Recently finished an undergraduate degree in Political Science with minors in History and Philosophy. Currently a research associate at a local state university. All opinions are my own and not reflective of those of my employer.
Cade Mataya
Karma: 32
Hi, thank you for the report summary! This seems pretty promising, though part of me wonders if there would be some serious limits to using this in some of the ways that some EA organizations may like to. In general, these experiments deal with a calf that is victimized, yet a lot of EA interventions focus on chickens, fish, or shrimp. My intuition is that omnivores are less likely to feel an impulse to donate for a victimized shrimp or fish than a calf (and many of my non-EA/non-utilitarian friends often cut out beef rather than chicken in their attempts to do better out of a stated respect for the life of a cow).
Is there perhaps more solid evidence or further investigation that may occur about the effect of species on total dollars donated?
This is pretty basic, but a majority of my giving goes to GiveWell; I find that I unfortunately do not have enough time in a day to carefully plan where I want to give, so most of it ends up to GiveWell to use at their discretion. I also think it’s important to give full-time experts that power as calculating the effectiveness of certain programs or inititatives is just impossibly difficult and I just don’t understand the math well enough (yet) to claim to be in a strong position to make this decision.
Through Giving What We Can, I give (in equal amounts) to: the Animal Welfare Fund, the Against Malaria Foundation, Evidence Action, and the Good Food Institute.
For the Animal Welfare Fund, it is my reasoning that animal suffering makes up a disproportionately large amount of the world’s suffering. It seems extremely cost-effective based on what I know to alleviate that suffering. It is very likely that I will donate any extra money that I come into this holiday season via odd jobs, gifts from family, or just excess in my budget to the Animal Welfare Fund.
The Against Malaria Foundation is GiveWell’s #2-ranked charity right now, so I figured that I could further my impact in malaria prevention by donating some money here.
I care a lot about proper education for a lot of reasons. It has done me a lot of good, but I also think it could be effective at lifting others out of poverty, breaking the cycle, perhaps alleviating global poverty and human suffering, and so much more. In the long term, having more educated people working on important issues would also be good for morally relevant beings as a whole. Seeing that deworming initiatives are effective at driving up school attendance rates in underdeveloped nations, I see this as a good cause to donate to. I do sometimes feel torn, because if deworming does lead to higher rates of literacy and spurs economic growth, this could lead to an increase in a demand for animal-based food products in nations that currently do not eat very much of them (this is a trend visible in all developing-to-developed countries except for India), which would increase suffering. However, it is probably better in the long run to move towards a more educated world with less global poverty than it is to maintain the status quo in this area; perhaps other nations will follow closer to India’s trends or once these populations reach a certain widespread level of education demand for animal-based products will fall.
Anyone who has read this far can probably tell that animal suffering is the thing I focus on a lot. So I donate to the Good Food Institute in hopes that lab-grown meat and other plant based alternatives can reduce the consumer demand for factory-farmed and traditionally produced animal products.
Hi! I think this seems like a really promising area of research. I have been working in public policy for awhile (admittedly not health policy, though). I am okay at making graphics in Tableau, though not #1 by any stretch. (I am 100% willing to learn, though!). If there is any other help that you may need, I would love to stay in the loop on this project.
Furthermore, I would like to know if you have any particular goals for this research. Do you plan on starting a nonprofit, conducting advocacy, raising funding for more research on these potential treatments, etc.?