Despite your clarifications within the post here to say that we should grow the pie, and that CWRs are still underfunded, I find the zero-sum tone of much of the post (I.e. saying that we should do less CWR work and more other stuff) off putting and poorly supported.
It is not obvious to me that other areas such as those you mention can readily absorb that much extra funding that quickly, or that anyone is currently erring in their approach here not finding a particular intervention and funding CWRs instead.
I would guess that e.g. Open Phil are eager to find other good opportunities in these areas and are more constrained by lack of good opportunities than by having committed large amounts to CWRs and therefore not having the budget to give more. Do you think this is wrong?
I’m late to the discussion, but I might add that I have a hypothesis that we have heavily underinvested in finding, connecting, and supporting existing supporters of farmed animal welfare. One symptom of this would be a seeming lack of diversity in the funding opportunities. Another symptom might be difficulty finding these opportunities, even if they do exist, due to lack of social network connectivity (i.e. there are no easy ways to find opportunities outside of our well-connected local social networks). Thus, perhaps one of the first things we should invest more heavily in is building up this connective infrastructure for the movement.
Lastly, I think the definition of “good opportunity” varies wildly, and a more holistic understanding of risk and uncertainty would nudge us in the direction of valuing strategic and tactical diversity as an inherent good, above and beyond any kind of impact evaluation or estimation. Thus, at an extreme, if you had 100% of funding invested in CWRs, then nearly any non-CWR opportunity would be seen as a good opportunity due to increasing the diversity of approaches.
Of course, we don’t have that extreme case of 100% investment in CWRs, but I think Kato’s point is that a more pluralistic movement (i.e. a more diversified one than we currently have) does probably lead to higher impact, which would expand our definition of good opportunities to include things we might otherwise pass on.
I believe Harish Sethu gave an excellent talk at the AR Conference a few years back using an apples and oranges market analogy to demonstrate this same kind of idea.
Nope, I think that is mostly (though not 100%) correct. My impression is that OpenPhil in particular is both more opportunity- and operationally-constrained than it is by funding. I do think though that they (and other funders) ought to do more active grant-making to try to identify non-CWR opportunities to fund (though they could very well already be doing this).
I also agree with your point that few if any other approaches could absorb significant amounts of money currently (though I also expect that there’s many orgs you could talk with trying more novel approaches who would disagree with us here, so perhaps I’m just not sufficiently aware of them).
My point is more that many of the EA funders seem to have found a local optimum with CWRs, and if we put more efforts into exploring we would find other approaches that also look very promising. What I’d like to see is more work from EAA and funders to incubate and help build new approaches. I realize that that can be a difficult role for these organizations to play though.
Despite your clarifications within the post here to say that we should grow the pie, and that CWRs are still underfunded, I find the zero-sum tone of much of the post (I.e. saying that we should do less CWR work and more other stuff) off putting and poorly supported.
It is not obvious to me that other areas such as those you mention can readily absorb that much extra funding that quickly, or that anyone is currently erring in their approach here not finding a particular intervention and funding CWRs instead.
I would guess that e.g. Open Phil are eager to find other good opportunities in these areas and are more constrained by lack of good opportunities than by having committed large amounts to CWRs and therefore not having the budget to give more. Do you think this is wrong?
I’m late to the discussion, but I might add that I have a hypothesis that we have heavily underinvested in finding, connecting, and supporting existing supporters of farmed animal welfare. One symptom of this would be a seeming lack of diversity in the funding opportunities. Another symptom might be difficulty finding these opportunities, even if they do exist, due to lack of social network connectivity (i.e. there are no easy ways to find opportunities outside of our well-connected local social networks). Thus, perhaps one of the first things we should invest more heavily in is building up this connective infrastructure for the movement.
Lastly, I think the definition of “good opportunity” varies wildly, and a more holistic understanding of risk and uncertainty would nudge us in the direction of valuing strategic and tactical diversity as an inherent good, above and beyond any kind of impact evaluation or estimation. Thus, at an extreme, if you had 100% of funding invested in CWRs, then nearly any non-CWR opportunity would be seen as a good opportunity due to increasing the diversity of approaches.
Of course, we don’t have that extreme case of 100% investment in CWRs, but I think Kato’s point is that a more pluralistic movement (i.e. a more diversified one than we currently have) does probably lead to higher impact, which would expand our definition of good opportunities to include things we might otherwise pass on.
I believe Harish Sethu gave an excellent talk at the AR Conference a few years back using an apples and oranges market analogy to demonstrate this same kind of idea.
Nope, I think that is mostly (though not 100%) correct. My impression is that OpenPhil in particular is both more opportunity- and operationally-constrained than it is by funding. I do think though that they (and other funders) ought to do more active grant-making to try to identify non-CWR opportunities to fund (though they could very well already be doing this).
I also agree with your point that few if any other approaches could absorb significant amounts of money currently (though I also expect that there’s many orgs you could talk with trying more novel approaches who would disagree with us here, so perhaps I’m just not sufficiently aware of them).
My point is more that many of the EA funders seem to have found a local optimum with CWRs, and if we put more efforts into exploring we would find other approaches that also look very promising. What I’d like to see is more work from EAA and funders to incubate and help build new approaches. I realize that that can be a difficult role for these organizations to play though.