if a lot of other donors are switching to things more in line with EA priorities, that suggests that EA priorities (in this domain) are broadly convincing, which seems like it makes it much harder to argue that “EA was having a damaging influence on animal advocacy”.
I may have misunderstood you, but I don’t think this follows. There are some additional assumptions needed to make this true, for example (non-exhaustive):
if you have a moderately strong prior that convincingness correlates with positive effects on the world. or
if you believe in the procedural justice/distributed decision-making of donors satisfying their preferences.
If something is broadly convincing – that is, convincing to altruistic donors with a range of different values and priorities – that is a pretty good sign that it is, in fact, solid. In the case of animal welfare, if a lot of non-EA donors have shifted their funding towards priorities that were originally pushed mainly by EAs, that seems like good evidence that shifting towards those priorities is good for animal welfare across a wide range of value systems, and hence (under moral uncertainty) more likely to be in fact a good thing. In that case,
There are certainly ways this could not be true, but I do think the above is the most likely / default case, and that the ways it could not be true are more complex stories requiring additional evidence. You need some mechanism by which EA funders influenced non-EA funders to change their priorities in a way that went against their values, or alternatively some mechanism by which EA funding “deprived [activists] of significant funding [etc]” despite the pre-existing non-EA funders still being around. And you need to provide evidence for that mechanism operating in this case, as opposed to (IMO the much more likely case of) people just being sad that other people think that their preferred approach is less good for animals.
I may have misunderstood you, but I don’t think this follows. There are some additional assumptions needed to make this true, for example (non-exhaustive):
if you have a moderately strong prior that convincingness correlates with positive effects on the world. or
if you believe in the procedural justice/distributed decision-making of donors satisfying their preferences.
Presumably the OP does not believe either.
If something is broadly convincing – that is, convincing to altruistic donors with a range of different values and priorities – that is a pretty good sign that it is, in fact, solid. In the case of animal welfare, if a lot of non-EA donors have shifted their funding towards priorities that were originally pushed mainly by EAs, that seems like good evidence that shifting towards those priorities is good for animal welfare across a wide range of value systems, and hence (under moral uncertainty) more likely to be in fact a good thing. In that case,
There are certainly ways this could not be true, but I do think the above is the most likely / default case, and that the ways it could not be true are more complex stories requiring additional evidence. You need some mechanism by which EA funders influenced non-EA funders to change their priorities in a way that went against their values, or alternatively some mechanism by which EA funding “deprived [activists] of significant funding [etc]” despite the pre-existing non-EA funders still being around. And you need to provide evidence for that mechanism operating in this case, as opposed to (IMO the much more likely case of) people just being sad that other people think that their preferred approach is less good for animals.