If you could travel back to 2015 and talk to your past self about developments in animal advocacy, do you think anything would really surprise him?
If so, is there anything Lewis circa 2015 could have been tracking/​paying attention to that would have made those developments less of a surprise? Would that have helped Open Philanthropy to make any additional good grants?
Interesting Q! I think there’s a lot that would surprise 2015-me. A few highlights:
Plant-based meat: I didn’t expect Impossible to get into Burger King so quickly, the popularity of the Beyond Meat IPO, the surge in sales of plant-based meat in US retail over the last few years, or the resulting investing boom in the space in the last few years. I think following the industry more closely would have given me a bit more foresight here, but I’m not sure it would have resulted in a lot more good grants, since there are limited grant opportunities (and the top investment opportunities all got taken without us).
Corporate campaigns: I didn’t expect advocates to so quickly get most large North American food and European food businesses to commit to go cage-free, or to succeed in extending these campaigns globally. But I also didn’t expect US broiler welfare campaigns to get as slowed down as they have. I think the main update here is the significance of momentum. I think one wrong lesson would be that we should ask for more—this was a lesson that we took from rapid US cage-free progress which I think led us to ask for too much on the US broiler ask.
Mismanagement and sexual harassment at some groups. I think the movement had more internal problems than we realized, see e.g. the above comments. As a funder it’s hard to learn about these issues—you’re mostly talking to group leadership and it’s hard to have informal conversations with regular employees. But I think these issues have updated us on a number of things, including the importance of (a) trying to have more informal conversations with non-leaders, (b) requiring strong sexual harassment policies and procedures from grantees, (c) encouraging orgs to invest in org-development, e.g. higher salaries, and better governance, e.g. independent boards.
I could go on. There are many more things that have surprised me, though I think most have been positive and due to the fact that we’re still a young fast-growing movement where there’s less of a stable baseline to predict forward.
If you could travel back to 2015 and talk to your past self about developments in animal advocacy, do you think anything would really surprise him?
If so, is there anything Lewis circa 2015 could have been tracking/​paying attention to that would have made those developments less of a surprise? Would that have helped Open Philanthropy to make any additional good grants?
Interesting Q! I think there’s a lot that would surprise 2015-me. A few highlights:
Plant-based meat: I didn’t expect Impossible to get into Burger King so quickly, the popularity of the Beyond Meat IPO, the surge in sales of plant-based meat in US retail over the last few years, or the resulting investing boom in the space in the last few years. I think following the industry more closely would have given me a bit more foresight here, but I’m not sure it would have resulted in a lot more good grants, since there are limited grant opportunities (and the top investment opportunities all got taken without us).
Corporate campaigns: I didn’t expect advocates to so quickly get most large North American food and European food businesses to commit to go cage-free, or to succeed in extending these campaigns globally. But I also didn’t expect US broiler welfare campaigns to get as slowed down as they have. I think the main update here is the significance of momentum. I think one wrong lesson would be that we should ask for more—this was a lesson that we took from rapid US cage-free progress which I think led us to ask for too much on the US broiler ask.
Mismanagement and sexual harassment at some groups. I think the movement had more internal problems than we realized, see e.g. the above comments. As a funder it’s hard to learn about these issues—you’re mostly talking to group leadership and it’s hard to have informal conversations with regular employees. But I think these issues have updated us on a number of things, including the importance of (a) trying to have more informal conversations with non-leaders, (b) requiring strong sexual harassment policies and procedures from grantees, (c) encouraging orgs to invest in org-development, e.g. higher salaries, and better governance, e.g. independent boards.
I could go on. There are many more things that have surprised me, though I think most have been positive and due to the fact that we’re still a young fast-growing movement where there’s less of a stable baseline to predict forward.