Director of Operations at GovAI. I have a blog about nonprofit ops and strategy.
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.
I’d be in favor of something like “>15 karma + many curated new posts by the moderation team” as Caleb suggested below as a filtering option to try to resolve the issue of people just filtering out 100% of new posts and new posts never rising. E.g. I imagine you all could often whitelist certain users or just glance at a post and tell that it is worth pushing through without reading it (and generally I feel pro-heavier moderation on the Forum especially if it is focused on maintaining quality).
I’m excited to see this happen! Some welfare tech ideas seem really promising, and I think this is clearly a promising project — it’s great that it’s happening.
My biggest areas of uncertainty about welfare tech (which overlap with some you flagged and some of which apply to only some technologies):
I think that these kinds of projects risk distracting donors because of the double appeal of impact + returns on investment.
I think cultivated meat and alternative proteins did this for the last decade, and a lot of money that might otherwise have been more effectively deployed was invested in unpromising companies and on an unpromising theory of change (and I think I am on record saying this at the time so am not just trying to claim retrospective credit!).
I think this was doubly true because if these companies were especially promising, they would (and did, at first) attract non-counterfactually valuable funding (e.g. non-EA venture capital, etc). I’d be very excited about welfare tech funded by non-EA money, and am moderately less excited about it when funded by EAs (though given that there is plausibly more funding coming online than can be spent effectively, this is less of an issue).
Jevons paradox just does seem challenging for this work — I think there are probably many technologies where it will be less relevant, but it seems plausible that most things impacting pre-slaughter mortality on farms will face it enough that it could be a significant concern for many interventions. Unfortunately, these might often be the best targets for welfare tech on fisheries and farms. I’m much more excited about slaughter-focused welfare tech for this reason, and am excited projects in this space are on your radar. But, slaughter tech seems less ripe for for-profits because there is less reason for producers to pay for it.
Animal welfare science is advancing at a pace far behind what we might need to make lots of welfare improvements. E.g. shrimp stunning evidence is incredibly thin, and the best, most recent evidence suggests that correct implementation really matters for whether or not we’re stunning or just electrocuting shrimp. I worry that accelerating tech before the science is settled in many cases risks just cementing further bad practices, and we’ll realize it too late. The companies being for-profits, because they can’t be reined in by funders if they are making a mistake, could make this worse (and I’m not sure of ways to design for-profits with strong mission-lock, outside of having their ownership run through a non-profit (which sometimes fails), and benefit corporations don’t really seem to work).
The best examples we have of welfare tech so far (shrimp stunning and in-ovo sexing) seem like they were driven by advocacy (or direct delivery), not for-profits. E.g. shrimp stunner deployment seems mostly driven via SWP just buying them for farms and then ICAW, etc. getting corporate commitments, not farms buying them themselves (even if later advocacy pressure started shifting that). Similarly, it seems like retailer commitments and policy were the initial major drivers in getting in-ovo sexing off the ground. I could imagine much of this work will be most effective when paired with appropriate advocacy to advance it.
Thanks so much for doing this! Seems like a great thing to try, and exciting to see the technology that will come out of it!
Thanks Michael!
I definitely agree—I have this sense of “am I complaining about something real, or is this just nostalgia for an inevitable change that comes with more funding?”
I also don’t really have good answers here on what to do about it. A slightly hesitant/low-confidence thought (because I’m recommending Continental philosophy on the EA Forum) is that I think Distinction is the best book for thinking about EA-as-a-social-scene, and think Distinction-y/Spheres of Justice-style interventions are probably going to be the best ones (reduce the number of spheres of power individuals have — i.e. try to not give people who have lots of financial resources greater cultural/social power, try to not give people who have cultural/social power lots of financial resources, don’t reinforce norms of “cultural elite” within EA in the pipelines for new people, etc). But I think this is quite hard to do, especially from the bottom up.
Hey! Apologies for the delay. You can support our work here. Thank you!
Thanks James! I liked the old piece. I have no idea how to handle the pay questions: I think my default answer is something like “pay people reasonably well such that they can save for retirement, have families, etc” but that view just collapses when you’re competing with the market in many ways. And I think the AI space feels it especially hard — they have to compete directly with labs for talent.
But yeah, I think I don’t really know how to sit with all of this. I think maybe it’s just a set of feelings I don’t want to be unsaid. But I also worry that things that have pushed the community to find really interesting, unusual opportunities have come from the community being narrow, high-trust, and high-truth seeking, which might change with the growth.
I definitely agree to some extent about FTX, though money did flow into some other spaces as well. But agree that I’m painting with too broad a brush there.
And definitely — I think I meant this post partially as a lamentation of what feels inevitable with funding. Our ability to make the world better might massively grow, but at the same time, it feels like something essential to EA’s past success (or at least, the culture and community that pushed it to do weird, fringe-y things that I think hold much of EA’s greatest promise) might be lost.
Thanks! I removed it!
Nice, that was useful. I agree that the downside to this is some risk of interventions not being robust. I’m not really sure how to think about that trade off—on the other hand, increasing our certainty could make it really hard to do any interventions at all (e.g. a world where we think nematodes matter, but don’t know if they have good or bad lives seems really hard to operate in).
On motivational trade-offs — I definitely agree that there is some evidence threshold that would change my mind. I’m not totally ruling this possibility out. But maybe directly answering your question — no, motivational trade offs alone wouldn’t change it I don’t think. But, I haven’t thought much about it, and not sure that position will hold up to scrutiny.
Math nitpicks are helpful, thanks! Both were right—just doing math too quickly :).
RE welfare comparisons: I could imagine a difference between us being relative confidence that empirical research will improve our understanding? I think I might be less bullish on this sort of work because I don’t feel confident we’ll meaningfully reduce our uncertainty about welfare ranges. But, I’m not confident in this. Would you expect the most useful work for reducing your own uncertainty to be philosophical or empirical?
RE nematodes: I agree that this isn’t clear cut in some sense, but I feel fairly confident that they should be bracketed out unless we significantly advance in our understanding of animal consciousness (and see above—maybe my own lack of confidence in our ability to make empirical progress on this is part of the reason I’m more confident in casting them aside).
RE cage-free: yes — I think the meaningful counterfactual is that money spent on cage free otherwise not being spent on animal welfare at all, or being spent in mostly useless ways, and I’d endorse cage-free campaigns over that most likely, despite agreeing with you on non-target uncertainty being high, but I haven’t thought about it much.
There is a (currently) non-public organization working on making this happen. If anyone is interested in learning more, feel free to reach out (we’re hiring)!
Yeah, I agree with all those being challenges here—I think I was mainly responding to what I perceive to be a push (maybe explicitly in this case) to reduce the options presented to new funders to a few funds with fairly similar views, which I think is possibly a strategic mistake, even if the alternative isn’t ideal either.
I think I feel less convinced than you that scaling most these are going to end up resulting in meaningful positive impact for more animals — the exception is welfare technology, which I’m quite excited about, but my impression is that the good opportunities here are pretty fundable right now.
To be clear, I also don’t think loads of money should go into neglected animals either (though on the margin I’m more excited about things here than FAW) — I think there is a lot more potential for helping animals in wild animal and invertebrate welfare, but there aren’t ways to absorb tons (e.g. tens of millions of dollars) of funding there either (at least not yet).
I generally in both cases am excited by a smaller, more highly coordinated and strategic movement (or set of movements) than a larger one, but I think more funding right now would be used primarily to try to make a bigger one. I’m guessing this is a lot of the crux between us. But, I also know that I’m a bit on my own island with these views at times, and am genuinely pro-pluralism in the space. So I appreciate you pushing on it so hard!
I think AI safety mostly can’t absorb new funding that effectively, except for political things (which maybe are complicated due to various backfire risks), but it also has a better track record so far than FAW which suggests it can use the money it has more effectively. But I’m not a partisan here really — at heart I’m an animal welfare person who mainly feels sad that it might be pretty hard to help more animals than we already are effectively.
For sure—I am quite negative on these marginal opportunities in FAW being good. To be clear, if there weren’t any funds primarily (or even partially) focused on farmed animal welfare, I’d make a bid for those to exist too rather than just funds for neglected animals / whatever it is I prefer (I’m not sure I even know). I think there shouldn’t just be one view / dominant position on how to help animals, multiple perspectives should get a seat at the table / we should make multiple types of bets, even those I disagree with because I’m sure I’m wrong about many things. I also agree that there would probably be a lot of wasted money under this model, but just think the higher upside offsets it.
I’d be happy to chat about views on FAW work specifically, but probably won’t here in detail (just because they are complicated and messy and hard to get into without talking about specific groups). At a high-level, I think that diet change work is basically intractable (or where it is tractable it just risks increasing chicken farming), and the vast majority of the value from welfare work is coming from the first $20M-$40M spent on it, in a pretty predictable way, such that marginal dollars are hard to spend effectively, and beyond those there isn’t anything super scalable it seems like. I think the climate/global heath analogies aren’t quite right, because the majority (maybe even large majority) of that money is spent in pretty ineffective ways — I probably wouldn’t be excited about marginal money to a random global development charity, vs a GiveWell top charity, which have much more limited room for more funding.
I disagree voted, because I don’t think it is a terrible policy / think it is a hard problem and they’ve solved it in probably the most reasonable way.
I think that it probably isn’t perfect and has a lot of issues, but pledged donations are counterfactual (no one would donate otherwise), while doing a direct work role is not as clearly counterfactual (the organization would usually probably hire someone else, but maybe they’d be less good than you, etc). I think that feels messy to litigate properly—in some cases doing direct work is way better than the counterfactual, but in others it might not be obvious, etc.
It just doesn’t seem clear cut how to resolve, and I think the explicit line of “you give away money that would otherwise be yours at this particular moment” seems like a fine way to slice it. If the pledge was “do the most good” pledge, I might agree, but then lots of other things besides taking a lower paying job or giving away money might count.
I’m pretty surprised by how high people are and that there are relatively few people in the middle (and I say this as a probably maximally invertebrate welfare friendly person who thinks we should spend lots of money on shrimp welfare but also only rated this question at 20%)! Interested in what’s leading to these views being so different and polarized. I guess my view for insects and other invertebrates is that the evidence we do have is very promising, but we really don’t have that much evidence.
Err towards applying for funding from an appropriate fund.
FWIW, I think this approach limits downside risk, as you outline, but really caps upside potential for EA. The existing funds are highly correlated with each other in values / perspectives on certain issues (e.g. I think it is quite bad that there isn’t an animal welfare-focused fund that is skeptical of the value of marginal dollars spent on farmed animal welfare, which I think is a reasonable position, and all of the AI funds seem to coordinate quite heavily). There just aren’t that many funds, they aren’t that diverse in viewpoint, and donations primarily going via funds concentrates power in EA in the hands of a few dozen people.
I think that I’d feel more excited about this approach if there were tons and tons of good funds with independent theses, but there aren’t. Maybe that means it is time for lots of people to start new funds. But by default, I expect everything going through funds to mean way less grift, yes, but also way less experimentation, less risk taking, and less divergence from consensus views.
FTX Future Fund, for all its issues / impacts on community dynamics, spurred a massive change in what people thought was on the table. The regrantor program in particular seemed like a genuinely massive improvement in democratizing EA, which, in my view, makes EA better and lets people do high risk/reward bets. There are downsides to that, including grift. But the push for funds, especially in animal welfare, seems like a fairly large mistake to me, and I think the end result will be a bunch of money wasted on marginal farmed animal interventions that Coefficient could have otherwise funded, or were obviously not worth funding.
I agree with the problems you outline in not going with the fund approach, but I don’t think the solutions being applied, especially on the fund side, are the right ones for doing the most good.
Very pro groups approaching fundraising with honesty and integrity though!
I generally find AI writing just a bit annoying — I think I found this harder to read than it would have been even if written by a not-super-skilled writer, because it triggered a “Ah, AI writing” negative reaction I’ve developed (though I did push through it and found the critique interesting). I’m not sure what triggers this, but I think a big part of it is being verbose while not being super clear. And then it also stylistically just sounds like a lot of other writing that I see these days.