Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸

Karma: 436

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 30 Aug 2024 20:03 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸’s comment on: Wild Animal Initiative has urgent need for more funding and more donors
Faunalytics published the results of their benchmarking research (I haven’t read them yet): https://faunalytics.org/compensation-in-farmed-animal-advocacy/

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 9 Aug 2024 23:42 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Joey 🔸’s comment on: Wild Animal Initiative has urgent need for more funding and more donors
The EA movement is quite unusual in the salaries it pays
This is plausible, because EA is weird in a lot of ways ( <3 ). But I think we should have a lot of uncertainty in claims like these. My experience researching salaries (at GFI in ~2019 and at WAI over the last couple years) is that it’s really hard to do well, because (a) it’s really hard to know when you’re comparing apples to apples and (b) there’s strong reporting bias in the freely available datasets (I talked with a firm who said they had better methods, but didn’t end up paying the minimum $10k they required to access their database).
Faunalytics will soon be publishing the results of their project benchmarking compensation in the farmed animal protection movement (details in their OSF registration, subscribe to their newsletter for updates, report will probably be posted here), which will at least be helpful in understanding the animal advocacy side of the equation (if not the other side, which is the other areas we compete with for talent).

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 8 Aug 2024 23:01 UTC
30 points
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in reply to: John Salter’s comment on: Wild Animal Initiative has urgent need for more funding and more donors
Thanks for sharing your thinking, John! I’ll share some opinions and relevant facts below. (Note to other readers: John wrote below that he didn’t want to spend more time on this discussion, so if he doesn’t respond to this comment, don’t take that as tacit agreement. I think time-capping is a really wise and healthy thing to do, so I really want to support his decision.)
Theory of change
My main goal with this post was to share updates, not make a full case for our strategy, so it makes sense that you didn’t find it compelling. Here’s my attempt at a quick case for field-building:
1. Research constraints: Wild animal welfare is very unusual in how much it is constrained by research (e.g., we don’t know basic facts like which animals live net-positive lives, or how to measure that). Trying to improve wild animal welfare without much more empirical understanding would be like trying to find the best public health interventions without germ theory—there’s stuff you can do, but not nearly as much as will be possible once you learn more.
2. Academic institutions: Academia is the best, and maybe the only, place for that kind of research to start happening, because it’s unlikely to lead to profit (thus not a good fit for the private sector), it primarily benefits nonhumans (thus not a good fit for government), it requires input from a wide range of disciplines (thus not a good fit for any one independent nonprofit), and it will require many years of iterative research (thus a good fit for academic institutions, which are unusually stable and long-lived).
3. Relationship to social change: You’re right that for many social movements, more academic research isn’t what will change people’s minds. Scaling up wild animal welfare interventions will require lots of the advocacy-type work you see in other social movements: educating, organizing, legislating, etc. But before it can get to that stage, our movement has to identify what things are worth advocating for. (I also think there are several powerful examples of academia influencing social change in real time: conservation biology and environmentalism, gender studies and feminism, critical race theory and racial justice...)
4. Tractability and scale: Wild animal welfare is way less tractable than many cause areas. But I think that’s outweighed by the scale: humanity, factory farmed animals, and other captive animals collectively make up only 0.1% of vertebrates. The other 99.9% of moral patients alive today are wild animals (or more, if you count invertebrates). So it’s worth working harder to help them.
Staff salaries
1. Actual salaries: Our salaries currently range from $60,000 to $104,000. Here’s how we set salaries.
2. Rationale: The biggest determinant of our impact is the quality of our team. Offering salaries that are roughly comparable to those offered by similar jobs elsewhere allows us to attract and retain the talent we need to do good work without spending more than necessary.
3. Why not lower salaries? Some organizations can attract and retain the talent they need while paying below market rate, but that’s typically because they have different talent needs than ours:
  1. We need people in high-income countries because that’s where there’s the most funding for science and nonprofits.
  2. Many of our roles require advanced degrees, or knowledge or skills that are hard to get without many years of experience in an area. Later-career people can often command higher salaries elsewhere. They’re also more likely to have inflexible financial commitments (kids, house, etc.) that prevent them from taking a lower-paying job even if they’re really excited about it.
  3. Many EAs have extreme moral commitments and the desire and flexibility to make sacrifices for those. Most people in the world aren’t like that, and our day-to-day work doesn’t offer the emotional rewards that direct action can. So although there may be some dedicated activists who would accept less pay, we don’t want to limit ourselves to those. (We’d also rather not take advantage of those people’s lower willingness-to-be-paid. They can always volunteer to take a lower salary if they really want to. That’s what I do.)
  4. People are more likely to accept low-paying jobs if they have family wealth or social privilege that means they don’t have to provide for others in their family and they don’t have to worry about their own long-term financial well-being. We want a diversity of people on our staff, because we think that will improve our epistemics and our ability to reach out to a wide range of people to build a sustainable and influential research community.
  5. There are always exceptions: people who will take lower salaries despite living in expensive university hubs, having advanced degrees, not having a safety net, etc. But the bigger your project, the harder it is to build it mostly out of exceptions.
In other words: some kinds of work can be done with the kinds of people that are more likely to accept lower salaries. Lots of issues call for pairs of quixotic collaborators or lean quirky startups or tight bands of ruthless activists. Wild animal welfare, it turns out, currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers with highly specialized skills working at a marathon pace more than a sprint pace.* So it’s more expensive per head, but if you think those heads can have a big impact, then it’s still cost-effective.
* Edit: “Currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers” sounds more exclusionary that what I meant to convey. I was trying to describe the type of work required, not the type of people required. Not everyone working a middle-class job identifies as belonging to the middle class. Many people who come from low-income backgrounds continue to feel out of place for much of their professional lives (in part due to insensitive comments from asshats like me). The wild animal welfare movement calls for everyone who can do the work, and that includes people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 7 Aug 2024 14:17 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: James L’s comment on: Wild Animal Initiative has urgent need for more funding and more donors
That’s incredibly generous! Thank you so much, James!!

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 6 Mar 2024 1:04 UTC
1 point
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on: How much parenting harms productivity and how you can reduce it
Thank you so much! I’ve been wondering about exactly this… but wasn’t productive enough to research it yet. 😅

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 6 Mar 2024 0:58 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: freedomandutility’s comment on: What posts are you thinking about writing?
I think more speculative fiction about wild animal welfare would be great! Thank you!
Here’s a related thought, but ignore it if it deters you from writing something soon:
When I talk to people who are skeptical of or opposed to wild animal welfare work (context: I work at Wild Animal Initiative), they’re more likely to cite practical concerns about interventions (e.g., “reducing predator populations will cause harmful trophic cascades”) than they are to cite purely ethical disagreements (e.g., “we should never violate autonomy, even to improve welfare”). There’s a chance that speculative fiction could add to that problem, especially if multiple pieces repeat the same tropes. So my ideal medium-term goal would be a body of speculative fiction (ideally a single anthology) that portrays a wide range of futures to reflect the huge uncertainty we currently have about what the biggest problems are and how to solve them.
If it’s interesting and motivating for you, perhaps you could imagine your post as an early version of one of the pieces in that anthology. But if adding considerations slows you down, ignore this; anything you write will probably be helpful.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 6 Mar 2024 0:38 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Kyle Smith’s comment on: What posts are you thinking about writing?
I work in fundraising but don’t have any experience with it outside EA; I’d be really interested in reading this piece.
Your thesis also happens to parallel one of the few conversations I’ve had about TBP: a non-EA friend was talking about what she didn’t like about EA; she espoused TBP instead; I asked her a bunch of questions and was generally confused because what she described sounded very similar to how lots of EA funding works.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 6 Mar 2024 0:35 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: rileyharris’s comment on: What posts are you thinking about writing?
This seems interesting and helpful!

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 6 Mar 2024 0:34 UTC
8 points
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on: What posts are you thinking about writing?
I’m considering writing about my personal journey to working on wild animal welfare, which was unusually pinbally: loving animals --> learning survival skills and slaughtering a bunch of poultry --> interested in things like rewilding --> working to end factory farming --> working on wild animal welfare at Wild Animal Initiative.
People often find this story interesting when I tell it, and it might help engage or persuade some people (e.g. by demonstrating that I’ve seriously considered other philosophies toward nature).
But my big hangup is I don’t really know who the audience for this piece would be, or what exactly I want to achieve with it. That could have a big effect on which arguments I make, what kind of language I use, and how much detail I go into. (Having an altruistic theory of change is also essential to feeling okay with spending this much time gazing into my navel.)
I’d welcome any thoughts on whether/how to proceed!

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 20 Dec 2023 22:43 UTC
13 points
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on: Bringing about animal-inclusive AI
Thanks for this post, Max!
tl;dr: Lemme know if you have ideas for approaches to animal-inclusive AI that would also rank among the most promising ways to reduce human extinction risk from AI. I think they probably don’t be exist, but it’d be wicked cool if they did.
Most EAs working on AI safety are primarily interested in reducing the risk of human extinction. I agree that this is of astronomical importance, especially when you consider all the wild animal suffering that would continue in our absence.
Many things that would move us toward animal-inclusive AI would also help move us away from extinction risks. But I suspect the majority of those things, while helpful, would not be among the most helpful ways to reduce extinction risk. In other words, we should be wary suspicious convergence; “what is best for one thing is usually not the best for something else.”
I’m working on plans to do more to support a rigorous search for approaches to animal-inclusive AI (or approaches to advancing wild animal welfare science broadly) that would also rank among the most promising ways to reduce human extinction risk from AI. In the meantime, I’d encourage anyone interested in the broader subject to consider this narrower subset, and to reach out to me if they’re excited to work on it more (cameronms@wildanimalinitiative.org).
To be clear, I also think animal-inclusive AI is worth pursuing for its own sake (i.e., working on animal-inclusive AI seems likely to be among the most impactful things you can do to make the world a better place in the set of scenarios where humans don’t go extinct), and I’d be excited to see work on most of the approaches discussed above. In those cases—especially when building coalitions with people who might have different priorities—I think it’s useful to be transparent about the fact that what we’re doing is important, but we don’t think it’s one of the most promising ways to avoid human extinction.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 5 Oct 2021 15:34 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: jkmh’s comment on: How do you decide how much to donate in “user fees” for free services?
Thanks so much for sharing your perspective! That’s basically what I’ve been doing so far.

But I’ve started feeling the urge often enough that each appreciation donation makes me worried about my overall approach to appreciation donations — which seriously distracts from the warm fuzzies I was trying to buy in the first place.

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 19 May 2021 22:52 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Animal Welfare Fund: Ask us anything!
I would think if an organization had operational constraints, it would still have room for more funding, just the funding would be spent on expanding operations.
Great point!

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 19 May 2021 22:52 UTC
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 🔸 15 May 2021 4:00 UTC
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 🔸 15 May 2021 3:30 UTC
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 🔸 15 May 2021 2:23 UTC
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 🔸 15 May 2021 2:14 UTC
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🔸 (15 May 2021 2:23 UTC; 4 points)

Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸 15 May 2021 1:41 UTC
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 🔸 15 May 2021 1:08 UTC
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 🔸 15 May 2021 0:53 UTC
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!