Principal — Good Structures
I previously co-founded and served as Executive Director at Wild Animal Initiative, and was the COO of Rethink Priorities from 2020 to 2024.
abrahamrowe
Karma: 5,140
On deference to funders
I think that the animal welfare space is especially opaque for strategic reasons. For example, most of the publicly available descriptions of corporate animal welfare strategy are, in my opinion, not particularly accurate. I think most of the actual strategy becoming public would make it significantly less effective. I don’t think it is kept secret with a deep amount of intentionality, but more like there is a shared understanding among many of the best campaigners to not share exactly how they are working outside a circle of collaborators to avoid strategies losing effectiveness.
I think outside organizations’ ability to evaluate the effectiveness of individual corporate campaigning organizations (including ACE unfortunately) is really low due to this (I think that evaluating ecosystems of organizations / the intervention as a whole is easier though).
(I don’t really want to engage much on this because I found it pretty emotionally draining last time — I’ll just leave this comment and stop here):
I think asking for feedback prior to publishing these seems really important. To be clear, I’m very sympathetic to the overall claim! I suspect that most published estimates of the impact of marginal dollars in the farmed animal space are way too high (maybe even by orders of magnitude)I also think the items you raise are important questions for Sinergia to answer!
But, I think getting feedback would be really helpful for you:You cite multiple places where Sinergia claims impact, but you cite evidence to the contrary, such as company statements on their sites either existing prior to Sinergia’s claimed date, or not existing at all.
The experience of corporate campaigners universally is that the degree to which you should take company statements about their animal welfare commitments seriously is relatively low. It’s just a regular fact of corporate campaigning in many countries that companies have statements on their websites that they either don’t follow or don’t intend to follow. Often, companies have weaselly language that lets them get out of a commitment, e.g. “we aspire to do X by Y year,” etc.
The language in company statements matter a ton — when I ran corporate campaigns, a major US restaurant company I was campaigning on put up a verbatim version of the Better Chicken Commitment with all of the specifics removed (e.g. “reduce stocking density” instead of “reduce stocking density to X lbs/sqft”) and did nothing in their supply chain. This allowed them to tell journalists / others that we were just lying that they had not made the commitment. I worry that Google translating pages loses nuance that might matter here. Google Translating Brazilian law also seems like a huge stretch as evidence — and taking the law at face value as a non-Brazilian lawyer (and not evidence about the interpretation and enforcement of the law) seems like a mistake.
Getting a commitment on the website is important, but it’s only a portion of work. Actually getting the company to make the change is way more work.
I know nothing about the JBS case, but can tell you that there are many times where a company has a commitment, then behind the scenes the actual work is several years of getting them to honor it. It seems completely plausible, and even routine, that the actual impact credit should go to an organization working to get a company to act on an existing policy, as opposed to getting them to put up the policy in the first place. I don’t know anything about Sinergia’s claims here, but seems totally plausible that much of their impact comes from this invisible work that you wouldn’t learn about without asking them.
I suspect that in your critique, some of your claims are warranted, but others might have much more complicated stories behind them, such as an organization getting a company to actually follow through on a commitment, or getting a law to be enforced. I think that feedback would help draw out where these critiques are accurate, and where they are missing the mark.
Equal Hands — 2 Month Update
Equal Hands is an experiment in democratizing effective giving. Donors simulate pooling their resources together, and voting how to distribute them across cause areas. All votes count equally, independent of someone’s ability to give.
You can learn more about it here, and sign up to learn more or join here. If you sign up before December 16th, you can participate in our current round. As of December 7th, 2024 at 11:00pm Eastern time, 12 donors have pledged $2,915, meaning the marginal $25 donor will move ~$226 in expectation to their preferred cause areas.
In Equal Hands’ first 2 months, 22 donors participated and collectively gave $7,495.01 democratically to impactful charity. Including pledges for its third month, that number will likely increase to at least 24, and $10,410.01
Across the first two months, the gifts made by cause area and pseudo-counterfactual effect (e.g. if people had given their own money in line with their voting, rather than following the democratic outcome) has been:
Animal welfare: $3,133.35, a decrease of $1,662.15
Global health: $1,694.85, a decrease of $54.15
Global catastrophic risks: $2,093.91, an increase of $1,520.16
EA community building: $319.38, an increase of $179.63
Climate change: $253.52, an increase of $16.52
Interestingly, the primary impact has been money being reallocated from animal welfare to global catastrophic risks. From the very little data that we have, this primarily appears to be because animal welfare-motivated donors are much more likely to pledge large amounts to democratic giving, while GCR-motivated donors are more likely to sign up (or are a larger population in general), but are more likely to give smaller amounts.
I’m not sure why exactly this is! The motivation should be the same regardless of cause area for small donors — in expectation, the average vote has moved over $200 to each donor’s preferred causes across both of the first two months, so I would expect it to be motivating for donors from various backgrounds, but maybe GCR-motivated donors are more likely to think in this kind of reasoning.
GCR donors haven’t had as high-retention over the first three months of signups, so currently the third month looks like it might look a bit different — funding is primarily flowing out of animal welfare, and going to a mix of global health and GCRs.
The total administrative time for me to operate Equal Hands has been around 45 minutes per month. I think it will remain below 1 hour per month with up to 100 donors, which is somewhat below what I expected when I started this project.
We’d love to see more people join! I think this project works best by having a larger number of donors, especially people interested in giving above the minimum of $25. If you want to learn more or sign up, you can do so here!
Nice! And yeah, I shouldn’t have said downstream. I mean something like, (almost) every intervention has wild animal welfare considerations (because many things end up impacting wild animals), so if you buy that wild animal welfare matters, the complexity of solving WAW problems isn’t just a problem for WAI — it’s a problem for everyone.
I have seen this before, and wondered if it is conflation with Humane Society of the United States (which is often called the Humane Society). Also, many local animal shelters are named “Humane Society”. I’d guess this phrase would have very high recognition in the US.
Thanks! That’s useful and makes sense! Appreciate the quick response
Minor question—I noticed that the website states for the climate fund that the same donation will help a lot more animals than the impact fund (over 2x as many—and mostly driven by chickens and pigs). I know the numbers are likely low confidence, but just curious how you’re thinking about those, as to me it was unintuitive to have one labelled “impact fund” that straightforwardly looks worse on animal impacts than the climate fund (and also worse on the climate side!). I didn’t quite understand why this was happening from looking at the calculations page (though from the charities in each, I definitely have the sense that the impact fund is better for animals!)
I voted for Wild Animal Initiative, followed by Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation (I have COIs with WAI and Arthropoda).
All three cannot be funded by OpenPhil/GVF currently, despite WAI/SWP being heavily funded previously by them.
I think that wild animal welfare is the single most important animal welfare issue, and it remains incredibly neglected, with just WAI working on it exclusively.
Despite this challenge, WAI seems to have made a ton of progress on building the scientific knowledge needed to actually make progress on these issues.
Since founding and leaving WAI, I’ve just become increasingly optimistic about there being a not-too-long-term pathway to robust interventions to help wild animals, and to wild animal welfare going moderately mainstream within conservation biology/ecology.
Wild animal welfare is downstream from ~every other cause area. If you think it is a problem, but that we can’t do anything about it because the issue is so complicated, then the same is true of the wild animal welfare impacts of basically all other interventions EAs pursue. This seems like a huge issue for knowing the impact of our work. No one is working on this except WAI, and no other issues seem to cut across all causes the way wild animal welfare does.
SWP seems like they are implementing the most cost-effective animal welfare intervention that is remotely scalable right now.
In general, I favor funding research, because historically OpenPhil has been far more likely to fund research than other funders, and it is pretty hard for research-focused organizations to compete with intervention-focused organizations in the animal funding scene, despite lots of interventions being downstream from research. Since Arthropoda also does scientific field building / research funding, I added it to my list.
This is starting to feel pretty bad faith, so I’m actually going to stop engaging.
(Responding because this is inaccurate): My claim in the comment above was that you haven’t provided any evidence that:
5 / 11 (or more) ACE top charities are not effective
That animals are suffering as a result of ACE recommendations
Which remains the case — I look forward to you producing it.
Wait, those are related to each other though—if we haven’t seen the full impact of their previous actions, we haven’t yet seen their historical cost-effectiveness in full! Also, you cite these as reasons the project should be dismissed in your post—you have a section literally called “Legal Impact for Chickens Did Not Achieve Any Favorable Legal Outcomes, Yet ACE Rated Them a Top Charity” which reads to me that you believe that it is bad they were rated a Top Charity, and make these same arguments (and no others) in the section, suggesting that you think this evidence means they should be dismissed.
This is not what we are trying to do. We simply critiqued the way that ACE calculated historic cost-effectiveness, and how ACE gave Legal Impact for Chickens a relatively high historic cost-effectiveness rating despite have no historic success.
FWIW this seems great—excited to see more comprehensive evaluations. Yeah, I agree with many of your comments here on the granular level — it seems you found something that is a potential issue for how ACE does (or did) some aspects of their evaluations, and publishing that is great! I think we just disagree on how important it is?
By the way, I’m ending further engagement on this (though feel free to leave a response if useful!) just because I already find the EA Forum distracting from other work, and don’t have time this week to think about this more. Appreciate you going through everything with me!
I don’t find that evidence particularly compelling on its own, no. Lots of projects cost more than 1M or take more than a few years to have success. I don’t see why those things would be cause to dismiss a project out of hand. I don’t really buy social movement theories of change for animal advocacy, but many people do, and it just seems like many social movement-y things take a long time to build momentum, and legal and research-focused projects take forever to play out. Things I’d want to look at to form a view on this (though to be clear, I plausibly agree with you!):
How much lawsuits of this type typically cost
What the base rate for success is for this kind of work
How long this kind of work typically takes to get traction
Has anyone else tried similar work on misleading labelling or whatever? Was it effective or not?
Has LIC’s work inspired other lawsuits, as ACE reported might be a positive side effect?
I don’t think we disagree that much here, except how much these things matter — I don’t really care about ACE’s ability to analyze cost-effectiveness outside broad strokes because I think the primary benefits of organizations like ACE is shifting money to more cost-effective things within the animal space, which I do believe ACE does. I also don’t mind ACE endorsing speculative bets that don’t pay off — I think there are many things that were worth paying for in expectation that don’t end up helping any animals, and will continue to be, because we don’t really know very many effective ways to help animals so the information value of trying new things is high.
But to answer your question specifically, I’d be very skeptical of anyone’s numbers on future cost-effectiveness, ACE’s or yours or my own, because I think this is an issue that has historically been extremely difficult to estimate cost-effectiveness for. I’m not convinced that’s the right way to approach identifying effective animal interventions, in part because it is so hard to do well. I don’t really think ACE is making cost-effectiveness estimates here though—it seems much more like trying to get a rough sense of relative cost-effectiveness, which, putting aside the methodological issues you’ve raised, seems like the right approach to me, but only a small part of the information I’d want to know where money should move in animal advocacy.
I don’t really have a strong view about LIC—as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in the comments, I’m skeptical in general that very EA donors should give to farmed vertebrate welfare issues in the near future. But I don’t find this level of evidence particularly compelling on its own. I think I feel confused about the example you’re giving because it isn’t about hypothetical cost-effectiveness, it’s about historic cost-effectiveness, where what matters are the counterfactuals.
I broadly think the critique is interesting, and again, seems like probably an issue with the methodology, but on its own doesn’t seem like reason to think that ACE isn’t identifying good donation opportunities, because things besides cost-effectiveness also matter here.
From this post, it seems like you’re trying to calculate historic cost-effectiveness and rate charities exclusively on that (since you haven’t published an evaluation of an animal charity yet I could be wrong here though). My understanding of what ACE is trying to do with its evaluations as a whole is identify where marginal dollars might be most useful for animal advocacy, and move money from less effective opportunities to those. Cost-effectiveness might be one component of that, but is far from the only one (e.g. intervention scalability might matter, having a diversity of types of opportunities to appeal to different donors, etc.). It’s pretty easy to imagine scenarios where you wouldn’t prefer to only look at cost-effectiveness of individual charities when making recommendation, even if that’s what matters in the end. It’s also easy to imagine scenarios where recommending less effective opportunities leads to better outcomes to animals—maybe installing shrimp stunners is super effective, but only some donors will give to it. Maybe it can only scale to a few M per year but you influence more money than that. Depending on your circumstances, a lot more than cost-effectiveness of specific interventions matters for making the most effective recommendations.
My understanding is also that ACE doesn’t see EAs as its primary audience (but I’m less certain about this). This is a reason I’m excited about your project—seems nice to have “very EA” evaluations of charities in addition to ACE’s. But, I also imagine it would be hard to get charities to participate in your evaluation process if you don’t run the evaluations by them in advance, which could make it hard for you to get information to do what you’re trying to do, unless you rely on the information ACE collects, which then puts you in an awkward position of making a strong argument against an organization you might need to conduct evaluations.
My understanding is ACE has tried to do something that’s just cost-effectiveness analysis in the past (they used to give probability distributions for how many animals were helped, for example). But it’s really difficult to do confidently for animal issues, and that’s part of the reason it’s only a portion of the whole picture (along with other factors like I mention above).
…we have reviewed 5 of ACE’s “Top 11 Animal Charities to Donate to in 2024” and only one of them (Shrimp Welfare Project) appears to be an effective charity for helping animals. ACE’s poor evaluation process leads to ineffective charities receiving recommendations, and many animals are suffering as a result.
I understand these are forthcoming, but no evidence is provided for this entire part—part of the reason I pushed on this is I think seeing your alternative evaluations would be very helpful for interpreting the strength of the critique of ACE. Without seeing them, I can’t evaluate the latter half of the quoted text. And in my eyes, if these are similar to the evaluation here of LIC, it’s pretty far from demonstrating that ineffective charities are receiving recommendations, etc. And, given that you’ve only evaluated <50% of their charities so far, it seems preemptive to make the overall claim. I think the overall claim is very possibly true, but again, I think to make the argument that animals are directly suffering as a result of this, you’d have to demonstrate that those charities are worse than other donation options, that donors would give to the better options, etc.
Thanks! My wording in the above message was imprecise, but I mean something like farmed vertebrates. SWP is probably among the two most important things to fund, in my opinion.
Basically I think the size of good opportunities in farmed animal advocacy is smaller than OpenPhil’s grantmaking budget and there are few scalable interventions, though I don’t think I want to go into most the reasons publicly. Given that they’ve stopped funding many of what I believe are more cost-effective projects, and that EA donors are basically the only people willing to fund those, EA donors should be mostly inclined to fund things OpenPhil can’t fund instead.
So some combination of 1+2 (for farmed vertebrates) + other factors
(I responded privately to this but wrote up some related reflections a while ago here).
That’s too bad! I’ll give this feedback to Every.org as they are a moderately aligned nonprofit themselves, and are really receptive to feedback in my experience. FWIW, using them saves organizations a pretty massive amount of bureaucracy / paperwork / compliance-y stuff, so I hope there is a way to use them that can be beneficial for the donors.