Do you think Sinergia and ACE almost certainly have no information you don't that could lead to different conclusions or interpretations of claims, in ways more favourable to Sinergia and/or ACE? Do you think there's no room for reasonable disagreement about whether the claims you call false are actually false?

E.g. see Abraham's comment.

These results are super interesting! Thanks for writing and sharing! (I happened to have already read a bunch of the original papers you're summarizing, and some of your work, too.)

By the way, I think you can capture common intuitions against fanaticism and dependence on unaffected things with a multi-step procedure:

1. Ignore anything unaffected between your options,^[1] and keep only the remaining differences between options.
2. Use some method that's not fanatical with respect to the remaining differences between options, e.g. the expected value of a bounded function of the differences.

However, this means violating stochastic dominance with respect to outcomes, and the approach might seem ad hoc. While these do count against the approach in my mind, I don't think they rule it out decisively, because the approach seems to match other intuitions of mine so well otherwise. So, I give a decent amount of weight to something like this approach under normative uncertainty. I also give some weight to fanatical views, of course, too.

I discuss these ideas a bit in this post, but kind of scattered across the subsections of this section.

1. ^{^}

   Either just pairwise, dealing with pairwise comparisons first, or across all of them together at the same time.

I agree that the numbers don't necessarily match due to experiences not accounted for, although I'd guess they're close enough as a best guess in practice, because WFP covered the most important causes of suffering for egg-laying hens and broilers. (For broilers, they have a separate page for slaughter reform, which is also included in the BCC, but I suppose doesn't reflect transportation or other differences during slaughter due to breed.)

My point was to highlight how great welfare reforms are in utilitarian suffering-reduction terms, relative to preventing animals from being farmed, in response to the original post. We could instead estimate a lower bound on the value of welfare reforms relative to preventing existence, to say welfare reforms are at least X% as good for each animal as preventing that animal from being born and farmed at all. The fact that WFP aimed to be conservative wrt the differences between conventional and reformed helps with this lower bound interpretation.

Also, in case you're not only concerned with suffering, these welfare reforms might increase pleasure or other things of positive value in a chicken's life, while preventing existence actually decreases them. So the welfare reforms could be even better for chickens relative to preventing existence than in my original interpretation. Again, I'd think of it like a lower bound.

I further motivate and describe views along the lines in this post in this sequence.

I further motivate and describe views along the lines in this post in this sequence.

The clearest evidence of discontent is the unprecedented fertility decline across developed nations. Humans are increasingly choosing not to reproduce at replacement rate when given modern conditions.

Why is this clear evidence of discontent? Aren't there many other plausible explanations for the decline in fertility rates, like changes in values and life goals, like ideal family size, prioritization of careers and other interests?

Nearly no one wants to torture broiler chickens at massive and increasing scale. If we're doing that, this suggests our interlocking coordination systems are already producing outcomes severely misaligned from individual human values and preferences.

I agree with the first sentence, but I'm not sure about the second. I think a primary reason is that it's not usually a political priority, because it's not actually important to the average voter. If it's not that important, the outcomes are not severely misaligned from individual human values and preferences.

But it can be made a priority through political advocacy. The outcomes of ballot measures seem like pretty good evidence of what people prefer.
 

Either we restore human agency

I doubt we have ever really had more human agency in the past than now.

Either we restore human agency enough to avoid relying on distasteful and repugnant systems like the worst aspects of factory farming (...) Only the first path offers hope of addressing animal welfare systematically.

This seems wrong to me. While factory farming is increasing, it's primarily because of increasing populations and incomes, and there are effective targeted ways to systematically reduce and mitigate factory farming that don't require increasing human agency as a whole. Basically what the animal welfare side of EA does.

The decision calculus would be substantially different if we were near the end rather than the beginning of expansion through the universe, just as one should usually focus more on improving one's own capacities earlier in life and on contributing to others' development later on.

Possibly! But I'd like to see actual intervention proposals and estimates of their effects and cost-effectiveness. If the decision calculus is so obvious, you should be able to easily give a lower bound on the cost-effectiveness that drastically beats targeted animal welfare work (and being fair, should consider long-term effects of animal welfare work).

we focus intense moral concern on animals successfully bred to tolerate their conditions

What do you mean?

I don't think factory farmed animals tolerate their conditions well at all, because they suffer a lot. I'd recommend Welfare Footprint Project's research on egg-laying hens and meat chickens, and RP's similar research on shrimp to get an idea of what factory farmed animals' lives are often like. In particular, egg-laying hens live with chronic frustration and meat chickens often with disabling chronic pain. And they don't have ways to effectively relieve these.

If factory farming seems like a bad thing, you should do something about the version happening to you first. The domestication of humans is particularly urgent precisely because, unlike selectively bred farm animals, humans are increasingly expressing their discontent with these conditions

Why do you believe discontent (or its expression) is increasing? On what time scale? And do you expect this trend to continue for long?

Plus, factory farming is also increasing, especially in developing countries and for farmed insects.

Your response to 2 in general seems totally insensitive to the relative numbers involved wrt farmed animals and humans, and our potential impacts on each group. Shouldn't there be a point where you'd prioritize farmed animals?

FWIW, it seems a bit too buried in text. I think this would be something to say upfront, e.g. in the summary, if you're critiquing an org, because readers will often just skim, like I did.