Aidan Alexander

• Aidan AlexanderAug 7, 2024, 2:17 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: Far­mKind (a new an­i­mal fundrais­ing plat­form) is live – Please DON’T DONATE

  I agree with your interpretation of this case (except for what the most straightforward way to describe it is), but you seem to be missing the broader point about the interplay between supply and demand for matching funding which means that both groups play a causal role in increasing donations to the favorite and super-effective charities alike. I understand you think the way we’ve communicated this is misleading, not in the spirit of EA or otherwise wrong. This is a valuable perspective, for which I thank you, but we respectfully disagree.

  I hope what we do now agree on is that, regarding your comment “the site gives the impression that part of the bonus goes to the favorite charity, but that isn’t usefully true”, it IS true that part of the bonus goes to the favorite charity.

  That’s all the time I have to spend on this topic. I hope to have clarified some of the facts about how the platform works.

  What links here?

  • Far­mKind’s Illu­sory Offer by Jeff Kaufman 🔸 (Aug 9, 2024, 11:32 AM; 96 points)
  • Far­mKind’s Illu­sory Offer by jefftk (LessWrong; Aug 9, 2024, 11:30 AM; 71 points)
  • Jeff Kaufman 🔸's comment on Far­mKind’s Illu­sory Offer by Jeff Kaufman 🔸 (Aug 10, 2024, 1:42 AM; 16 points)

• Aidan AlexanderAug 7, 2024, 2:01 PM

  10 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: Far­mKind (a new an­i­mal fundrais­ing plat­form) is live – Please DON’T DONATE

  That people are willing to donate through a platform that clearly sign-posts that you don’t get >$X donated to your favorite charity if you donate $X split between two charities IS evidence that many donors don’t share Ben’s expectation about how our bonus system should or does work. That’s all I suggested it was evidence for. I’ve only weighed in here to correct false or misleading claims made about how the platform works.

  As for whether how the platform works is aligned with EA or not, or misleading or not, I haven’t weighed in because 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. It’s reasonable to disagree and I understand and respect your disagreement. I have similar disagreements with many EAs’ approaches, decisions, cause area prioritisation, communications styles and so on. Once there aren’t any remaining misunderstandings about how our platform works, all that’s left is one of those kinds of disagreements. I don’t have much to say about your position except that I respect it, I disagree and I thank you for sharing it. I considered your critique of Giving Multiplier prior to deciding to launch our platform and was grateful to come across this perspective before rather than after making the decision. So thank you again!

  What links here?

  • Far­mKind’s Illu­sory Offer by Jeff Kaufman 🔸 (Aug 9, 2024, 11:32 AM; 96 points)
  • Far­mKind’s Illu­sory Offer by jefftk (LessWrong; Aug 9, 2024, 11:30 AM; 71 points)
  • Jeff Kaufman 🔸's comment on Far­mKind’s Illu­sory Offer by Jeff Kaufman 🔸 (Aug 10, 2024, 1:42 AM; 16 points)

• Aidan AlexanderAug 7, 2024, 12:58 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: Far­mKind (a new an­i­mal fundrais­ing plat­form) is live – Please DON’T DONATE

  If that’s what it takes for you to feel your donation is being meaningfully matched then it’s another reason this platform isn’t the right choice for you. But that’s a very specific requirement that our platform never claims to meet, and that plenty of folks don’t share with you, as evidenced by existing donations through our platform. Many other donors are excited by the prospect of having both their donation to the favorite and super-effective charity receive a bonus. This is what happens on our platform, and is what’s laid out as they step through the process. No one is donating under any misapprehension that after splitting their donation and receiving a bonus they get more than the total amount they donated given to their favorite charity.

  We are not “baiting” people in with the promise to cause more dollars than they donate to go to their favorite charity and then “switching” to a split and boost mechanism. Rather, the platform (as we lay out on our landing page, and repeat throughout) promises to allow you to help fix factory farming while supporting your favorite charity too, and to get your donations to both charities boosted. The platform isn’t about getting more than the total amount you donated to go to your favorite charity (it’s about splitting and boosting your donation) so the fact that it doesn’t do that is a feature and not a bug

• Aidan AlexanderAug 7, 2024, 12:28 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: Far­mKind (a new an­i­mal fundrais­ing plat­form) is live – Please DON’T DONATE

  On your first point, your way of describing things may or may not be clearer, but it’s not accurate. See my response to Ben Milwood about how the money flows. You may see the two scenarios as being the same in effect, but in that case our comms are equally accurate in describing the effect and more accurate in describing the money flows. We’ve chosen what we believe to be the most clear, intuitive and compelling way to explain things.

  On the first part of your second point, yes—some bonus funding money would have otherwise been given to help animals (like anyone convinced by this post), while other bonus funding money (and so far the majority) wouldn’t have. So it is not the case that all bonus funds would otherwise go to help animals, which your original critique suggested was the case. That’s what I wanted to correct the claim.

  Regarding your more limited claim, I don’t agree that “every dollar donated to the bonus pool is one that will be paid out to effective animal charities regardless of how other donors behave” because dollars in the fund very literally get paid out to favorite charities that needn’t be super-effective or support animals.

  Plus, when thinking about the counterfactual impact of the bonus system, I think what’s relevant is what would have happened to those dollars if the fund didn’t exist—not just what would have happened to them once already in the bonus fund. As explained, many donations to the bonus fund would not have been donated at all were it not for the fund or would not have gone to effective animal charities. And were it not for regulator donors generating demand for bonus funding, we could not fundraise for the bonus fund. The two groups of donors incentivise one another to donate and lead to more total donations to effective farmed animal charities than if the system did not exist. We explain this in our comms. I believe that how our system works is in keeping with the spirit of even the most naive interpretation, in that, whether you’re a regular or bonus donor, your participation in the system leads to more money being donated than would have occurred otherwise.

  It’s fair enough that you would have chosen to communicate things differently in our position. Thank you for giving the system some thought and voicing your perspective on how you would choose to communicate things! It’s helpful for us to consider such perspectives as we continuously improve our platform.

• Aidan AlexanderAug 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 AlexanderAug 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 AlexanderAug 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 AlexanderAug 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

Far­mKind (a new an­i­mal fundrais­ing plat­form) is live – Please DON’T DONATE

• Aidan AlexanderJun 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 AlexanderJun 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 AlexanderApr 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 :)

Par­ti­ci­pa­tory Learn­ing and Ac­tion (PLA) groups for ma­ter­nal and new­born health—AIM top idea 2024

• Aidan AlexanderApr 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 AlexanderApr 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 AlexanderMar 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.

Fa­cil­i­tat­ing in­ter­na­tional la­bor mi­gra­tion via a digi­tal platform

From salt in­take re­duc­tion to la­bor mi­gra­tion: An­nounc­ing top ideas for the AIM 2024 CE In­cu­ba­tion Program

• Aidan Alexander 6 Dec 2023 11:56 UTC

  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 16 Nov 2023 18:48 UTC

  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?)