This is the ninth post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence, which provides an overview of the research Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on making resource allocation decisions across species. The goal of this post is to help animal welfare grantmakers assess the relative value of improvements to the lives of some commercially-important insects.

This is the eighth post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence, which provides an overview of the research Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on making resource allocation decisions across species. In this post, Senior Research Manager Bob Fischer briefly recaps the research team’s understanding of welfare ranges and their proposed way of using them. The post also summarizes the methodology and responds to some questions and objections.

This is the seventh post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence, which provides an overview of the research Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on making resource allocation decisions across species. In this post, Senior Research Manager Bob Fischer warns against dismissing research just because its findings suggest "the Equality Result" (i.e. that certain species can realize roughly the same amount of welfare as humans).

This is the sixth post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence, which provides an overview of the research Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on making resource allocation decisions across species. In this post, Joe Gottlieb summarizes his full report on phenomenal unity and cause prioritization. He concludes that there is not enough empirical evidence to assume that certain species “house” multiple welfare subjects per individual.

This is the fifth post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence, which provides an overview of the research Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on making resource allocation decisions across species. This post assesses the hypothesis that brains have many conscious subsystems, which could affect how we ought to make tradeoffs between members of different species.

Approximately 200-300 billion black soldier flies are farmed annually. In a new post, academic collaborator Meghan Barrett (Ph.D. Entomology) summarizes and provides additional context related to her and her colleagues’ academic article on “Welfare considerations for farming black soldier flies, Hermetia illucens (Diptera: Stratiomyidae): a model for the insects as food and feed industry.”

This is the fourth post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e., making resource allocation decisions across species. The aim of this post is to summarize our full report on the use of neuron counts as proxies for moral weights.

Voluntary certification schemes (VCS) specify production standards and auditing processes. International VCSs are one of the few current governance tools to improve the welfare of farmed fishes and shrimps. Knowing to what degree farmers register with certification schemes and what influences their decisions may inform future uses of this animal welfare advocacy strategy. This shallow literature review addresses the determinants considered by exporting farmers in China and Thailand.

This is the third post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization. The aim of this post is to suggest a way to quantify the impact of assuming hedonism on welfare range estimates.

Understanding the US public’s levels of support for radical actions such as banning slaughterhouses helps to inform animal advocates’ proposals and messaging. In contrast to previous surveys conducted by others, this report presents preregistered studies that cast doubt on the extent to which the public actually supports radical action against factory farming. The researchers suggest that polling responses to broad questions may not be reliable indicators of actual support for specific policies or messages. Instead, they recommend testing people's responses to more detailed messages and policy proposals, paying special attention to how radical messages compare to counterfactual moderate messages.

This is the second post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e. making resource allocation decisions across species. The aim of this post is to provide an overview of the Welfare Range Table, which records the results of a literature review covering over 90 empirical traits across 11 farmed species.

This post is the first in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e., making resource allocation decisions across species. The aim of this post is to introduce the project and explain how EAs could use its results.

This report explores using AI to increase the effectiveness of human-wildlife conflict (HWC) mitigations in order to benefit wild animal welfare (WAW). Two concrete examples are providing more funding, research, and direct work into reducing fatalities due to 1) collisions between bats and wind turbines, and 2) culling crop-raiding starlings. The report aims merely to raise awareness of this topic and introduce the idea for discussion, but does not yet strongly suggest it is a cost-effective intervention on par with other interventions.

This report is a postscript to "The relative Importance of the severity and duration of pain,” and addresses whether the order of negative and positive experiences matter. For example, is pain worse if it occurs at the end of an individual’s life?

How should effective altruists decide whether to prioritize interventions that alleviate severe but relatively brief suffering or instead those that alleviate longer-lasting but less severe suffering? When one pain is longer-lasting but less intense than a second pain, the most straightforward way to compare how much disutility they cause is to multiply how much longer by how much less severe the first pain is than the second pain. This report investigates whether this mathematical approach is sufficient for making cause prioritization decisions, requires some amendments, or is fundamentally flawed.

Billions of black soldier flies (BSFs) are farmed annually. This post summarizes research into the brain cell counts of BSFs, which may help us to assess the likelihood that they are sentient. The research described in this post was the first to use the isotropic fractionation technique to count an insect’s brain cells across developmental stages and the first to describe the nervous system of a popular, farmed invertebrate.

In this text, Saulius Šimčikas analyzed whether animal advocates should work on decreasing aquatic noise as it potentially stresses wild fish. His tentative conclusion is that most likely, ocean noise interventions wouldn’t be cost-effective compared to current farmed animal interventions, although there is some small chance that it’s more cost-effective than them.

This paper describes the past and current rodent pest control landscape with a particular focus on the harms of rodenticidal poisons and the possibilities for rodent birth control as a cruelty-minimizing alternative. Because rodent birth control is most available in the United States, the focus of this paper is primarily on the U.S.

Is it worth the effective altruism (EA) community trying to accelerate the growth of cultured meat production? Should EA just let market forces move it forward? Should EA invest directly in cultured meat R&D or identify high-leverage ways to increase funding? Or should EA just not invest in it because it is insufficiently promising?

Several societal issues could be mitigated by reducing global consumption of meat and animal products (MAP). In three randomized, controlled experiments (n=217 to 574), we evaluated the effects of a documentary that presents health, environmental, and animal welfare motivations for reducing MAP consumption. Study 1 assessed the documentary’s effectiveness at reducing reported MAP consumption after 12 days. This study used methodological innovations to minimize social desirability bias, a widespread limitation of past research. Study 2 investigated discrepancies between the results of Study 1 and those of previous studies by further examining the role of social desirability bias. Study 3 assessed the documentary’s effectiveness in a new population anticipated to be more responsive and upon enhancing the intervention content. We found that the documentary did not decrease reported MAP consumption when potential social desirability bias was minimized (Studies 1 and 3). The documentary also did not affect consumption among participants whose demographics suggested they might be more receptive (Study 3). However, the documentary did substantially increase intentions to reduce consumption, consistent with past studies (Studies 2 and 3). Overall, we conclude that some past studies of similar interventions may have overestimated effects due to methodological biases. Novel intervention strategies to reduce MAP consumption may be needed.