyway far more cost-effective at improving sentient lives (see the points made by Vasco Grilo and Ben Millwood made in this thread).

Thanks Vicky and no worries at all about the response time!

That makes sense. The footnote makes me realize again how little I know about the practicalities of cage free farming (and other farming systems). I'm glad someone is doing the research on it!

Seems reasonable to try out something new, given that it's a major welfare issue. Fingers crossed!

Thank you for sharing and good luck with incubating these latest ideas!
Could you share a bit more about why you feel positive about the keel bone fracture topic, even though Healthier Hens has not been very successful in addressing this so far (to my knowledge)? Is it because this new recommendation takes a different angle, not focusing on feed fortification? Or what is your reasoning behind this?

Yes, this has certainly updated my view on prioritisation between big and small countries. So thanks for sharing your thoughts!

I think it's a good idea to reduce the weight of scale, though probably not as much as you might. Aashish and I might update this as soon as we got around to talking about it and are aligned.

In any case, we encourage people to just take the model, make a copy, and change parameters themselves, if it seems useful for their purposes.

Thanks for your comment! And no worries about not polishing, I will do the same, so it will also be a bit long :)

I agree with your concern and it is something I've also thought about before (in other contexts as well). However, I see two reasons for why working in high-population countries should indeed be favoured:

1. At Animal Advocacy Africa we're currently working on recommendations and implementation guides for advocates that aim to mitigate the rise of industrial animal agriculture in Africa. Based on our research, policy work is the top recommendation and I do think the expected value of this is higher in high-population countries. The reason is that it is hard to know where policy work is more likely to be successful (which you also mentioned). As long as we don't have an indication that it is significantly less likely to be successful in higher-population countries, it seems fair to focus on the factor that we know will be important: the expected impact, if successful.
2. For work besides the area of policy/regulations (e.g. working with farmers or certain public outreach interventions, which are our recommendations #2 and #3), I agree that scale considerations can be overblown. If we cannot cover the whole population anyway, there is no limit that should really matter. However, I think scalability and potential flow-through effects are important to consider here. If we can get a successful model to work for some part of a large country, there is the potential to scale this much further or to have it scale automatically across the country (e.g. word of mouth).

In short, there is a lot of upside to working in such large countries and as long as I don't have evidence that working in smaller countries is much more tractable I would keep focusing on the large ones. However, if there is clear evidence that working in a specific country is likely to be significantly more tractable, we should give this consideration a lot of weight. Unfortunately our rough model is not well-suited for such nuances, so it should definitely be combined with contextual knowledge/factors.

That said, I think it is a good point that the weight might be too high and these weights are mostly based on our intuitions anyway. So it's great that you are challenging this. I think it would probably be fruitful to do some kind of MC simulation on how the scores change if we vary the weights of different parameters. Maybe I'll find time for this somewhere down the road.