Thank you for writing this post; I thought that some of the points you mentioned here were among the strongest arguments I’ve seen during Debate Week for why one might not prioritize animal welfare as highly. (Note: I run an animal advocacy organization focused on ending factory farming and voted “strongly agree” for spending the $100m on animal welfare.)
Specifically, I think your comments about solvability/tractability are very important to keep in mind. This idea becomes clearer for me (and probably others) when considering wild animal welfare and invertebrate welfare, as you brought up. Those are areas where my gut reaction is something like “wow those are really tough, maybe we should just focus right now on animal suffering that humans are actively causing (like factory farming) since that is more tractable.” Not that I think my gut reaction is correct—just that I can see this being an important consideration to keep in mind.
The thought experiment of traveling back in time is very interesting, as well. As one specific personal anecdote, the idea of “the correct era for advocacy” comes up for me when wondering if artificial intelligence may one day be able to help us with wild animal welfare at scale. If AI were to end up being crucial for certain efforts (like wild animal welfare), then I could see how that consideration might change one’s prioritization of what to work on right now. (Note: I’m familiar with wild animal welfare/suffering work, but am certainly not an expert.) But of course, society would need to want to use AI for wild animal welfare work, and so I think in this specific instance it might just shift your resources potentially away from direct work and more towards field building and convincing people of the importance of the cause. (Which may be exactly what some wild animal welfare advocates are doing these days.)
I’m not sure if these considerations would necessarily change my vote of how to prioritize the funding in this specific $100m question, partially because I have taken many of these ideas into account already, but I think these are the some of the right questions to be asking, and I haven’t seen these ideas discussed as much. (I’ve seen moral value comparison stuff discussed way more, how much do you value chickens vs. humans, etc.) I think questions of present tractability become much more important when dealing with overall funding allocations, such as the question of should a much larger percentage of our funding be going towards animal welfare, rather than a marginal $100m (which we can more confidently allocate to animal welfare).
Also, I have notes in my comment here about some organizations that I think could effectively use quite a bit more funding, and some new initiatives (like plant-based defaults in institutional food settings, like the work done by Greener By Default) that seem possibly very impactful but haven’t scaled up (primarily due to lack of funding, I would guess).
Thanks for the post Engin. Also echoing what you wrote Steven. Wanted to add that my (still limited) experience with training orgs in M&E, is that there’s a lot we can learn about the effectiveness of animal interventions by improving the use of M&E. Calculating actual impact seems more difficult, but hopefully we can step by step narrow the knowlegde gap, and better know how to spend an additional 100m.
Hey Nicoll! Thank you very much. I definately agree that M&E work is very valuable and very needed. Not only because it may reveal how to spend additional 100m but also because it may allow us to better understand how to use the existing ~300m.
I completely agree that the funding can be absorbed by many organisations who will try their best. I also agree that there are a lot of things that we might reasonably experiment. But overall I am a bit pessimistic about them since earlier and somewhat similar campaigns did not lead to very positive results unfortunately. I also think most of the outcomes are related largely due to the performance of leaders and keystaff—so maybe some new project might succeed afterall! So I guess allocating “some” funding to new initiatives (and new leaders) makes sense but I would not expect a huge win even if we spend 100m on new initiatives. But I might wrong.
Thank you for writing this post; I thought that some of the points you mentioned here were among the strongest arguments I’ve seen during Debate Week for why one might not prioritize animal welfare as highly. (Note: I run an animal advocacy organization focused on ending factory farming and voted “strongly agree” for spending the $100m on animal welfare.)
Specifically, I think your comments about solvability/tractability are very important to keep in mind. This idea becomes clearer for me (and probably others) when considering wild animal welfare and invertebrate welfare, as you brought up. Those are areas where my gut reaction is something like “wow those are really tough, maybe we should just focus right now on animal suffering that humans are actively causing (like factory farming) since that is more tractable.” Not that I think my gut reaction is correct—just that I can see this being an important consideration to keep in mind.
The thought experiment of traveling back in time is very interesting, as well. As one specific personal anecdote, the idea of “the correct era for advocacy” comes up for me when wondering if artificial intelligence may one day be able to help us with wild animal welfare at scale. If AI were to end up being crucial for certain efforts (like wild animal welfare), then I could see how that consideration might change one’s prioritization of what to work on right now. (Note: I’m familiar with wild animal welfare/suffering work, but am certainly not an expert.) But of course, society would need to want to use AI for wild animal welfare work, and so I think in this specific instance it might just shift your resources potentially away from direct work and more towards field building and convincing people of the importance of the cause. (Which may be exactly what some wild animal welfare advocates are doing these days.)
I’m not sure if these considerations would necessarily change my vote of how to prioritize the funding in this specific $100m question, partially because I have taken many of these ideas into account already, but I think these are the some of the right questions to be asking, and I haven’t seen these ideas discussed as much. (I’ve seen moral value comparison stuff discussed way more, how much do you value chickens vs. humans, etc.) I think questions of present tractability become much more important when dealing with overall funding allocations, such as the question of should a much larger percentage of our funding be going towards animal welfare, rather than a marginal $100m (which we can more confidently allocate to animal welfare).
Also, I have notes in my comment here about some organizations that I think could effectively use quite a bit more funding, and some new initiatives (like plant-based defaults in institutional food settings, like the work done by Greener By Default) that seem possibly very impactful but haven’t scaled up (primarily due to lack of funding, I would guess).
Thanks for the post Engin. Also echoing what you wrote Steven. Wanted to add that my (still limited) experience with training orgs in M&E, is that there’s a lot we can learn about the effectiveness of animal interventions by improving the use of M&E. Calculating actual impact seems more difficult, but hopefully we can step by step narrow the knowlegde gap, and better know how to spend an additional 100m.
Hey Nicoll! Thank you very much. I definately agree that M&E work is very valuable and very needed. Not only because it may reveal how to spend additional 100m but also because it may allow us to better understand how to use the existing ~300m.
Thanks for the comment!
I completely agree that the funding can be absorbed by many organisations who will try their best. I also agree that there are a lot of things that we might reasonably experiment. But overall I am a bit pessimistic about them since earlier and somewhat similar campaigns did not lead to very positive results unfortunately. I also think most of the outcomes are related largely due to the performance of leaders and keystaff—so maybe some new project might succeed afterall! So I guess allocating “some” funding to new initiatives (and new leaders) makes sense but I would not expect a huge win even if we spend 100m on new initiatives. But I might wrong.