An initiative needs to be simple enough to attract votes (confused voters vote no), but complex enough to address the biggest animal welfare challenges (e.g. try defining higher welfare broiler breeds in a way the average voter will endorse).

Do you think broiler breed ballot initiatives are worth trying or at least investigating further, given the potential upside and cost-effectiveness of cage-free ballot initiatives (Duffy, 2023)? EDIT: Also see Khimasia, 2023 on potential broiler ballot initiatives, from CE/AIM's research program.

Has there been surveys/polls on potential broiler initiatives (target states, wording, etc.)?

To me, they seem quite promising, but the first step should be further investigation, e.g. finding the best wording for expected impact (impact if passed x probability of passing).

What's going on with the progress on breeds for the Better Chicken Commitment? I've heard it hasn't been going well. But I think I also read the BCC hadn't actually settled on breeds until after many commitments were made, so we wouldn't expect them to start making progress on breeds until after that, anyway. But I think we have settled on approved breeds for a while now.

FWIW, shrimp paste alternatives seem morally ambiguous and have a significant risk of backfiring.

1. Shrimp paste alternatives would probably increase paste shrimp populations. If you think paste shrimp have overall bad lives naturally, then increasing their populations this way would be bad. If you're highly uncertain about this, then the effects on their population would be highly morally ambiguous.
2. Shrimp paste alternatives could increase paste shrimp catch (if they're overfished; see my recent post).
3. I don't know how common this is or will be, but I've also seen a few articles about paste shrimp (mostly from India) being used as farmed animal feed, like fishmeal. Shrimp paste alternatives could divert paste shrimp catch towards feed and therefore support and increase aquaculture, including shrimp farming, where fishmeal typically makes up >10% of shrimp diets.^[1] However, it could also make it harder for insects to compete as a fishmeal substitute, and so decrease insect farming.

1. ^{^}

   Whether or not paste shrimp are fed to farmed shrimp, they could increase the supply and reduce the prices of fishmeal and fishmeal substitutes, and so reduce fishmeal prices for shrimp farms.

FWIW, it seems reasonably likely that fishing has increased fish populations on the whole, by disproportionately reducing the populations of more predatory species and increasing the populations of their prey. See Christensen et al., 2014 (only considers fish, not invertebrates) and Bell et al., 2018 (very limited in regional representation).

In general, the effects of fishing on welfare seem quite morally ambiguous, when you consider the effects on population sizes across species, tradeoffs between species, uncertainty about whether their lives are overall bad or overall good: The moral ambiguity of fishing on wild aquatic animal populations.

I also suspect efforts to make fishing more sustainable actually just increase fishing, while outright bans seem politically infeasible; see my other recent post Sustainable fishing policy increases fishing, and demand reductions might, too.

It may be worth considering even interventions that seem less cost-effective than marginal cage-free campaigns, say because:

1. You can gather evidence on their cost-effectiveness and build capacity for the future, when cage-free campaigns are less cost-effective.
2. If the upside is high enough and feedback loops are good enough, you could scale it up if it seems successful or shut it down if not. For example, if it has a 5% chance of being 10x cage-free campaigns is worthless otherwise, then the EV is only 50% cage-free. After a pilot, if you become confident that it will succeed and scale, then you now have a 10x intervention, which would be great. If instead you become confident that it isn't cost-effective, hopefully you didn't spent too much to find that out, and then you can stop funding it.
3. Diversifying across intervention types, regions, or species might be instrumentally useful (e.g. for capacity building) or otherwise valuable if you're somewhat difference-making risk averse or difference-making ambiguity averse, which I assume most who prioritize animal welfare are.

I suppose for most of these, more careful cost-effectiveness modelling can actually capture these benefits. For 2, AIM/Charity Entrepreneurship often models the expected benefits and expected costs, taking into account different benefits and costs conditional on success/scale up and separately conditional on failure/shutdown (with good enough feedback loops). You can also think of this like value of information. For 1 and 3, you can also just include the value of indirect benefits like capacity building and value of information.

Interesting!

Fleurbaey and Voorhoeve wrote a related paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199931392.003.0009

FWIW, GPT said the greenhouse effect is not stronger locally to the emissions. So, I would guess that if you can offset and emit the same kind of greenhouse gas molecules roughly simultaneously, it would be very unlikely we'd be able to predict which regions are made worse off by this than neither emitting nor offsetting.

Would precision farming decrease costs or increase outputs (reduce mortality, increase growth) much compared standard conventional factory farmings? It could reduce labour costs, increase energy and equipment costs, and have no effect on feed and juvenile costs. It seems that feed often (e.g. chicken, salmon) accounts for around 50% or more of the cost of production in factory. So precision farming could only reduce costs so much.

Yudkowsky's views are discussed here:

1. https://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/12/16/a-debate-on-animal-consciousness/

2. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KFbGbTEtHiJnXw5sk/i-really-don-t-understand-eliezer-yudkowsky-s-position-on

He's the guy farthest left, next to the panel host. He just looks very different now.