The EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare—I think the meat eater problem discourse seems like a much bigger deal than it actually is in the community. I personally think it’s all kinda silly and significantly prioritise saving human lives
The EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare
Donations are dominated by large donors, so this only means large donors tend to donate more to global health and development than animal welfare. The votes in the Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week, and 2024 donation election favoured animal welfare.
But the debate week question and the donation election were about marginal funding, which limits the breadth of the conclusions one can draw from those data. IIRC, many of the discussions—and at least my own votes trending toward AW—were heavily influenced by the small percentage of EA funding that is going into AW. Perhaps the EA Survey is the best sense of general community sentiment on the community’s relative cause prio here?
Hi Jason. One’s top cause is simply that whose best interventions one thinks are the most cost-effective at the margin? I think so. The EA Survey may offer a better perspective due to covering more people, and often presenting results for different levels of engagement with effective altruism, but I do not remember whether there was a question about allocating marginal funding, although I remember there was one about allocating total funding.
The proposition asserted upthread was “[t]he EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare.” If I understood your response correctly, you suggested that this is a function of the largest donors’ decisions. That many of us, including myself, favor giving the marginal last dollar to AW is also a function of those big-donor decisions.
As far as survey data, I specifically had the response to Please give a rough indication of how much you think each of these causes should be prioritized by EAs. I took that wording to invite the respondent to divvy up the entire pie of EA resources. I would read them as suggesting that GHD > AW in the community’s collective ideal cause prio, but by considerably less than donation numbers would imply. It’s of course possible that the 2024 survey will show different outcomes.
There was also this response, although the high SDs make interpretation a bit confusing to me:
If I understood your response correctly, you suggested that this is a function of the largest donors’ decisions. That many of us, including myself, favor giving the marginal last dollar to AW is also a function of those big-donor decisions.
Agreed. I just meant that much more donations to the best global health and development (GHD) interventions than to the best ones in animal welfare (AW) does not necessarily imply that the median donor believes that the former are more cost-effective at the margin than the latter.
As far as survey data, I specifically had the response to Please give a rough indication of how much you think each of these causes should be prioritized by EAs. I took that wording to invite the respondent to divvy up the entire pie of EA resources.
I agree with your interpretation that the question is about allocationg total funding, nor marginal funding. So the results are compatible with people thinking GHD should have a much greater fraction of the resources than AW, but believing the best interventions in GHD are less cost-effective than the best ones in AW.
It’s of course possible that the 2024 survey will show different outcomes.
I guess the results will be more favourable to animal welfare than in 2022, although not as much as one may infer from discussions on the forum, as I think people who are less engaged tend to prioritise GHD relatively more.
The EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare—I think the meat eater problem discourse seems like a much bigger deal than it actually is in the community. I personally think it’s all kinda silly and significantly prioritise saving human lives
That seems true in practice but you wouldn’t come to that conclusion reading the forum over the last few months like JWS says
Donations are dominated by large donors, so this only means large donors tend to donate more to global health and development than animal welfare. The votes in the Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week, and 2024 donation election favoured animal welfare.
But the debate week question and the donation election were about marginal funding, which limits the breadth of the conclusions one can draw from those data. IIRC, many of the discussions—and at least my own votes trending toward AW—were heavily influenced by the small percentage of EA funding that is going into AW. Perhaps the EA Survey is the best sense of general community sentiment on the community’s relative cause prio here?
Hi Jason. One’s top cause is simply that whose best interventions one thinks are the most cost-effective at the margin? I think so. The EA Survey may offer a better perspective due to covering more people, and often presenting results for different levels of engagement with effective altruism, but I do not remember whether there was a question about allocating marginal funding, although I remember there was one about allocating total funding.
I had these results in mind.
The proposition asserted upthread was “[t]he EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare.” If I understood your response correctly, you suggested that this is a function of the largest donors’ decisions. That many of us, including myself, favor giving the marginal last dollar to AW is also a function of those big-donor decisions.
As far as survey data, I specifically had the response to Please give a rough indication of how much you think each of these causes should be prioritized by EAs. I took that wording to invite the respondent to divvy up the entire pie of EA resources. I would read them as suggesting that GHD > AW in the community’s collective ideal cause prio, but by considerably less than donation numbers would imply. It’s of course possible that the 2024 survey will show different outcomes.
There was also this response, although the high SDs make interpretation a bit confusing to me:
Thanks for sharing, Jason! Strongly upvoted.
Agreed. I just meant that much more donations to the best global health and development (GHD) interventions than to the best ones in animal welfare (AW) does not necessarily imply that the median donor believes that the former are more cost-effective at the margin than the latter.
I agree with your interpretation that the question is about allocationg total funding, nor marginal funding. So the results are compatible with people thinking GHD should have a much greater fraction of the resources than AW, but believing the best interventions in GHD are less cost-effective than the best ones in AW.
I guess the results will be more favourable to animal welfare than in 2022, although not as much as one may infer from discussions on the forum, as I think people who are less engaged tend to prioritise GHD relatively more.