“I don’t really think non-OpenPhil EA donors should give to farmed animal welfare, for example.” Wow, this is interesting! I would love to know what you mean by this?
Having read your reflections, I’m still curious as to why you don’t think non-OpenPhil donors should give to farmed animal welfare, if you feel comfortable sharing it publicly. I guessed four options, ordered from most to least likely, but I might have misunderstood the post
We should donate to wild animal welfare instead, as it’s more cost-effective
There are no donation opportunities that counterfactually help a significant amount of farmed animals
There is no strong moral obligation to improve future lives, and donations to farmed animal welfare necessarily improve future lives, as farmed animal lives are very short
Tomasik-style arguments on the impact of animal farming on the amount of wild animal suffering
Is it a combination of these? As a concrete example, I’m curious if you believe that the Shrimp Welfare Project shouldn’t be funded, should be funded by “non-EA” donors, or will be funded anyway and donors shouldn’t worry about it.
By the way, thank you for nudging towards sharing evaluations with the evaluated organization before posting, I think it’s a really valuable norm.
Thanks! My wording in the above message was imprecise, but I mean something like farmed vertebrates. SWP is probably among the two most important things to fund, in my opinion.
Basically I think the size of good opportunities in farmed animal advocacy is smaller than OpenPhil’s grantmaking budget and there are few scalable interventions, though I don’t think I want to go into most the reasons publicly. Given that they’ve stopped funding many of what I believe are more cost-effective projects, and that EA donors are basically the only people willing to fund those, EA donors should be mostly inclined to fund things OpenPhil can’t fund instead.
So some combination of 1+2 (for farmed vertebrates) + other factors
“I don’t really think non-OpenPhil EA donors should give to farmed animal welfare, for example.” Wow, this is interesting! I would love to know what you mean by this?
(I responded privately to this but wrote up some related reflections a while ago here).
Having read your reflections, I’m still curious as to why you don’t think non-OpenPhil donors should give to farmed animal welfare, if you feel comfortable sharing it publicly. I guessed four options, ordered from most to least likely, but I might have misunderstood the post
We should donate to wild animal welfare instead, as it’s more cost-effective
There are no donation opportunities that counterfactually help a significant amount of farmed animals
There is no strong moral obligation to improve future lives, and donations to farmed animal welfare necessarily improve future lives, as farmed animal lives are very short
Tomasik-style arguments on the impact of animal farming on the amount of wild animal suffering
Is it a combination of these? As a concrete example, I’m curious if you believe that the Shrimp Welfare Project shouldn’t be funded, should be funded by “non-EA” donors, or will be funded anyway and donors shouldn’t worry about it.
By the way, thank you for nudging towards sharing evaluations with the evaluated organization before posting, I think it’s a really valuable norm.
Thanks! My wording in the above message was imprecise, but I mean something like farmed vertebrates. SWP is probably among the two most important things to fund, in my opinion.
Basically I think the size of good opportunities in farmed animal advocacy is smaller than OpenPhil’s grantmaking budget and there are few scalable interventions, though I don’t think I want to go into most the reasons publicly. Given that they’ve stopped funding many of what I believe are more cost-effective projects, and that EA donors are basically the only people willing to fund those, EA donors should be mostly inclined to fund things OpenPhil can’t fund instead.
So some combination of 1+2 (for farmed vertebrates) + other factors