What is your bar for funding for some of the most common welfare interventions? On the margin, how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the following welfare improvements:

a. Cage-free transition for egg-laying hens

b. Stunning before slaughter for farmed sea bass and sea bream

c. Transition to ECC/BCC standards

Lewis Bollard:

"I agree with Ellen that legislation / corporate standards are more promising. I've asked if the breeders would accept $ to select on welfare, & the answer was no b/c it's inversely correlated w/ productivity & they can only select on ~2 traits/generation."

Thank you so much for this research. Is there a more intuitive way to interpret SMD values? For example, how many standard deviations is an average vegetarian away from the average person in the general population?

What does EA AWF think about publishing annual impact reports reporting the outcomes of its previous grants? I understand how this might be much more difficult than publishing an impact report for a single organisation. But as it stands, donating to EA AWF requires a lot of trust in fund managers and EA movement as there is little data available on the impact of previous grants. I care a lot about the growth of this fund and I'd have much easier time recommending this fund to potential donors if they could learn more about its past impact.

Thank you for writing this. I really appreciate EA's focus on highlighting people doing the right thing out of good judgment. Normally people tend to focus on selflessness, courage and hard work instead of good judgment when they think of praiseworthy figures. These are also pretty important but it's nice to learn more about people succeeding in this overlooked requirement for doing good.

I thought about this question over the last few months while drafting our strategy and vision. A few thoughts and observations:

Some other EA organizations also seem to have adopted directional visions instead of static visions describing an ideal world. 80k had this in their 2014 business model:
"Our aim is to have the biggest possible social impact."

and they currently have this more detailed blog post about the meaning of social impact.

2022 CEA:
"CEA's overall aim is to do the most we can to solve pressing global problems — like global poverty, factory farming, and existential risk — and prepare to face the challenges of tomorrow."

What I primarily need from a vision statement is to succinctly and clearly communicate my goal to my team, supporters, and the general public. The problem with static vision statements is that they are unable to properly communicate what we are trying to do.

Making the ideal world come sooner or making it more likely to come is only one part of doing good. Another important part of doing good is affecting non-ideal worlds by making them less bad or making the worst futures less likely. It becomes more difficult to explain my focus on harm-mitigation with a static vision statement, because in many cases harm-mitigation doesn't obviously make the ideal world come sooner. I think harm mitigation is worthwhile even if it has zero impact on when the ideal world comes.

On the other hand, one main distinction that both the general public and animal advocates are primarily interested in is whether the organization is against all animal farming or not. Directional vision statements make your position on this unclear. When you say "I'm trying to do the most good for the animals", people(both mainstream public and animal advocates) keep asking you "I don't get it, are you a vegan organisation or not?".

Pretty much all animal advocacy organizations I know of have static vision statements describing an ideal world. I'm still confused about what is the best way to proceed here.

I appreciate the correction. When I said "I generally feel much more comfortable standing behind Givewell's estimates" that was for their main page recommendations. I currently won't prioritise reviewing these BOTECS in detail in the short term but as a future exercise I will look into the linked analyses and compare them to animal welfare ones.

Some other factors not mentioned here but I sometimes think about:

-PETA used to do welfare campaigns and proudly own up their work on welfare campaigns when they talk about their history. But they stopped doing welfare campaigns around 10 years ago and even published public statements against some of the initiatives. I keep wondering whether that has anything to do with EA entering into space, refusing to fund PETA, and PETA withdrawing from welfare work to differentiate itself from welfare campaigning organisations in response. That would reduce cost-effectiveness of welfare campaigns significantly.

-One part I often see missing from human-animal comparisons is that animal welfare work prevents very extreme types suffering that would be classified as torture in human contexts. If I were to choose between extending a human life for 50 years versus preventing a person from suffering for one full year in a wire coffin, I would choose the latter. Similarly choosing between preventing 20.000 years of non-stop chicken torture vs. saving a human life is a lot different from saving the lives of 20.000 chickens versus saving the life of a human being. I think $5000 is currently able to fund alleviating 40000 years of chicken suffering by about half.

-Animals suffer from acts of deliberate violence. If acts of violence are also axiologically bad in themselves than there are more reasons to prevent violence than prevent deaths due to neglect. I don't endorse this position but I think it is aligned with folk ethics. People are willing to spend much more on preventing murders than preventing deaths due to natural causes.

-In animal welfare CEAs, it's often assumed that advocacy speeds up eventual progress by 10 years. I think that's a bit short. Here's one data point from France:
 

From 1997 to 2017, the number of hens in cages was reduced by 10 million hens in 20 years. In 2017, Open Philanthropy came in. After that, the number of hens in cages was reduced by 20 million hens in 7 years. If the rate of decline had remained constant, that reduction would have happened in 40 years instead.

-If we're in the business of speculating about sociological side effects of interventions, many animal activists like arguing that violence against animals is breeding ground for all kinds of violence. Calling people "cockroaches" or "rats" is an important part of legitimising violence. I don't like this type of arguments as they can be used to justify any type of intervention. But I think at the very least this should serve as an example to be wary of this kind of hardly falsifiable arguments.

This seems to be a representative publicly available estimate from 4 years ago by Lewis Bollard:

"This is a major question for us, and one we continue to research. Our current very rough estimate is that our average $ spent on corporate campaigns and all supporting work (which is ~40% of our total animal grant-making) achieves the equivalent of ~7 animals spared a year of complete suffering. We use this a rough benchmark for BOTECs on  new grants, and my best guess is this reflects roughly the range we should hope for the last pro-animal dollar. "

I think several more up to date estimates will be available soon.

For advocacy evaluation, a concrete area for improvement is the following. Saulius's analysis has a really nice section titled "Ways this estimate could be misleading". Other advocates cite concerns similar to those when they argue against corporate welfare campaigns. They usually don't have empirical evidence, but I don't have super strong evidence to show them wrong either. I'm not very happy about that.

Unitarian views are actually pretty common in the field. It's hard to have all three of these:

1. There is no moral hierarchy between humans, no matter what their mental capacities are.
2. Species-membership itself is merely genetics and it's morally irrelevant. What morally matters is other morally relevant capacities like sentience, consciousness, mental capacities etc.
3. There is some kind of moral hierarchy between humans and animals.