Knowing Matt, I’d wager he’s asking why your p(bee sentience) is so low
Aidan Alexander
Karma: 2,327
Read the Rethink research in its entirety and you’ll see the section with our reflections on the findings. It explains how the research influenced our strategy, and why campaigns like this can still make sense in light of it. We care a lot about what will actually work to drive donations — that’s why we requested this piece of research be done in the first place
Also our thousands of donors over the past 12 months. Many of them email us expressing that our compassion calculator is exactly what they’re been looking for and/or that they’ve been put off by other animal advocates in the past and find our website refreshing.
Reflections on FarmKind’s January media campaign
I took a ~3/4 pay cut to work in EA (and that’s before accounting for the upward trajectory of my previous salary versus my static one working in EA). Most EAs I know could be earning a lot more if they worked in the for profit sector based on their education and experience.
I don’t think this is the right question, as we should be just trying to encourage everyone to do more good rather than telling everyone to get to one “good enough” point and then stop. Also, being vegan is not the biggest thing someone can do for animals, so focusing our commendations on that seems like setting the wrong norm/incentive
“Are FarmKind claiming that Veganuary is one of those organisations?” — No
“I think if EA’s on the forum feel uncomfortable about this, the general public is likely to take it even worse than us”—I really disagree with this. EA’s values and sensibilities are very different to the average person. Things that EAs consider horrifically callous are normal to the average person and vice versa.
Examples of the former: eating meat, keeping all your wealth for yourself, ‘charity begins at home’
Examples of the latter: measuring impact and saying we shouldn’t give resources to organizations that don’t perform well against these measurements, donating to help shrimp rather than people, donating to help strangers overseas rather than your local community, expressing support for billionaires who give away some of their wealth
There hasn’t been backlash to this campaign from average people, only EAs and animal advocates.
Haha kayfabe is exactly right. Let’s not spoil it for the fans
Veganuary seeming against it is part of the bit. These media outlets hate Veganuary and wouldn’t cover it if they thought it was what they wanted. We (FarmKind) have an announcement coming tomorrow explaining the context behind this campaign but the TL;DR is that it is not encouraging meat eating, it’s encouraging donating as another option for people who aren’t willing to change their diet, and generating coverage for Veganuary who have a harder time getting in the media each year without a new hook
Strong agree from FarmKind’s perspective. An equal bugbear for me is that to the extent EA orgs focus on comms, they’re insufficiently focused on how to communicate to non-EAs. There seems to be a resistance to confront the fact that to grow we need to appeal to normal people and that means speaking to them the way that works for them, rather than what would work for us
One very important problem (that I don’t have the solution to) is that being “an EA funder” is not binary—all sorts of funders make grants to charities that would be considered EA (and “EA charity” is a fraught definition itself but let’s bracket that). It seems entirely plausible to me, nay perhaps probable (given that the Randomstas and evidence-based GHD predates EA) that the majority of “EA funding” is coming from grantmakers that aren’t being counted here. This would render any trends we see in the data in this post not reflective of what’s actgually happening with “EA funding”.
A bottom-up charity (or specific project or even grant) based method would probably be a lot better (although very hard and not your responsibility to create).
Anyway, meta is hard. Good work for creating this resource!
For those excited about Shrimp Welfare Project, FarmKind is hosting a fundraiser for them from International Shrimpact Day™ (25th November, 2025) through until Giving Tuesday (2nd December, 2025).
There will be ~25 blog posts on Substack making the case for donating to shrimp, as well as a live debate between Jeff Sebo and Lyman Stone (moderated by Peter Singer) on whether donating to shrimp is a good idea, and a light-hearted debate between Bentham’s Bulldog and Jeff Maurer (moderated by Josh Szeps) on whether donating to SWP or GiveDirectly is a the better idea.
You can follow the fundraiser here :)
We hope to raise $100k (and redeem $50k in contingent matching funding from a generous Anthropic employee) 🦐📈
Thanks for writing this! It seems all the more important to get this right given the trend that the beings on the edge of our moral circle tend to be the most numerous, meaning that if we take the possibility of their sentience seriously, we may spend quite large amounts of resources trying to help them. Seems worth trying to figure out whether beings on the edge of our moral circles are basically all that matters or don’t matter at all!
Agreed! We’re trying to find people with audiences who are sympathetic the cause but unwilling or unable to change their diet (e.g. Sam Harris) and provide them with a non-diet-related solution that they can speak to their audience about without having to fear backlash due to perceived moralising about people’s diets
I have no idea about that. I’m not talking about whether cage free or broiler work is a better idea for a new organization — I’m answering your question about whether an org that started off doing caged free might expand to broiler :)
No, not to many animal advocates and vegans. I’ve had plenty reach out to check my “vegan credentials” to determine whether (in their view) I’m “on their side”
It’d be up to the founders, but I’d guess it would make sense to focus on layers in the Middle East until hitting diminishing returns there. After that, how to scale would likely depend on what the team’s comparative advantage is: Expertise and connections within the Middle East context (such that different asks in that context makes sense) or expertise at cage free campaigns specifically (such that the same ask in a different context makes sense)
It is valid but I think it’s being downvoted because (a) Vasco posts the same point so often and so widely that some people come to view it as spam, (b) this is on a public forum and is the kind of view that is perfect to be used by bad-faith EA critics and journalists to paint EA in a negative light in media.
Although, to Vasco’s credit, this comment is much improved on the optics front compared to previous ones
Yep Ben is right. We did turn the tabloid coverage into further deeper coverage and were on our way to the North Star but leaned out of controversy to a degree that killed our momentum. Of course we don’t know what would have happened otherwise, and it should certainly be characterized as a “low probability bet” because trying to land media hits is inherently “hits-based”, but this was a reasonable PR strategy that our two staff who both have ample PR experience devised. I don’t think we should put much stock in our armchair PR intuitions