I’d agree if this seemed like an especiallyextremely promising organisation [edited this sentence to better reflect my beliefs]. To a layperson looking into the field from the outside, it isn’t clear from the post.
1. The theory of change is suspect - People rarely listen to academics even where there is consensus. - Most academic papers do not replicate - We’re learning that data fabrication is common even in top journals - It’s not clear that this research is any different or will prove to be any different - It’s going to take decades to find out if they’re successful because the feedback loops are weak—it’s going to cost tens of millions to find out if their plan is viable.
2. Their average staff members have higher salaries than the founders / CEOs of most other EA animal charities, so their cost is probably high
I think AIM is a good example of a field-leading charity that it doesn’t make sense to try and compete with much. They spend ~$2M per year, paying their senior staff <$40k. WAI is spending double that, paying their average staff almost triple. They’ve been incubating charities for ~5 years, and WAI has been around for 5 years. AIM incubated ~30 charities in the time WAI published 4-12 papers (for ~10 total citations) and attended some conferences.
They seem several orders of magnitude less cost-effective than a field leading charity, but are sucking up about the same amount of money. Maybe WAW is just a really difficult area for making progress, but that isn’t really a strong case for putting more money into WAI.
It strikes me that either:
1 - WAW isn’t tractable yet and isn’t worthy of much spending 2 - WAI ought be disrupted by hungrier EAs willing to work harder, for less, via a stronger theory of change.
(obviously I have a bias here, but didn’t talk to anyone at WAI before leaving this comment, nor do I have any formal affiliation with them except via marriage).
I feel confused by most of this critique. To be clear, I think founding new charities is incredibly impactful, and there are great funding opportunities there, and that funding AIM charities at launch is a great opportunity for EA donors focused on GHD and animal welfare. But to address your concerns:
1. This critique just sounds like you wouldn’t accept any scientific results, and presumably this is also an issue for all AIM charities / animal welfare charities. If you’re worried about the replication crisis (obviously an issue, but much less so in bio/ecology than social sciences), then presumably every AIM-intervention based on scientific research should be viewed with a ton of skepticism too? Why should I think Shrimp Welfare Project, for example, has good reason for thinking their interventions are good except for through scientific research, which by your lights looks like should be dismissed? AIM’s work is backed by tons of science which presumably would also fail this test. It seems like if you want to make this critique, you’d need special reasons for thinking that WAI funded work is less likely to replicate than other animal welfare science work. I think the opposite is likely to be true, given that WAI seems highly focused on enforcing good scientific practice compared to the average funder?
I also think that this misunderstands what I take WAI’s theory of change to be — I don’t think the idea is that people will listen to scientists—it’s that there will be more scientific evidence so future interventions can have a bigger body of evidence behind them.
Finally, I think the timelines for WAW interventions are a lot shorter than you expect—I’ve been writing something up about this, but when WAI launched, I expected it to take decades to get to a place where we could be highly confident about the sign of WAW interventions. Now, I’d guess that we are under a decade away for some.
Finally, I’ll note that this critique has a common failure mode for discussing WAW — if you acknowledge that WAW is an issue, but are worried about the tractability due to flowthrough effects of interventions, than this should make you think basically all charitable interventions are less tractable, because they’ll all have unknown flowthrough effects on WAW. I think this is a bad line of reasoning, but at its core “WAW is a problem but intractable” seems like just as big a problem for other cause areas as WAW.
2. I don’t think this is accurate. I think it is true that AIM founded charities pay much less, and so do many startups. But WAI has been around several more years than the oldest AIM animal charities and is significantly more established. I think I’d expect most AIM charities that survive to having 20+ staff, etc to raise their salaries significantly, with AIM itself being an exception to this due to a particular ideological commitment.
Also, WAI’s salaries appear to be well below or competitive with many other EA animal charities, like THL or GFI.
But, I also think that this could just be a strategic disagreement — clearly outside the animal space, many EA charities believe people should be paid much more than AIM pays. I suspect many people do not apply to AIM roles due to the pay. That could be a worthwhile tradeoff, but paying lower salaries isn’t something that is all upside—it makes the talent pool smaller, and in many spaces, that could be directly bad for impact.
AIM incubated ~30 charities in the time WAI published 4-12 papers (for ~10 total citations) and attended some conferences.
This seems like it intentionally left off WAI’s main program and activity / the source of the vast majority of their impact? A little confused about why you didn’t include it and it makes me unclear how much to update on this comment or to take your critique overall. For reasons outlined below, I also think the AIM statistic is also misleading, because not all those charities were successful or impactful — very few of them were/are (which is still great, and I think on net, donating to the right new charity could be better than donating to WAI).
They seem several orders of magnitude less cost-effective than a field leading charity
Could you share the calculations you did for this or was this just a guess/made up figure? I’d be interested to see it since you seem confident and gave a pretty specific figure here, and this outcome is very different from other rigorous estimates I’ve seen in the space by independent parties.
***
Finally, as a high-level point, comparing founding a charity with an established charity is not as straightforward as looking at the dollars to each. If you think WAI does cost-effective work (which clearly many EA-aligned evaluators think, like EA Funds, OpenPhil, ACE), then you’re comparing a risky bet against a reliable outcome. Say AIM has a 1 in 5 success rate for founding impactful charities, but it’s hard to tell which of the new charities at founding will be successful. I think this would be incredibly successful and is way above where they currently are. But that means if each one needed $100k to start, you spend $500k overall to get the $100k in value from the good charity. The charity would need to generate 5x the value of WAI in this scenario to make funding a new charity from the pot over WAI the right choice.
Founding new charities is obviously a great way to have impact. But lots of new charities are bad, and by your lights donations to them will be wasted when the charity tries their intervention and it doesn’t work, or otherwise fails and shuts down. The comparison you should be making is more like: donate X to WAI with a known impact (Z progress on some issue), or donate X to a risky bet with a lot of upside, and a high likelihood (in my view >80% for AIM charities—still incredibly impressive and a testament to AIM) of going to $0. That’s much less obviously a clear bet one way or another in the abstract.
Time is precious, so I’m just going to commit to ending my involvement after this comment.
BLUF: I’m not trying to convey “AIM good, WAI bad”. Just that “WAI does not appear to be unbeatable and therefore other charities in this space might be better uses of funding” AIM was just an example of a charity which would be very hard.
This critique just seems weirdly anti-science and presumably an issue for all AIM charities / animal welfare charities. you’re worried about the replication crisis… then presumably every AIM-intervention based on scientific research should be viewed with a ton of skepticism too?
I didn’t claim there was anything wrong with the scientific method. I claimed there was something wrong with academia. Apologies if I am misinterpreting you, but you seem to imply that other charities are around equally as dependent on academia. I think that’s clearly false.
Quotes from the post
“Our primary goal is to support the growth of a self-sustaining interdisciplinary research community focused on reducing wild animal suffering.”
“Here are some highlights of our progress to date… Establishing that wild animal welfare science is a serious academic endeavor, including by… helping to get the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program established.”
Regarding other charities based on scientific research, you can largely tell that they’re working within a year or two of them launching. The evaluation doesn’t require academics. It doesn’t depend on anyone taking published research seriously; the interventions help regardless of whether or not anyone takes the evaluation seriously.
The rest of your writing here seems to assume that I accept that wild animal welfare considerations dominate all others. I don’t come close to believing that.
I don’t think this is accurate. I think it is true that AIM founded charities pay much less, and so do many startups. But WAI has been around several more years than the oldest AIM animal charities and is significantly more established. I think I’d expect most AIM charities that survive to having 20+ staff, etc to raise their salaries significantly, with AIM itself being an exception to this due to a particular ideological commitment.
I don’t think that every AIM charity is field-leading. I’m trying to communicate that for Jason’s case to hold true, crudely paraphrased, that when fields funding is scarce we should rally around its incumbents), the incumbent charities need to be hard to beat. AIM is one example of a charity I think is field leading in it’s area. I’m trying to show that WAI is not nearly as hard to beat because the TOC seems a lot weaker and the cost is a lot higher.
This seems like it intentionally left off WAI’s main program and activity / the source of the vast majority of their impact? A little confused about why you didn’t include it and it makes me unclear how much to update on this comment or to take your critique overall
Based on the post, I haven’t read much further into their work, it seems that most their value cashes out in published research papers, either of them or their grantees. I included both in the statistics cited above, even preprints. AIM could equally complain that I’ve left off their research, for-profit incubation program, and researcher incubation program.
“WAI does not appear to be unbeatable and therefore other charities in this space might be better uses of funding”
I was basing my comment on you asserting WAI was several orders of magnitude less cost-effective then other charities in the space. I absolutely agree that WAI might be less cost-effective than other groups, but this claim is a lot less extreme than the first one you made. I’d still love to see your estimate if you have it, because I’d appreciate a more critical lens on WAI’s theory of change than I’ve seen before.
Regarding other charities based on scientific research, you can largely tell that they’re working within a year or two of them launching. The evaluation doesn’t require academics. It doesn’t depend on anyone taking published research seriously; the interventions help regardless of whether or not anyone takes the evaluation seriously.
...
I didn’t claim there was anything wrong with the scientific method. I claimed there was something wrong with academia. Apologies if I am misinterpreting you, but you seem to imply that other charities are around equally as dependent on academia. I think that’s clearly false.
I think this is interesting but probably incorrect — while other charities don’t have interventions that involve academia, any kind of claim about their effectiveness, and any ability they have to develop interventions is heavily reliant on it. We can’t tell at all if they are working without academics. Basically everything EA affiliated groups have done to help animals (cage-free campaigns, alternative proteins, welfare reforms, etc) have relied incredibly heavily on academia—they just happen to work on the other side of the academic research than WAI.
Taking Shrimp Welfare Project as an example (primarily because I suspect from a neartermist lens, SWP is far and away the most cost-effective animal charity, likely more cost-effective than WAI, and a great opportunity for donors right now too), they exclusively do welfare interventions. We literally would have no idea if they are helping animals without animal welfare science (like the science WAI funds). We might know that their interventions impacted a lot of animals, but we wouldn’t know the sign or degree of it at all. The only reason we have any idea that SWP, for example, is so impactful, is because of academic research. And SWP was only able to make determinations on what interventions to do based on that science. If you’re uncertain that science can be trusted as you express in your initial point, you’d have to throw this out all. The issues in science you point to are very very real. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make progress on animal issues based on scientific research, and that doing science well to support future interventions isn’t important.
Final comment—I’ve edited by initial comment to better reflect what I wanted to convey, but left the original text so the context of your reply remains for later readers.
Relatedly: People who have the skill set to found new EA orgs well, plus the ability and willingness to accept AIM-level pay, are not in unlimited supply. There’s a significant opportunity cost to putting the hypothetical WAW-startup founder in a WAW startup vs. (e.g.) an AIM startup. Conditioned on them being skilled enough to do well in a serious WAW funding downturn, they probably would have been top-tier talent elsewhere.
Thanks for sharing your thinking, John! I’ll share some opinions and relevant facts below. (Note to other readers: John wrote below that he didn’t want to spend more time on this discussion, so if he doesn’t respond to this comment, don’t take that as tacit agreement. I think time-capping is a really wise and healthy thing to do, so I really want to support his decision.)
Theory of change
My main goal with this post was to share updates, not make a full case for our strategy, so it makes sense that you didn’t find it compelling. Here’s my attempt at a quick case for field-building:
Research constraints: Wild animal welfare is very unusual in how much it is constrained by research (e.g., we don’t know basic facts like which animals live net-positive lives, or how to measure that). Trying to improve wild animal welfare without much more empirical understanding would be like trying to find the best public health interventions without germ theory—there’s stuff you can do, but not nearly as much as will be possible once you learn more.
Academic institutions: Academia is the best, and maybe the only, place for that kind of research to start happening, because it’s unlikely to lead to profit (thus not a good fit for the private sector), it primarily benefits nonhumans (thus not a good fit for government), it requires input from a wide range of disciplines (thus not a good fit for any one independent nonprofit), and it will require many years of iterative research (thus a good fit for academic institutions, which are unusually stable and long-lived).
Relationship to social change: You’re right that for many social movements, more academic research isn’t what will change people’s minds. Scaling up wild animal welfare interventions will require lots of the advocacy-type work you see in other social movements: educating, organizing, legislating, etc. But before it can get to that stage, our movement has to identify what things are worth advocating for. (I also think there are several powerful examples of academia influencing social change in real time: conservation biology and environmentalism, gender studies and feminism, critical race theory and racial justice...)
Tractability and scale: Wild animal welfare is way less tractable than many cause areas. But I think that’s outweighed by the scale: humanity, factory farmed animals, and other captive animals collectively make up only 0.1% of vertebrates. The other 99.9% of moral patients alive today are wild animals (or more, if you count invertebrates). So it’s worth working harder to help them.
Rationale: The biggest determinant of our impact is the quality of our team. Offering salaries that are roughly comparable to those offered by similar jobs elsewhere allows us to attract and retain the talent we need to do good work without spending more than necessary.
Why not lower salaries? Some organizations can attract and retain the talent they need while paying below market rate, but that’s typically because they have different talent needs than ours:
We need people in high-income countries because that’s where there’s the most funding for science and nonprofits.
Many of our roles require advanced degrees, or knowledge or skills that are hard to get without many years of experience in an area. Later-career people can often command higher salaries elsewhere. They’re also more likely to have inflexible financial commitments (kids, house, etc.) that prevent them from taking a lower-paying job even if they’re really excited about it.
Many EAs have extreme moral commitments and the desire and flexibility to make sacrifices for those. Most people in the world aren’t like that, and our day-to-day work doesn’t offer the emotional rewards that direct action can. So although there may be some dedicated activists who would accept less pay, we don’t want to limit ourselves to those. (We’d also rather not take advantage of those people’s lower willingness-to-be-paid. They can always volunteer to take a lower salary if they really want to. That’s what I do.)
People are more likely to accept low-paying jobs if they have family wealth or social privilege that means they don’t have to provide for others in their family and they don’t have to worry about their own long-term financial well-being. We want a diversity of people on our staff, because we think that will improve our epistemics and our ability to reach out to a wide range of people to build a sustainable and influential research community.
There are always exceptions: people who will take lower salaries despite living in expensive university hubs, having advanced degrees, not having a safety net, etc. But the bigger your project, the harder it is to build it mostly out of exceptions.
In other words: some kinds of work can be done with the kinds of people that are more likely to accept lower salaries. Lots of issues call for pairs of quixotic collaborators or lean quirky startups or tight bands of ruthless activists. Wild animal welfare, it turns out, currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers with highly specialized skills working at a marathon pace more than a sprint pace.* So it’s more expensive per head, but if you think those heads can have a big impact, then it’s still cost-effective.
* Edit: “Currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers” sounds more exclusionary that what I meant to convey. I was trying to describe the type of work required, not the type of people required. Not everyone working a middle-class job identifies as belonging to the middle class. Many people who come from low-income backgrounds continue to feel out of place for much of their professional lives (in part due to insensitive comments from asshats like me). The wild animal welfare movement calls for everyone who can do the work, and that includes people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
On mobile while on train, but I don’t see the math fully working here. Per the post, all-in cost per employee “range is more like $83,000 to $140,000,” which covers salary, benefits, taxes, and various smaller things. That does imply a median all-in of roughly $111.5K...but I think you are comparing that figure to AIM base salary alone. If you added in other costs, I suspect it would be considerably closer (although you’re very likely right that WAI is significantly higher cost than AIM).
The other thing to note is that AIM pays considerably lower than most EA orgs (or even most non-EA profits in the US at least.) I think it is particularly unusual in keeping low salaries after it becomes successful, so wouldnt assume the hypothetical startup would follow suit. So I think a fair bit of your critique applies to most EA orgs having the possibility of lower-cost upstarts in their area, rather than to WAI especially.
+1 to the idea that AIM has idiosyncratically low senior staff costs that I think are pretty strongly influenced by Joey Savoie’s personal attitude to cost minimization and sacrifice; I think the main scarce resource that AIM staff spends is not exactly “amount of money” but more like “number of Joeys”, and that if you wanted to start a second AIM you wouldn’t get it nearly as cheaply.
I think this is partially correct. I do believe AIM is lower than the EA average, and I think my personal attitude does affect this, though I would guess it accounts for less than 50% of the reason. I would argue that more EA organizations should and could adopt this approach. The EA movement is quite unusual in the salaries it pays—see some numbers I looked up (although these figures are now somewhat higher as they are based on older data).
I do believe AIM is lower than the EA average, and I think my personal attitude does affect this, though I would guess it accounts for less than 50% of the reason.
I get the sense that your and/or AIM’s views on pay localization explain a fair amount of the variance.[1] I’m not sure if that is counting in the less-than-50% or not.
For example, the median US full-time worker salary in 2022 was about twice the figure you linked for the UK in that year. I get the sense that many other orgs have chosen to pay at US rates (even Bay rates) as a baseline, with a desire to avoid huge US/non-US disparities minimizing the degree of downward adjustment applied to other locations. But it seems that could explain a good bit of the variance.
I am attempting to use a more favorable characterization than “cost-of-living adjustments” because untangling cost of similar lifestyles vs. differences in quality of lifestyle across areas can be challenging.
I do think localization has some effect but not a huge one. A quick Google search gave me a sum of $60,000 or £47,000 for the US in 2022 (if you only include full-time workers), so it’s a bit higher, but not enough to radically change the picture. My soft sense is that US vs. UK EA organizations would not have large pay differences. Also, I do not think AIM historically has had fewer US employees than other organizations that are based in the UK.
The EA movement is quite unusual in the salaries it pays
This is plausible, because EA is weird in a lot of ways ( <3 ). But I think we should have a lot of uncertainty in claims like these. My experience researching salaries (at GFI in ~2019 and at WAI over the last couple years) is that it’s really hard to do well, because (a) it’s really hard to know when you’re comparing apples to apples and (b) there’s strong reporting bias in the freely available datasets (I talked with a firm who said they had better methods, but didn’t end up paying the minimum $10k they required to access their database).
Faunalytics will soon be publishing the results of their project benchmarking compensation in the farmed animal protection movement (details in their OSF registration, subscribe to their newsletter for updates, report will probably be posted here), which will at least be helpful in understanding the animal advocacy side of the equation (if not the other side, which is the other areas we compete with for talent).
Thanks for correcting the numbers and sorry for my sloppiness with them. I think 2 → 2.5x would be a more sensible multiplier based on what you wrote. I think the conclusion still holds.
Regarding paragraph 2, a charity must hit an exceptionally high standard for me to deem it unworthy of competition, even in a downturn. I accept it’s not realistic for the median charity to do that well.
I wrote that line poorly. Thank you for the correction and sorry for being sloppy. I should have said more like 2 to 2.5x based on what Jason’s wrote. However, I’m not sure this changes the conclusion much.
[I respect your desire to conclude participation in this thread, so what follows is an attempt to identify potential cruxes rather than persuade anyone.]
I think we may have different implicit models of what is likely to happen when there are too many orgs / projects in an area are chasing too few dollars.
The following types of statements would update me toward a more pro-disruption position:
At least in the medium-run, relatively more impactful organizations will be able to return to healthy operating status despite the funding famine. Less impactful organizations will die off.
There is a relatively strong correlation between impact and an organization’s ability to survive the funding famine. This could be true because donors are fairly good at measuring impact and willing to move their funding around accordingly.
The funding famine will be of relatively short duration. This not only gives a quality upstart a greater upside, it also reduces the odds that the famine will stunt its natural growth pattern.
The leading organization (or most organizations) in the subfield are not that compelling, and it is likely that the disruptor will pull funding from those organizations and/or grow the subfield’s pie.
In contrast, I mostly have assumptions that make me less excited about disruption:
Rather than a dichotomy between healthy organizations/projects and collapsing ones, the ecosystem is likely to remain above its healthy carrying capacity with many organizations/projects in a weakened or even semi-starved state.
There is only a moderate correlation between impact and an organization’s ability to survive the funding famine. This could be true because donor relationships are fairly sticky, or because some organizations are more famine-resistant in a way that is loosely correlated with their impact.
The funding famine will be of relatively longer duration. A quality upstart org is at high risk of losing momentum because the famine will prevent it from getting the resources it needs. And the limited funding caps its upside.
This one I have no clear opinion on:
It is likely that the disruptor will pull significant funding away from organizations in adjacent subfields that are pretty effective (e.g., you might think more speculative farmed animal welfare [like shrimp] and wild animal welfare compete for some of the same dollars).
I’d agree if this seemed like an
especiallyextremely promising organisation [edited this sentence to better reflect my beliefs]. To a layperson looking into the field from the outside, it isn’t clear from the post.1. The theory of change is suspect
- People rarely listen to academics even where there is consensus.
- Most academic papers do not replicate
- We’re learning that data fabrication is common even in top journals
- It’s not clear that this research is any different or will prove to be any different
- It’s going to take decades to find out if they’re successful because the feedback loops are weak—it’s going to cost tens of millions to find out if their plan is viable.
2. Their average staff members have higher salaries than the founders / CEOs of most other EA animal charities, so their cost is probably high
I think AIM is a good example of a field-leading charity that it doesn’t make sense to try and compete with much. They spend ~$2M per year, paying their senior staff <$40k. WAI is spending double that, paying their average staff almost triple. They’ve been incubating charities for ~5 years, and WAI has been around for 5 years. AIM incubated ~30 charities in the time WAI published 4-12 papers (for ~10 total citations) and attended some conferences.
They seem several orders of magnitude less cost-effective than a field leading charity, but are sucking up about the same amount of money. Maybe WAW is just a really difficult area for making progress, but that isn’t really a strong case for putting more money into WAI.
It strikes me that either:
1 - WAW isn’t tractable yet and isn’t worthy of much spending
2 - WAI ought be disrupted by hungrier EAs willing to work harder, for less, via a stronger theory of change.
(obviously I have a bias here, but didn’t talk to anyone at WAI before leaving this comment, nor do I have any formal affiliation with them except via marriage).
I feel confused by most of this critique. To be clear, I think founding new charities is incredibly impactful, and there are great funding opportunities there, and that funding AIM charities at launch is a great opportunity for EA donors focused on GHD and animal welfare. But to address your concerns:
1. This critique just sounds like you wouldn’t accept any scientific results, and presumably this is also an issue for all AIM charities / animal welfare charities. If you’re worried about the replication crisis (obviously an issue, but much less so in bio/ecology than social sciences), then presumably every AIM-intervention based on scientific research should be viewed with a ton of skepticism too? Why should I think Shrimp Welfare Project, for example, has good reason for thinking their interventions are good except for through scientific research, which by your lights looks like should be dismissed? AIM’s work is backed by tons of science which presumably would also fail this test. It seems like if you want to make this critique, you’d need special reasons for thinking that WAI funded work is less likely to replicate than other animal welfare science work. I think the opposite is likely to be true, given that WAI seems highly focused on enforcing good scientific practice compared to the average funder?
I also think that this misunderstands what I take WAI’s theory of change to be — I don’t think the idea is that people will listen to scientists—it’s that there will be more scientific evidence so future interventions can have a bigger body of evidence behind them.
Finally, I think the timelines for WAW interventions are a lot shorter than you expect—I’ve been writing something up about this, but when WAI launched, I expected it to take decades to get to a place where we could be highly confident about the sign of WAW interventions. Now, I’d guess that we are under a decade away for some.
Finally, I’ll note that this critique has a common failure mode for discussing WAW — if you acknowledge that WAW is an issue, but are worried about the tractability due to flowthrough effects of interventions, than this should make you think basically all charitable interventions are less tractable, because they’ll all have unknown flowthrough effects on WAW. I think this is a bad line of reasoning, but at its core “WAW is a problem but intractable” seems like just as big a problem for other cause areas as WAW.
2. I don’t think this is accurate. I think it is true that AIM founded charities pay much less, and so do many startups. But WAI has been around several more years than the oldest AIM animal charities and is significantly more established. I think I’d expect most AIM charities that survive to having 20+ staff, etc to raise their salaries significantly, with AIM itself being an exception to this due to a particular ideological commitment.
Also, WAI’s salaries appear to be well below or competitive with many other EA animal charities, like THL or GFI.
But, I also think that this could just be a strategic disagreement — clearly outside the animal space, many EA charities believe people should be paid much more than AIM pays. I suspect many people do not apply to AIM roles due to the pay. That could be a worthwhile tradeoff, but paying lower salaries isn’t something that is all upside—it makes the talent pool smaller, and in many spaces, that could be directly bad for impact.
This seems like it intentionally left off WAI’s main program and activity / the source of the vast majority of their impact? A little confused about why you didn’t include it and it makes me unclear how much to update on this comment or to take your critique overall. For reasons outlined below, I also think the AIM statistic is also misleading, because not all those charities were successful or impactful — very few of them were/are (which is still great, and I think on net, donating to the right new charity could be better than donating to WAI).
Could you share the calculations you did for this or was this just a guess/made up figure? I’d be interested to see it since you seem confident and gave a pretty specific figure here, and this outcome is very different from other rigorous estimates I’ve seen in the space by independent parties.
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Finally, as a high-level point, comparing founding a charity with an established charity is not as straightforward as looking at the dollars to each. If you think WAI does cost-effective work (which clearly many EA-aligned evaluators think, like EA Funds, OpenPhil, ACE), then you’re comparing a risky bet against a reliable outcome. Say AIM has a 1 in 5 success rate for founding impactful charities, but it’s hard to tell which of the new charities at founding will be successful. I think this would be incredibly successful and is way above where they currently are. But that means if each one needed $100k to start, you spend $500k overall to get the $100k in value from the good charity. The charity would need to generate 5x the value of WAI in this scenario to make funding a new charity from the pot over WAI the right choice.
Founding new charities is obviously a great way to have impact. But lots of new charities are bad, and by your lights donations to them will be wasted when the charity tries their intervention and it doesn’t work, or otherwise fails and shuts down. The comparison you should be making is more like: donate X to WAI with a known impact (Z progress on some issue), or donate X to a risky bet with a lot of upside, and a high likelihood (in my view >80% for AIM charities—still incredibly impressive and a testament to AIM) of going to $0. That’s much less obviously a clear bet one way or another in the abstract.
Time is precious, so I’m just going to commit to ending my involvement after this comment.
BLUF: I’m not trying to convey “AIM good, WAI bad”. Just that “WAI does not appear to be unbeatable and therefore other charities in this space might be better uses of funding” AIM was just an example of a charity which would be very hard.
I didn’t claim there was anything wrong with the scientific method. I claimed there was something wrong with academia. Apologies if I am misinterpreting you, but you seem to imply that other charities are around equally as dependent on academia. I think that’s clearly false.
Quotes from the post
“Our primary goal is to support the growth of a self-sustaining interdisciplinary research community focused on reducing wild animal suffering.”
“Here are some highlights of our progress to date… Establishing that wild animal welfare science is a serious academic endeavor, including by… helping to get the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program established.”
If that doesn’t make it sufficiently clear, view their grants page; Almost all of their grants went to academics.
Regarding other charities based on scientific research, you can largely tell that they’re working within a year or two of them launching. The evaluation doesn’t require academics. It doesn’t depend on anyone taking published research seriously; the interventions help regardless of whether or not anyone takes the evaluation seriously.
The rest of your writing here seems to assume that I accept that wild animal welfare considerations dominate all others. I don’t come close to believing that.
I don’t think that every AIM charity is field-leading. I’m trying to communicate that for Jason’s case to hold true, crudely paraphrased, that when fields funding is scarce we should rally around its incumbents), the incumbent charities need to be hard to beat. AIM is one example of a charity I think is field leading in it’s area. I’m trying to show that WAI is not nearly as hard to beat because the TOC seems a lot weaker and the cost is a lot higher.
Based on the post, I haven’t read much further into their work, it seems that most their value cashes out in published research papers, either of them or their grantees. I included both in the statistics cited above, even preprints. AIM could equally complain that I’ve left off their research, for-profit incubation program, and researcher incubation program.
I was basing my comment on you asserting WAI was several orders of magnitude less cost-effective then other charities in the space. I absolutely agree that WAI might be less cost-effective than other groups, but this claim is a lot less extreme than the first one you made. I’d still love to see your estimate if you have it, because I’d appreciate a more critical lens on WAI’s theory of change than I’ve seen before.
I think this is interesting but probably incorrect — while other charities don’t have interventions that involve academia, any kind of claim about their effectiveness, and any ability they have to develop interventions is heavily reliant on it. We can’t tell at all if they are working without academics. Basically everything EA affiliated groups have done to help animals (cage-free campaigns, alternative proteins, welfare reforms, etc) have relied incredibly heavily on academia—they just happen to work on the other side of the academic research than WAI.
Taking Shrimp Welfare Project as an example (primarily because I suspect from a neartermist lens, SWP is far and away the most cost-effective animal charity, likely more cost-effective than WAI, and a great opportunity for donors right now too), they exclusively do welfare interventions. We literally would have no idea if they are helping animals without animal welfare science (like the science WAI funds). We might know that their interventions impacted a lot of animals, but we wouldn’t know the sign or degree of it at all. The only reason we have any idea that SWP, for example, is so impactful, is because of academic research. And SWP was only able to make determinations on what interventions to do based on that science. If you’re uncertain that science can be trusted as you express in your initial point, you’d have to throw this out all. The issues in science you point to are very very real. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make progress on animal issues based on scientific research, and that doing science well to support future interventions isn’t important.
Final comment—I’ve edited by initial comment to better reflect what I wanted to convey, but left the original text so the context of your reply remains for later readers.
Relatedly: People who have the skill set to found new EA orgs well, plus the ability and willingness to accept AIM-level pay, are not in unlimited supply. There’s a significant opportunity cost to putting the hypothetical WAW-startup founder in a WAW startup vs. (e.g.) an AIM startup. Conditioned on them being skilled enough to do well in a serious WAW funding downturn, they probably would have been top-tier talent elsewhere.
Thanks for sharing your thinking, John! I’ll share some opinions and relevant facts below. (Note to other readers: John wrote below that he didn’t want to spend more time on this discussion, so if he doesn’t respond to this comment, don’t take that as tacit agreement. I think time-capping is a really wise and healthy thing to do, so I really want to support his decision.)
Theory of change
My main goal with this post was to share updates, not make a full case for our strategy, so it makes sense that you didn’t find it compelling. Here’s my attempt at a quick case for field-building:
Research constraints: Wild animal welfare is very unusual in how much it is constrained by research (e.g., we don’t know basic facts like which animals live net-positive lives, or how to measure that). Trying to improve wild animal welfare without much more empirical understanding would be like trying to find the best public health interventions without germ theory—there’s stuff you can do, but not nearly as much as will be possible once you learn more.
Academic institutions: Academia is the best, and maybe the only, place for that kind of research to start happening, because it’s unlikely to lead to profit (thus not a good fit for the private sector), it primarily benefits nonhumans (thus not a good fit for government), it requires input from a wide range of disciplines (thus not a good fit for any one independent nonprofit), and it will require many years of iterative research (thus a good fit for academic institutions, which are unusually stable and long-lived).
Relationship to social change: You’re right that for many social movements, more academic research isn’t what will change people’s minds. Scaling up wild animal welfare interventions will require lots of the advocacy-type work you see in other social movements: educating, organizing, legislating, etc. But before it can get to that stage, our movement has to identify what things are worth advocating for. (I also think there are several powerful examples of academia influencing social change in real time: conservation biology and environmentalism, gender studies and feminism, critical race theory and racial justice...)
Tractability and scale: Wild animal welfare is way less tractable than many cause areas. But I think that’s outweighed by the scale: humanity, factory farmed animals, and other captive animals collectively make up only 0.1% of vertebrates. The other 99.9% of moral patients alive today are wild animals (or more, if you count invertebrates). So it’s worth working harder to help them.
Staff salaries
Actual salaries: Our salaries currently range from $60,000 to $104,000. Here’s how we set salaries.
Rationale: The biggest determinant of our impact is the quality of our team. Offering salaries that are roughly comparable to those offered by similar jobs elsewhere allows us to attract and retain the talent we need to do good work without spending more than necessary.
Why not lower salaries? Some organizations can attract and retain the talent they need while paying below market rate, but that’s typically because they have different talent needs than ours:
We need people in high-income countries because that’s where there’s the most funding for science and nonprofits.
Many of our roles require advanced degrees, or knowledge or skills that are hard to get without many years of experience in an area. Later-career people can often command higher salaries elsewhere. They’re also more likely to have inflexible financial commitments (kids, house, etc.) that prevent them from taking a lower-paying job even if they’re really excited about it.
Many EAs have extreme moral commitments and the desire and flexibility to make sacrifices for those. Most people in the world aren’t like that, and our day-to-day work doesn’t offer the emotional rewards that direct action can. So although there may be some dedicated activists who would accept less pay, we don’t want to limit ourselves to those. (We’d also rather not take advantage of those people’s lower willingness-to-be-paid. They can always volunteer to take a lower salary if they really want to. That’s what I do.)
People are more likely to accept low-paying jobs if they have family wealth or social privilege that means they don’t have to provide for others in their family and they don’t have to worry about their own long-term financial well-being. We want a diversity of people on our staff, because we think that will improve our epistemics and our ability to reach out to a wide range of people to build a sustainable and influential research community.
There are always exceptions: people who will take lower salaries despite living in expensive university hubs, having advanced degrees, not having a safety net, etc. But the bigger your project, the harder it is to build it mostly out of exceptions.
In other words: some kinds of work can be done with the kinds of people that are more likely to accept lower salaries. Lots of issues call for pairs of quixotic collaborators or lean quirky startups or tight bands of ruthless activists. Wild animal welfare, it turns out, currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers with highly specialized skills working at a marathon pace more than a sprint pace.* So it’s more expensive per head, but if you think those heads can have a big impact, then it’s still cost-effective.
* Edit: “Currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers” sounds more exclusionary that what I meant to convey. I was trying to describe the type of work required, not the type of people required. Not everyone working a middle-class job identifies as belonging to the middle class. Many people who come from low-income backgrounds continue to feel out of place for much of their professional lives (in part due to insensitive comments from asshats like me). The wild animal welfare movement calls for everyone who can do the work, and that includes people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Final comment—thank you for your gracious reply. I appreciate it is difficult to engage productively with the type of criticism I delivered.
Wow, that is a beautiful salary source of truth doc. I’m impressed! Thanks for sharing.
On mobile while on train, but I don’t see the math fully working here. Per the post, all-in cost per employee “range is more like $83,000 to $140,000,” which covers salary, benefits, taxes, and various smaller things. That does imply a median all-in of roughly $111.5K...but I think you are comparing that figure to AIM base salary alone. If you added in other costs, I suspect it would be considerably closer (although you’re very likely right that WAI is significantly higher cost than AIM).
The other thing to note is that AIM pays considerably lower than most EA orgs (or even most non-EA profits in the US at least.) I think it is particularly unusual in keeping low salaries after it becomes successful, so wouldnt assume the hypothetical startup would follow suit. So I think a fair bit of your critique applies to most EA orgs having the possibility of lower-cost upstarts in their area, rather than to WAI especially.
+1 to the idea that AIM has idiosyncratically low senior staff costs that I think are pretty strongly influenced by Joey Savoie’s personal attitude to cost minimization and sacrifice; I think the main scarce resource that AIM staff spends is not exactly “amount of money” but more like “number of Joeys”, and that if you wanted to start a second AIM you wouldn’t get it nearly as cheaply.
I think this is partially correct. I do believe AIM is lower than the EA average, and I think my personal attitude does affect this, though I would guess it accounts for less than 50% of the reason. I would argue that more EA organizations should and could adopt this approach. The EA movement is quite unusual in the salaries it pays—see some numbers I looked up (although these figures are now somewhat higher as they are based on older data).
I get the sense that your and/or AIM’s views on pay localization explain a fair amount of the variance.[1] I’m not sure if that is counting in the less-than-50% or not.
For example, the median US full-time worker salary in 2022 was about twice the figure you linked for the UK in that year. I get the sense that many other orgs have chosen to pay at US rates (even Bay rates) as a baseline, with a desire to avoid huge US/non-US disparities minimizing the degree of downward adjustment applied to other locations. But it seems that could explain a good bit of the variance.
I am attempting to use a more favorable characterization than “cost-of-living adjustments” because untangling cost of similar lifestyles vs. differences in quality of lifestyle across areas can be challenging.
I do think localization has some effect but not a huge one. A quick Google search gave me a sum of $60,000 or £47,000 for the US in 2022 (if you only include full-time workers), so it’s a bit higher, but not enough to radically change the picture. My soft sense is that US vs. UK EA organizations would not have large pay differences. Also, I do not think AIM historically has had fewer US employees than other organizations that are based in the UK.
This is plausible, because EA is weird in a lot of ways ( <3 ). But I think we should have a lot of uncertainty in claims like these. My experience researching salaries (at GFI in ~2019 and at WAI over the last couple years) is that it’s really hard to do well, because (a) it’s really hard to know when you’re comparing apples to apples and (b) there’s strong reporting bias in the freely available datasets (I talked with a firm who said they had better methods, but didn’t end up paying the minimum $10k they required to access their database).
Faunalytics will soon be publishing the results of their project benchmarking compensation in the farmed animal protection movement (details in their OSF registration, subscribe to their newsletter for updates, report will probably be posted here), which will at least be helpful in understanding the animal advocacy side of the equation (if not the other side, which is the other areas we compete with for talent).
Faunalytics published the results of their benchmarking research (I haven’t read them yet): https://faunalytics.org/compensation-in-farmed-animal-advocacy/
Thanks for correcting the numbers and sorry for my sloppiness with them. I think 2 → 2.5x would be a more sensible multiplier based on what you wrote. I think the conclusion still holds.
Regarding paragraph 2, a charity must hit an exceptionally high standard for me to deem it unworthy of competition, even in a downturn. I accept it’s not realistic for the median charity to do that well.
Why do you say WAI is paying average staff almost $120k? I’m no longer an insider, but I am almost certain that isn’t true, or remotely close to true.
I wrote that line poorly. Thank you for the correction and sorry for being sloppy. I should have said more like 2 to 2.5x based on what Jason’s wrote. However, I’m not sure this changes the conclusion much.
[I respect your desire to conclude participation in this thread, so what follows is an attempt to identify potential cruxes rather than persuade anyone.]
I think we may have different implicit models of what is likely to happen when there are too many orgs / projects in an area are chasing too few dollars.
The following types of statements would update me toward a more pro-disruption position:
At least in the medium-run, relatively more impactful organizations will be able to return to healthy operating status despite the funding famine. Less impactful organizations will die off.
There is a relatively strong correlation between impact and an organization’s ability to survive the funding famine. This could be true because donors are fairly good at measuring impact and willing to move their funding around accordingly.
The funding famine will be of relatively short duration. This not only gives a quality upstart a greater upside, it also reduces the odds that the famine will stunt its natural growth pattern.
The leading organization (or most organizations) in the subfield are not that compelling, and it is likely that the disruptor will pull funding from those organizations and/or grow the subfield’s pie.
In contrast, I mostly have assumptions that make me less excited about disruption:
Rather than a dichotomy between healthy organizations/projects and collapsing ones, the ecosystem is likely to remain above its healthy carrying capacity with many organizations/projects in a weakened or even semi-starved state.
There is only a moderate correlation between impact and an organization’s ability to survive the funding famine. This could be true because donor relationships are fairly sticky, or because some organizations are more famine-resistant in a way that is loosely correlated with their impact.
The funding famine will be of relatively longer duration. A quality upstart org is at high risk of losing momentum because the famine will prevent it from getting the resources it needs. And the limited funding caps its upside.
This one I have no clear opinion on:
It is likely that the disruptor will pull significant funding away from organizations in adjacent subfields that are pretty effective (e.g., you might think more speculative farmed animal welfare [like shrimp] and wild animal welfare compete for some of the same dollars).