You didn't choose the circumstances of your birth; even if it couldn't have been any other way, it was something outside of your control. I expect many of the people who are reading this to be in a rare situation, on Earth: wealthy, educated, living in a democracy, free of easily-treatable disease, and, above all of these, homo sapiens; all for reasons that are, in part, outside of their control. And, so, it's meaningful to say that there's an element of chance to where you ended up; probability is not ontologically fundamental, it's how you quantify what is uncertain and what is outside your control. How else could those elements of chance have went?
Draw again from the birth lottery to take a different sample from the way those circumstances outside your control go for living beings on Earth today.
Making such a wheel depends on some assumptions about which things in the world are conscious, and if it's to be used to motivate any decisionmaking, which things on the world count as relevantly part of the world, for the sake of what humans should intervene on. The following settings let you configure which beings to include, and how much those beings relatively matter.
The goal of this page is to bring into relief just how much you are likely in one of the best situations of anything sentient that has ever lived in the world (though I, of course, don't know your situation). Most humans in the world live outside of developed countries, and there are more farmed animals than there are humans, and there are more wild animals than there are farmed animals. You are you, and you are in the situation you are in; and it's likely that this situation can be used to help the other sentient life in the world!
Givewell evaluates charities that help humans living today. All else equal, it's more effective to help people who are living in developing countries; Givewell estimates that, on average, an extra $3500 spent correctly in developing countries can do the equivalent of saving a life (specifically from vitamin A supplementation reducing the rate of death from infections caused by vitamin A deficiency weakening immune systems), and there's nothing so impactful for sale for $3500 in developed countries; people in developed countries are rich enough that they've already, and the country as a whole is rich enough that the government can tax people enough to pay for this for people who are too poor to pay for it themselves.
Malaria Consortium gives out malaria medicine. In some countries, especially in subsaharan Africa, malaria is highly seasonal - most cases of malaria happen during the summer. Malaria Consortium focuses on giving out malaria medicine during these four months, where it has the greatest impact.
The Against Malaria Foundation funds the distribution of bednets treated with insecticide to prevent malaria from being transmitted by mosquitoes, in Africa and Papua New Guinea where malaria rates are highest.
Hellen Keller International distributes Vitamin A supplements for preschool aged children in Africa, reducing Vitamin A deficiency which makes people vulnerable to infection.
New Incentives operates in Nigeria and gives small cash incentives to parents to take their children to get routine vaccinations.
Animal Charity Evaluators evaluates charities that help nonhuman animals. They focus on helping factory farmed animals and wild animals, which make up the largest populations of animals, while receiving less philanthropic focus.
Animal Welfare Observatory performs corporate outreach in Spain and Europe with the goal of getting them to commit to the European Chicken Commitment (a set of welfare standards for meat chickens that gives them more room and nicer living conditions than current standards) and cage-free commitments for egg-laying hens (self-explanatory). They're also expanding into corporate outreach for improving welfare standards for farmed fish and shrimps in Spain and the EU.
Aquatic Life Institute works on improving welfare standards for farmed and wild-caught fish and shrimp. They engage in corporate outreach to get corporates to adopt a policy of stunning shrimp before slaughter so that it's painless, as well as engaging in longer-term policy advocacy to require higher welfare standards for fish and shrimp.
Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği performs corporate outreach in Turkey with the goal of getting corporations to make cage-free commitments for egg-laying hens, as well as corporate outreach for improving welfare standards for fish.
Dansk Vegetarisk Forening performs outreach towards institutions in Denmark and the Danish government to adopt pro-vegan polices, like providing plant-based meals and government funding towards plant-based meals.
The Good Food Fund works in China to build the field of animal advocacy in China, promoting plant-based and lower-meat diets among consumers and establishing themselves as a player in the food systems space.
The Shrimp Welfare Project directly engages with the shrimp industry to secure corporate commitments to stun shrimps before slaughter, and works with farmers in India to improve the water quality and therefore welfare levels for farmed shrimps.
Sinergia Animal does corporate and institutional outreach in south America and southeast Asia, getting corporations to make cage-free commitments for egg-laying hens, to get institutions to provide plant-based meals in Argentina, Columbia and Indonesia, and to get pork producers in Brazil to give sows more space and to treat piglets better.
Sociedade Vegetariana Brasileira reaches out to institutions (municipal schools and community kitchens) in Brazil to get them to provide plant-based instead of animal-based meals.
The Humane League performs corporate outreach to get companies to adopt cage-free policies for egg-laying hens, and to get chicken meat producers in the UK and EU to make the Better Chicken Commitment for higher welfare standards for broiler chickens raised for meat.
The Wild Animal Initiative performs research and field-building in the field of wild animal welfare; there's very little information on where to even start with improving the lives of wild animals, so Wild Animal Initiative is performing the research to find out and to get people to find out.
Many of the values used for animals were based off random guesses and sketchy methodology; there's no omniscient planner who's tracked the population of every being on Earth and then published it online, and some people have made some estimates and I've taken what I can get and dropped an order of magnitude or two here or there. If you have some objections, or better data sources, tell me at tetraspace.west@protonmail.com.
Shrimp: The animals most commonly used and killed for food production for the number of farmed shrimps.
Insects raised for food and feed — global scale, practices, and policy for the number of farmed insects.
Managed honey bee welfare: problems and potential interventions for the number of managed honey bees.
Global cochineal production: scale, welfare concerns, and potential interventions for the number of farmed cochineals.
Animal Charity Evaluators' How We Prioritize Causes for the number of pet dogs and cats.
Sentience Institute's Global Farmed & Factory Farmed Animals Estimates for the number of farmed fish and vertebrates.
Wikipedia's list of countries and dependencies by population for the human population of each country.
Rethink Priorities' Welfare Range Estimates for Rethink Priorities' moral weights. "Pigs" was used as the value for all mammals, "chickens" was used as the value for all birds, "salmon" was used as the value for all fish, and "black soldier flies" was used as the number for all insects and shrimps, except for springtails and mites which have significantly smaller brains for which I used "silkworm". I also used the silkworm value for pteropods, and used zero for copepods which have significantly smaller brains than mites, springtails and pteropods.
Sensory-associative neuron counts for humans, dogs, cats, rabbits, ducks, geese, and turkeys were obtained from Wikipedia's list of animals by number of neurons. I got a language model to read Cellular scaling rules for the brain of Artiodactyla include a highly folded cortex with few neurons for pigs, cows, sheep, goats, and buffalo, and used the numbers it gave me without checking them. I used the value for the house cricket for all insects. I used the value of the common starling for all wild birds. For shrimp, I divided the total neuron count for humans by a million then used a tenth of that for the mushroom body or whatever shrimps have, proportional to the uncited(?) neuron count in Rethink Priorities' Welfare Range and Probability of Sentience Distributions. For fish, I randomly guess that pallial neurons are about 10% of the total brain, and that an adult zebrafish's neuron count is similar to that of the most common fish taxon, lanternfish (both being a few cm long), the total neuron count of which I got from How many neurons are there?. For insects, I randomly guessed that about a tenth of the neurons are in the mushroom bodies (which I am not allowed to do, because it varies significantly by taxon), used 100k for termites from Inside a Termite’s Brain: How They Navigate, Communicate, and Rebuild Faster Than You Think, used Tomasik's guess scaled by body size in Net Impact of Vegetarianism on Factory-Farm Suffering vs. Invertebrates on Pasture Fields for springtails, and used this value for springtails for mites, except for other insects, for which I used the number for crickets.
For wild animal populations I used The biomass distribution on Earth alongside Total number of neurons and welfare of animal populations. For the ratios of each taxon in wild insect populations, I looked at The global biomass and number of terrestrial arthropods, which gives 95% of individuals being springtails or mites, about 2/3 of springtails or mites being mites, and the other taxa having similar-looking population densities. For specific taxa of wild mammals I asked a language model and used its guesses. For wild shrimps I randomly guessed that shrimps caught by humans represent about a tenth of all shrimps. For wild mammals I assumed that small mammals were about the same size as small birds and used the relative biomass of mammals compared to birds.