We’re committed to evaluating our own efforts and changing directions or even disbanding the organization if we determine that we can make a greater impact elsewhere. If our research fails to generate new, actionable insights that make a significant difference to advocates’ decisions, we plan to shift our priorities towards outreach and movement-building, such as the career content described above.
Your philosophy is very admirable. How do you plan to track this, more concretely?
We’re planning to make predictions about movement progress (e.g. rate of corporate welfare reforms) as well as our own goals (e.g. amount of evidence our research generates (ideally will be evaluated by an external party), number of influential advocates who change their minds based on our research). This is similar to what ACE and OPP do, and I think other EA orgs. With the self-predictions, we’ve been thinking we’ll have some lower bounds where if we’re consistently underperforming, we’ll note that on our Mistakes page and consider big-picture reprioritization such as doing more outreach work.
We’re currently in touch with several influential animal advocates because of our survey for the Foundational Summaries page on how EAA researchers currently view the evidence on these questions. We’ve had positive feedback on it so far, above our expectations, but it’ll give us a good first feedback loop to see if our work is useful.
I’d also note that we wanted to get a ‘minimum viable product’ out there ASAP, so lots of our specific plans are still up in the air. We’re still very interested in feedback, and now that we’ve got the website published, we’ll be able to spend more time on the nitty gritty. Full disclosure, we’re still going to need to spend a lot of time fundraising in the coming weeks, and then of course we need to do the actual research, so I’m not sure how much we should prioritize progress-tracking relative to that work..
Your philosophy is very admirable. How do you plan to track this, more concretely?
We’re planning to make predictions about movement progress (e.g. rate of corporate welfare reforms) as well as our own goals (e.g. amount of evidence our research generates (ideally will be evaluated by an external party), number of influential advocates who change their minds based on our research). This is similar to what ACE and OPP do, and I think other EA orgs. With the self-predictions, we’ve been thinking we’ll have some lower bounds where if we’re consistently underperforming, we’ll note that on our Mistakes page and consider big-picture reprioritization such as doing more outreach work.
We’re currently in touch with several influential animal advocates because of our survey for the Foundational Summaries page on how EAA researchers currently view the evidence on these questions. We’ve had positive feedback on it so far, above our expectations, but it’ll give us a good first feedback loop to see if our work is useful.
I’d also note that we wanted to get a ‘minimum viable product’ out there ASAP, so lots of our specific plans are still up in the air. We’re still very interested in feedback, and now that we’ve got the website published, we’ll be able to spend more time on the nitty gritty. Full disclosure, we’re still going to need to spend a lot of time fundraising in the coming weeks, and then of course we need to do the actual research, so I’m not sure how much we should prioritize progress-tracking relative to that work..