Aidan Alexander

Karma: 1,703

Aidan Alexander Aug 7, 2024, 12:04 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: FarmKind (a new animal fundraising platform) is live – Please DON’T DONATE
What’s actually happening in the back end is what is laid out in the screenshot: The donor’s donation is split according to their chosen percentage, and then the bonus fund (which is an independent pool of money held by every.org) is disbursed to the favorite charity and the super-effective one.

Aidan Alexander Aug 7, 2024, 7:50 AM
1 point
2 ∶ 4
in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: FarmKind (a new animal fundraising platform) is live – Please DON’T DONATE
Hey Jeff, I just want to correct a couple of false claims: (a) The bonus WILL in part go their favorite charity, as you can see when you step through the donation process (see this screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/175IonBvB7uRDuZUCybJ50njnTMh5NV5n/view?usp=drivesdk). This is true of Giving Multiplier as well. (b) It is not the case that all bonus funds would otherwise go to help animals. We fundraise for our bonus fund from the same donor pool as our regular donors, encouraging them later to “pay forward” the match they received by supporting the bonus fund and encouraging others to donate. For this reason, much of the money in the fund would not have otherwise gone to animals or effective charities. In our case, our bonus fund was seeded by a friend’s birthday fundraiser, where most of the money was donated by their extended family who are not animal people or EAs.

I disagree with your other critiques, but don’t see a productive outcome or use of time in digging into it here, so I just wanted to correct those 2 factual misapprehensions.

Aidan Alexander Aug 6, 2024, 2:58 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David_R 🔸’s comment on: FarmKind (a new animal fundraising platform) is live – Please DON’T DONATE
Hi David, it’s great to hear you’re interested in supporting the Bonus Fund! I’d recommend playing around with the giving widget on the website to understand what donors get to decide, but in short:

They choose both a Favorite and Super-Effective charity to split their donation between. They can choose any U.S registered charity as their Favorite Charity, and they can choose from 6 individual charities (The Humane League, Fish Welfare Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project, Sinergia Animal, Dansk Vegetarisk Forening, Good Food Institute) or our Impact Fund (a combo of all 6) or Climate Fund (a combo of the last 3 I listed) as their Super-Effective Charity. The more of their donating they allocate to the Super-Effective Charity (as opposed to their Favorite) the larger the bonus they get, incentivising people to give more effectively and causing the vast majority of matching funding to go to the Super-Effective Charities.

You can also click on “More detail on how it works” at https://farmkind.giving/support-bonus-fund for more detail on how the system adds value.

Aidan Alexander Aug 3, 2024, 8:09 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: FarmKind (a new animal fundraising platform) is live – Please DON’T DONATE
Fixed—thanks

Aidan Alexander Jun 30, 2024, 2:53 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Give me feedback on a web app to encourage donations to animal welfare charities
Hey Luke, are you still moving ahead with this? I just stumbled across this post, and next month I’m launching a donation platform for animals (called Farmkind—https://farmkind.giving) that has this sort of “offset calculator” as one of it’s features, so we should coordinate!

Aidan Alexander Jun 30, 2024, 2:51 PM
16 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: How can we get the world to talk about factory farming?
Regarding offsetting, I am launching a donation platform for animals next month (as a recent graduate from Charity Entrepreneurship / AIM’s incubation program), which has ‘reducetarians’ as one of our target audiences, and we’ve build such an offset calculator. We’ll be trying to generate some earned media coverage at launch about donating as something other than diet change that people who care about fixing factory farming can do. We don’t be saying that people should donate instead of changing their diet, but that if they aren’t willing/able to reduce their animal consumption right now, there’s still something they can do.

We’ll need all the help we can get spreading the word about the platform and this calculator, so if you’d like to be updated when we launch so you can potentially spread the word, you can sign up to our mailing list at farmkind.giving

Aidan Alexander Apr 27, 2024, 10:01 PM
10 points
3 ∶ 4
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: If You’re Going To Eat Animals, Eat Beef and Dairy
I found going vegan very difficult so I relate to your experience but I think your argument for it not actually being the right thing for you to do on altruistic grounds is weak. It’s worth introspecting on the extent to which “focusing” on getting used to veganism entails a meaningful trade off with doing good. I think people’s lives and schedules have a lot more slack in them than we like to admit, and I think far from all of the time/energy put into being vegan would have otherwise been spent on altruism. Meanwhile, once you’re used to being vegan, you’re used to it forever. Is the amount of time/energy you’d need to invest (discounted for the fact that likely you wouldn’t otherwise be spending this all on altruism) not worth it to unlock the benefits for animals of being vegan for the rest of your life?

Lastly, this argument doesn’t account for the extent to which being vegan will actually fuel your altruism. Acting in accordance with your values is fulfilling in a way that can fuel you. Plus, your commitment to the belief that ‘helping animals should be a top priority’ will likely be stronger if your actions are in alignment with that belief, given our tendency to change our beliefs to be in harmony with our actions, reducing cognitive dissonance. I haven’t articulated this last point well, but I think it’s an important one. See Joey’s post on this concept here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DBcDZJhTDgig9QNHR/altruism-sharpens-altruism

If you’re open to giving veganism a go again I’m always happy to share tips or just lend you my ear as someone who tried for years and found it very hard :)

Aidan Alexander Apr 2, 2024, 11:01 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Bella’s comment on: 80,000 Hours has been putting much more resources into growing our audience
Thanks for the prompt response! DM’d you

Aidan Alexander Apr 2, 2024, 9:56 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: 80,000 Hours has been putting much more resources into growing our audience
Hi Bella, thank you for writing this up! Are you willing to share more granular performance data for the different marketing efforts to help other orgs estimate the expected cost and performance of paid advertising?

Aidan Alexander Mar 27, 2024, 9:37 PM
47 points
22 ∶ 3
in reply to: mildlyanonymous’s comment on: AIM Animal Initiatives
Hello! One point that seems important to make: “People in the space” being skeptical of a startup idea, or even being confident it’s a bad idea, is not good evidence that it’s a bad idea.
Whilst we can expect subject matter experts to be skeptical of ideas that turn out to be bad, we can also expect them to be skeptical of a lot of ideas that turn out to be good!
This is true of many extremely successful for-profit start-ups (it’s mentioned in Y-Combinator lectures a lot) and of non-profits as well, including many of CE’s most successful incubated charities. If i’m not mistaken, it’s even true of CE itself! When it’s co-founders asked experts for their advice when considering launching the Incubation Program, the majority view was that it was a bad idea. I, for one, am glad they didn’t listen! If you look around the room you’re in now, you’re almost certainly surrounded by a number of inventions that “people in the space” said were impossible or a bad idea. The job of an entrepreneur (or a researcher identifying start-up ideas for entrepreneurs) is to figure out when “people in the space” are wrong, or at least likely enough to be wrong for it to be worth trying.
So in conclusion: Track record of CE incubated charities—good indicator. Whether or not people in the space were skeptical—not a good indicator.

Aidan Alexander Dec 6, 2023, 11:56 AM
9 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Intervention Report: Oral Rabies Vaccination of Dogs
Great that you’ve taken the time to write this up even though the conclusion was not to recommend

Aidan Alexander Nov 16, 2023, 6:48 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: Maternal Health Initiative—Marginal Funding & 1st Year in Review
Also, as Karen Levy pointed out in her ep on the 80k podcast, adoption by LMIC governments effectively means the taxpayers of these countries are the ones to pay. Sustained service by an internationally funded charity represents a desirable wealth transfer to LMICs. Better than the charity graduating from being funded by EAs to being funded by LMIC governments would be for it to graduate to being funded by big funders with cheap counterfactuals like USAID.

(To play devil’s advocate to myself: If government adoption means capacity building in LMIC healthcare systems then that’s great compared to dependence on sustained service from international NGOs. Maybe the best of both worlds is government adoption with ongoing technical assistance and international funding?)

Aidan Alexander Nov 3, 2023, 9:43 AM
11 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Shrimp paste might cause more animal deaths than any other food product. Who’s working on this?
“There’s no life bad enough for us to try to actively extinguish it when the subject itself can’t express a will for that”—holding this view while also thinking that it’s good to prevent the existence of factory farmed chickens would need some explaining IMO.

Also, the claim that Michael’s line of reasoning is “weird and bad” seems to imply that it being “weird” should count against it in some way, just as it being “bad” should count against it. But why/how exactly? After all, from most people’s perspective caring about shrimp at all is weird.

Aidan Alexander Oct 19, 2023, 6:18 PM
14 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Presenting: 2023 Incubated Charities (Round 2) - Charity Entrepreneurship
Hello, member of the incubation program team here! There has been no change in our thinking on the optimal number of co-founders. This is a rare scenario where 3 makes sense :) The reasons it made sense in this case are idiosyncratic to the individuals involved and their career plans, so I won’t speak to that here, but I’m sure they’d be happy to explain the context 1:1 if you’re interested!

Aidan Alexander Aug 28, 2023, 10:55 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Local charity evaluation: Lessons from the “Maximum Impact” Program in Israel
Fantastic work! It’s awesome to see a national EA chapter taking on such an ambitious project and having the follow through to make it happen.

I just want to clarify what you mean when you say “most of our research is empirical and quasi-experimental designed (and RCTs when possible) based on the outputs of each nonprofits”: I assume this means that your research uses existing empirical (preferably quasi-experimental or better yet RCT) evidence . You don’t mean you’re actually conducting or funding any primary research, right? I ask because that would be insanely cheap and fast

Aidan Alexander Aug 28, 2023, 7:33 PM
3 points
2 ∶ 2
on: EA Organisations budget size
Manifold is a lot lower than I expected given it’s a tech platform that presumably requires a bunch of dev hours!

Aidan Alexander Jul 31, 2023, 6:42 PM
14 points
4 ∶ 0
on: [JOB] Opportunity to found Charity Entrepreneurship NGO (outside of the incubation program): Tobacco taxation advocacy
Nice stuff! In particular I think “Finalists will also get to talk to other incubatees from that cohort about what it was like to work with your future co-founder” is an excellent feature.

Aidan Alexander Jul 20, 2023, 7:51 AM
30 points
4 ∶ 0
on: AMA: We’re the Forum team (and we’re hiring). Ask us anything!
What is the theory of change for the EA forum?

Aidan Alexander Jul 16, 2023, 5:51 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jona’s comment on: Nailing the basics – Theories of change
Good stuff Jona! I agree on all fronts.
Re: #2, at Charity Entrepreneurship for example, we should have ToCs for our Incubation Program, Grantmaking Program and Research Training Program, but we don’t yet. We have a fairly polished one for the Incubation Program, and a few different ones drafted for the new Research Program we’re planning, but we haven’t written one down for our Grantmaking Program, so here I am again not practicing what I preach. Looks like we have work to do :)

Aidan Alexander Jul 16, 2023, 9:59 AM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Embracing the automated future
I’m broadly in favour of automation and against jobs for jobs’ sake, so I agree with this post :)
However I do think that we need to invest heavily in making sure that the transition to a jobless or low-job society goes well. Currently, many people’s identity and self-worth is tied up in their jobs… having a job is a prerequisite for getting a romantic partner in a lot of the world etc. I’d like to see more ideas about how to manage this transition.
Meanwhile, small quibble: I don’t agree that thinking is uniquely human (what about non-human animals, and in the future, digital minds?)