I started out as a animal advocate in 2001 at the age of 12. Nearly a decade later, I discovered effective altruism and decided to start down an earning to give career path as a physician. Currently, I own a health services business and donate my time and money to direct work in animal advocacy. You usually can find me at the Hive (formerly known as Impactful Animal Advocacy) slack community.
Constance Li
Karma: 1,462
Glad that it was interesting for op-sy people!
Accommodations: We self booked the airbnbs and had people fill out a form about accommodation preferences (comfort with sleeping in common spaces, sharing rooms with same/opposite gender, light/sound sensitivity). Then we assigned houses to everyone and set up a whatsapp chat for each of the houses to communicate with one another. One person was the designated housing manager who made sure each house had the things it needed and the relevant airbnb checkin/out info was posted to each whatsapp. We didn’t charge anything for housing because the ops side of collecting money for each person corresponding to how long they stayed seemed like too much overhead. Instead of reimbursing people for travel support (which many conferences do), we just offered a free registration and spot in the shared accommodations instead, making it much cleaner from an expense tracking perspective.
I’ll share the form privately with you via a DM on the forum!
There is a students channel on Hive, which is a community of farmed animal advocates. You could connect there to find various resources and connections.
One that jumps to mind is the student led Food 4 Thought Innovations. They are having a festival in the Harvard for food transformation change next week.Short video explainer
A bit too spot on to be an April fools day joke! This is valid commentary.
A super usable bird directory that was made with AI? This could actually be useful to wildlife researchers and hobbyists. I hope you keep it up somewhere and maybe even expand to other animals. Though I’ve got birds on my brain now!
I suspect that the majority of positive impact from vegan/vegetarian diets comes from the normalization of these practices in different communities, not from the economic effects. I don’t have any data to back this up other than anecdotes of people telling me that I influenced them just by pointing out animal harm in their food choices… which I guess is different from me just being vegan, but I think me being vegan adds to the impact of my words.
Thanks for the mention, Kevin. I’m looking to gather people together who can build the in infrastructure necessary for what animal welfare initiatives could look like post-AGI transformation.
There is the meat eater problem where more animal lives would likely be lost by increasing the human population. It also seems much more cost effective per dollar to suffering spared to help animals and factory farming is spreading rapidly through Asia and Africa, making this a hingey time.
It is a pretty uncomfortable problem and not one that I have been able to reconcile very well. One way around it is steering people to support global health/dev orgs that help people while not increasing meat consumption. An example is
FemaleFamily Empowerment Media, which improves openness and access to contraceptives in Nigeria. Another examples is the Beans is How Coalition, which aims to double worldwide bean consumption for the purpose of reducing hunger and increasing sustainability.
As economic growth in developing countries is generally correlated to increased meat consumption and the current trend in Africa (where Give Directly does cash transfers) is the rapid expansion of factory farming, how you factoring the welfare of these farmed animals into your decision-making?
Is there some sort of offset donation to animal/plant-based food charities you would consider making? Do you have a theory of change where economic growth in these regions will turn out to somehow benefit animals downstream?
Given that there are vastly more animals than humans in this world, and that effective farmed animal welfare interventions can have an enormous positive impact, have you considered directing more of your philanthropic efforts towards effective animal charities? You can see the support for the cost-effectiveness of these interventions in the recent post “Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare”?
Hey if you want to learn more about the intersection of AI and animal welfare, I recommend you checking out the website https://www.aiforanimals.org/ and subscribing to the newsletter.
Glad you enjoyed it and sad you weren’t able to attend the retreat.
tbh, I was also quite tired after EAG and skipped out on some after conference events, which was quite suboptimal. Next year, I’m thinking about doing it before EAG and giving folks a 1-2 days of rest before EAG starts.
Hey Austin, thanks for reading this so thoroughly, making the suggestion to put it up on Manifund, and generously offering to contribute to retroactive funding. This seems like a great idea and I just made a grant request page. :)
I really like your suggested post-EAG debate statement, Toby!
Other suggested debate topics:
1. Digital Minds will possess sentience or moral status
2. It is a moral obligation to develop protections for digital minds
Hi Toby, thank you so much for writing a comprehensive review for this time sensitive opportunity.
For anyone interested in a different version of the suggested answers that Ben and Haven made that is more aimed at encouraging the adoption of on-farm monitoring systems in order to lay the groundwork for AI analysis for welfare metrics, please see this guide that I just wrote.
Fish welfare would be a big factor in my model about the net utility of free malaria nets. However, it seems really hard to calculate because we don’t know the average net qualia of fish in these regions. If it is negative, then overfishing may be a positive thing for their welfare.
Yeah.. I think I agree. We have thought and re-thought enough about shrimps and it is now the time to ACT! Will change it in the post.
Thank you for your devotion to the maximum utils!
Had to google Naming What We Can first… love it!
I really appreciate this transparency write up. It actually did trigger me to immediately reach out to one of the grantees with some critical information about their strategic plan, which I was previously not aware of.