Mid-career climate science researcher in academia
Previously used display name “Pagw”
ClimateDoc
Karma: 724
Thanks for posting an update about the outcomes and your reflections. It sounds like the right lesson that it would be good to consult more widely in the movement before trying similarly risky approaches.
I just wanted to ask a somewhat technical question about the estimate of the amount raised:
We estimated donations attributable to this campaign by looking at donations that (a) occurred after the first news coverage and before January 18th, (b) came from donor who had never donated through our platform before, (c) weren’t attributable to any other source [i.e. they didn’t use a matching code and they didn’t choose one of our other campaign when answering the “where did you first come across FarmKind?” question in the optional post-donation survey]. Our less conservative estimate counted all donations meeting these three requirements. Our conservative estimate only counted donations which either (a) were made through the offset calculator widget, (b) said they heard of us in a news article, or (c) donated a very specific number that very likely came from our calculator e.g. $209. We manually excluded 10 donations for which we have evidence that they weren’t caused by this campaign.
This doesn’t sound like it takes into account that (I guess) there would have been some amount donated through FarmKind without the campaign i.e. donations from new donors in that period not indicated as being linked to a campaign. What effect would subtracting this “background donation rate” have e.g. if it were based on a representative previous recent period of similar length (maybe from October-November or something if Christmas distorts things)? Or is this accounted for in a way I’ve not understood?
There hasn’t been backlash to this campaign from average people, only EAs and animal advocates.
I think non-EA animal advocates count as being part of the general public in Nick’s usage? From what I’ve seen it’s been going down badly with them so far...
Thanks for engaging Aidan. Things may be clearer once we see any follow up I guess, but this strategy seems like it could come across as duplicitous, and rather risky not just for the organisations involved but also the wider EA movement, given the desire to seem trustworthy after the events of the past couple of years.
Thanks Thom for responding. I wasn’t actually aware of who FarmKind were when I wrote my post above. It looks like a very good project overall, thanks for your work in the space.
Your response doesn’t answer for me the question of why it was decided to create such an anti-vegan campaign (at least in its webpage). I can see there could be a lot of good done by persuading people who are unlikely to try a vegan diet to donate. But something along the lines of “If you don’t want to be vegan but want to help animals, try this instead” or even “If you hate Veganuary, here’s how to beat vegans at their own goals” or something would seem to suffice (but with better words...). Creating a webpage full of negative messages about being vegan doesn’t seem necessary, and seems to me to actually be misinformation, given I’m not aware of anything showing that the typical Veganuary participant’s experience is like what is presented.
Having read the article in the Telegraph, I didn’t think it was actually that bad—it seemed to be mainly arguing for promoting donations rather than diet change, and didn’t actually seem to put veganism down (except for bringing up “vegan dogma”). (Though I wouldn’t agree that putting on a meat-eating challenge is ethically OK.) So being negative about veganism doesn’t seem to have been necessary to get publicity, so it makes it seem even stranger why the campaign web page takes this line.
It doesn’t seem to have been picked up by any substantial media outlet other than the right wing UK press—I’d have thought it would be desirable to get a broader reach, since I’d guess that people on the political left would be more likely to donate, and I wonder if being less adversarial might have worked better.
It would be good to see follow up analysis of what impact on donations the campaign actually has.Cooperation: We let Veganuary know about our intention to launch this campaign at the very start of our planning process and have kept them informed throughout.
Aidan says here that it is a “bit”. That would seem to imply that Veganuary are collaborating with you on this. Can you say if that’s accurate? If there’s a follow up, it would seem good to highlight it to people here.
Our funders: FarmKind made the decision to launch this campaign. Organisations and individuals that have provided FarmKind with funding are not endorsing the campaign and it would be a mistake to equate past funding of FarmKind with support for our approach.
One of the things that people are going to do with a campaign like this is try to see who is funding it. Currently if you click the “Transparency” link at the bottom of the campaign page, it goes to a list of FarmKind’s funders, including the EA Animal Welfare Fund. It’s then going to at least raise the possibility in people’s minds that these funders implicitly endorse the campaign. Unless you’ve switched to self-funding, it does seem like these funders’ money is being used to finance it (including individual donors to the EA AWF). Would it not be normal to check with funders before launching a campaign that’s expected to be controversial? Particularly if their own donors might feel attacked by the campaign? It seems like it creates a fair amount of potential for blowback against the EA animal welfare movement.
If there is some complex strategy involving coordination with Veganuary or others, I’d hope it was discussed with a diverse range of experienced people in the animal welfare space and got their endorsement.
I would also say that the campaign web page loses credibility by calling competitive eaters “experts” (I’ve seen this in comments in non-EA spaces) - why would anyone go to such people for expertise on how to best help farm animals through donating? To me, relevant “experts” would be people knowledgeable about welfare campaigns and ethics.
I think there should also be considerably more nuance around the idea of offsetting impacts of meat-eating—calling it “like carbon offsetting” seems misleading as they seem different in a number of significant ways, which may affect what people want to decide to do.
I doesn’t seem “lighthearted” to me—it seems quite serious. OK, the browser “game” is quite silly. But if it’s meant to be lighthearted then that seems to have not come across to quite a lot of people… Trying to appeal to people who don’t want to adopt a vegan diet is fine, but I don’t think attacking another group’s effort and the idea of veganism in general is.
It doesn’t really seem honest to me. It ignores all the experiences of people who didn’t find it particularly problematic or even positive to do Veganuary.
Encouraging such donations could be good, and advocating for diet change doesn’t seem to be favoured in EA. Advocating a “moral offsetting” approach to meat consumption is probably controversial I guess, but within realms of the plausibly reasonable. There doesn’t seem to be anything gained by being negative about veganism though, and not doing that would seem robustly better.
Edit—perhaps it could be argued that a campaign against veganism may more effectively raise attention than if no criticism were made. That would still seem to me to be an excessively risky and divisive strategy, though. And it makes claims that don’t seem to generally be correct about veganism and says some other silly things, which doesn’t seem like a good way to go.
There is a new “Forget Veganuary” campaign, apparently part-funded by the EA Animal Welfare Fund:
https://www.forgetveganuary.com/
https://www.farmkind.giving/about-us/who#transparency (the “Transparency” link on the campaign page)
Reddit link to news article that calls this a “meat-eating campaign” and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1px018m/veganuary_champion_quits_to_run_meateating/
The idea seems to be to promote a message to not give up animal products, but rather donate to organisations that effectively campaign to improve farm animal welfare (including EA favourites like The Humane League, Fish Welfare Initiative and the Shrimp Welfare Project).
Promoting donating to such organisations seems all well and good, but it puts out very negative messages about being a vegan (which apparently means you will have “annoyed friends and family” and “got bloating from plant protein” etc.). This has got a lot of negative attention from vegan groups that I’ve seen. The website seems a bit ridiculous in places e.g. its “expert” views are just those of some eating champions. [Edit—OK that last bit was the authors being tongue-in-cheek.]
Interestingly the person who seems to be doing the PR, Toni Vernelli, used to do the PR for Veganuary, and wrote on the forum defending it less than a year ago: link. It’s unclear if they actually changed their mind or have some other motivation to change their stance.
Anyway, it seems like quite a controversial initiative, unnecessarily negative about veganism and quite poorly put together [edit—OK that last part was unfair, more effort had gone into it than I’d initially realised]. As a donor to the EA Animal Welfare Fund, it’s not something I’d expect to be paying towards myself [edit—following discussion, I’ll withhold judgement from here until we see how it all plays out].
What do you think it is about going vegan that would prevent you from donating more? I’m still not sure of the causal link.
Out of interest, what is it you consider so effortful about becoming vegan that it would so substantially reduce the effort you could put towards other causes? Do you think it is knock-on effects of enjoying food less, effort required to learn to change your meals, effects from finding it harder socially, or something else?
The actual effort to change to a vegan diet isn’t that high in my view, at least if you have access to a decent supermarket (having done it) - it’s just learning to make some different foods and remembering to buy some multivitamins once in a while (or at least B12). Once you’ve done the learning, it’s not really an ongoing extra effort (like there’s not really an ongoing effort in knowing how to cook omni food), and the benefits accrue over time.
I wonder if people overestimate the effect on enjoyment. First, if you find vegan alternatives that you enjoy, then you don’t lose out a lot. Second, I think most EAs are probably familiar with hedonic adaptation, and how your happiness levels seem to be pretty resilient to lifestyle changes in the long-term (hence making donating money seem like less of a big deal) - so switching food also seems unlikely to really make you emotionally worse off. Third, we probably spend less than an hour per day with food in our mouths—it doesn’t seem like it should be that important to overall wellbeing—I recall Daniel Kahnemann making a point that we overestimate the impact of certain things because we imagine the effect when we are doing them but not the lack of effect during all the time we are not doing them.
Social is quite situation-dependent. But if it’s just that you have friends who take you to restaurants with no decent vegan option, it doesn’t prevent being vegan in other meals. Shared meals with family who won’t accept vegan food would seem trickier, but again there are surely some meals where a person could normally be independent.Edit—or I guess worries about health could be another reason? Well, I don’t know of good evidence that being vegan with a varied, not-heavily-processed diet whilst taking extras of certain vitamins has substantial negative effects (and if anything physical health seems to be better than with typical omni diets).
I think there are at least two relevant aspects here—the impact of ceasing insect farming and the question of which policies should be supported.
On the impact of ceasing insect farming, a consideration that it’s not clear to me has been taken into account is what the land would be used for if not for growing food for insects—it wouldn’t necessarily become wild, rather it could be used to grow other crops, and thereby have no large effect on wild animal welfare. Rates of deforestation seem to indicate there is plenty of demand for arable land. Also, biofuels seem to be being held back by land availability and worries over these competing with food crops, again potentially acting as a strong source of demand for land. So the effect of removing one source of demand seems complex, and it seems like it may just result in substitution by another type of farming. The marginal effect may be to affect deforestation rates—but to what degree these are affected by changes in demand for crops is unclear to me.
Re the question of support this gives for insect farming, even if it had an overall positive effect, it’s not clear it should be advocated if there would be other uses for that land that would be better e.g. growing biofuels. So it doesn’t clearly make a “case” for defending insect farming.
More generally, if an action A involves doing P and Q, where P is good and Q is bad, but there are ways of doing P that don’t involve the harm of Q, then the implication would seem to be to advocate one of those other ways of doing P and not to defend A—in this case P = farming crops and Q = farming insects.
It sounds like the benefit under this argument comes from reducing wild land. You could do that without causing lots of other insects (or other farmed animals) to suffer e.g. grow crops and burn them for energy instead, or manage the land to keep insect numbers down. So I don’t find this argument very persuasive that we should think of this as a positive benefit to intensive farming of insects or other animals, even supposing that insects (or other animals) have overall negative lives in the wild. Perhaps this isn’t the right location to discuss this in depth, though.
Relevant news article from today, on a report saying people are unlikely to be willing to eat insects—just thought I’d share: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/25/eating-insects-meat-planet
One of the main points of the article is that insect farming is bad for insect welfare, so Vasco’s comment seems on-topic enough for me. Maybe the link to that part of the argument could have been stated more clearly.
Maybe it seems repetitive if you see such comments a lot, but then it suggests that main posts are repeatedly neglecting the argument. Perhaps it would be better for main posts just to point out that this argument exists in their caveats and link to a discussion somewhere. If it might change the whole sign of whether something is good or bad, it seems like it should be at least mentioned.
For people like me who only come to read the occasional post, it does feel useful to be reminded of these other perspectives.
I had a look, it seems to presume the AI-owners will control all the resources, but this doesn’t seem like a given (though it may pan out that way).
I realise you said you didn’t want to debate these assumptions, but just wanted to point out that the picture painted doesn’t seem inevitable.
I don’t really follow why one set of entities getting AGI and not sharing it should necessarily lead to widespread destitution.
Suppose A, B and C are currently working and trading between each other. A develops AGI and leaves B and C to themselves. Would B and C now just starve? Why would that necessarily happen? If they are still able to work as before, they can do that and trade with each other. They would become a bit poorer due to needing to replace the goods that A had a comparative advantage in producing I guess.
For B and C to be made destitute directly, it would seem to require that they are prevented at working at anything like their previous productivity eg if A were providing something essential and irreplaceable for B and C (maybe software products if A is techy?) or if A’s AGI went and pushed B and C off a large fraction of natural resources. It doesn’t seem very likely to me that B and C couldn’t mostly replace what A provided (eg with current open-source software). For A to push B and C off a large enough amount of resources, when the AGI has presumably already made A very rich, would require A to be more selfish and cruel than I hope is likely—but it’s unfortunately not unthinkable.
Of course there would probably still be hugely more inequality—but that doesn’t imply B and C are destitute.
I could imagine there being indirect large harms on B and C if their drop in productivity were large enough to create a depression, with financial system feedbacks amplifying the effects.
In any case, the picture you paint seems to require an additional reason that B and C cannot produce the things they need for themselves.
Are there roles in your current organisation that you think would be more enjoyable and could move into, say more at the level of making direct contributions?
Also, have you very thoroughly thought through the risks of retiring on $700k? I’ve seen in various discussions that it’s common for people to think that a 4% withdrawal rate is likely sustainable to enable early retirement with low risk, but there are various reasons why that’s probably optimistic, so just thought I’d flag it in case that’s what this is based on. Maybe it’s not...
My understanding of these “reasoning” approaches is that they seem to work very well on problems where there is a well-defined correct answer, and where that can be automatically verified. And it seems reasonable to expect much progress in that area.
What is the thinking of how much of human reasoning work is to do with problems like these?
As a counter-example, in my own particular work on climate prediction, we do not get rapid feedback about what works well, and it is contested what methods and frameworks we should even use i.e. it’s not possible presently to say “getting a good answer just requires solving [list of well-defined problems]” (except making computers so fast that we can do pretty much exact simulations of physics). So it doesn’t seem clear to me that these reasoning models will get a lot better at that kind of thing. But this is perhaps towards the far end of the spectrum of complex problems.
I can see these reasoning models becoming very good at things like writing code where requirements to be met can be precisely specified and automatically verified, and improving performance of devices (such as computer chips) according to well-specified benchmarks. How much difference would it make to make fast progress on problems similar to these?
There doesn’t look to me to be a reason to think that systems trained this way will yield impressive performance at solving messier problems without clear right answers, like predicting complex systems (that can’t be observed experimentally or simulated very well), selecting amongst decision options with different strengths on multiple criteria, dealing with organisational politics etc. Does that seem fair?
These are genuine questions—I don’t feel I have a good grasp of what kinds of work most of our economy is engaged in...
It’s not clear to me why the aim ought to be to sample randomly amongst all people—it seems like a different population could reasonably be chosen!
I read that as saying that this dairy farm owner wanted to support a campaign to abolish use of animals by humans—is that right? Surprising if so! I wonder how they square that with owning the farm.