Thanks, Alex. For roles in organisations supported by impact-focussed funders like Open Philanthropy or EA Funds, do you have guesses for the difference between hired and best rejected candidates in $/year donated to the organisation hiring? I understand this depends on the organisation and role, but any thoughts are welcome.

Abraham Rowe said:

[...] If you forced me to in some hypothetical I'd guess X [the aforementioned difference] is quite low for many junior roles (<$10k), but higher for more mid/senior roles (>$50k?). [...]

Joey Savoi said:

Taking all of this into account, I think a reasonable proxy would be around $1M per year donated to mid-stage/AIM charities, which would be worthwhile versus one additional founder. However, I think the variance across cause areas is substantial (it could be half this for animals/mental health and double for global health, or even four times higher for EA meta). I also think personal variance changes things a lot. For example, a top-third founder, I would say, would be twice as expensive as an average one.

Thanks for sharing, Greg. For readers' reference, I am open to more bets like this one against high global catastrophic risk.

All of the shrimps helped transition to electrical stunning, 95 % from air asphyxiation, and 5 % (= 1 - 0.95) from ice slurry. These fractions are informed by Aaron’s comment at the end of this section, here and here.

I was previously assuming 67.5 % for air asphyxiation, and 37.5 % for ice slurry. I have updated to the above based on Aaron's comments linked just above. The cost-effectiveness is now 1.48 (= 639/431) times as high as before.

Thanks. I will update the analysis using 95 % (= (0.9 + 1)/2), which results in the same expected cost-effectiveness as using a uniform distribution ranging from 90 % to 100 %.

Thanks for the comment, Alex! I strongly upvoted it because I like that you tried to think about how to increase welfare assuming farmed animal end up with positive lives, instead of dismissing this as impossible, or arguing that factory-farming is intrinsically bad.

I think humans are capable of much more positive lives than farmed animals, so in the long term future it would be best to have as much biomass in the form of humans (and possibly pets) as possible. A world where humans eat predominantly plants and cultivated meat would be able to support more humans, and these extra humans would have much better lives than farmed animals.

I agree humans are capable of more positive experiences that animals, but not that much more. I also agree plant-based foods would enable supporting more humans. However, to maximise welfare, one should look for interventions which increase welfare the most per $. At least now, I think these are ones helping animals, not humans (i.e. not the species whose individuals are capable of experiecing the most welfare). I estimate:

• Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns (helping chickens) are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
• Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative is 64.3 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.

I expect helping animals will continue to be more cost-effective than helping humans longerterm, at least given humans' current form, because animals have a higher ratio between welfare range and calorie consumption^[1].

1. ^{^}

   The welfare range is the difference between the welfare per time of a practically maximally happy and unhappy life.

The supposed health benefits of replacing red with white meat are also questionable.

I have looked more into this, and now believe than chicken meat is healthier than red meat. So I updated the last 2 paragraphs of the post to:

I believe the major drawback of replacing chicken meat with beef or pork is that these may well be worse for your health.

You can always replace chicken meat with legumes to improve your health, save money, or if you are very concerned about GHG emissions (I am not). I have been following a plant-based diet for 5 years. However, know that replacing chicken meat with beef or pork significantly decreases suffering.

I strongly updated your comment now because it prompted me to look into the health aspect of the replacement, which I think is important, and was previously missing from the post.

Thanks for the comment! I have added the following to the post, before the last paragraph:

The supposed health benefits of replacing red with white meat are also questionable.

@core_admiral , I follow these recommendations on supplementation.

Hello.

Does this include wild shrimp?

Nitpick. I think it would be good to include "Logarithm of" in the titles of the axes, or just keep the titles you used, but display values in kg and $ instead of their logarithms, and have the axes in a logarithmic instead of linear scale.

Thanks for sharing, Caroline, and welcome to the EA Forum!

Every $1 you donate to Sinergia Animal impacts*:

• Freeing approximately 53 hens from cages, or
• Liberating 21 mother pigs (or 354 piglets) from brutal confinement and painful procedures, or
• Replacing three animal-based meals with plant-based options.

*source: ACE 

Trusting these numbers, your cage-free campaigns are very cost-effective. Each hen lives for "60 to 80 weeks", i.e. 1.34 years (= (60 + 80)/2*7/365.25), so your cage-free campaigns improve 71.0 hen-yeas per $ (= 53*1.34). This is 6.57 (= 71.0/10.8) times the 10.8 hen-years per $ implied by Open Philanthropy's adjustment of Saulius Šimčikas’ estimate, and respects a cost-effectiveness of 24.2 DALY/$ (= 6.57*3.69).

The above implies your cage-free campaigns are hugely more cost-effective than your meal replacement program, as I would have expected. Assuming all replaced meals had 1 portion of chicken meat from broilers in a conventional scenario, which I think overestimates the cost-effectiveness of the program, this would avert 4.18 chicken-days per replaced meal. Consequently, the program would eliminate 0.0343 chicken-years per $ (= 3*4.18/365.25). I estimate eliminating 1 chicken-year of broilers in a conventional scenario is as good as averting 0.754 DALYs. So the cost-effectiveness of the program would be 0.0259 DALY/$ (= 0.0343*0.754), i.e. 0.107 % (= 0.0259/24.2) of that of your cage-free program.

In contrast, it is unclear to me whether your program to help mother pigs is more/less cost-effective than your cage-free campaigns. Mother pigs have a breeding lifetime of about 3 years, so your program to help mother pigs improves 63 pig-years per $ (= 21*3). This is 88.7 % (= 63/71.0) as many animal-year per $ as your cage-program, so there would not a major difference in cost-effectiveness between them assuming the improvement per animal-year is similar.

Have you considered moving funding from your meal replacement program to your cage-free campaigns and program helping mother pigs?