It’s a fair argument, but not well supported as written. Corporate campaigns and changing public opinion are complements. The latter would have zero impact without public pressure; the former would have impact only insofar as members of the public took action on their own. That doesn’t tell us much about the best split between funding these two complements, after non-EA funding is taken into account.
My sense is that many of the returns for improving general public opinion in this area accrue over a long period of time (i.e., the consumer’s lifetime). If one thought, for instance, that cultured meat or other alternatives will be economically and otherwise competitive, and environmentally superior, within 20 years—then a significant fraction of the returns on improving public opinion may not matter very much because economic and/or environmental issues will carry the day anyway.
It’s true that it doesn’t reveal the right split—but on the other hand, it shines a light on us in EA funneling money towards the easily measurable parts of complex interdependent systems, and neglecting to account for the less measurable parts.
I’m sadly skeptical about cultured meat, mostly because of reports I’ve read here on the forum but don’t have the time to find at the moment.
That’s fair, and I think at a very minimum the messaging toward the activist community could often be a little more charitable. “Although it is challenging to evaluate the impact of your work using our toolkit, we do not think that the level of generalized public support for animal welfare (of the sort we think your work is likely to produce) is currently the limiting factor to achieving more impact. We appreciate that much of the work we currently fund stands on the shoulders of activists who have worked over the past several decades, and we do not intend our allocation of very limited marginal funding to suggest otherwise.”
While I ostensibly agree regarding the activist community, I think this problem is probably not unique to activism vs. interventions that ‘tip the scales’ after it had been done. Many systems have interdependent parts, some of which are easier to measure than others.
It’s a fair argument, but not well supported as written. Corporate campaigns and changing public opinion are complements. The latter would have zero impact without public pressure; the former would have impact only insofar as members of the public took action on their own. That doesn’t tell us much about the best split between funding these two complements, after non-EA funding is taken into account.
My sense is that many of the returns for improving general public opinion in this area accrue over a long period of time (i.e., the consumer’s lifetime). If one thought, for instance, that cultured meat or other alternatives will be economically and otherwise competitive, and environmentally superior, within 20 years—then a significant fraction of the returns on improving public opinion may not matter very much because economic and/or environmental issues will carry the day anyway.
It’s true that it doesn’t reveal the right split—but on the other hand, it shines a light on us in EA funneling money towards the easily measurable parts of complex interdependent systems, and neglecting to account for the less measurable parts.
I’m sadly skeptical about cultured meat, mostly because of reports I’ve read here on the forum but don’t have the time to find at the moment.
That’s fair, and I think at a very minimum the messaging toward the activist community could often be a little more charitable. “Although it is challenging to evaluate the impact of your work using our toolkit, we do not think that the level of generalized public support for animal welfare (of the sort we think your work is likely to produce) is currently the limiting factor to achieving more impact. We appreciate that much of the work we currently fund stands on the shoulders of activists who have worked over the past several decades, and we do not intend our allocation of very limited marginal funding to suggest otherwise.”
While I ostensibly agree regarding the activist community, I think this problem is probably not unique to activism vs. interventions that ‘tip the scales’ after it had been done. Many systems have interdependent parts, some of which are easier to measure than others.