Similar to you, I also want to bring about systemic change for animals (see e.g. animal welfare is now enshrined in the Belgian constitution). One problem people like us face is that the EA framework doesn’t really gel with it. My group couldn’t get any funding from EA, even though we have a decades long track record with things like:
Legal prohibition of the sale of dogs and cats in public marketplaces.
The closure of several markets where animals suffered routine and abject abuse (due to hidden camera investigations)
The prohibition of hunting stray cats in Wallonia and Flanders.
The prohibition of keeping wild animals in circuses in Belgium.
The decision of all Belgian supermarkets to stop selling eggs from battery hens. Now 90% of all fresh eggs sold in our country come from animal friendly farms (ground system, free range or organic).
The European ban on trade in seal products.
The Flemish and Walloon ban on slaughter without stunning.
The ban on fur farming and force feeding in Flanders.
But the impact of changing the constitution is impossible to quantify. With things like medical interventions, we can run an RCT (which the EA framework loves), but the same cannot be done with constitutional changes since we don’t have a control country. The problem with RCTs is that they are expensive and measure narrow, direct, continuous effects, while they’re unpractical for broad, indirect, or discontinuous effects. Which means those RCT based interventions privilege the status-quo more. Systemic change advocates face an uphill battle in getting EA funding.
But it’s more than that; the culture of EA is very anglo-sphere. It’s human nature to prefer your ingroup so it’s unsurprising that the big EA funders, mostly anglo-sphere entrepreneurs, prefer to give to other anglo-sphere entrepreneurs (plus other demographic data which you can probably guess). The Silicon Valley approach of starting a firm gets you more EA money and attention than lobbying the government for slow systemic change, and it helps a lot if you do it in the anglo-sphere. If you look at all the projects/people EA gives funding/attention to, you’ll see that it’s dominated by english-speaking/anglo-sphere projects/people to an absurd degree, like, much more than you would expect if you thought EA gave to maximum impact projects/people indiscriminately. (And I’m not even going to talk about race and gender in EA, which really speaks for itself.) Take for example a look at: the individuals on the EA people page, the people that appear on EA podcasts, the AI people/project funding landscape, the AI projects that get attention, the philosophers that get attention, longtermism people/projects in general, all the people EA made famous, the people who work at EA organizations, the EA survey showing that EAs disproportionately move to the UK/US, individual EA university chapters in the US/UK being so well funded that they can throw regular pizza parties while our entire country can’t get a single community organizer despite being the center of EU-legislation, the EA forum having a tag for the US and UK but almost no other countries, the EA forum having a tag for UK policy and US policy but not for other countries… You get the point.
So to get funding, I highly recommend you first get someone who knows a lot of insiders in the EA anglo-sphere, and who can speak/present themselves as one of them (and, realistically, being white and male will probably also help). Secondly, throw some numbers around. In academia, it’s bad form to claim to be able to quantify unquantifiable things, but EA funders want numbers, even if they’re made up. Lastly, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get funding, and don’t assume you’re not effective because the “effective altruists” funders don’t consider you to be. Again, we didn’t get any funding, and we did change the constitution, while just last week it came to light that EA funders did, e.g. give $100.000 to a video game that never got developed. Just because they call themselves effective doesn’t mean they are effective. Like other humans, they’re also very biased in favor of their in-group.
Hi Melvin, wonderful work!
Similar to you, I also want to bring about systemic change for animals (see e.g. animal welfare is now enshrined in the Belgian constitution). One problem people like us face is that the EA framework doesn’t really gel with it. My group couldn’t get any funding from EA, even though we have a decades long track record with things like:
Legal prohibition of the sale of dogs and cats in public marketplaces.
The closure of several markets where animals suffered routine and abject abuse (due to hidden camera investigations)
The prohibition of hunting stray cats in Wallonia and Flanders.
The prohibition of keeping wild animals in circuses in Belgium.
The decision of all Belgian supermarkets to stop selling eggs from battery hens. Now 90% of all fresh eggs sold in our country come from animal friendly farms (ground system, free range or organic).
The European ban on trade in seal products.
The Flemish and Walloon ban on slaughter without stunning.
The ban on fur farming and force feeding in Flanders.
But the impact of changing the constitution is impossible to quantify. With things like medical interventions, we can run an RCT (which the EA framework loves), but the same cannot be done with constitutional changes since we don’t have a control country. The problem with RCTs is that they are expensive and measure narrow, direct, continuous effects, while they’re unpractical for broad, indirect, or discontinuous effects. Which means those RCT based interventions privilege the status-quo more. Systemic change advocates face an uphill battle in getting EA funding.
But it’s more than that; the culture of EA is very anglo-sphere. It’s human nature to prefer your ingroup so it’s unsurprising that the big EA funders, mostly anglo-sphere entrepreneurs, prefer to give to other anglo-sphere entrepreneurs (plus other demographic data which you can probably guess). The Silicon Valley approach of starting a firm gets you more EA money and attention than lobbying the government for slow systemic change, and it helps a lot if you do it in the anglo-sphere. If you look at all the projects/people EA gives funding/attention to, you’ll see that it’s dominated by english-speaking/anglo-sphere projects/people to an absurd degree, like, much more than you would expect if you thought EA gave to maximum impact projects/people indiscriminately. (And I’m not even going to talk about race and gender in EA, which really speaks for itself.)
Take for example a look at: the individuals on the EA people page, the people that appear on EA podcasts, the AI people/project funding landscape, the AI projects that get attention, the philosophers that get attention, longtermism people/projects in general, all the people EA made famous, the people who work at EA organizations, the EA survey showing that EAs disproportionately move to the UK/US, individual EA university chapters in the US/UK being so well funded that they can throw regular pizza parties while our entire country can’t get a single community organizer despite being the center of EU-legislation, the EA forum having a tag for the US and UK but almost no other countries, the EA forum having a tag for UK policy and US policy but not for other countries… You get the point.
So to get funding, I highly recommend you first get someone who knows a lot of insiders in the EA anglo-sphere, and who can speak/present themselves as one of them (and, realistically, being white and male will probably also help).
Secondly, throw some numbers around. In academia, it’s bad form to claim to be able to quantify unquantifiable things, but EA funders want numbers, even if they’re made up.
Lastly, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get funding, and don’t assume you’re not effective because the “effective altruists” funders don’t consider you to be. Again, we didn’t get any funding, and we did change the constitution, while just last week it came to light that EA funders did, e.g. give $100.000 to a video game that never got developed. Just because they call themselves effective doesn’t mean they are effective. Like other humans, they’re also very biased in favor of their in-group.