“In general, continued economic growth in low- and middle-income countries is in the interests of nonhuman animals.”
(This seems like a pretty important question to me, and I’m not sure how to weigh effects like increased factory farming against the plausible reduction in invertebrate populations that economic growth comes with.)
I don’t have a good data source on hand, but my understanding is that pollution from car travel is particularly harmful to local air quality. Whereas, for instance, emissions from plane travel less so.
But yes, I assume some portion of Giving Green’s grantees do work that benefit air quality at least second hand. It could be included in the calculator as a harm but just directed to Giving Green as well.
Thanks for the question Ben! The main reason that this is a priority is to help EA Funds (which is now part of CEA) grow and diversify their donations, by making it easier to gather info from donors[1] and build relationships with them, and giving us more freedom to optimize the UX of the donation flow. AWF in particular has ambitious 2026 plans and a significant funding gap, and we’d be excited to help them reach their donation goal for this year! :)
GWWC, the primary platform EA Funds has used historically, defaults to opt-out for donor data sharing. As far as I understand, this prevents us from being able to contact the majority of donors. We recently added the option of donating via every.org as well, which is opt-in by default so that’s improved the situation.
The word “offsetting” seems to have bad PR.
Yeah not great, but personally I think of it as a good thing so part of the hope with this is to turn the corner on the feeling of “offsetting”.
Maybe guilt is a good framing, especially since it is more generalizable here than most charities are capable of eliciting.
My goal is to make this site stick with people who are not familiar with EA in any way and possibly be a stepping stone from impact due to personal responsibility into impact for the sake of doing more good, regardless of how the opportunity got there. In order to do this I think I need to tap into the “do you have a vague, persistent sense of guilt” feeling and give the solution very quickly after. It’s definitely a balance between “think about the guilt of not doing this” vs “think about the pride you’ll feel after doing this” and going too hard in either direction here I think will be a huge turn off for most people.
I’m certainly not an expert on this, but I wonder if this could have particular appeal to religious groups? The concept of “Ahimsa” in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism seems relevant.
I don’t think I’d like to put religious framing on the site but connecting to communities who resonate with this kind of thing seems very useful.
Air pollution may be a good additional category of harms
I’ll do some research on this but I think this is covered by Climate? What are you imagining is air pollution harm but not climate harm?
I can imagine donating to these causes has hidden second-order effects with a chance to make the whole donation negative impact. My goal is definitely NOT to be on the cutting edge of moral philosophy with this site, just to make the kinds of information I feel will click easily with people more accessible.
Love that you’re exploring microorganism welfare that seems interesting and like not many people have thought it through.
Yes, you are probably right. I just threw that out as a stand-in for what I’m looking for. Ending all factory farming is too high a bar (and might just happen due to paper clipping instead!).
Maybe 10-20x-ing donor numbers is closer? I’d reference survey data instead, but public opinions are already way ahead of actual motivations. But maybe “cited among top 10 moral problems of the day” would work. Could also be numbers of vegans.
Do you believe effective altruism principles are compatible with religious faith traditions? Vote here: https://www.thealignedapp.com/question/10a539e1-0c5f-4607-b7ea-c156182e5a3a
This app takes the top EA forum post from each day and has an LLM generate a discussion question based on it. Here’s more info about the app.
I agree that veganism is the strongest identity in the animal movement at the moment. It’s a powerful meme, a very salient identity for many. I don’t think any other animal advocacy related identity has more mentions in Twitter bios. Plant-based people or vegetarians don’t tend to refer to that in their social media profiles.
I disagree that vegans are 2% in the US. 2% is the figure you get when you lump plant-based and vegan together. When you ask specifically for “vegan”, only 1% identify as vegan in 2023 Gallup survey. I think plant-based people are also around 1% in the US. Google searches for veganism have also been globally declining since 2020. And I think the leadership of major animal advocacy organisations are amenable to the idea that we should stop mentioning veganism. So I think there is some possibility for change.
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I agree re the career problem. I wonder how much additional money would fix the problem vs other issues like the cultures of the two movements/ecosystems, status of working in the spaces, etc.
Dwarkesh (of the famed podcast) recently posted a call for new guest scouts. Given how influential his podcast is likely to be in shaping discourse around transformative AI (among other important things), this seems worth flagging and applying for (at least, for students or early career researchers in bio, AI, history, econ, math, physics, AI that have a few extra hours a week).
The role is remote, pays ~$100/hour, and expects ~5–10 hours/week. He’s looking for people who are deeply plugged into a field (e.g. grad students, postdocs, or practitioners) with high taste. Beyond scouting guests, the role also involves helping assemble curricula so he can rapidly get up to speed before interviews.
More details are in the blog post; link to apply (due Jan 23 at 11:59pm PST).
I think that is both correct and interesting as a proposition.
But the topic as phrased seems more likely to mire it in more timelines debate. Rather than this proposition, which is a step removed from:
1. What timelines and probability distributions are correct
2. Are EAs correctly calibrated
And only then do we get to
3. EAs are “failing to do enough work aimed at longer than median cases”.
- arguably my topic “Long timelines suggest significantly different approaches than short timelines” is between 2 & 3
If you think welfare is net positive either way. This seems like a tough case to make. I see how one can opt for agnosticism over believing net negative but I doubt there exists anything remotely close to a good case that WAW currently is net positive (and not just highly uncertain).
The point I’m trying to make is that we should have a probability distribution over timelines with a chance of short, medium or long — then we need to act given this uncertainty, with a portfolio of work based around the different lengths. So even if our median is correct, I think we’re failing to do enough work aimed at the 50% of cases that are longer than the median.
I feel less confident in this specific approach — I think downstream effects are just often very contingent. It’s easy to imagine scenarios like: eliminate very bad disease 1, population goes up, now very bad disease 2 emerges or is transmitted from some other population because contact occurs, etc.
I suppose this could be less of an issue for the very worst diseases/issues, etc., but I suspect those by their nature are less common (e.g. could be self-limiting, etc), and it seems like the method would only work insofar as changing population levels, etc. doesn’t increase the risk of novel worse things, which seems only possible for the very worst things.
That being said I am very sympathetic to just trying more things, at least for some animals, especially vaccinations.
Hi @abrahamrowe, thanks for the post!
Would love to be in touch re-hiring. I wrote my whole master’s thesis specifically on this topic and have been consulting on it for years. Let’s chat!
Thanks for sharing!
We could identify the most severe diseases through research and target them with vaccination campaigns. Yes, eliminating a disease would lead to population growth until another factor limits the population—but since it was such an unusually severe limiting factor, the net effect is likely to be positive.
This is interesting and seems possible to me, but I’d probably want to look more into any particular case and see population modelling to verify the logic more generally.
If this does work, I wonder if we’d have a general and reliable path forward for reducing wild animal suffering (whether disease or another cause, it sounds like you’re more agnostic about it being diseases in the paper): just iteratively and incrementally reduce the causes of suffering in a population, roughly in order from the most severe (worst conditional on their occurrence[1]) to the mildest.
However, the worst conditional on their occurrrence could be rare enough that this wouldn’t look cost-effective. In that case, we might look for another animal population where it does look cost-effective to reduce the most severe cause of suffering.
Perhaps “Long timelines suggest significantly different approaches than short timelines” is more direct and under discussed?
I think median EA AI timelines are actually OK, it’s more that certain orgs and individuals (like AI 2027) have tended toward extremity in one way or another.
I ran this very lightweight poll and super crudely (probably massive sampling bias) 4 out of 9 EAs residing in the US considered moving abroad.