Director of Operations at GovAI.
I previously co-founded and served as Executive Director at Wild Animal Initiative, was the COO of Rethink Priorities from 2020 to 2024, and ran an operations consultancy, Good Structures, from 2024-2025.
abrahamrowe
Karma: 5,927
I noticed the checkbox for confirming awareness of the CC-BY license disappeared on new posts. I’m curious why the decision was made to drop it? It was useful for me personally to remind me when publishing things.
For what it’s worth (as someone who helped found Arthropoda but is no longer involved), I’d very much like there to be more convincing arguments against taking insects and other arthropods seriously. I feel pretty heavily incentivized to believe arguments against it as doing the animal welfare work I care more about emotionally (wild animal welfare) would be far easier. Working on animal welfare (and any other issue, if you care about second order effects) is vastly harder if you care about effects on insects, and I’d prefer the simpler world of only caring about vertebrates.
I think it’s pretty typical for the people who work on a cause area to be convinced that cause area matters. This is of course a source of bias, but, for example, asking global health charities to hire at least some people skeptical that we should improve the lives of people in developing countries seems like…. a hard request to fulfill at a minimum?And, I believe that I and probably other people who have worked in this space are skeptics—just not extreme ones. I personally would not bet on any insects having morally relevant experiences, and put the odds at probably <30%. Relative to many this is less skeptical, but in absolute terms it still is skepticism—it sounds like you’re just advocating for there to be extreme skeptics—e.g. people who put the odds at, say, <1%. To analogize to global health again, it already feels odd to say “global health organizations should have folks who think there is a >70% chance this isn’t good thing to do”, let alone asking them to have staff who think there is a >99% chance.
A non-exhaustive list of things that seem like plausible candidates from a scale perspective, but are at varying points in the quality of research (and many are probably not near the certainty level we would need on the overall sign, but could be fairly easily, at least for target effects), and a rough guess at the scale of the number of animals that could be impacted by target effects:
Adapting more humane insecticides (hundreds of trillions?)
Indoor cats outside the US (where it’s mostly successfully been done) (low billions)
Eradicating rabies (mostly done successfully in Europe, very much not done in the US and other parts of the world) (tens of millions)
Rodent fertility control (hundreds of millions)
Other fertility control treatments for “pest” animals (pigeons, etc) (tens of millions)
Bird safe glass (already required by law in many jurisdictions (e.g. New York City for new construction)) (hundreds of millions)
More effective and humane island predator removal (millions)
Screwworm eradication (tens of billions)
All of these seem feasible in the nearer future, but still are minor compared to the scale of the bigger problems in the space, which I think academic field building is fundamental to address. If I could choose only one, I’d choose doing further academic field building over implementing any of these (though luckily we don’t have to choose between them).
(also, to be clear, WAI’s views might be very different than my own—just trying to give a flavor of what kind of timelines I was thinking about when setting up WAI).
If useful for calibrating, when we launched WAI, I expected it to take 50+ years to feel excited about any large-scale interventions. That level of investment at current wild animal welfare spending levels seems very worth it given the scale of the the issues at stake — at current levels, it would cost less over 50 years than is spent on farmed animal welfare in a single year, and farmed animal welfare is a much smaller problem by many orders of magnitude.
But my timelines for good WAW interventions are now much shorter—on the order of a few years (so I guess making a correct original prediction at more like 10-15 years). That’s partially due to WAI having a lot of success in building a pipeline for research, but also due to me thinking that non-target effects are less important to understand perfectly than I used to and due to me no longer thinking other animal interventions (with a few very notable exceptions) are particularly cost-effective, such that I think the kinds of interventions on the table in the near future for wild animals look much more promising.
I also should have flagged that the IRS will expedite applications in two other unusual circumstances:
A newly created organization providing disaster relief to victims of emergencies.
IRS errors have caused undue delays in issuing a determination letter.
The second doesn’t really help (since you’ve probably already been delayed by the errors), but I could imagine very impactful projects needing to be set up quickly for disaster response.
This is super interesting and not something I considered—but it seems right that you’re more likely to make a mistake and move money to less impactful things accidentally is you’re trying to move the money between very impactful things, then from relatively low impact to higher impact.
Yeah, I think that one of the most impactful things already impactful organizations can do is raise money from non-EA sources (because presumably the alternate use is so much worse). I do think donor advisors who work to bring new donors in provide a ton of value.
Yeah! I strongly agree with the difficulty in doing this (and that EA is a unique fundraising environment with donors with a weirdly high willingness to change their mind). But, I think one under-appreciated fact is that if charities really strongly differ in cost-effectiveness, non-cost-effectiveness-oriented donation advising for non-EA donors might accidentally be doing tons of good (e.g. by making minor shifts in how funds are used that end up having larger changes in size of effect than the difference in cost-effectiveness between EA interventions)
How to start a 501(c)3 nonprofit as quickly as possible
Nice! That’s super exciting. And I feel very excited about the work ACE is doing to bring conventional animal donors / conservation donors into this work, because that seems incredibly valuable! I think where I disagree with many people’s views about ACE is that I think ACE doing perfectly rigorous charity evaluation is much less important than ACE expanding the pool of donors, because I think most of ACE’s impact comes via expanding the pool of donors, like you describe.
See the last sentence :) But I should have highlighted this more. It’s a great piece.
The overall cost-effectiveness of an intervention often matters less than the counterfactual use of its funding
I agree, I basically believe this, at least within my lifetime / timespans that seem reasonable to think strategically on, and I think I count as an animal advocate! I’d prefer this not be true obviously, but it seems pretty likely to me.
My sense is this feeling is not uncommon among very EA animal advocates — e.g. I can think of 5-10 people offhand who I would bet would agree, including people in leadership roles at animal organizations.
Thanks for the feedback! I definitely think that the EA hiring process for job seekers is terrible. Doing multiple work tests, long applications, etc is awful. I’d be especially excited to get rid of written prompts in job applications (which I think might be possible), and work tests (much harder). And I’m sorry that experience was so negative — I invite many people who look like strong fits on paper to apply for roles, and in most hiring rounds I work on, candidates are evaluated blindly, so it’s hard to perfectly tie these things together.
I couldn’t find your specific case, but if you bump the email, I’m happy to tell you why I didn’t provide feedback. In almost every case, it’s because I don’t think I have useful feedback to give people — I’m highly skeptical of most hiring evaluation methods, and think after reviewing someone’s application, I, at best, have only the very mildest sense of their skills. I also have found that the only useful advice I have for people looking for roles in EA organizations is advice on how to game hiring processes, so generally avoid doing so.
Yep, I agree. I think a really good challenge organizations could work on is trying to get fewer applicants (without losing the best ones), because it just seems better for both candidates and organizations (candidates are more likely to get a role, orgs have fewer people to sort through).
Yeah, I agree with all of this difficulty. But, I also think the animal movement trends too far in hiring too many people, and all things considered, I’d probably prefer an animal movement that was smaller and more strategic (though this is partially because I don’t think ambitious animal welfare goals, like abolishing factory farming, are tractable), and think the things that are tractable (wild animal welfare policy, shrimp welfare, etc.) would do better if coordinated by fewer talented people rather than more mass movement — but I recognize that I’m the only animal advocate in the world who is against broad movement building so don’t put too much stock in my views.
I also think the animal movement suffers from a lack of “coolness” unfortunately — e.g. I think AI risk, for example, just has more general appeal / trendiness, and so they can appeal to a way larger audience of potential applicants, which should in theory mean higher quality (just because more people are interested).I agree that it could be centralized — I think the benefits outweigh the risks here, especially for heavily EA organizations.
I definitely agree with this challenge — I also wonder if this is part of the reason many of the people who I have found to be most thoughtful about recruiting in the field founded or ran small or new organizations — they had to recruit under different constraints (e.g. offering less job stability, less name recognition, etc), and had to be more creative to get talented people in.
Yeah definitely, I think that would be a really reasonable thing to do, and is the kind of experimentation I want to see in hiring in the space that I talk about here!
Yeah, I think it provides some evidence in favor of it, but there are lots of downsides to that too, like:
Obviously, there is risk a bias, etc. (e.g. I know a small subset of possible people!)
Lots of times, I don’t actually know someone who would be a particularly good fit.
I think that doing this is lower downside risk, but probably somewhat lower upside potential in expectation, and probably just varies case-to-case in how those shake out overall.
I think that the good opportunities in the farmed (vertebrate) animal welfare space are:
Smaller in scale than Coefficient’s budget (I think that EAs have been overestimating the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for at least a few years, and the good opportunities are actually pretty limited).
Pretty likely to be funded by non-EAs / people who will give to farmed animal welfare no matter what.
I think that there are likely a couple exceptions to this (shrimp welfare, insect farming, and some other things that Coefficient cannot fund currently), but they are fairly small in scale, and have decent routes to funding.
I think the opportunity for impact for wild animal welfare is way bigger, and it’s much more “normal” (e.g. it seems like there are more viable interventions that are acceptable in the mainstream, don’t require significant lifestyle changes of people, etc, WAI has gotten some traction within conservation), and generally is more neglected.