You’re right! I swear I read it like 3 times before asking 😳
I think I got confused because in both the text and figure 3, that sentence comes after a heading about “the odds of quitting smoking” so I read the subsequent “less likely”s to mean “less likely to quit smoking” instead of “less likely to smoke”. Sorry about that
Thanks for this analysis! I’m a bit confused: In the places where this post says that people are less likely to quit if their spouse, friends or co-workers quit, is that a typo and you mean to say more likely to quit? Or is this written as intended?
Thanks for raising this!
What about applying for funding from non-EA funders? I know that most of these funders won’t be interested in EA charities because they don’t fit into their view of what good charities look like, but the non-EA funding landscape is big and there are definitely funders out there that could be convinced to fund some EA projects. My sense is that many many EA orgs don’t even try to access this funding.
Granted—it’s a lot of work, and may take years of relationship building, and all of that is a distraction from execution. But the rewards are significant because the counterfactuals of that funding is far ‘cheaper’ than the counterfactuals of the money orgs take from EA funders. Plus I think fundraising from non-EA funders is really good practice for EAs at communicating about effective charity work in ways that are appealing to non-EAs. This is something we’re generally very bad at, and becoming good at it is a necessary condition for us to really grow the base of support and resources for this movement, so I think we should lean into opportunities to engage with the non-EA world instead of staying in our silo
Hey Christoph, I think it would be a real shame if you let not helping some amount of animals through diet change stop you from helping any animals at all—especially when you can actually help far more animals though donating than you can through diet change. Making being vegan the price of admission to being a part of the solution to factory farming is a sure fire way to ensure that we never solve this problem. Far more helpful is to allow everyone to do what they’re willing to do to solve it, regardless of their diet.
I don’t think the animals who would experience drastically less suffering because of your donations care whether you’re being hypocritical in the eyes of some. Those animals, and I, think that you and the world are far better off if you eat meat and donate to help animals than if you just eat meat ❤️
By the way, we’ve made a tool just for people like you, to figure out how much you’d need to donate to do as much good for animals as going vegan (https://www.farmkind.giving/compassion-calculator). If you want to do the same amount of net good as doing vegan, you can offset your meat consumption twofold
Very happy to talk this topic through with you some more if you’re interested as I’d hate to lose you as animal donor for this reason
Hive, Fish Welfare Initiative, FarmKind
Thank you for writing this Martin!
I don’t think they’re doing explicit cost-effectiveness analyses at this level of detail for the grants they’re assessing. They don’t have the time (consider how many hours they have per grant vetted), and the evidence to make those analyses anything more than multiplying a bunch of guesses together just won’t exist for many applications. Instead, they’ll be looking at other forms of evidence, like the strength of the theory of change, the strength of the team, the quality of thinking displayed in the team’s plan and their track record
On the funding amount discrepancy: It could be that they don’t do all of their giving through the funding circle
Hey Caroline! Fun to interact outside of emails. I agree it’s not about changing people‘s values, but I think that most people’s values (if they allow themselves to think about it) support taking action against factory farming. They just have other forces like food preferences, social norms and misinformation about the issue holding them back. What’s great about donating is that people can do it without changing their diet or dealing with the social costs that come with that. So I’m hopeful that this can be the easier on-ramp that gets far more people to begin taking action on this issue 🤞
Good question Abraham!
The impact fund does help more animals, because it includes the Shrimp Welfare Project, but we recently decided to stop displaying the number of shrimp helped, because for the average donor we think this is counterproductive:
But this means that the number of animals helped that we display for a given donation is lower for Impact Fund than Climate Fund which I agree is confusing. I’ll think about what we can do about this. Thanks for pointing it out!
Note: There’s also the matter of how much each animal is helped, which is a way that a charity with a lower animals helped per dollar could still be more impactful per dollar. You can see the spreadsheet underlying these impact estimates here.
I’m an ardent critic of the use of naive EV calculations in EA. But what determines whether something is a naive EV calculation isn’t whether the probability is low, but whether the level of uncertainty in that probability is super high.
Any EV calc we “came up with” about mites would be uncertain to the point of being worthy of zero credence. It would be a Pascal’s mugging.
The case for stunning shrimp, as far as I can tell, is far less uncertain. I think Omnizoid is right that it’s hard to dispute it being a very strong bet.
But I also want to mention that the more I learn about our “surest bets” for doing good (e.g bednets) the more uncertain I discover them to be. This leads me to be super reluctant to go “all in” on anything the way you suggest we might be inclined to with the EV calcs for microscopic organisms.
In conclusion: SWP looks like a highly cost-effective org for doing good in the world. We should support it, but we shouldn’t go all in on it or any other cause/intervention. The world is messy enough that we should be highly pluralistic (even while continuing to prioritize and make trade-offs)
Very interesting! Thanks for digging into this and taking the time to write up what you found. I realize was definitely over-confident in the accuracy of population estimates!
That’s fair. I think we should try both. I also think we particularly need to test ways of motivating non “animal people” to donate to farm animal welfare, as otherwise orgs like GWWC will only be able to capture latent willingness to donate to AW. We need increased willingness to get where we need to be on funding
Hey hey!
If you’re talking about getting GHD donors to give to GWWC et al themselves, then I agree that this converts some (<10%) of these donors’ donations to animal welfare. But GWWC at al. are mostly funded by grants as far as I’m aware. Is your suggestion that they fundraise more from individual donors, on the margin?
If you’re talking about getting GHD donors to give through GWWC et al, then I’m doubtful any significant amount will go to animal welfare, as they’ll presumably pick GHD charities and funds on GWWC et al’s platforms.
Hello!
After receiving impassioned criticisms on our announcement post last week, I decided to use a plane trip (I’ve been on leave) to reflect on them with a scout mindset to make sure Thom and I aren’t missing anything important that would mean we should change our approach. I’m glad I did, because on my way back from leave I noticed this new post. I thought it would help to share my reflections.
To set expectations: We won’t be able to continue engaging in the discussion on this here. This is not because we consider the “case closed”, but because we are a team of 2 running a brand new organization so we need to prioritise how we use our time. It’s important (and a good use of time) for us to make sure we consider criticisms and that we are confident we are doing the right thing.[1] But there is a limit to how much time we can dedicate to this particular discussion. Please enjoy the ongoing discussion, and apologies that we can’t prioritise further engagement with it :)
Before I get to my reflections, I want to point out an unhelpful equivocation I’ve seen in the discourse: Some of the comments speak of donation matching as if it’s one very specific thing, and they claim or imply that we are doing that one thing. In reality, “donation matching” can refer to a wide range of arrangements that can work in all sorts of ways.
The most common form of donation matching that I’ve seen involves a large individual or institutional donor promising to match all donations to a specific charity 1:1 until a certain date. This can be fully counterfactual (if the large donor chooses to participate in the match where they wouldn’t otherwise have given to that charity or any other) or it can be not counterfactual at all (if they would have given that amount to that charity no matter what), or somewhere in between. What we’re doing is different to this, as we explain here and below, which is why we don’t call it donation matching, as we aren’t wanting people to import expectations about how it works from previous experiences they may have had with common forms of donation matching.
It’s fair to have qualms with how some forms of donation matching work (or even all forms of it, as some commenters do). But most of the reasons given for concern about donation matching apply to some and not all forms of it. We would be able to make better sense of this collectively by being precise about what forms of donation matching we do and don’t have problems with and for what reasons.
Okay, on to my reflections on 5 criticisms of FarmKind’s bonus system:
We received this criticism: “The fact that you can’t donate $X and get more than $X going to your favourite charity means I don’t really feel like my donation is being meaningfully matched”.
We never promise or imply that it would be possible to donate $X in total and have >$X go to your Favorite Charity (after splitting and receiving a bonus). We make it very clear that it won’t:
Our comms make it very clear that FarmKind’s purpose is to help users donate to fix factory farming through our Super-effective Charities, with the ability to support your Favorite Charity at the same time and to get a bonus included as perks. It’s hard to see how anyone could read our comms and see things the way the critics are worried they will, and so it’s hard to see how anyone could be misled:
We received this criticism: “The ‘bonus’ is presented to users as if it (a) will go in part to their favorite charity and (b) is money that would not otherwise be going to help animals, but neither of these are true”[2]
We think this is incorrect, because it quite literally IS true that the Favorite Charity receives money from the Bonus Fund. This is how the money flows: Every.org splits the regular donors donation between their chosen Favorite and Super-Effective charity and then Every.org disburses money to each from the Bonus Fund in the exact way that’s summarised during the donation process:
Critics have pointed out that the effect of these cash flows is the same as a different set of cash flows where more of the donor’s money was given to their Favorite Charity than indicated (e.g. $90 of the $150 in the donation went to the Favorite Charity), and all of the bonus went to the Super-Effective Charity ($30 in this case). Those critics claim that this is a simpler set of cash flows, and a simpler/clearer way to understand what has happened. We disagree that it’s simpler or clearer, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be what actually happened, and it wouldn’t make our description misleading.
This is an interesting and nuanced one. The criticism goes something like:
The average donor assumes that in donation matching, the matching funding added to their donation would not have otherwise…
(a) been donated OR
(b) been donated to the same cause OR
(c) been donated to the same charities
Because we will not promise a bonus for a donation if the money isn’t already in the Bonus Fund, and if no donations were ever made that money would eventually go to the Impact Fund, our bonus system doesn’t work the way the average donor assumes it does, and we don’t make this clear enough, and so it’s misleading
There are valid aspects of this criticism, which I nonetheless disagree with, and there are invalid aspects. Let’s start with what the criticism gets right and wrong about the reality of the counterfactuality of the bonus system:
Regular donations do, in expectation, cause more counterfactual donations to occur. Let’s talk through it, considering counterfactuals in both the narrower/direct and the broader/indirect sense:
1. The narrower/direct sense — i.e. Thinking just about the money that’s already in the bonus fund when a regular donation is made:
(a) Total donations: At the moment that a regular donation is made, that donation doesn’t increase the total amount of money given to charity, because the funds in the Bonus Fund have already been given, and if no more donations ever occurred and FarmKind shut down, we would give the balance of the Bonus Fund to our Super-effective Charities (as explained at farmkind.giving/support-bonus-fund) ❌ no direct counterfactual impact on total donations ❌
(b) Causes: The regular donor gets to pick any Favorite Charity, from any cause, and their donation will cause money from the Bonus Fund to go to it. Unless by some miracle, the Bonus Fund supporters would otherwise have collectively donated to the same causes as the regular donors in the same proportions, then regular donations do have direct counterfactual impact on how much money goes to different causes ✅ direct counterfactual impact on donations to different causes ✅
(c) Charities: The regular donor gets to pick any Favorite Charity and one of our Super-effective Charities and their donation will cause money from the Bonus Fund to go to it. Unless by some miracle, the Bonus Fund supporters would otherwise have collectively donated to the same charities as the regular donors in the same proportions, then regular donations do have direct counterfactual impact on how much money goes to different charities (both ‘effective’ and ‘ineffective’) ✅ direct counterfactual impact on donations to different charities ✅
2. The broader/indirect sense — Regular donations on our platform, which receive a bonus, use up the supply of money that’s in the pool. The more regular donations that occur (i.e. the more demand there is to redeem our bonuses), the more that folks who like how our bonus system is motivation donations will want to keep the system going, by donating to the Bonus Fund. In particular, if the Bonus Fund is running low, we will communicate this to people who like our bonus system, imploring them to donate to keep the system going. As such, each regular donation increases, in expectation, the amount of money contributed to the Bonus Fund.
This is like the how buying one of chickens at the grocery store (which the grocer has already bought and so pre-committed to selling or throwing away) increases the expected amount of chicken they will buy next time. If you think that lower demand for animal products can decrease the amount of animal products produced, you should understand how increased demand for bonus funding can increase the amount of money given to the Bonus Fund.
But what would have happened to the money donated to the Bonus Fund were it not for past demand?
(a) Total donations: That’s what M&E is for, but in all likelihood, as with all fundraising efforts, some money raised would otherwise have gone to charity and some wouldn’t have ✅ indirect counterfactual impact on total donations ✅
(b) Causes: For the money that would have otherwise been given to charity, the odds are infinitesimal that it would have gone to the same causes and specific charities that the regular donors chose, in the same proportions ✅ indirect counterfactual impact on donations to different causes ✅
(c) Charities: See above^ ✅ indirect counterfactual impact on donations to different charities ✅
Certainly not. Our communications are accurate, both in the ‘large print’ and the ‘fine print’.
It is possible to be misleading without being dishonest, however. This can be done by presenting information in a way that leads someone to draw incorrect conclusions, even though the facts themselves are technically true. Typical ways to do this is by omitting certain information, or framing the facts in a particular way.[3]
To cut right to the chase: Will some people who don’t read our communications carefully think that they’re having direct counterfactual impact on total donations, when they aren’t [as per (1)(a)]? Probably yes, there is always a risk that some people will get the wrong idea. However, we don’t believe that this constitutes misleading communication. Let me explain why:
We take reasonable steps to dispel misconceptions, making what we believe are appropriate and ethical trade-offs to ensure honest communication (although people could reasonably disagree):
Measures we take:
We don’t call what we do “matching”, in order to reduce the association with the most common form of matching campaigns (and common misconceptions that come with them)
In order to donate, users must click a box confirming that they agree with our terms of use and that they “understand that the bonus funds are already pre-paid by bonus fund supporters. Learn how our bonus system works here.”
If one clicks any of the various links to learn more about how the process works, they’ll be taken to farmkind.giving/support-bonus-fund, where we explain exactly how the system does and doesn’t allow regular and bonus fund donors to increase their counterfactual impact (I won’t quote the explanation here because it’s too long).
In the section about the Bonus Fund on our About Us page, we say: “We help you multiply your impact by boosting your donation with prepaid bonus funds… These funds have been contributed by other donors who want to motivate more people to donate to fix factory farming. When you get you a bonus added to your donation through our platform, you get to direct these funds to the Favorite charity and the recommended Super-effective charity of your choosing.”
The need for trade-offs in honest communication:
Honest communication involves trade-offs between two goals (among others): Having those who read it form maximally true beliefs — this is the ‘honest’ bit — and making your communication sufficiently simple, concise and interesting that people actually listen to /read it — without this, you haven’t actually done the ‘communication’ bit.
Everyone we’ve ever encountered makes these sorts of trade-offs, and considers them to be a part of honest communication. Of course, it’s also possible to make the trade-off wrong and fail to communicate or do so honestly. Here are various some examples, some of which you may think get the balance right and others of which you may not:
Every product/service’s terms and conditions and how they surface them to users (I think we’ve all seen examples we think are acceptable and others we think aren’t. Do any readers think that 100% of cases where one clicks to agree with terms and conditions without being forced to read them in detail are misleading?)
Teaching Newtonian Physics to early high-school students, even though it’s technically incorrect (I think this is acceptable, as it’s simple enough for students at this level to understand and is a helpful building block towards the correct model that uses Special Relativity)
I’ve put two more in the footnotes for brevity’s sake[4]
To sum this point up: People who read the donation form carefully as they fill it out (or who is otherwise curious and so clicks around to learn what this “bonus” thing is all about) will understand it and be making an informed donation decision. People who skim it, may misunderstand what’s happening and so not be fully informed. We’ve taken measures to reduce the likelihood of such misunderstandings, because we think it’s the right thing to do for deontological reasons. It would be possible to take more intense measures (like a series of pop-ups reminding donors several times that bonus funds are pre-committed), but given the trade-offs, we think it wouldn’t be right for consequentialist reasons. Different people will reasonably disagree on what measures we ought to take for deontological reasons, and there is no level that is immune from the criticism that they ought to do more.
Even if donors have a misconception about how participating in the bonus system increases their impact, they understand that it increases impact. As discussed, despite our efforts, a skim reading donor may believe that getting a bonus is counterfactually impactful in a way that it isn’t, but there are still 5 other ways (2 direct, 3 indirect) that it IS counterfactually impactful, causing more donations to go to the things they care about. This, after all, is the promise that makes receiving a bonus attractive.
This is also an interesting one, which we’re grateful was raised, and we will incorporate this into future comms.
Such a double count is likely, and is one of the challenges with counting impact using standard counterfactual reasoning (see discussion here and here). These kinds of double-countings are actually really common. For example, whenever two advocacy groups both play a necessary role in achieving a policy change, they will generally both conclude that the counterfactual impact of their work is the full impact of the policy change. This double count of impact can lead to an inaccurate view of the cost-effectiveness of each group, leading to suboptimal grantmaking decisions.
What are we to do about this? Surely the answer isn’t to not encourage both groups to participate in our bonus system — after all, the participation of each group counterfactually causes higher impact. Each group benefits (in terms of increased impact. We don’t think the answer is to introduce Shapley Values or some other more complicated means of impact attribution, which would compromise our ability to communicate the value to each group. Rather, we should probably talk about the increased impact each group will have in general terms, without using specific numbers unless someone asks for them and/or we heavily caveat them. Having received this criticism, we would not use specific numbers the way we didhere again.
It’s worth mentioning that, of course, resource allocation is extremely far from perfectly efficient, so the real cost of these kinds of double counts is probably very low. It’s also worth reiterating that this problem applies to nearly every intervention in EA — it is not a particular problem of donation matching.
It is reasonable to disagree about what is and is not ‘EA’. For example, we have similar disagreements with many EAs’ cause area prioritisation, epistemics, use of funding, communications styles. We also see many projects that don’t meet what we see as minimum standards in terms of the existence of feedback loops, theories of change, or measurement and evaluation.
We personally wouldn’t choose to claim there is no place for these people or projects in EA. We think that there is value in a more pluralistic and diverse EA community that takes many different approaches, all motivated by the honest desire to do the most good we can.
I’m sure it’s clear from our choice to launch this platform that we think this is a good thing to be doing, and that it’s our attempt at doing altruism effectively. If some folks who disagree decide that FarmKind does not belong in effective altruism, there is likely nothing we can say that will change their mind. That’s ok.
I don’t have more to say about this criticism except to reiterate that I respect its intention, I disagree and I thank people for sharing it. We considered Jeff’s critique post of Giving Multiplier prior to deciding to launch FarmKind and we were grateful to come across this perspective before rather than after making the decision — it influenced decisions we made for the better.
Thanks for reading, and happy foruming!
To that end, if any new points are made in response that we haven’t considered, we will consider them and may change our mind, but we may not neccessarily report back about this.
Criticism 2 is about part (a) of this statement. We discuss part (b) under Criticism 3
For example, stating “Our product has been used by over 1 million people!”, when 99% of people used it once, were dissatisfied and never used it again. The statement is true (and in that sense, not dishonest), but it omits context so that it might lead someone to believe that 1 million people are active, happy users, which isn’t the case.
3rd example: The donation platform Ribon using the half-sentence “Ensure free-range living for farm animals” to describe the impact of donating to a specific charity, even though no given donation can possibly guarantee this outcome is achieved (I think this is acceptable, and I’d hope that further comms were available for those who are interested enough to read more to understand how their donations might have an impact).
4th example: Saying “I like ice cream”, even if you think that the self is an illusion (an illusion which your statement reinforces), such that you’re giving the false impression that you think the self is a real thing (I include this example because I imagine that even our most steadfast critics would agree this is honest communication. The kind of person who caveats their use of the word ‘I’ is probably failing to communicate)
No I don’t think “part of the pot goes to your account” is a fair way to characterize your offer. I think you may have edited your comment as I was responding to it.
It’s clear we agree on what would have otherwise happened to the money already in the bonus fund at the time of a regular donation. I don’t think we need a hypothetical example to dig into that any further. It’s also clear what we disagree on (please see other comments so I don’t have to state it again). I don’t aim to change your mind on those points, and so I’ll leave things there :)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is offsetting harms ethically the same as not doing them?
This is a fascinating question, which Scott Alexander has blogged about twice (here and here). But ultimately, it’s not crucial to the value of this tool. The key question isn’t whether donating while eating meat is as good as going vegan (since, we think it is likely that almost no one using the calculator will be planning to change their diet otherwise). The question is whether eating meat and donating is better than eating meat and not donating. We think the answer to that is a confident “yes”.
Don’t we want people to change their diets?
It’s great when people change their diets! We just think that the movement against factory farming needs to test a variety of strategies for achieving its goals. Having multiple ways that individuals can take action—with different levels of commitment required—makes it more likely that people will take a first step in helping. Our aim is to expand the menu of options, not replace existing approaches.
Won’t offsetting cause people to change their diet less due to moral licensing?
We take this possibility very seriously, but we don’t see it as likely and believe it’s far outweighed by the benefits.
Given historically low rates of diet change, most people using our calculator wouldn’t have otherwise changed their diet. In fact, we hear frequently from donors using the calculator that they weren’t willing or able to change their diet and are glad to have found another way to help (see testimonials in the post^). Even in the rare case where someone does donate instead of changing their diet, the effect for animals would be neutral or (more likely) positive since we’ve built conservative assumptions into our calculator.
Moreover, taking a first step to help animals through donations may actually make people more open to future actions, as it helps them see themselves as someone who takes action on factory farming rather than someone who avoids thinking about the issue. It’s not just that beliefs drive actions – actions also shape beliefs. I’ve personally met a number of people who went vegan purely for health reasons only to find themselves becoming increasingly convinced by the ethical arguments over time. Forthcoming research from Samantha Kassirer supports the view that getting people to take actions that help farmed animals can increase their moral sympathy towards them 6 months later.
Finally, we think the benefit from the majority of users now eating meat and donating instead of eating meat and not donating safely outweighs potential negative effects.
Isn’t FarmKind the charity with that novel donation matching model?
Yes, we were.
We originally launched with a ‘split and boost’ donation model inspired by Giving Multiplier’s research. If you’re a regular forum reader, you may have first heard of us through a critique of this model. We shared a detailed response at the time, addressing those concerns, which you can see here.
Nonetheless, we’ve since decided to deprioritize this donation model and it’s no longer available on our website. We found that (unlike Giving Multiplier) we need to do quite a bit of persuading for people to be willing to support the farmed animal cause in the first place. By the time they’re convinced to donate, adding complexity to the process can create more friction than benefit. While the model continues to work well for Giving Multiplier (who’ve raised over $4M), we’ve found a simpler approach better serves our context.