Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸

Karma: 657

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸May 19, 2021, 10:52 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
tl;dr: I don’t think “slow and steady” growth is a problem, only “slow and unsteady” growth.
speed of hiring—an organization can only spend money to hire and expand so quickly and maybe they are already saturated
Actually, I don’t think expansion speed alone should be considered a factor in room for more funding. If there are no mission constraints or relative timing constraints, should it matter to me when the organization spends my money? If not, why not donate now so they’ll have more to use once they are no longer saturated?
I was trying to define operational constraints more narrowly, to include only the kind of growth that actually threatens the effectiveness of the org. I’m not sure exactly what this would look like. Perhaps if an org currently has promising programs, but is growing in a way that I think will create problems for them, then I would worry they won’t be effective by the time they are no longer saturated.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸May 15, 2021, 4:00 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Max_Carpendale’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
Hi Max!
I may not have much to add, because I know you’ve thought a ton about this and I’m obviously not on the AWF panel. But for what it’s worth, here’s how I would rate those categories, in descending order of expected impact:
1. Research to inform future interventions
2. Advocacy to raise concern about the subject
3. Current interventions to improve wild animal welfare
Most of all, I think we should be measuring projects by how they contribute to the formation of a movement around wild animal welfare. That points in a slightly different direction than if we just think about the direct impact of a particular project. For example:
1. Research: Developing methods or concepts might catalyze further research better than simply developing technologies or species-specific knowledge.
2. Advocacy: Appealing to conservation organizations (“grasstops”) might build coalitions quicker than appealing to the general public (“grassroots”).
3. Current interventions: Conceptually simple interventions on somewhat likable species (e.g., rat contraception) might attract more resources to the cause than counterintuitive interventions on alien species (e.g., humane insecticides), even if the latter would have more impact in the short term.
Feel free to reach out if you want to bounce around ideas! cameronms@wildanimalinitiative.org

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸May 15, 2021, 3:30 AM
5 points
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in reply to: MichaelA🔸’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
Hi Michael and Abraham!
The answer depends on which type of longtermism we’re talking about.
As an organization, Wild Animal Initiative is committed to the position that animals matter equally regardless of when they exist.
That is, we exist to help as many wild animals as we can as much as we can. All else equal, it doesn’t matter to us whether that happens in our lifetimes or in the long-term future, because it feels the same to the animals in either case. We’re not in the business of warm fuzzies—despite the warmth and fuzziness of many of our clients.
In practice, because there are so many wild animals in the far future, that leads us to think about the far future a lot. It’s the main reason we’re laser-focused on supporting the growth of a self-sustaining academic field dedicated to improving wild animal welfare. As far as we can tell, that currently seems like the most reliable vehicle for institutionalizing an ethical and scientific framework capable of continuously serving wild animals’ interests.
Several of our staff also believe that our decisions should primarily work backward from what we think would be best ~1000+ years from now. But we haven’t committed to that as an organization.
This position has been called “strong longtermism.” It’s something we plan to consider further.
Even though it’s not our official position, strong longtermists might still choose to donate to WAI—because they believe we have the most promising theory of change, because they believe we’re the most funding-constrained of available longtermist projects, or for other reasons.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from anyone who has ideas on what we might do differently if we were to adopt a strong longtermist position.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸May 15, 2021, 2:23 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Luke Freeman’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
My guess is that the EA AWF’s grantees almost always have room for more funding. In addition to the reasons I think effective orgs generally tend to have room for more funding, the EA AWF does an excellent job highlighting neglected orgs in neglected areas.
I think the grantees least likely to have room for more funding are individuals, teams of less than 4 people, and high-impact projects within lower-impact organizations. But these are also the cases where it tends to be easiest to cold-call the grantee and get the full answer in a quick call. For example, an independent researcher could tell you “I’m doing this alongside my PhD so I really can’t actually take on more projects” or “My last grant just ran out so I can keep working on this new project as long as I can pay for it.”
Note that my reasoning might be motivated by the fact that I work for an org that receives substantial support from the EA AWF (Wild Animal Initiative), and part of my job includes fundraising. Hopefully my perspective contributes more than my bias detracts!

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸May 15, 2021, 2:14 AM
2 points
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in reply to: kierangreig🔸’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
I’m sure others have much more considered thoughts on how to evaluate and communicate room for more funding, but here are some I’ve been musing on.
I’ve found it more productive to frame the question in the negative: “Why wouldn’t this charity have room for more funding?”
I think that’s because it only takes a few things to constrain a charity’s growth, but when the org has room to grow, there are many directions it can grow. So when I try to think of the ways a charity could grow, I’m almost always going to underestimate the number of opportunities the charity itself has identified. For example, I might think a charity has exhausted the opportunities for a certain kind of campaign, but it probably wouldn’t occur to me that they could make all of their campaigns much more effective if they hired an operations staffer with Salesforce expertise.
Starting with the negative framing, there seem to be only a few kinds of constraints a charity can have other than funding. Probably not exhaustive, but here’s my list:
- Mission constraints: Do I generally expect this charity to do high-impact work? If I’m only excited about a few of their projects, then it’s less likely that marginal donations will counterfactually increase those projects.
  - Note that questions of program constraints (e.g., “no more states they could run ballot measures in”) often reduce to questions of mission constraints (e.g., “if they run out of states to do ballot measures in, will they identify another high-impact program to launch?”).
- Talent constraints: Is the charity able to hire people good enough to continue their high-impact work?
- Operational constraints: Does the charity have enough administrative bandwidth to hire staff or expand programs without straining their systems so much that their effectiveness suffers?
- Relative timing constraints: Are there comparably cost-effective charities with much more urgent and important funding needs?
  - Note that I don’t think timing should be considered a constraint independent of the needs of comparably cost-effective charities. If a charity already has enough funding to, e.g., hire as many staff as it has the capacity to hire in the next two years, then additional funding now will allow them to plan for hiring in the third year and optimize their current plans accordingly.
What links here?
- Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸's comment on Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything! by kierangreig🔸 (May 15, 2021, 2:23 AM; 4 points)

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸May 15, 2021, 1:41 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
Funding is also a major constraint in wild animal welfare.
At Wild Animal Initiative, our core objective is to establish a self-sustaining academic field dedicated to improving wild animal welfare. This welfare focus is a major paradigm shift from the naturalness focus that currently dominates conservation biology and related disciplines.
That means one major constraint is the availability of interested scientists. Many researchers need to be persuaded before they can develop relevant projects.
However, we’ve been finding that we consistently underestimate the number of scientists who don’t need any persuasion at all. Plenty of people pursue careers in wildlife sciences because they love wildlife the same way they love their pets: they just want animals to be happy. Then there are the people who pursued careers in wildlife sciences for other reasons, but devoted themselves to helping them after seeing wild animals suffer in their labs or in the wild. (One such researcher was so radicalized by her experiences studying flying snake biomechanics that she eventually became our executive director.)
Funding is the main thing keeping these scientists from researching the highest-priority wild animal welfare questions. Often, they have to put aside their welfare concerns to focus on projects that appeal to traditional conservation funders. Sometimes they manage to fund welfare research by appealing to funders’ other priorities. These compromises tend to lead to suboptimal projects (e.g., exploring high-cost ways to improve rare species’ welfare, rather than low-cost ways to improve common species’ welfare). And even the best welfare projects funded by traditional funders tend to have limited impact, because the conservation spin makes it harder for other scientists to recognize the work and contribute to a cohesive research agenda.
More funding would give these scientists the support they need to come out of the woodwork. Eventually, Wild Animal Initiative would like to start a research fund we can use to issue calls for proposals on key themes in wild animal welfare. We’re also really excited about the possibility of the EA Animal Welfare fund supporting academic wild animal welfare research. It’s a big enough space that we’re years away from funging each other, but it’s still worth noting that the EA AWF will be a better funder for many projects that WAI could be, including:
- Small scoping projects
- Projects that need funding quickly
- Projects outside the natural sciences, especially policy and social science projects

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸May 15, 2021, 1:08 AM
6 points
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in reply to: mikaela_saccoccio’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
[Observations from inside the charity pipeline]
As Mikaela said, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has a lot of leverage to strategically diversify the effective animal advocacy movement:
The EA Animal Welfare and ACE Recommended Charity Fund sometimes act as a pipeline, where a nascent project will seek support from the EA Animal Welfare Fund before growing into a more established charity that receives support from the ACE Recommended Charity Fund. One example of this pipeline is Wild Animal Initiative, which has received EA Animal Welfare Fund grants since 2017 (under the name Wild Animal Suffering Research), and became an ACE Top Charity in 2020.
I’m lucky enough to work for Wild Animal Initiative, and I can confirm that the EA AWF’s support was essential to establishing enough of a track record that ACE could evaluate us. Without that funding, ACE just wouldn’t have much to evaluate, and whatever we might have accomplished could not have been accomplished nearly as professionally.
As a former donor to the EA AWF, it’s really important to me that it keep playing this role as the beginning of the high-impact project pipeline. So we’re taking care to design a fundraising strategy that allows the EA AWF to dial down their funding for us as soon as possible. Over the next 2-5 years, we plan to grow a donor base rooted more and more in the broader wildlife advocacy movement. We’ll need the EA AWF’s support to get there, but once we get there, we’re looking forward to freeing up more funding for fledgling ventures.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸May 15, 2021, 12:53 AM
2 points
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in reply to: mikaela_saccoccio’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
[Adding some unoriginal thoughts on risky donations]
As Mikaela said, which fund you donate to depends in large part on how safe/risky you want your donations to be:
In contrast, the EA Animal Welfare Fund tends to donate to more numerous, often earlier-stage projects that are higher-risk and, arguably, higher-reward.
When I first got involved in EA, I thought “high-impact donations” obviously had to be “safe donations.”
Over the past several years, I’ve changed my mind. I now think EAs should generally lean toward riskier donations than the average donor, for three reasons:
1. Preferring safety too strongly can be irrational. As this article on risk aversion concludes, “it may be best for altruists to be approximately risk-neutral overall.”
2. Neglected causes are both especially likely to be high-impact and especially likely to be relatively risky to work in. In order to pick low-hanging karmic fruit, you may have to start a new charity or try a new method. They might not be the safest bets, but they can still be good bets.
3. Non-EA donors tend to be risk-averse. That means those relatively risky projects in neglected cause areas are likely to stay neglected until risk-neutral donors support them. In other words, EAs have a comparative advantage in making relatively risky donations.
I think all that makes the EA Animal Welfare Fund an incredibly exciting place to donate to. So much karma to pluck, and so few plucking it!

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸May 14, 2021, 10:16 PM
4 points
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in reply to: kierangreig🔸’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
In some cases, I am wary of us funging Open Phil or OWA or some other funder. E.g., potentially at times with some corporate chicken campaigns in a neglected region, or even with larger promising groups based in Europe or the US.
Because Lewis Bollard is both a manager of the EA AWF and a program officer at Open Philanthropy, does his involvement reduce the likelihood of funging with Open Phil?

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸Mar 22, 2021, 10:07 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Jordan_Warner’s comment on: Why Research into Wild Animal Suffering Concerns me
This was such an interesting discussion! Jordan, I was particularly impressed by (and grateful for) the way you continued to clarify the nature of your concerns while simultaneously remaining open to the new evidence and arguments others shared.
And for what it’s worth, I think “Other people are doing this thing wrong!” is a great reason to do that thing yourself. I hope anyone with concerns about wild animal welfare will join the movement and make it better—or at least voice those concerns as productively as you did.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸Mar 22, 2021, 9:50 PM
6 points
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in reply to: abrahamrowe’s comment on: Why Research into Wild Animal Suffering Concerns me
In the time since Abraham wrote this comment, Animal Charity Evaluators recommended one of the orgs he started as a Top Charity! So ACE definitely counts now, and Abe needs to update his resume.
I also think Abe was right to count ACE as working in wild animal welfare before, because their early explorations directly contributed to the formation of the field. For example, the intern that carried out their 2016 survey on attitudes toward wild animal welfare is now a researcher at Wild Animal Initiative. (You can see some of Luke Hecht’s recent work here.)

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸Oct 27, 2020, 4:01 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Will Bradshaw’s comment on: When you shouldn’t use EA jargon and how to avoid it
(That said I do think “deeply understand” doesn’t quite do the job.)
I feel the same way, even though I’m relatively strongly opposed to EA jargon, and even though I don’t know the specific connotations from Stranger in a Strange Land.
Here’s the compromise I’ve settled on: “to grok” → “to grok, to really deeply understand.”
That is, I’ll use the jargon and immediately follow it with the translation. It’s inelegant, and I’ve only used it in conversation so far. Not sure I’d be comfortable with so many redundant words in text. But I like that this compromise:
- Conveys as much of the point as possible to someone unfamiliar with the term “grok.”
- Adds the marginal value of “grok” for anyone who is familiar with the term.
- Maybe even adds some of the marginal value of “grok” for someone unfamiliar with the term. The fact that I’m using a foreign word to describes this idea suggests that it’s a different/harder-to-capture idea than simply “really deeply understand.” So from context, you could conclude that “grok” means “like really deeply understand, but in a different or harder-to-capture way,” which is most of what I mean by “grok” anyway.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸Apr 19, 2020, 9:07 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Eze Paez’s comment on: Building healthy relationships between people and nature and synergizing stewardship projects to benefit the wellbeing of wild animals
Agreed! I appreciate the correction.
Thanks for sharing Catia’s dissertation! I hadn’t seen that before and I’m looking forward to reading it.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸Apr 16, 2020, 10:17 PM
4 points
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on: Measuring happiness increases happiness
Anecdatum: This is consistent with my recent experience measuring my own happiness!
I recently started using UpLift (a cognitive behavioral therapy app developed by our friend Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking.org) to manage some mood changes that might be mild depression. The app prompts you to rate and reflect on your happiness several times each day.
Each time I tried to rate my mood, I thought:
“Huh, I don’t feel that great. But I do feel better than before. So I have to say a higher number this time. Dammit, I can’t even measure my mood accurately. This damn app is confounding everything by making me slightly happier! …Oh.”

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸Apr 13, 2020, 8:35 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Eze Paez’s comment on: Building healthy relationships between people and nature and synergizing stewardship projects to benefit the wellbeing of wild animals
Great point, Eze Paez! I’m glad you added it.
1. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Jane was trying to say you have to be a utilitarian to support wild animal welfare. I interpreted her comment as mostly referring to the intellectual history of the wild animal welfare movement, which does seem to have its roots primarily in utilitarianism.
2. One of my favorite illustrations of a non-consequentialist/non-welfarist rationale for improving wild animal welfare (backing up your points b and c) is “Legal Personhood and the Positive Rights of Wild Animals” (Jay Shooster 2017). Well worth checking out if you haven’t already!

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸Apr 9, 2020, 4:26 PM
3 points
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in reply to: GeorgeBridgwater’s comment on: Why I’m Not Vegan
Another argument against this position is its effect on your moral attitudes as Jeff Sebo argued in his talk at EA global in 2019. You could dismiss this if you are certain it will not effect the relative value you place on other being and by not advertising your position as to not effect others.
(FYI, this is the argument I was referring to as the “epistemic” argument in my other comment. Thanks for linking to that talk, George!)

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸Apr 9, 2020, 4:21 PM
19 points
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in reply to: abrahamrowe’s comment on: Why I’m Not Vegan
Hi Abraham! Thanks for pointing out that it would be helpful to clarify what is meant by the tradeoff values.
I differ on this point:
if you’re just saying, with little basis, that a pig has ¹⁄₁₀₀ human moral worth, I don’t know how to evaluate it. It isn’t an argument. It’s just an arbitrary discount to make your actions feel justified from a utilitarian standpoint.
I think we should give Jeff the benefit of the doubt here. I don’t think his estimates are arbitrary. I think they are honest reflections of the conclusions he has come to given his experience and his understanding of the evidence.
It would be nice to hear more about Jeff’s rationale. But in terms of community norms, I’d like to keep space open for people who want to present novel arguments without having to exhaustively justify every premise.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸Apr 9, 2020, 2:59 PM
10 points
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in reply to: Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸’s comment on: Why I’m Not Vegan
Another kind of reason to do both: There is epistemic value to going vegan.
It’s legitimately hard to understand the experiences and needs of individuals that are different from us. Most of the time, it’s even harder than it needs to be, because we approach them with unfounded prejudices.
Going vegan might be a psychologically necessary step to considering animals’ experiences and needs in at least a somewhat objective manner.
(I’m hoping to elaborate on this later, and apologies for the doc-dump, but the elegantly argued and eminently readable John & Sebo 2019 does a great job elaborating on this point: https://jeffsebodotnet.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/consequentialism-and-nonhuman-animals-penultimate.pdf .)

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸Apr 9, 2020, 2:55 PM
8 points
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in reply to: Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸’s comment on: Why I’m Not Vegan
One kind of reason to do both: It’s not a true tradeoff.
It’s easy to spend a lot of money on top-of-the-line vegan cheeses and meats. But it’s also quite feasible to meet most people’s dietary requirements with vegan foods that cost just as much as, or even less than, animal-based foods. (Shout out to my boi rice-and-beans.)
In that case, we’re not trading off dollars for dollars. We’re trading off time, effort, and comfort for dollars.
At some point, if you spend enough time on something, it might cut into your earning potential. But many of us have jobs that only allow us to work a certain number of hours per week anyway, or minds that only allow us to be focused and productive for a certain number of hours per week. For these people, it’s possible to spend additional time and effort without cutting into earning potential.
So the question is not “Can I do more good than veganism with my money?” but rather “Can I do more good than veganism with my time?” Not a lot of other volunteer opportunities give you the chance to spare multiple individuals from torture every year, so I think it’s likely still a good use of time.
(Though this obviously intersects with the other question of “Just how morally valuable is it to spare animals from factory farming?”)

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 9 Apr 2020 14:49 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Why I’m Not Vegan
I think veganism doesn’t represent a very good tradeoff, and I think we should put our altruistic efforts elsewhere.
For the sake of this comment thread, let’s assume that veganism is a substantially worse tradeoff than other altruistic efforts.
Personally, I think that’s likely to be true. For people (like me) who place a high likelihood on the sentience of farmed animals, it’s worth considering how the costs and benefits of going vegan compare to the costs and benefits of donating to a nonprofit that is attempting to end animal farming through systematic/institutional change (meat alternatives, corporate campaigns, legislative campaigns, etc.). Seems like those nonprofits are probably a lot more efficient at doing good for animals than I am.
However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we shouldn’t both go vegan and donate to highly cost-effective charities. Let’s use this comment thread to discuss why that might be.