Thanks Sarah! Is something written up about the CEA donation system? I’m surprised that that’s a priority, but obviously know zero details.

All the things you mentioned aren’t uniquely evidence for the simulation hypothesis but are equally evidence for a number of other hypotheses, such as the existence of a supernatural, personal God who designed and created the universe. (There are endless variations on this hypothesis, and we could come up endless more.)

The fine-tuning argument is a common argument for the existence of a supernatural, personal God. The appearance of fine-tuning supports this conclusion equally as well it supports the simulation hypothesis.

Some young Earth creationists believe that dinosaur fossils and other evidence of an old Earth were intentionally put there by God to test people’s faith. You might also think that God tests our faith in other ways, or plays tricks, or gets easily bored, and creates the appearance of a long history or a distant future that isn’t really there. (I also think it’s just not true that this is the most interesting point in history.)

Similarly, the book of Genesis says that God created humans in his image. Maybe he didn’t create aliens with high-tech civilizations because he’s only interested in beings with high technology made in his image.

It might not be God who is doing this, but in fact an evil demon, as Descartes famously discussed in his Meditations around 400 years ago. Or it could be some kind of trickster deity like Loki who is neither fully good or fully evil. There are endless ideas that would slot in equally well to replace the simulation hypothesis.

You might think the simulation hypothesis is preferable because it’s a naturalistic hypothesis and these are supernatural hypotheses. But this is wrong, the simulation hypothesis is a supernatural hypothesis. If there are simulators, the reality they live in is stipulated to have different fundamental laws of nature, such as the laws of physics, than exist in what we perceive to be the universe. For example, in the simulators’ reality, maybe the fundamental relationship between consciousness and physical phenomena such as matter, energy, space, time, and physical forces is such that consciousness can directly, automatically shape physical phenomena to its will. If we observed this happening in our universe, we would describe this as magic or a miracle.

Whether you call them “simulators” or “God” or an “evil demon” or “Loki”, and whether you call it a “simulation” or an “illusion” or a “dream”, these are just different surface-level labels for substantially the same idea. If you stipulate laws of nature radically other than the ones we believe we have, what you’re talking about is supernatural.

If you try to assume that the physics and other laws of nature in the simulators’ reality is the same as in our perceived reality, then the simulation argument runs into a logical self-contradiction, as pointed out by the physicist Sean Carroll. Endlessly nested levels of simulation means computation in the original simulators’ reality will run out. Simulations at the bottom of the nested hierarchy, which don’t have enough computation to run still more simulations inside them, will outnumber higher-level simulations. Since the simulation argument says, as one of its key premises, that in our perceived reality we will be able to create simulations of worlds or universes filled with many digital minds, but the simulation hypothesis implies this is actually impossible, then the simulation argument’s conclusion contradicts one of its premises.

There are other strong reasons to reject the simulation argument. Remember that a key premise is that we ourselves or our descendants will want to make simulations. Really? They’ll want to simulate the Holocaust, malaria, tsunamis, cancer, cluster headaches, car crashes, sudden infant death syndrome, and Guantanamo Bay? Why? On our ethical views today, we would not see this as permissible, but rather the most grievous evil. Why would our descendants feel differently?

Less strongly, computation is abundant in the universe but still finite. Why spend computation on creating digital minds inside simulations when there is always a trade-off between doing that and creating digital minds in our universe, i.e. the real world? If we or our descendants think marginally and hold as one of our highest goals to maximize the number of future lives with a good quality of life, using huge amounts of computation on simulations might be seen as going against that goal. Plus, there are endlessly more things we could do with our finite resource of computation, most we can’t imagine today. Where would creating simulations fall on the list?

You can argue that creating simulations would be a small fraction of overall resources. I’m not sure that’s actually true; I haven’t done the math. But just because something is a small fraction of overall resources doesn’t mean it will be likely be done. In an interstellar, transhumanist scenario, our descendants could create a diamond statue of Hatsune Miku the size of the solar system and this would take a tiny percentage of overall resources, but that doesn’t mean it will likely happen. The simulation argument specifically claims that making simulations of early 21st century Earth will interest our descendants more than alternative uses of resources. Why? Maybe they’ll be more interested in a million other things.

Overall, the simulation hypothesis is undisprovable but no more credible than an unlimited number of other undisprovable hypotheses. If something seems nuts, it probably is. Initially, you might not be able to point out the specific logical reasons it’s nuts. But that’s to be expected — the sort of paradoxes and thought experiments that get a lot of attention (that “go viral”, so to speak) are the ones that are hard to immediately counterargue.

Philosophy is replete with oddball ideas that are hard to convincingly refute at first blush. The Chinese Room is a prime example. Another random example is the argument that utilitarianism is compatible with slavery. With enough time and attention, refutations may come. I don’t think one’s inability to immediately articulate the logical counterargument is a sign that an oddball idea is correct. It’s just that thinking takes time and, usually, by the time an oddball idea reaches your desk, it’s proven to be resistant to immediate refutation. So, trust that intuition that something is nuts.

I would not describe the finetuning argument and the Fermi paradox as strong evidence in favour of the simulation hypothesis. I would instead say that they are open questions for which a lot of different explanations have been proposed, with the simulation offering only one of many possible resolutions.

As to the “importance” argument, we shouldn’t count speculative future events as evidence of the importance of now. I would say the mid-20th century was more important than today, because that’s the closest we ever got to nuclear annihilation (plus like, WW2).

I’ve thought about this a lot too. My general response is that it is very hard to see what one could do differently at a moment to moment level even if we were in a simulation. While it’s possible that you or I are alone in the simulation, we can’t, realistically, know this. We can’t know with much certainty that the apparently sentient beings who share our world aren’t actually sentient. And so, even if they are part of the simulation, we still have a moral duty to treat them well, on the chance they are capable of subjective experiences and can suffer or feel happiness (assuming you’re a Utilitarian), or have rights/​autonomy to be respected, etc.

We also have no idea who the simulators are and what purpose they have for the simulation. For all we know, we are petri dish for some aliens, or a sitcom for our descendents, or a way for people’s minds on colony ships travelling to distant galaxies to spend their time while in physical stasis. Odds are, if the simulators are real, they’ll just make us forget about whatever if we finally figure it out, so they can continue it for whatever reasons.

Given all this, I don’t see the point in trying to defy them or doing really anything differently than what you’d do if this was the ground truth reality. Trying to do something like attempting to escape the simulation would most likely fail AND risk getting you needlessly hurt in this world in the process.

If we’re alone in the sim, then it doesn’t matter what we do anyway, so I focus on the possibility that we aren’t alone, and everything we do does, in fact, matter. Give it the benefit of the doubt.

At least, that’s the way I see things right now. Your mileage may vary.

Hi Tom.

From a longtermist (~totalist classical utilitarian) perspective, there’s a huge difference between ~99% and 100% of the population dying, if humanity recovers in the former case, but not the latter. Just looking at GCRs on their own mostly misses this nuance.

I would be curious to know your thougths on my post arguing that decreasing the risk of human extinction is not astronomically cost-effective.

From a longtermist (~totalist classical utilitarian) perspective, preventing a GCR doesn’t differentiate between “humanity prevents GCRs and realises 1% of it’s potential” and “humanity prevents GCRs realises 99% of its potential”

The same applies to preventing human extinction over a given period. Humans could go extinct just after the period, or go on to an astronomically valuable, and I believe the former is much more likely.

From a longtermist (~suffering focused) perspective, reducing GCRs might be net-negative if the future is (in expectation) net-negative

This also applies to reducing the risk of human extinction.

Thanks for sharing this, Tom! I think this is an important topic, and I agree with some of the downsides you mention, and think they’re worth weighing highly; many of them are the kinds of things I was thinking in this post of mine of when I listed these anti-claims:

Anti-claims

(I.e. claims I am not trying to make and actively disagree with)

• No one should be doing EA-qua-EA talent pipeline work

  • I think we should try to keep this onramp strong. Even if all the above is pretty correct, I think the EA-first onramp will continue to appeal to lots of great people. However, my guess is that a medium-sized reallocation away from it would be good to try for a few years.

• The terms EA and longtermism aren’t useful and we should stop using them

  • I think they are useful for the specific things they refer to and we should keep using them in situations where they are relevant and ~ the best terms to use (many such situations exist). I just think we are over-extending them to a moderate degree

• It’s implausible that existential risk reduction will come apart from EA/​LT goals

  • E.g. it might come to seem (I don’t know if it will, but it at least is imaginable) that attending to the wellbeing of digital minds is more important from an EA perspective than reducing misalignment risk, and that those things are indeed in tension with one another.

  • This seems like a reason people who aren’t EA and just prioritize existential risk reduction are less helpful from an EA perspective than if they also shared EA values all else equal, and like something to watch out for, but I don’t think it outweighs the arguments in favor of more existential risk-centric outreach work.

This isn’t mostly a PR thing for me. Like I mentioned in the post, I actually drafted and shared an earlier version of that post in summer 2022 (though I didn’t decide to publish it for quite a while), which I think is evidence against it being mostly a PR thing. I think the post pretty accurately captures my reasoning at the time, that I think often people doing this outreach work on the ground were actually focused on GCRs or AI risk and trying to get others to engage on that and it felt like they were ending up using terms that pointed less well at what they were interested in for path-dependent reasons. Further updates towards shorter AI timelines moved me substantially in terms of the amount I favor the term “GCR” over “longtermism”, since I think it increases the degree to which a lot of people mostly want to engage people about GCRs or AI risk in particular.

I’ve upvoted this comment, but weakly disagree that there’s such a shift happening (EVF orgs still seem to be selecting pretty heavily for longtermist projects, the global health and development fund has been discontinued while the LTFF is still around etc), and quite strongly disagree that it would be bad if it is:

From a longtermist (~totalist classical utilitarian) perspective, there’s a huge difference between ~99% and 100% of the population dying, if humanity recovers in the former case, but not the latter.

That ‘if’ clause is doing a huge amount of work here. In practice I think the EA community is far too sanguine about our prospects post-civilisational collapse of becoming interstellar (which, from a longtermist perspective, is what matters—not ‘recovery’). I’ve written a sequence on this here, and have a calculator which allows you to easily explore the simple model’s implications on your beliefs described in post 3 here, with an implementation of the more complex model available on the repo. As Titotal wrote in another reply, it’s easy to believe ‘lesser’ catastrophes are many times more likely, so could very well be where the main expected loss of value lies.

From a longtermist (~totalist classical utilitarian) perspective, preventing a GCR doesn’t differentiate between “humanity prevents GCRs and realises 1% of it’s potential” and “humanity prevents GCRs realises 99% of its potential”

I think I agree with this, but draw a different conclusion. Longtermist work has focused heavily on existential risk, and in practice the risk of extinction, IMO seriously dropping the ball on trajectory changes with little more justification that the latter are hard to think about. As a consequence they’ve ignored what seem to me the very real loss of expected unit-value from lesser catastrophes, and the to-me-plausible increase in it from interventions designed to make people’s lives better (generally lumping those in as ‘shorttermist’). If people are now starting to take other catastrophic risks more seriously, that might be remedied. (also relevant to your 3rd and 4th points)

From a “current generations” perspective, reducing GCRs is probably not more cost-effective than directly improving the welfare of people /​ animals alive today

This seems to be treating ‘focus only on current generations’ and ‘focus on Pascalian arguments for astronomical value in the distant future’ as the only two reasonable views. David Thorstad has written a lot, I think very reasonably, about reasons why expected value of longtermist scenarios might actually be quite low, but one might still have considerable concern for the next few generations.

From a general virtue ethics /​ integrity perspective, making this change on PR /​ marketing reasons alone—without an underlying change in longtermist motivation—feels somewhat deceptive.

Counterpoint: I think the discourse before the purported shift to GCRs was substantially more dishonest. Nanda and Alexander’s posts argued that we should talk about x-risk rather than longtermism on the grounds that it might kill you and everyone you know—which is very misleading if you only seriously consider catastrophes that kill 100% of people, and ignore (or conceivably even promote) those that leave >0.01% behind (which, judging by Luisa Rodriguez’s work is around the point beyond which EAs would typically consider something an existential catastrophe).

I basically read Zabel’s post as doing the same, not as desiring a shift to GCR focus, but as desiring presenting the work that way, saying ‘I’d guess that if most of us woke up without our memories here in 2022 [now 2023], and the arguments about potentially imminent existential risks were called to our attention, it’s unlikely that we’d re-derive EA and philosophical longtermism as the main and best onramp to getting other people to work on that problem’ (emphasis mine).

Nanda, Alexander and Zabel’s posts all left a very bad taste in my mouth for exactly that reason.

There’s something fairly disorienting about the community switching so quickly from [quite aggressive] “yay longtermism!” (e.g. much hype around launch of WWOTF) to essentially disowning the word longtermism, with very little mention /​ admission that this happened or why

This is as much an argument that we made a mistake ever focusing on longtermism as that we shouldn’t now shift away from it. Oliver Habryka (can’t find link offhand) and Kelsey Piper are two EAs who’ve publicly expressed discomfort with the level of artificial support WWOTF received, and I’m much less notable, but happy to add myself to the list of people uncomfortable the business, especially since at the time he was a trustee of the charity that was doing so much to promote his career.

Great post, Tom, thanks for writing!

One thought is that a GCR framing isn’t the only alternative to longtermism. We could also talk about caring for future generations.

This has fewer of the problems you point out (e.g. differentiates between recoverable global catastrophes and existential catastrophes). To me, it has warm, positive associations. And it’s pluralistic, connected to indigenous worldviews and environmentalist rhetoric.

Over the last ~6 months I’ve noticed a general shift amongst EA orgs to focus less on reducing risks from AI, Bio, nukes, etc based on the logic of longtermism, and more based on Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs) directly… My guess is these changes are (almost entirely) driven by PR concerns about longtermism.

It seems worth flagging that whether these alternative approaches are better for PR (or outreach considered more broadly) seems very uncertain. I’m not aware of any empirical work directly assessing this even though it seems a clearly empirically tractable question. Rethink Priorities has conducted some work in this vein (referenced by Will MacAskill here), but this work, and other private work we’ve completed, wasn’t designed to address this question directly. I don’t think the answer is very clear a priori. There are lots of competing considerations and anecdotally, when we have tested things for different orgs, the results are often surprising. Things are even more complicated when you consider how different approaches might land with different groups, as you mention.

We are seeking funding to conduct work which would actually investigate this question (here), as well as to do broader work on EA/​longtermist message testing, and broader work assessing public attitudes towards EA/​longtermism (which I don’t have linkable applications for).

I think this kind of research is also valuable even if one is very sceptical of optimising PR. Even if you don’t want to maximise persuasiveness, it’s still important to understand how different groups are understanding (or misunderstanding) your message.

One point that hasn’t been mentioned: GCR’s may be many, many orders of magnitude more likely than extinctions. For example, it’s not hard to imagine a super deadly virus that kills 50% of the worlds population , but a virus that manages to kill literally everyone, including people hiding out in bunkers, remote villages, and in antarctica, doesn’t make too much sense: if it was that lethal, it would probably burn out before reaching everyone.

The framing “PR concerns” makes it sound like all the people doing the actual work are (and will always be) longtermists, whereas the focus on GCR is just for the benefit of the broader public. This is not the case. For example, I work on technical AI safety, and I am not a longtermist. I expect there to be more people like me either already in the GCR community, or within the pool of potential contributors we want to attract. Hence, the reason to focus on GCR is building a broader coalition in a very tangible sense, not just some vague “PR”.

Speaking personally, I have also perceived a move away from longtermism, and as someone who finds longtermism very compelling, this has been disappointing to see. I agree it has substantive implications on what we prioritise.

Speaking more on behalf of GWWC, where I am a researcher: our motivation for changing our cause area from “creating a better future” to “reducing global catastrophic risks” really was not based on PR. As shared here:

We think of a “high-impact cause area” as a collection of causes that, for donors with a variety of values and starting assumptions (“worldviews”), provide the most promising philanthropic funding opportunities. Donors with different worldviews might choose to support the same cause area for different reasons. For example, some may donate to global catastrophic risk reduction because they believe this is the best way to reduce the risk of human extinction and thereby safeguard future generations, while others may do so because they believe the risk of catastrophes in the next few decades is sufficiently large and tractable that it is the best way to help people alive today.

Essentially, we’re aiming to use the term “reducing global catastrophic risks” as a kind of superset that includes reducing existential risk, and that is inclusive of all the potential motivations. For example, when looking for recommendations in this area, we would be happy to include recommendations that only make sense from a longtermist perspective. A large part of the motivation for this was based on finding some of the arguments made in several of the posts you linked (including “EA and Longtermism: not a crux for saving the world”) compelling.

Also, our decision to step down from managing the communications for the Longtermism Fund (now “Emerging Challenges Fund”) was based on wanting to be able to more independently evaluate Longview’s grantmaking, rather than brand association.

From a “current generations” perspective, reducing GCRs is probably not more cost-effective than directly improving the welfare of people /​ animals alive today

I think reducing GCRs seems pretty likely to wildly outcompete other traditional approaches^[1] if we use a slightly broad notion of current generation (e.g. currently existing people) due to the potential for a techno utopian world which making the lives of currently existing people >1,000x better (which heavily depends on diminishing returns and other considerations). E.g., immortality, making them wildly smarter, able to run many copies in parallel, experience insanely good experiences, etc. I don’t think BOTECs will be a crux for this unless we ignore start discounting things rather sharply.

• If GCRs actually are more cost-effective under a “current generations” worldview, then I question why EAs would donate to global health /​ animal charities (since this is no longer a question of “worldview diversification”, just raw cost-effectiveness)

IMO, the main axis of variation for EA related cause prio is “how far down the crazy train do we go” not “person affecting (current generations) vs otherwise” (though views like person affecting ethics might be downstream of crazy train stops).

Mildly against the Longtermism --> GCR shift

Idk what I think about Longtermism --> GCR, but I do think that we shouldn’t lose “the future might be totally insane” and “this might be the most important century in some longer view”. And I could imagine focus on GCR killing a broader view of history.

1. ^

   That said, if we literally just care about experiences which are somewhat continuous with current experiences, it’s plausible that speeding up AI outcompetes reducing GCRs/​AI risk. And it’s plausible that there are more crazy sounding interventions which look even better (e.g. extremely low cost cryonics). Minimally the overall situation gets dominated by “have people survive until techno utopia and ensure that techno utopia happens”. And the relative tradeoffs between having people survive until techno utopia and ensuring that techno utopia happen seem unclear and will depend on some more complicated moral view. Minimally, animal suffering looks relatively worse to focus on.

Meta: this should not have been a quick take, but a post (references, structure, tldr, epistemic status, …)

Consensual ways of affecting the size of some wild animal populations

What does “consensual” mean here (and to some extent above)? Consensual on the part of humans/​institutions?

Thanks for sharing, Jim!

Red-teaming of different moral weights that have been explicitly proposed and defended (by Rethink Priorities, Vaso Grillo, …)

Nitpick. Vasco Grilo.

Donating at the end of the year.

I used to donate mid-year for the reasons you gave. The last couple years I donated at the end of the year because the EA Forum was running a donation election in early December, and I wanted to publish my “where I’m donating” post shortly before the donation election, and I don’t want to donate until after I’ve published the post. But perhaps syncing with the donation election is less important and I should publish and donate mid-year instead?

As someone who worked with Thom to raise almost £2000 for FarmKind charities for my birthday fundraiser a couple of months ago, I want to say publicly that I am disappointed by FarmKind’s communication with the animal movement over this campaign.

As far as I can tell, FarmKind misled the movement by initially saying (or at least heavily implying) that they cooperated with Veganuary on this campaign; and they haven’t acknowledged the statement by the CEO of Veganuary which makes clear that FarmKind did not in fact cooperate with Veganuary on this campaign.

Misleading the movement, and then not acknowledging doing so, violates important movement norms relating to transparency and accountability.

I continue to be open to evidence that FarmKind did not mislead the movement, and if this evidence is presented I will retract this criticism and apologise on this comment.

The criticism in this comment is separate from public-facing questions about FarmKind’s campaign, such as “is this campaign likely to harm societal perceptions of veganism, and even if so, how would that trade off against the opportunity to bring more money into the animal movement?”.

Evidence

Thom and Aidan, co-founders of FarmKind, initially said this about FarmKind’s cooperation with Veganuary:

• Thom referred to “cooperation” and wrote “we [FarmKind and Veganuary] are all on good terms and there is absolutely no infighting” here

• Aidan characterised the ostensible conflict between FarmKind and Veganuary as reported in the initial press articles as “part of the bit” here and “kayfabe” (fake wrestling) here

But that seems misleading:

• Wendy Matthews, CEO of Veganuary, wrote that Veganuary “was not involved in developing the “Forget Veganuary” campaign and had no role in shaping or approving its messaging or execution” here

• Jane Land, co-founder of Veganuary, said that FarmKind’s campaign led to “a morale dent” in Veganuary’s team here, going on to say (whilst wiping away tears):

• [the Veganuary team are] working way over time during this period; and then for another organisation to come in and undermine, try to discredit arguably, the work you’re doing – that is hard to take I think, when you feel like you’re doing so much...

• ...the risk in this case has very much not been symmetrical, in that Veganuary has the more established reputation and visibility. So I feel like we did have more to lose during this...

• Thom himself saying at 34:50 in this YouTube interview:

• I hope that we haven’t implied that Veganuary was sort of in on it or something like this because I wouldn’t want to do that. That’s not the the case.

Thom and Aidan have also come close to deciding what is in Veganuary’s interests. Given the absence of cooperation between FarmKind and Veganuary, I think this is inappropriate and disrespectful to Veganuary:

• Our campaign provides them with another opportunity to put forward the benefits of diet change [Thom here]

• Tapping into the pre-existing anti-Veganuary media narrative is a feature, not a bug, because this is why [the press are] running stories about effective giving for farmed animals (which they would never touch otherwise) and giving Veganuary free media coverage here [Thom here]

• [this campaign is] generating coverage for Veganuary who have a harder time getting in the media each year without a new hook [Aidan here]

Why this matters

I’ve seen several people (like Lewis Bollard here, and several others in this thread) question FarmKind or wonder about their cooperation with Veganuary, and I’ve seen some people (like Aidan Kankoyku here) say that there was cooperation, based on what Thom and Aidan initially said. The former deserve an answer, and the latter ought to be told what actually happened – by FarmKind.

I am increasingly worried that FarmKind’s campaign, especially their handling of their relationship with Veganuary, is harming the vegan movement’s perception of effective altruism and EA animal advocacy (forgive the crude labels). You can see this in this LinkedIn comment by Alistair Currie of the Vegan Society. If you think that this is happening, that it matters and that some of the vegan movement’s concerns are reasonable, more EAs ought to challenge FarmKind publicly.

Next steps

Chris Bryant of Bryant Research apologised to Jane (and by extension Veganuary) here because his initial response to FarmKind’s campaign had focused on its public-facing impact (e.g. donations) in a positive way, and he had overlooked the campaign’s impact on the people at Veganuary and by extension the animal movement. I commend Chris for this response, which I think demonstrates personal integrity and promotes good movement norms. I would strongly encourage FarmKind to do something similar, and would commend them for it.

I am keen to discuss questions about the roles that veganism and offsetting do and ought to play in our movement; I am struggling to do so, and I think many others are, until FarmKind acknowledge their misleading communications and apologise.

Would it not make more sense that do a campaign encouraging the vegan community to donate (and donate more effectively)? It seems the vegan community is well primed to want to use their money to help animals, rather than meat eaters. So it seems like a much lower hanging fruit to hold a campaign for this purpose rather than hold an anti-vegan campaign to get meat eaters to donate to help animals. I also somehow feel anti-vegan meat eaters would simply resonate with the anti-vegan sentiment of the Forget Veganuary campaign, rather than actually end up donating (though this is just a hunch). It might also give them “license” to eat more meat as they can now simply “offset” their consumption, but that sounds a lot like “start a fire and donate to the fire brigade” kind of situation.

I could imagine that at this point this is quite a rough place to be in and to navigate going forward for FarmKind. One potential way might be:

• apologise to the veganuary founders, CEO, and team for the impact on their brand, decades work, current campaign, and adding to their stresses on the dawn of veganuary 2026. Acknowledging that the campaign may have hurt many within the team at a personal level, and that undermining another org in the movement and their campaign is in hindsight unethical;

• Really own and extend that apology to any offence and upset caused within the wider movement;

• Show really remorse by taking down the campaign asap;

• Make amends by helping correct damage to the veganuary brand and message by putting a good story to the press of how you called this wrong, and that there’s value to the vegan diet as well as donating—good enough that the press covers it. Then do a future fundraiser specifically for Veganuary, or commit a proportion of your future fundraising to them.

None of that’s easy, especially when under duress, but could well be the right thing for all parties long term, and regaining some goodwill from large parts of the movement.

Given the pitfalls of mass communication, I am worried that the “forget Veganuary” piece of this will be a bigger takeaway for most people than “donate to help farmed animals”

Thank you to everyone on the EA Forum who has shared their thoughts and reflections so far.

We would like to clarify that Veganuary was not involved in developing the “Forget Veganuary” campaign and had no role in shaping or approving its messaging or execution. While we were given advance notice that FarmKind was planning a campaign promoting offsetting as an alternative to trying vegan in January and were kept informed about media timing, we did not have sight of the website content until after it was launched, nor of the final PR framing. We share some of the concerns raised in this discussion about the potential risks associated with this approach.

Our organization supports both dietary change and effective philanthropy. We see the value in open discussion about the most effective ways to reduce harm to animals. We recognize that everyone involved shares a desire to end factory farming, even where we disagree on strategy/​tactics.

As this discussion has arisen during our busiest period of the year, our focus is now on executing an impactful Veganuary 2026 and delivering a norm-changing campaign that reduces demand for animal products at scale and incentivizes corporations to shift the food environment toward higher availability and visibility of cruelty-free options. We may not be able to engage deeply in real time now, but we’re open to further discussion and evaluation post-January.

I’m not wild about this campaign either. I’ve shared this feedback privately with Aidan and Thom, but think there’s value to doing so publicly to make clear that EA /​ the animal movement’s moderate wing /​ FarmKind’s funders don’t uniformly endorse this approach. (To be clear: I’m writing in my personal capacity and haven’t discussed the following with anyone else at Coefficient Giving.)

I’m a huge fan of FarmKind’s team. I’ve personally donated to them and directed funding to them via Coefficient Giving. I thought they did an incredible job during the Dwarkesh fundraiser earlier this year and I admire their ingenuity and grit in pursuing the very hard challenge of bringing in counterfactually new funds to effective animal advocacy. I appreciate that they meant well with this campaign, which I think they saw as using a a playful fake-feud with Veganuary to generate media.

But I thing this campaign was a mistake for three reasons:

1. This feels like an incitement to infighting, which has long plagued the animal movement. In recent years, I’ve seen the abolitionist /​ more radical wing of the animal movement take major good faith steps to reduce this infighting (see, e.g., my session with Wayne Hsiung at this year’s AVA). Whether Veganuary was in on this or not, I’m seeing vegan activists reasonably interpreting this as an attack on their advocacy. I think we should have a very high bar for deliberately starting a fight in the movement, and I don’t think this meets it.

2. This feels like an attack on vegans. I think we should also have a very high bar for attacking well-meaning people doing good in the world, whether vegans, EAs, organ donors, aid workers, or longtermists. I appreciate that attacking vegans wasn’t the campaign’s intent, but I think it was the predictable result, and certainly how the folks in the Daily Mail’s comments sections have (gleefully) interpreted it.

3. This feels dishonest. To be clear: I don’t think FarmKind intended it this way and I think the people behind it are deeply ethical people. But I think our movement is at its best when we hold ourselves to high standards and that includes not deliberately misleading people. And creating a fake “meat-eating campaign” feels like it crosses the line for me.

Again, this isn’t to question the intent or abilities of FarmKind’s team. Instead, I’m sharing how I personally feel about this campaign. I hope we can avoid campaigns like this in future, while continuing to pursue the innovation in tactics that the animal movement and EA needs.

As @NickLaing has pointed out, I think how people perceive the campaign or interpret its message is a lot more important than what the intentions are behind it. We can try and spin it however we like, but this is a straightforwardly anti-vegan campaign, maybe not in intent but in actuality. It is absolutely horrible in its attitude towards vegans, even though vegans are probably more likely to donate money to animals than any other group. Here are just a few choice snippets from the site:

1. Someone trying to go vegan had to plan every meal, give up her favourite foods, annoy friends and family, and get bloated. For all that, she helped far fewer animals than someone with an overflowing platter of meat.
2. “Can you survive Veganuary?” implying that its some terrible trial that someone needs to endure.
3. “Every day can be hard when you’re vegan”. Hardly selling veganism.
4. Listing celebrities who couldn’t “make veganism stick,” including references to them feeling weak and struggling with ill health.

Honestly, you’d have a hard time finding a carnivore influencer who more passionately bashes veganism. People should donate money. They should also go vegan. If they can’t do both, they should at least do one. But if they can do both, they should do both. That isn’t implied anywhere; to the contrary, veganism is portrayed as a waste of time and vegans as weak, misguided, joyless fools.

Hi all,

Thom from FarmKind here. We at FarmKind wanted to provide a bit of context and explanation for the choices we’ve made around this campaign.

Context

• Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout. Our campaign provides them with another opportunity to put forward the benefits of diet change. We are all on good terms and there is absolutely no infighting.

• Origin: At this time of year, due to the annual Veganuary campaign, many people and the UK press debate the pros and cons of diet change, often with very entrenched views on both sides. This creates a unique opportunity to get people who are currently unwilling to change their diet to consider donating as an alternative entry-point into helping farmed animals—something that is extremely hard to get media attention for most of the time.

• Goal: The goal of this campaign is to get the question of ‘should you do Veganuary’ more media attention, and shift the focus from ‘is eating animals bad’ to a focus on the question of which solution(s) to factory farming an individual will choose to participate in. In other words, we want the debate to be about whether to choose diet change or donating, rather than whether factory farming is a problem worth dealing with or not.

• Our funders: FarmKind made the decision to launch this campaign. Organisations and individuals that have provided FarmKind with funding are not endorsing the campaign and it would be a mistake to equate past funding of FarmKind with support for our approach.

Campaign

The campaign encourages people to offset their meat this January by donating to help fix factory farming. As part of this, we hired three top competitive eaters to talk about donating to offset the animal welfare impact of their diet as they undertake one of their typical eating challenges.

By working with individuals who eat meat (but who would be undertaking these meat-eating challenges anyway), we can help reduce suspicion among entrenched meat eaters that our true motive is to make them vegan. It allows us to be authentic in our message that being unwilling to change your diet doesn’t mean you can’t start helping animals.

Our campaign aims to show that those who are unwilling to change their diet today can and should still begin their lifelong journey of helping animals by donating to charities working to change the food system.

Concerns

We know that some may have concerns about this approach and feel uncomfortable with the idea of paying competitive eaters who are eating meat, even in an effort to help farmed animals. However, to make change we have to start from where people are now. For most people, that starting point is eating and enjoying meat and being unwilling to change their diet.

Some media coverage has suggested that our campaign aims to encourage people to eat meat or that we are running a ‘meat-eating campaign’. This is untrue, and we have corrected them. Tapping into the pre-existing anti-Veganuary media narrative is a feature, not a bug, because this is why they’re running stories about effective giving for farmed animals (which they would never touch otherwise) and giving Veganuary free media coverage.

As part of our commitment to being as transparent and effective as we can, we’re happy to answer specific questions anyone has about the campaign but as this campaign is ongoing we may have to answer some questions in the future or privately via email.

After having a quick look at this campaign, it pretty straightforwardly seems misguided and confusing. Farmkind’s efforts to appeal to regular people to donate rather than go vegan seems good and makes sense. This adversarial campaign looks and feels awful. Two reasons immediately jumped out as to why it feels off.

1. it undermines and even goads vegans and vegetarians doing their bit for animals

2. glorifying people who eat lots of meat feels bad in a guttaral almost “Kantian” kind of way, regardless of the utilitarian calculation.

In general i think complex utilitarian arguments struggle to be communicated well in pithy campaigns.

I’m surprised the FarmKind people have made what seems like a pretty straightforward mistake like this, I’ve been super impressed by all the other material they have put out.

I think I understand the worries and discomfort people feel about this approach. But I’m not sure how fruitful it is for all of us to have a vibes-based conversation about the possible merits of this campaign. It already exists. It might end up being good, it might end up being bad. We can make it better. If you think some of the risks taken and assumptions made by FarmKind are unaddressed, let’s talk about how we can mitigate those. Let’s also figure out how we can support FarmKind do what they intend to do for animals. And most importantly, let’s make sure we learn from this campaign.

How can we learn from this experiment?

• Trying new approaches in this complex and relatively new space is great if you thoughtfully measure if it works or not. Measurement and evaluation are especially important because there are backfire risks and because this is a deeply underfunded cause area, so we cannot afford to be careless.

• It can be easy to falsely attribute successes and failures. So, what are some indicators that this might demand pivoting /​ repeating? I’d love to hear from FarmKind, The Mission Motor, behavioral scientists, and ACE researchers who worked on the Better for Animals resource what they think would give us valuable insights.

• What is the bar for money raised that would make this worth it? What is the cost of FarmKind’s Veganuary campaign, what else could have been done with those funds, how much money is raised through their platform specifically in response to this campaign?

• Can we assess spillover effects?

• Are there some PhD students out here who are willing to work with FarmKind to figure out some RCTs to learn some stuff? E.g. how long do people donate, do they change their diet, what do they think of factory farming, what were their priors, etc.

How can we mitigate possible harms?

• Risk: discussion remains focused on individual diet change, not ending factory farming

  • Can FarmKind, now that they have the attention, redirect their messaging and no longer talk about diets but instead about the horrors of factory farming?

  • Can both vegans/​Veganuary and FarmKind state that what they care about is a more hospitable world for all and that industrial agriculture is the enemy.

• Risk: moral circle expansion is slowed

  • Can Toni and FK and participants come out saying something like this, “Don’t get us wrong, we are all actually bleeding hearts, we do care about animals, we don’t think eating animals the way society does now is necessary, natural, or normal, but we are just being pragmatic. We think being vegan is good, but preaching veganism is not.”?

  • Can they direct some of the funds they raise to high-impact interventions that do things like education programs aimed at fostering compassion and empathy for animals, anti-speciesist policy work, actions promoting moral consideration of animals in public discourse, etc.?

• Risk: time is wasted on infighting

  • Can both Veganuary and FarmKind state that what they agree on and care about is a more hospitable world for all and that industrial agriculture is the enemy?

  • Can Toni flip-flop some more, and in February say, “You know what, I was wrong. It’s not either/​or; it should be both or can be a little bit of each.”?

  • Can FarmKind share the metrics and results of their campaign and show up in vegan spaces like R/​vegan to explain their approach and solicit feedback?

  • I think AVA is planning to host a discussion about this at their Summit in Canada in May.

• Risk: fewer people reduce their animal consumption or do it later

  • Meat producers can use this in their propaganda; can we use AI to find the conversations about this that misrepresent the arguments and counteract them?

  • Can Toni and other former vegans come out and say something like, “Actually, after having hung out with all of these meat eaters and learning more about where their food comes from and having seen what it does to their bodies, I think it’s actually kinda gross/​disgusting/​unsympathetic. I’m happy they donate, but for their sake, I hope they eventually put their mouths where their money is.”

  • What would happen if Veganuary went on offense with aggressive angles like:

    • “We applaud that FarmKind offers all the weak-willed meat-addicts out there a compassion cheat code against animal cruelty. We do hope that the people who listen to Toni and FarmKind’s advice 1) also talk with their doctors and nutritionists and 2) learn about the hidden truths about factory farming.”

    • “We agree that there are multiple roads that lead to Rome, and the super-highway is one where we both do no harm and reduce harm as much as possible. So, we actually already recommend to people who participate in Veganuary also donate to high-impact pro-animal charities. Yes, we are even more holier-than-thou than you thought. We hope vegans put their money where their mouths are. And we hope that offsetters eventually put their mouths where their money is, for animals’ sake and their own.”

    • “How do you know someone is a meat eater? They will tell you. (And they’re more likely to need GLP-1.)”

    • “If you’re not one of these privileged people who can buy humanely raised meat and donate money, remember that beans are healthy, cheap, and cruelty free.”

      (I don’t particularly endorse any of these messages, but I could see people pulling up a chair and a popcorn bucket to watch this while being exposed to different arguments based on the same premise, that farming cruelty is bad.)

How can we increase the likelihood of success?

• Opportunities to increase donation conversion

  • Is there a possibility for a follow-up press release by FarmKind or a pitch with testimonials of carnists who have made donations?

  • What would happen if FarmKind dares vegans and Veganuary supporters to donate? Can they do a donation contest with Veganuary? ACE can probably set up a fundraising page for vegans if Veganuary doesn’t want to do it on the FarmKind site. (Happy to credit FarmKind for those donations, but I’d like them to go where they are likely to do the most good.)

  • Can Toni share where she donates to?

  • Can we leverage the comment sections to encourage people to share where they donate and include donate links?

• Opportunities for awareness increase

  • Can Toni talk about how Veganuary doesn’t talk about animals enough and too much about health and climate, and how the big problem is factory farming?

  • Can FarmKind include and promote people in their pitches who also started reducing their meat intake after learning more about factory farming?

  • Can FarmKind or Toni talk about small-bodied animals and their Shrimpact work? What if Toni says, “Sure, maybe it’s okay if some of these people want to eat some red meat and offset their donations, as long as they don’t start eating chicken or salmon, or eggs.”

There are probably more and more productive ways to help FarmKind and Veganuary and the whole EAA movement in this endeavor. Please share your ideas. Also, what will you do this January, donate, go vegan, or both?

Three final thoughts that I didn’t really know where to put:

1. If we think AI can soonish solve some of the big alt-protein questions (taste, scaling, price, etc.), then we will still need people to stop thinking they need animal products. If we think public discussions will affect alignment, then we need pro-animal messaging to be out there. I’m wondering if this means that hard-to-measure interventions toward increased prevalence of anti-speciesist values might have become more important than I thought they were. On the other hand, if we think AI will solve factory farming, maybe in the meantime we need to focus as much of our time as possible on increasing the welfare of animals who are farmed until then, and that’s more likely done through welfare campaigns than promoting veganism. Either way, we should probably be careful in how we talk about vegans and bring animals up more often, even in meat reduction work. However, I’m very uncertain about all of this and curious what you think.

2. What could this offsetting approach to donating mean for effective giving? Is there a way to leverage this work to get people to make GWWC pledges or to get offsetters to think about how they use their donations in general. FarmKind wasn’t successful in becoming the Giving Multiplier for animals and pivoted to offsetting, but maybe they can still direct offsetters to the Giving Multiplier?

3. I work fulltime in animal advocacy. I don’t think that gives me an excuse to eat animals. I am vegan. I don’t think that absolves me from donating to effective charities to reduce as much harm as possible. It’s a privilege that I can do all three of these things. In this world, few people can. It seems good to encourage people to do everything they can, while also understanding that might be limited. So, let’s help people help more animals as best as they can. We need to understand better what works and work together to make that happen.

Edit: This is my personal take and not Animal Charity Evaluators’ opinion.

Contrarian marketing like this seems like it would only work well if the thing being opposed was extremely well known, which I don’t think Veganuary is.

This feels like a very negative take on a lighthearted campaign that is trying to get across an important point. It’s important to do outreach to people who disagree with you—even people who think vegans are annoying.

Oh. I find this negative and personally upsetting.

Effective altruism brought to animal advocacy a strong norm of collaboration and this feels like undermining years of work. I wrote about it some time ago:

Back in the days, the movement was constantly infighting and spending significant time attacking and criticizing each other. There were a lot of personal attacks, hostile takeovers, and constant attempts to bring individuals down.

In this post I won’t get into details, but many ambitious projects stopped due to this culture, and I suspect many people have drifted away from the movement because of it.

This campaign seems like a well made one, but I think it contributes to polarization and I worry of alienating potential talent that is motivated by helping animals. It feels off to use a name for campaign that uses other charity’s name in a negative sense—feels like an attack. Finally, very adversarial tone toward plant based choices undermines some of the charities’ work recommended by FarmKind, like Dansk Vegetarisk Forening.

So, overall it feels like optimizing for bringing money at the expense of collaborativeness and at the expense of other factors that contribute to the impact of the movement, like alienating talent.

I hope I’m wrong and that I’m missing some considerations, but I think effective altruists should have moral guardrails that make them unlikely to engage in certain behaviors and, to me, collaborativeness is one of the virtues that should not be discarded easily.

If anything, it feels a bit like a missed opportunity for some collab with Veganuary, but maybe FarmKind had reached out to Veganuary.

Completely speculating here, but I wonder how much of the impetus for a campaign like this could be (emphasis on could!) illustrative of a broader disinterest in diet change work among some EAs. And so, even if vegnauary and adjacent efforts, or even veganism generally, are undermined in public discourse, some EAs might be ok with this because they basically don’t think diet change is a serious way to help animals?

Like, to me, if this campaign successfully brings in a lot of donations that otherwise wouldn’t be given, then that would be a success, assuming in the interim there aren’t major fractures in the movement generally or other harms. But I wonder if some EAs basically round those fractures to zero regardless of how serious they are/​may seem.

This could be completely wrong, though! This is a quick take afterall :).

Thank you for sharing this. I’m personally very surprised to see this campaign from FarmKind after reading “With friends like these” from Lewis Bollard and “professionalization has happened, differences have been put aside to focus on higher goals and the drama overall has gone down a lot” from Joey Savoie.

I would have expected the ideal way to promote donations to animal welfare charities to be less antagonizing towards vegan-adjacent people.

@Vasco Grilo🔸 given that your name is on the https://​​www.forgetveganuary.com/​​ campaign and you’re active on this forum, I’m curious what you think about this. Were you informed?

Edit: they will remove that section from the page

Woah! Agreed. I have a somewhat more positive view of go-vegan/​meat reduction campaigns; but even disregarding that, this doesn’t make sense. Current vegans are probably the best targets for a donate-more campaign and I can tell from experience reading r/​vegan that this is unlikely to go down well!

I can attest that I message @Toby Tremlett🔹 quite a bit and he’s always really nice, even when my suggestions are kind of stupid or a little emotional.

Actually he’s polite and nice even when they’re really stupid or extremely emotional as well.

Hmm this is interesting.

Speculatively, I think there could actually just be convergence here, though, once you account for moral uncertainty and just very plausible situations where doing bad by everyone’s lights are as bad as, say, utilitarian nightmares but just easier to get others on board for (ie extreme power).

Two hours before you posted this, MacAskill posted a brief explanation of viatopianism.

This essay is the first in a series that discusses what a good north star [for post-superintelligence society] might be. I begin by describing a concept that I find helpful in this regard:

Viatopia: an intermediate state of society that is on track for a near-best future, whatever that might look like.

Viatopia is a waystation rather than a final destination; etymologically, it means “by way of this place”. We can often describe good waystations even if we have little idea what the ultimate destination should be. A teenager might have little idea what they want to do with their life, but know that a good education will keep their options open. Adventurers lost in the wilderness might not know where they should ultimately be going, but still know they should move to higher ground where they can survey the terrain. Similarly, we can identify what puts humanity in a good position to navigate towards excellent futures, even if we don’t yet know exactly what those futures look like.

In the past, Toby Ord and I have promoted the related idea of the “long reflection”: a stable state of the world where we are safe from calamity, and where we reflect on and debate the nature of the good life, working out what the most flourishing society would be. Viatopia is a more general concept: the long reflection is one proposal for what viatopia would look like, but it need not be the only one.

I think that some sufficiently-specified conception of viatopia should act as our north star during the transition to superintelligence. In later essays I’ll discuss what viatopia, concretely, might look like; this note will just focus on explaining the concept.

. . .

Unlike utopianism, it cautions against the idea of having some ultimate end-state in mind. Unlike protopianism, it attempts to offer a vision for where society should be going. It focuses on achieving whatever society needs to be able to steer itself towards a truly wonderful outcome.

I think I’m largely on board. I think I’d favor doing some amount of utopian planning (aiming for something like hedonium and acausal trade). Viatopia sounds less weird than utopias like that. I wouldn’t be shocked if Forethought talked relatively more about viatopia because it sounds less weird. I would be shocked if they push us in the direction of anodyne final outcomes. I agree with Peter that stuff is “convex” but I don’t worry that Forethought will have us tile the universe with compromisium. But I don’t have much private info.

Am a charity Trustee. (of a much smaller charity)

I would say: go for it! Try to learn a lot from your experience. It’s a huge development opportunity for you.

I would ask myself something like these questions to figure this out, I’m assuming by the picture you paint that you don’t think their current work is necessarily wildly impactful?

1. Do I have the time and headspace to take this on? Will it negatively affect other things I do

2. Do I like the other board members (at least in theory), and will I work well with them?

3. Will this be something energy giving and enjoyable for me? Some work (even if not that impactful) can almost paridoxically give us more energy for the more impactful stuff. I’ve noticed this more and more over the years.

4. Is there perhaps an opportunity for me to shape the charity’s work towards something more impactful? Influencing the thought world of children has potential. There’s a saying attributed to the Jesuits which goes something like “Give us a child till they are 7 and we’ll have them for life”, so those years are importantly formative.