There was a period of time during which I thought the shrimp welfare project was obviously the best charity in the world. You can spare more than 10,000 shrimp from intense pain for $1. How could anything else be better? I no longer think that, but I realized I have never really explained my rationale. I thought it would be worth explaining.
Now, to be clear, this is not because I think the SWP is bad. I think it’s an amazingly good charity. It is one of the best charities in the world. But I no longer believe it’s clearly head-and-shoulders above the rest. For a while, my guess was that most of my expected impact came from directing money to the Shrimp Welfare Project. I no longer think that.
My aim in this post is not to get you to stop donating to SWP. It’s instead to argue that you should think that other effective charities are comparably good too, so if you’re trying to get others to give to effective charities, don’t just aim to get them to donate to shrimp. SWP is amazingly good, but there are other similarly good charities.
Here is the first reason I became less convinced SWP beat other charities: it isn’t clear that it’s much more effective than other animal charities. It prevents about 14,000 painful shrimp deaths per dollar. Now, there’s a good amount of uncertainty about how much it reduces their pain, but let’s say conservatively it reduces the pain of death by half. So each dollar is about as good as preventing 7,000 shrimp from painfully dying.
But other animal charities might be similarly effective. Charities helping insects, for example, might affect many thousands per dollar. Even a small impact on the trillions of insects being farmed is enormously impactful in expectation.
In the helping arthropods space, it isn’t clear SWP is much better than its competitors. It looks like one of a number of good options, not qualitatively set apart over its competitors.
Then, compare it to other animal charities. My best guess is that the most effective charities helping chickens spare multiple from a cruel fate per dollar. I’d guess ICAW is the best, and maybe helps ten per dollar. Is 10 years in a cage per dollar better than eliminating the pain equivalent to 7,000 shrimp deaths?
It isn’t clear. That comes out to about two shrimp deaths averted per day of chickens spared from a life in a cage. Shrimp are less conscious in expectation than chickens by, say, a factor of 5. So then it comes out to about two days in a cage per sentience-adjusted death averted. Is the pain of one death worse than two days in a cage? Probably, though not obviously. My guess is that the SWP has more positive second-order effects on lowering the odds of a future where we completely neglect invertebrates, but that isn’t obvious.
So overall, I’d still probably bet that SWP beats the best chicken charities. But it no longer looks like it’s in some league of its own in effectiveness. Both are very effective. Similarly, it isn’t clear it beats GiveWell charities by much—these raise the human population and lower insect populations. Tomasik estimated that each dollar given to the Against Malaria Foundation prevents about 14,000 years of insect life. If insects live two weeks on average, then this is about 365,000 insect deaths averted per dollar. This lowers insect suffering by a lot, but this is a lot messier, and the second order effects are less positive in expectation.
So I think SWP>GiveWell, but it’s not clear the first order effects are substantially greater. And probably giving directly to organizations that grow the EA community—Giving What We Can, Effektiv Spenden, the EA infrastructure fund—has similar first-order effects on wild animals and might have more positive second-order effects.
My old view was basically “SWP is so good that it’s crazy more people aren’t giving there, and it’s much better to give there than to other EA animal charities.” My new view is, “SWP is amazingly good, but so are other EA animal charities, and if one has more funding, funders might prioritize others—thus, we should prioritize spending more on animal welfare rather than aiming to specifically funnel it at SWP.” That realization was the first part of no longer concluding SWP was obviously the best.
The second part was internalizing Longtermism to a greater degree. There are a lot of shrimp. There are even more future people. Bostrom’s best guess was that there could be 10^58 people in the far future. There are reasons to think that estimate was conservative. Even a tiny chance of affecting so many people is very impactful in expectation.
Even going by conservative estimates of impact, dollars donated to Longtermist organizations are ridiculously impactful in expectation. If averting an existential catastrophe “only” adds 10^40 future people in expectation, and ten billion dollars would reduce existential risks by .01%, then each dollar adds 10^26 expected future people. So even by ludicrously conservative estimates, Longtermist donations swamp the first-order effects of donations to SWP. And see here for my defense of Longtermism.
Now, my best guess is that the animal welfare movement—especially when it’s focused on the welfare of neglected animals—has positive expected effects on the far future. I can easily imagine a scenario where we neglect the welfare of future animals, and so they suffer in very large numbers. Organizations promoting animal welfare lower the odds of such a scenario. But still, my best guess is that from a Longtermist perspective, probably SWP is not the best place to donate—but still very good.
In short, I stopped believing that SWP was the best charity because it seemed both that:
There were other animal charities that were similarly good.
Longtermist charities might be even better.
My assessment of how good SWP is hasn’t really changed. It’s my assessment of other organizations that have changed. I now think they were better than I did at the time. The best charities are amazingly effective!
Tens of billions of animals languish in dark, filthy, miserable, squalid domiciles—covered in feces, lungs burning from the ammonia in the air. Countless future generations that could exist may be wiped out entirely by mistakes made in the present era. Humans acting today have enormous opportunities to make the world a better place with our money and especially our careers. Failing to take these opportunities because we’d rather do other things—while mutilated chickens cry out from the confines of a cage, where babies are snatched from mothers—is a morally culpable kind of malfeasance.
