Hiya! I work on data stuff at CEA. I used to be the content lead on the EA Global team at CEA, and before that I did economic consulting. Here’s an old website I might update at some point.
Think I’m making a mistake? Want to give me feedback? Here’s my admonymous. You can also give feedback for me directly to my manager, JP Addison.
I was so excited to hear about you joining the team, @KarolinaSarek🔸! This is a great update, thank you!
Yeah, your second comment is the message I meant to convey :)
Woah, those are some impressive speakers! Nice work!
Light musings, I work with Ollie but am sharing personal thoughts only.
I overall feel sympathetic to the argument that folks should consider supporting meta orgs, and I find the “tipping” model interesting! E.g. I liked this post about effective giving :) But I have some pushback.
Take the example of university groups. My model is that groups can change pretty dramatically over time due to organiser turnover. Alumni who think their university group positively impacted their trajectory would almost definitionally be funding an entirely new set of organisers by the time this impact has been realised. I have a strong prior that organiser fit is one of the most important variables in how successful a group is. So in many cases, I think you should model the current EA group at your alma mater as a pretty different project, with a less strong track record than you might think.
I think the above is a specific application of a general problem:
The EA meta ecosystem changes pretty quickly, and smaller projects change more rapidly than large ones
Success stories usually come with pretty long lag times — It takes years for people to change their minds about important questions, decide to take action, and for those decisions to actually cache out into doing good for the world.
By the time someone has gone through this transition, the ecosystem has probably changed enough that the project which first helped them along might not recognizably exist anymore, or new meta projects might have an even greater impact.
I think this all means I’m more sceptical than Ollie that the tipping model is the right approach, even though I agree it has nice qualities :) I expect this idea works better for long standing projects (e.g. city and national groups) that experience less turnover, or meta projects with shorter lag times for impact. I could see myself changing my mind here!
Based on this, it appears shrimp welfare was an area affected by this, and that TNF has filled SWP’s funding gap until the end of 2026.
I’d be interested in updates about funding for the welfare of smaller animals in general!
Good luck finding a good volunteering project! Consider reaching out to 80K for advice? ( https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us/ ) I wonder if they might have a good sense of which orgs might be excited to use your support.
Woah!!! Those are some awesome impact stories 😱 I found the top three particularly impressive.
“Recruiting ~220 participants for BlueDot Impact’s courses, including employees from OpenAI, Meta’s RLHF team, and the WHO Assistant Director General”
That’s wild! Nice job!
I personally am a fan of the “both/and” approach to praise :)
I like it when people celebrate their favorite contributors, I think this is a great thing about the Forum! This also genuinely feels pretty rare for an online community IMO!
I think leaving a quick positive comment on posts you like, e.g. “I enjoyed reading this post, thanks!”, is an underrated move (even if you have nothing substantive to say) :) — as a post author, I’ve really appreciated these.
I would also love for people to highlight folks they think are going under-recognized & are making significant contributions.
My main uncertainty re: the specific debate question is whether the AW space can absorb an extra $100m in funding anytime soon (e.g. within the next 5 years).
This seems pretty relevant from the perspective of the ecosystem, but much less relevant to the choices I face as an individual person / donor.
So the question as written is not the one I care about most for my personal decision-making.
I’m mostly interested in whether I should be donating differently. In the past few years, I’ve given a substantial chunk of my donations to animal focused charities.
A lot of that is motivated by being bought-in on the general importance of focusing on non-human animals (particularly small animals), as opposed to ‘near-term’ human welfare (via global health interventions).
I could imagine reducing my animal focused donations if any of the below happened:
I changed my mind on the importance / tractability of prioritising welfare improvements for smaller farmed animals (currently what I’m most excited about within the AW space).
E.g. I haven’t delved into the two envelopes problem as much as I’d like, and I’m worried this might change my mind if I understood this better?
This is a potential crux because I feel substantially more confused about the current marginal ROI of corporate campaign work for larger animals + wild animal focused work.
This is mostly because I haven’t spent much time digging into these areas.
I thought the marginal animal giving opportunities no longer looked that great.
There are some unusually good GH giving opportunities I haven’t been tracking right now. E.g. I think some of the EA-driven accomplishments with lead exposure have been incredibly exciting.
I have a general worry that using the donation decision protocol of “FIRST choose a cause area to focus on, and THEN choose the interventions to support” is not quite right and might lead to missed rare opportunities.
Mostly this seems probably fine from the perspective of an individual donor though. E.g. I’m not aiming purely to maximise the impact of my donations, I’m also aiming to bound the time I spend figuring this out.
I’m not sure yet where I’d give if I updated negatively on the marginal ROI of AW donations. I’d want to think about this more.
I don’t think I’d change my job in the short term based on this question alone. But it seems plausible this might change what I focus on within my job.
“So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.”
I hadn’t considered this idea before, am interested in you writing something up here! I’m a bit confused how tractable it is to shift donors from AMF → AW fund versus [Other charity] → AMF, but my intuition is the first might be fairly tractable.
Can I directly ask: Is SWP one of the orgs that has been affected by Good Ventures dropping support for some cause areas? (I couldn’t parse all the context previously on a quick skim.)
I’m not sure how much they funded you previously, or if this is a concern. No worries if you can’t or would prefer not to say :)
I am directionally sympathetic to the arguments in this post.
Good Ventures dropping out of some AW focused areas makes me think there might currently be promising gaps to fill (although it sounds like immediate gaps in some shrimp + wild animal orgs might be covered?)
I’m not marking myself as higher mainly because I don’t have good taste on how good the marginal AW focused funding proposals are right now, vs the marginal GH focused ones.
Heart! “It’s freakin’ awesome!!” really resonates with me here (my initial reaction was “OMG yes”).
Also this in general makes me feel relieved and grateful that the ecosystem is robust enough to deal with sudden funding shortfalls like this on a short timeline (although I imagine this was no trivial lift to juggle for everyone involved). This feels like an existence proof / credible test of at least one part of our collective resilience.
🤝🏻 Hope you & others get some time to celebrate this win before you have to dive back into resolving the longer term sustainability issue!
Background: Good Ventures is requiring Open Philanthropy (OP) to exit the wild animal welfare space.
Recent development: The Navigation Fund (TNF) plans to fill the gap left by OP, at least through the end of 2026.
This is awesome :) Really glad to hear this news!
Buying the WAW sector & other allies time to deal with the funding gap left by GV seems naively to me like a really good spend. Very glad someone filled it, thank you to those who made it happen and especially TNF / Jed!
This is so so awesome and so inspiring. Thanks to all working on this! 💜
Are you willing to draft some rough bullet points (that you urge people to NOT copy and paste) on SB-1047 that might help people complete this exercise faster?
Also, do you have a sense for how much better a slightly longer letter (e.g. a 1 page note) is as compared to just a 1 paragraph email with something like: “As a [location] resident concerned about AI safety, I urge you to sign SB 1047 into law. AI safety is important to me because [1 sentence].”
FWIW, I did just send off an email, but it took me more like ~30 minutes to skim this post and then draft something. I also wasn’t sure how important it was to create the PDF — otherwise I would have just sent an email on my phone, which would again have been a bit faster.
On WAW specifically, my view is something like:
Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren’t that far away.
The intervention space is so large and impacting animals’ lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
These interventions will often not involve nearly as much “changing hearts and minds” or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.
I would love to hear you talk more about this :) What makes you hopeful that scalable interventions are coming, and can you say more about anything you’re particularly excited about here? Also curious what “aren’t that far away” caches out into in terms of your beliefs—in 1 year? 3?
I wonder if your opinions are related to the following, which I’d also be excited to hear more about!
I think that my research has generally caused the EA space to focus too much on farmed insects, and less on insecticides. I am somewhat inclined toward thinking that insecticide-caused suffering is both more tractable and larger in scale. I’m now working on a insecticide project though, so trying to correct this.
(Thanks for sharing this post Abraham, I enjoyed reading it :) )
I’m curious if you have general advice (top 3 tips? common mistakes?) for EA orgs who are just starting to experiment with more marketing.
No pressure, of course!