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: 4,526
I’ve definitely heard speciesism used both ways, but I think it’s usually used without much reference to an exact view, but as a general “vibe” (which IMO makes it a not particularly useful word). But, I think people in the EA-side of the animal advocacy world tend to lean more toward the “it’s discriminatory to devalue animals purely because they aren’t a member of the human species” definition. I’d guess that most times its used, especially outside of EA, it’s something more like the “it’s discriminatory to not view all animals including humans as being of equal value” view but with a lot of fuzziness around it. So I’d guess it is somewhat context dependent on the speaker?
Sorry to just see this!
I agree that for many individuals, going vegan could be a good way to help animals! It’s not obvious to me that it is easier to do for most of those people than say, donating to a charity at a rate that roughly offsets the harm from it. I don’t really think the specific harm of “eating animals” is worse than the variety of other ways that we eat animals, so feel pretty neutral about veganism — it seems like one of many effective things one can do personally to help animals.
I basically don’t know if I believe we’ll find anything amazingly effective to do for farmed animals beyond cage free campaigns on this timeline, and those impact a pretty small portion of farmed animals.
I feel confused by this personally—I don’t think it makes sense that I’d have an obligation to bring positive lives into existence, and feel like there should be some symmetry here, but it doesn’t feel exactly the same. I also don’t think 35% is a small probability! It seems not unlikely to me that I have this kind of obligation.
I think EAs won it because they spent a lot of money on things that actually worked (e.g. cage-free campaigns) instead of wasting money on diet change advocacy that wasn’t very effective, etc. And I think it was good because it actually did something to help animals! I generally just think the EA side of the animal welfare space is more interested in evidence, and less in ideological purity. These both seem very good to me!
Not really, primarily because I don’t think the animal welfare world currently has the organizational competency to do any of them successfully at that scale, and not shoot itself in the foot while doing so, with the potential exception of the advance market commitments. I don’t think the existing groups have the organizational competency to handle the ~$200M they already receive well, and think the majority that money is already being spent in expectedly worse ways than giving to GiveWell top charities, even if the best animal stuff is incredibly cost-effective. I think that the movement could get there at some point. But if I imagine that much money going to any existing group to be spent in the next 2 years I think it would mostly be wasted.
I think many of these ideas seem feasible in the longrun, and are viable candidates for what to try, though I just generally think that farmed animal welfare is significantly less tractable than wild animal welfare or invertebrate welfare in the longrun, so would rather the funds went to scaling those fields instead of farmed animal welfare. Also, it is not obvious to me that lots of these ideas will beat out global health charities, though I think blue sky thinking is good.
Also just generally, most of those ideas are ones that don’t need to be implemented at scale? E.g. Healthier Hens doesn’t seem like it has been able to demonstrate that it is cost-effective to donors at a small scale. Why would scaling it up 1000x go better? It seems like if these ideas could absorb $100M, many could be tried now. The one that hasn’t been tried at that scale is advance market commitments, but I think the track record for alternative proteins doesn’t look great in general right now, and it isn’t obvious to me that R&D is the main barrier — see the margarine issues.
I also generally think lots of untried ideas look good on paper, but will probably not end up being effective if tried. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try them, but I think the bar has to be higher than “beats GiveWell in expectation from current evidence,” because the uncertainty is also a lot higher.
I think that if I were allocating this funding, there is a very low chance I’d choose to allocate any significant portion of it to farmed animal welfare, given that it isn’t nearly as neglected as other larger scale animal issues, and I don’t think there are good opportunities on the horizon at scales larger than OpenPhil’s animal welfare budget. If OpenPhil stopped funding animal welfare entirely, I’d likely want to see something like $50M going to farmed animal welfare, and almost entirely to corporate campaigns for shrimp as well as some cage-free clean up work, and maybe something in the near future on fish that no one has figured out yet.
If I had to guess at “the fastest way we could spend $100M on animals extremely effectively”, I’m think it will be something like putting some research into insecticide interventions and scaling them a lot, and definitely nothing implemented by existing farmed animal groups. If there was anything in the farmed animal space, it would be research, but again—I’m skeptical there are good opportunities beyond what OpenPhil can already fund.
I feel pretty disappointed by a lot of the above—I spent several years professionally working on corporate campaigns, and am as animal friendly as they come, but I’ve just heavily decreased my confidence in the actual scale of tractable opportunities to improve farmed animal welfare as a whole over the last few years — in large part because it seems like very little has worked despite lots of money being poured into the space.
There are 7 days left to sign up for the first month of this experiment!
As of right now, the marginal $25 influences the allocation of about $253 in expectation.
Nice—yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if that period is slower than the last ~5 years, as a lot of the capital that has gone into the space seems like it has been spent, and it doesn’t seem like recent capital inflows have been as high. My 4-7x guess is based on a crude estimate done by Sagar Shah of how much production capacity can be bought with the capital that companies have available to do it, with a delay baked in for construction time.
What do you mean by “invest” here?
I meant more literally, put $100M in an investment account to save for good future animal opportunities vs spending on the best global health interventions today. I’m not certain it’s actually a 50⁄50 item, but was trying to find a mid point.
Maybe there are better global health interventions that can absorb $100M over time than GiveWell recommendations, though.)
I don’t really know enough about global health work to say—but I’d guess there are some novel medical things seem plausibly able to:
Appear over the next few decades
Require a lot of cash to scale up
Could be really cost-effective
Yes correct—just the Insects as Food and Feed industry. Though note these estimates were from 2020 - my best guess is that there are at least 4-7x as many insects farmed by the industry today (mainly because it’s going through a lot of industrialization / scale up, and a bunch of new major factories have opened in the last few years).
Yep, I voted strongly agree from seeing that, though I wouldn’t necessarily agree with the non-footnoted version, and without all these caveats.
In the abstract I think this would be good, but I’m skeptical that there are great opportunities in the animal space that can absorb this much funding right now! This is like, doubling the EA funds going to animal welfare stuff. I think I would strongly agree with claims like:
Conditional on there being several years of capacity build up, animal welfare would use the funds more effectively.
From a pure EA lens, some animal welfare spending is many times more cost-effective than the most effect global health interventions.
The current most effective $100M spent on animal welfare is more cost-effective than the current most effective $100M spend on global health.
I think something that would be closer to 50⁄50 for me (or I haven’t thought about it actually, but on its face seem closer to a midpoint):
It would be better to invest an extra $100M to spend on animal welfare in the future than spending it on global health now.
I’d strongly disagree with a claim like:
It would be better to spend an extra $100M in the next two years on animal welfare than on global health
So I listed myself as strongly agreeing, but with all these caveats.
Thanks! This is a great point. I’ll work on getting some German-deductible options on the list for all categories for future months, but also can confirm that the pool has up to $1,500 (and potentially more) in donation swappable dollars to help navigate this right now.
Thanks! That’s a great question and something I should figure out how to handle. I’ll think about the ideal implementation of this and include something for November, but I think if it comes up for October participants:
Pledge in USD, stating the other currency amount planned to give in the alternate currency (spot converted on the day of the pledge) in the comments.
Give them amounts to give in their preferred currency using that rate.
Once donated and receipts are submitted, I’ll spot convert at the time they donated, and if the dollar weakened relative to their original pledge substantially, backstop it.
Nice! This is great pushback! I think that most my would be responses are covered by other people, so will add one thing just on this:
Even absent these general considerations, you can see it just by looking at the major donors we have in EA: they are generally not lottery winners or football players, they tend to be people who succeeded in entrepreneurship or investment, two fields which require accurate views about the world.
My experience isn’t this. I think that I have probably engaged with something like ~15 >$1M donors in EA or adjacent fields. Doing a brief exercise in my head of thinking through everyone I could, I got to something like:
~33% inherited wealth / family business
~40% seems like they mostly “earned it” in the sense that it seems like they started a business or did a job well, climbed the ranks in a company due to their skills, etc. To be generous, I’m also including people here who were early investors in crypto, say, where they made a good but highly speculative bet at the right time.
~20% seems like the did a lot of very difficult work, but also seem to have gotten really really lucky—e.g. grew a pre-existing major family business a lot, were roommates with Mark Zuckerberg, etc.
Obviously we don’t have the counterfactuals on these people’s lucky breaks, so it’s hard for me to guess what the world looks like where they didn’t have this lucky break, but I’d guess it’s at least at a much lower giving potential.
7% I’m not really sure.
So I’d guess that even trying to do this approach, only like 50% of major donors would pass this filter. Though it seems possible luck also played a major role for many of those 50% too and I just don’t know about it. I’m surprised you find the overall claim bizarre though, because to me it often feels somewhat self-evident from interacting with people from different wealth levels within EA, where it seems like the best calibrated people are often like, mid-level non-executives at organizations, who neither have information distortions from having power but also have deep networks / expertise and a sense of the entire space. I don’t think ultra-wealthy people have worse views, to be clear — just that wealth and having well-calibrated, thoughtful views about the world seem unrelated (or to the extent they are correlated, those differences stop being meaningful below the wealth of the average EA donor), and certainly a default of “cause prioritization is directly downstream of the views of the wealthiest people” is worse than many alternatives.
I strongly agree about the clunkiness of this approach though, and many of the downsides you highlight. I think in my ideal EA, there would be lots and lots of various things like this tried, and good ones would survive and iterate, and just generally EAs experiment with different models for distributing funding, so this is my humble submission to that project.
I agree! I think that these donors are probably the least incentivized to do this, but also where a the most value would come from. Though I’ll note that as of me writing this comment the average is well above 10x the minimum donation.
Yeah, I agree that this seems tricky. I thought about sub-causes, but also worried they’d just make it really burdensome to participate every month.
I ended up making a Discord for participants, and added a channel where people can explain their allocation, so my hope is that this lets people who have strong sub-cause prioritization make the case to it for donors. Definitely interested in thoughts on how to improve this though, and seems worth exploring further.
Oh interesting. Great catch, thanks! Added.
Announcing Equal Hands — an experiment in democratizing effective giving.
After some discussions with someone offline that were clarifying, I want to clarify my decrease in confidence in the statement, “Farmed vertebrate welfare should be an EA focus”.
I think my view is slightly more complicated than this implies. I think that given that OpenPhil and non-EA donors are basically able to fund what seem like the entirety of the good opportunities in this space, I don’t think these groups are that talent constrained, and it seems like the best bets (e.g. corporate campaigns) will continue to have decreasing cost-effectiveness, new animal-focused talent should probably be mostly going into earning-to-give for invertebrates/WAW, and that donations should mostly go to groups there or the EA AWF (which should in turn mostly fund invertebrates and WAW). I don’t think farmed vertebrate welfare should be the default way that EAs recommend to help animals
I mean something like directly implementing an intervention vs finance/HR/legal/back office roles, so ops just in the nonprofit sense.
Yeah, I think there are probably parts of EA that will look robustly good in the long run, and part of the reason I think that it’s less likely EA as a whole will be less likely to be positive (and more likely to be neutral or negative) are that actions in other areas of EA could impact those areas negatively. Though this could cut both in favor of or against GHD work. I think just having a positive impact is quite hard, even more so when doing a bunch of uncorrelated things when some of them have major downside risks.
I think it is pretty unlikely that FTX harm outweighs good done by EA on its own, but it seems easy enough to imagine that conditional on EA’s net benefit being barely above neutral (which for other reasons mentioned above seems pretty possible to me, along with EA increasingly working on GCRs which directly increases the likelihood EA work ends up being net-negative or neutral, even if in expectation that shift is positive value), that the scale of the stress / financial harm caused by EA via FTX, outweighs that remaining benefit. And then there is brand damage to effective giving, etc.
But yeah, I agree that my original statement above seems a lot less likely than FTX just contributing to an overall portfolio of harm or work that doesn’t matter in the longrun from EA.
Nice—that’s good to know—I was under the impression that it was a good idea, but didn’t get much traction.