Hi! I’m a generalist on CEA’s Executive Office, where I work on Growth, Operations, M&E/data, and other projects. I used to work on the EA Global team at CEA, and before that I did economic consulting. I was born and raised in Hong Kong 🇭🇰.
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, Oscar Howie.
I am really glad for your engagement on this question, Mia! I found this part of your comment interesting, especially the bolded part:
We have seen in Europe that welfare in cage-free systems improves over time as producers gain experience. The cage-free system has a high ceiling for welfare potential; the furnished cage has a very low one.
Do you have a quick explanation for why this is the case? I guess it makes sense intuitively to me (e.g. cages impose a fixed physical restriction on how much space a hen can have).
It is also really interesting and encouraging to hear that you think welfare in some cage-free systems is continuing to improve over time. I didn’t realize that! If you have a quick sense for how much you think welfare is empirically improving in the European context, I would find this very interesting.
No worries if you don’t have capacity to respond :)
That’s really interesting, thanks for sharing! I’ll pass it on :)
Responded on the dashboard above, but wanted to quickly say thanks @MHR🔸 and @Vasco Grilo🔸 for letting us know you are invested in this project, that kind of feedback is useful for us.
I think it would also be helpful to see the number of people engaging in each tier across time. [...] Many past annual changes in engagement up or down of 10 % to 20 % would make a 25 % increase from 2024 to 2025 less impressive relative to a past downwards trend of a few years.
Thank you for the feedback, Vasco. As you have noted, we have some older data on growth trends (although not cost trends) in the dashboard. This is of course not formatted the same way, and plus how we think about growth (i.e. our funnel approach) has changed over time.
The team is presently busy preparing with EAG SF, but I’ll make a note of your feedback so we don’t lose it.
Thanks Vasco! Here’s the graph of EA Newsletter subscribers over time. We’re about to hit 64K subscribers :)
(Edit: replaced the tooltip to show our end-of-January totals, the last full month of data we have)
As a side note, the reason why we track actively engaged subscribers as our central growth metric is because many people who are subscribed never open the newsletter, and therefore we don’t think they get value from it. In general, we think “flow” metrics (like active engagement, attendance in a given year) are a better proxy for our present-day impact than “stock” metrics (like the number of people who have ever come to an EAG).
I’m glad the dashboard has been useful for you! Hearing about user demand is definitely valuable data for us. Unfortunately we’ve had to deprioritize maintenance on this for a while, due to higher priority M&E and engineering projects taking precedence over the last few quarters.
Relatedly, we will soon be hiring for a software engineer to join the Online Team and work on engineering projects across CEA. I’m really excited that we are building out our technical and analytical capacity (hi @Rory Fenton!). If any software engineers reading want CEA to have more capacity to execute on projects like this, I encourage you to apply!
Our companion post with more detail on CEA’s growth results is now out as well.
Thank you for the kind note, and for your work on building the EA community!
Wow, I’ve never seen that print before. That is absolutely horrifying. I feel kind of sick looking at it. What a stark reminder of the costs of getting morality wrong. Thank you for painting it, for sharing it, and for the reminder of this day.
I found this a very readable explainer of a core insight. Thank you!
That’s a catchy tagline, I might have to start using it :) Thanks!
A rule of thumb that I follow for generating data visualizations: One story = one graph
The best visualizations are extremely simple and easy to read: e.g. a line or bar chart that tells you exactly what you care about
If you are struggling to figure out what to visualize, zoom out and ask yourself: what story are you trying to tell? Once you have clarity on that, figure out the simplest way to illustrate this.
If you have multiple stories to tell, make multiple graphs :)
Some made up stories and solutions:
Total engagement hours steadily went down over this year = You want a line graph of engagement over the year, and possibly you want to smooth your data out to show the trend line: e.g. graph the rolling 7 day average over time, or include a trend line.
Engagement really spiked on May 1, 2025 = You want a line graph of engagement per day, zoomed out far enough to show how it’s changed over time, and maybe add a labelled vertical line on May 1
Engagement this giving season is much stronger than last year = You want to plot two lines: engagement per day in 2025 over giving season, plus the equivalent engagement per day in 2024. Here, the comparison is the story you want to tell, so you want to make sure your 2025 and 2024 data are apples to apples.
Sharing communication advice a few colleagues have found helpful.
Came here to also comment, “the right way to get Toby to see things is to post on the forum” 💙 (Glad you liked the header!!)
I really enjoyed your EAG talk, and am glad you’re sharing it here! This is the first I’ve heard of the “ecologically inert” strategy, and I found it inspiring to understand how some WAW researchers tackle cluelessness head on.
I find your section on justification standards provocative in a valuable way. Thank you!
If we’re still early on in the name change process then the cost to change to a better name is basically nothing.
I think the point where the “cost to change to a better name is basically nothing” has long past, at the point where they have published a brand new set of digital assets, done journalist interviews, etc. :)
(I am expecting the new name is going to stick around!)
This is so exciting to hear about, thank you for sharing!!
Are you willing to share what your rough fundraising target is? I can’t tell if you are aiming to raise $60K, or if your room for more funding is larger than that. No worries if you don’t want to share on a public forum and would prefer potential donors reach out for more information, I understand.
Wow thank you! I’m sending this to someone I know. Appreciate it!
Something that would make this post more helpful for me: If you had to pick 1-3 resources for someone to start reading about cluelessness (say: someone who is vaguely worried about cluelessness but hasn’t invested deeply in building their own models yet / could use a refresher), where would you choose?
(No pressure of course, this is already very helpful :) )
Nice, I remembered when you first posted on the Forum about this: very cool that the project is alive still! If it felt low cost to share, I feel curious about how it’s going, but also no pressure :)
I like this as a memorable term for (some variants of) this failure mode. Thanks Toby!
Nice, really appreciate you doing this + sharing both the BLUF and the raw data :)
This feels like an interesting benchmark that other media projects in the community (within and outside of AIS) could extend upon. Thanks!
So interesting, thanks! :)