I really like this framing, especially the push against “problem hunting” when there’s already an overwhelming amount of neglected suffering in front of us. Animals are not “one issue” but instead, the majority of moral patients. This is underappreciated, even within EA.
What struck me about the original article was the idea that we don’t yet have the ecosystem to absorb a huge influx of capital. I think that applies here too. Even if we take the case for prioritising animals as seriously as we can, it’s not obvious the field is currently set up to productively deploy funding at the scale you’re pointing to (multiple interventions, geographies, and organisations) without hitting bottlenecks or diminishing returns.
That seems less like a reason not to prioritise animals, and more like a reason to invest heavily in building out the space itself. The animal space doesn’t have nearly enough people, enough organisations, and needs better-developed intervention areas, and especially more work on neglected animal populations (which is why what we’re doing now at Myrias feels particularly valuable).
Overall, I agree with the core concern. There’s a real risk that a wave of new funding ends up looking for new, legible problems while continuing to underinvest in ones that are already vast, tractable, and unsolved. Making sure that doesn’t happen for animals seems like one of the key challenges for this next phase.
I don’t understand the negative karma for a comment that has 5 agreement votes to 0 disagreement. I wonder if some of you can explain the reason for agreeing but downvoting this?
I downvoted it because it is AI generated, and reads (to me) like someone has prompted an AI to ‘respond to this post’, i.e. it doesn’t really make any specific points. I could be wrong though, and clearly others have found value in it.
Hi Toby, that’s a fair comment. I dictated a reply to the post to my LLM and then it put together into something less rambley and slightly more cohesive. I then edited it manually, but I guess some of the AI-stink remained! I do think I added something new to it, as my professional experience as an animal rights activist is that the animal space is quite under developed. So content was all mine (a human with experience in the field, albeit mostly agreeing with both pieces!), but the formatting and copywriting was handled by AI.
Makes sense Carlos! It might be a personal thing but when I see AI writing I often struggle to read it/ understand what is the idea of the author and what is the AI-fluff.
I really like this framing, especially the push against “problem hunting” when there’s already an overwhelming amount of neglected suffering in front of us. Animals are not “one issue” but instead, the majority of moral patients. This is underappreciated, even within EA.
What struck me about the original article was the idea that we don’t yet have the ecosystem to absorb a huge influx of capital. I think that applies here too. Even if we take the case for prioritising animals as seriously as we can, it’s not obvious the field is currently set up to productively deploy funding at the scale you’re pointing to (multiple interventions, geographies, and organisations) without hitting bottlenecks or diminishing returns.
That seems less like a reason not to prioritise animals, and more like a reason to invest heavily in building out the space itself. The animal space doesn’t have nearly enough people, enough organisations, and needs better-developed intervention areas, and especially more work on neglected animal populations (which is why what we’re doing now at Myrias feels particularly valuable).
Overall, I agree with the core concern. There’s a real risk that a wave of new funding ends up looking for new, legible problems while continuing to underinvest in ones that are already vast, tractable, and unsolved. Making sure that doesn’t happen for animals seems like one of the key challenges for this next phase.
I don’t understand the negative karma for a comment that has 5 agreement votes to 0 disagreement. I wonder if some of you can explain the reason for agreeing but downvoting this?
I downvoted it because it is AI generated, and reads (to me) like someone has prompted an AI to ‘respond to this post’, i.e. it doesn’t really make any specific points. I could be wrong though, and clearly others have found value in it.
Hi Toby, that’s a fair comment. I dictated a reply to the post to my LLM and then it put together into something less rambley and slightly more cohesive. I then edited it manually, but I guess some of the AI-stink remained! I do think I added something new to it, as my professional experience as an animal rights activist is that the animal space is quite under developed. So content was all mine (a human with experience in the field, albeit mostly agreeing with both pieces!), but the formatting and copywriting was handled by AI.
Makes sense Carlos! It might be a personal thing but when I see AI writing I often struggle to read it/ understand what is the idea of the author and what is the AI-fluff.