Hey Vasco, you make lots of good points here that are worth considering at length. These are topics we’ve discussed on and off in a fairly unstructured way on the research team at FP, and I’m afraid I’m not sure what’s next when it comes to tackling them. We don’t currently have a researcher dedicated to animal welfare, and our recommendations in that space have historically come from partner orgs.
Just as context, the reason for this is that FP has historically separated our recommendations into three “worldviews” (longtermism, current generations, and animal welfare). The idea is that it’s a lot easier to shift member grantmaking across causes within a worldview (e.g. from rare diseases to malaria, for instance) than across worldviews (e.g. to get people to care much more about chickens). The upshot of this, for better or for worse, is that we end up spending a lot of time prioritizing causes within worldviews, and avoiding the question of how to prioritize across worldviews.
This is also part of the reason we don’t have a dedicated animal welfare researcher — we haven’t historically moved as much money within that worldview as within our others. But it’s actually not sure which way the causality flows in that case, so your post is a good nudge to think more seriously about this, as well as the ways we might be able to incorporate animal welfare considerations into our GHD calculations, worldview separations notwithstanding.
Hey Vasco, you make lots of good points here that are worth considering at length. These are topics we’ve discussed on and off in a fairly unstructured way on the research team at FP, and I’m afraid I’m not sure what’s next when it comes to tackling them. We don’t currently have a researcher dedicated to animal welfare, and our recommendations in that space have historically come from partner orgs.
Just as context, the reason for this is that FP has historically separated our recommendations into three “worldviews” (longtermism, current generations, and animal welfare). The idea is that it’s a lot easier to shift member grantmaking across causes within a worldview (e.g. from rare diseases to malaria, for instance) than across worldviews (e.g. to get people to care much more about chickens). The upshot of this, for better or for worse, is that we end up spending a lot of time prioritizing causes within worldviews, and avoiding the question of how to prioritize across worldviews.
This is also part of the reason we don’t have a dedicated animal welfare researcher — we haven’t historically moved as much money within that worldview as within our others. But it’s actually not sure which way the causality flows in that case, so your post is a good nudge to think more seriously about this, as well as the ways we might be able to incorporate animal welfare considerations into our GHD calculations, worldview separations notwithstanding.
Thanks for sharing your thought, Matt!