Thank you for writing this! Was really interesting to read. I’d love to see more posts of this nature. And it seems like you’ve done a lot for the world — thank you.
I have a couple questions, if you don’t mind:
You write
I still generally suspect corporate campaigns are no longer particularly effective, especially those run by the largest groups (e.g. Mercy For Animals or The Humane League), and don’t think these meet the bar for being an EA giving area anymore, and haven’t in the US since around 2017, and outside the US since around 2021.
I would love to hear your reasoning (pessimism about fulfillment? WAW looking better?) and what sort of evidence has convinced you. I think this is really important, and I haven’t seen an argument for this publicly anywhere. Ditto about your skepticism of the organizations leading this work.
We can make meaningful progress on abolishing factory farming or improving farmed animal welfare by 2050
Did you mean to change one of the years in the two statements of this form?
Most people interested in EA should earn to give
I’d love to hear more about this. How much value do you think e.g. the median EA doing direct work is creating? Or, put another way, how significant an annual donation would exceed the value of a talented EA doing direct work instead?
Seems like the majority of commitments happened in prior years and there’s been a rapid decline in number of commitments.
Enforcement is still needed, but is isn’t obvious to me that dozens of well funded orgs are needed for it.
The broiler ask was not tenable from the start, and many campaigners think it’ll never be fulfilled at a large scale.
The well-funded orgs seem like they have lots of internal issues that prevent them from being particularly effective.
There’s been a pretty big break from the tactics I think are most effective for winning commitments, and it would be hard to get well-funded groups to go back to them.
On WAW specifically, my view is something like:
Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren’t that far away.
The intervention space is so large and impacting animals’ lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
These interventions will often not involve nearly as much “changing hearts and minds” or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.
Did you mean to change one of the years in the two statements of this form?
Yes, 2100. Thanks for spotting that!
I’d love to hear more about this. How much value do you think e.g. the median EA doing direct work is creating? Or, put another way, how significant an annual donation would exceed the value of a talented EA doing direct work instead?
I think my view is something more like the talent pool in EA is deep enough (for most kinds of roles, especially junior ones), and the donor diversification issues are large enough that it seems like some kind of shift is warranted. I wouldn’t want fewer people doing direct work — I’d want fewer people trying to.
Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren’t that far away.
The intervention space is so large and impacting animals’ lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
These interventions will often not involve nearly as much “changing hearts and minds” or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.
I would love to hear you talk more about this :) What makes you hopeful that scalable interventions are coming, and can you say more about anything you’re particularly excited about here? Also curious what “aren’t that far away” caches out into in terms of your beliefs—in 1 year? 3?
I wonder if your opinions are related to the following, which I’d also be excited to hear more about!
I think that my research has generally caused the EA space to focus too much on farmed insects, and less on insecticides. I am somewhat inclined toward thinking that insecticide-caused suffering is both more tractable and larger in scale. I’m now working on a insecticide project though, so trying to correct this.
(Thanks for sharing this post Abraham, I enjoyed reading it :) )
What makes you hopeful that scalable interventions are coming, and can you say more about anything you’re particularly excited about here?
The ones that seem most likely in the near future are:
Insecticide interventions like alternative crop insect management approaches, including genetic ones
Less painful insecticides
Fertility control for urban wildlife
Probably a lot more no one has considered
Things that make me think this is on the table:
I think there aren’t great alternative animal welfare interventions, but animal interventions have really good returns if you get them right because you can impact so many animals.
We’ve made some cool progress on validating welfare measures that might be cheap to measure, which could be useful for assessing the sign of interventions.
It seems generally like the academic field building project is going well, so we should expect this to accelerate.
In terms of timelines — I think this is more like 10-15 years. But part of the reason I think that’s exciting is that I used to think it would be more like 2050+ before anything like this was on the table. I think I’ve also just generally decreased my confidence that the problems as are as difficult as I thought before (though I definitely think they are still tricky).
For insecticides, I think my view remains that we are something like 2-5 years of specific lab/field research away from plausibly having a great intervention, so it is sad that progress hasn’t been made on it, and given that this also seemed like the case a few years ago, funding the research should have been a priority earlier.
Thank you for writing this! Was really interesting to read. I’d love to see more posts of this nature. And it seems like you’ve done a lot for the world — thank you.
I have a couple questions, if you don’t mind:
You write
I would love to hear your reasoning (pessimism about fulfillment? WAW looking better?) and what sort of evidence has convinced you. I think this is really important, and I haven’t seen an argument for this publicly anywhere. Ditto about your skepticism of the organizations leading this work.
Did you mean to change one of the years in the two statements of this form?
I’d love to hear more about this. How much value do you think e.g. the median EA doing direct work is creating? Or, put another way, how significant an annual donation would exceed the value of a talented EA doing direct work instead?
Thanks for the questions!
Corporate campaigns
Seems like the majority of commitments happened in prior years and there’s been a rapid decline in number of commitments.
Enforcement is still needed, but is isn’t obvious to me that dozens of well funded orgs are needed for it.
The broiler ask was not tenable from the start, and many campaigners think it’ll never be fulfilled at a large scale.
The well-funded orgs seem like they have lots of internal issues that prevent them from being particularly effective.
There’s been a pretty big break from the tactics I think are most effective for winning commitments, and it would be hard to get well-funded groups to go back to them.
On WAW specifically, my view is something like:
Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren’t that far away.
The intervention space is so large and impacting animals’ lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
These interventions will often not involve nearly as much “changing hearts and minds” or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.
Yes, 2100. Thanks for spotting that!
I think my view is something more like the talent pool in EA is deep enough (for most kinds of roles, especially junior ones), and the donor diversification issues are large enough that it seems like some kind of shift is warranted. I wouldn’t want fewer people doing direct work — I’d want fewer people trying to.
I would love to hear you talk more about this :) What makes you hopeful that scalable interventions are coming, and can you say more about anything you’re particularly excited about here? Also curious what “aren’t that far away” caches out into in terms of your beliefs—in 1 year? 3?
I wonder if your opinions are related to the following, which I’d also be excited to hear more about!
(Thanks for sharing this post Abraham, I enjoyed reading it :) )
Thanks for the questions!!
The ones that seem most likely in the near future are:
Insecticide interventions like alternative crop insect management approaches, including genetic ones
Less painful insecticides
Fertility control for urban wildlife
Probably a lot more no one has considered
Things that make me think this is on the table:
I think there aren’t great alternative animal welfare interventions, but animal interventions have really good returns if you get them right because you can impact so many animals.
We’ve made some cool progress on validating welfare measures that might be cheap to measure, which could be useful for assessing the sign of interventions.
It seems generally like the academic field building project is going well, so we should expect this to accelerate.
In terms of timelines — I think this is more like 10-15 years. But part of the reason I think that’s exciting is that I used to think it would be more like 2050+ before anything like this was on the table. I think I’ve also just generally decreased my confidence that the problems as are as difficult as I thought before (though I definitely think they are still tricky).
For insecticides, I think my view remains that we are something like 2-5 years of specific lab/field research away from plausibly having a great intervention, so it is sad that progress hasn’t been made on it, and given that this also seemed like the case a few years ago, funding the research should have been a priority earlier.