I start caring about animal welfare 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 and bootstrapped my own telehealth company. Once I started trying to decide where to donate, I was quite shocked by the limitations of the existing organizations and communities in the EA/Animal space and switched into doing meta-work through co-founding Hive and later increasing my moral circle to include all kinds of nonhumans including artificial minds and founding Sentient Futures (formerly AI for Animals).
Constance Li
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Hey Ariel! Just to give you a quick update, AI for Animals is rebranding to Sentient Futures to better reflect our overall goal of making the future go well for all sentient beings and avoid committing ourselves to a specific theory of change.
Also, we are running a wargame to figure out how different interventions might end up playing out for animals in the context of AGI. That will give us some insight into what strategies could be promising. In the meantime, we are fairly certain that capacity building (growing a collaborative movement, refining ideas, creating networks with dense talent, and nurturing stakeholder relationships) to be able to adopt/test a promising intervention quickly is a fairly good bet.
It depends on what you find yourself wanting to do more… it definitely helps to come into a network trying to do something specific so that you can get a “lay of the land” and know who/what is helpful or not. Knowing how resources pan out for you is useful for knowing how they would pan out for others.
… that video was sick!
Love this post, but I don’t love the title, “The Need to Optimize EA Content to Show Up in AI Chats.” I feel like I’m being told what to do and there is a part of me that is resistant and feels like, “I don’t NEED to do anything!” 😅
I much prefer something more like this section heading as the title:
AEO Can Help Effective Organizations Amplify Their Impactor maybe something like, “A Guide to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for EA Comms”
The content is great though and helps uncover some of the inner workings of AEO, which can often be a source of disinformation. Good job!
Thanks for this great analysis Lewis and Emma! I am curious if cage-free enforcement campaigns will continue to be a funding priority for OP after the 2025 deadlines and how it compares to other interventions like the ones given in this recent post, Systems Change 101.
I think this is a good quote from that post:In animal welfare, cage-free campaigns help millions of animals but don’t necessarily address the economic incentives and cultural narratives that will lead to future animal suffering.
While I do think that cage-free has led to some major improvements in economic incentives (though not enough because otherwise companies and states wouldn’t be as resistant to fulfilling the commitments) and cultural narratives (“cage-free” for eggs is as recognizable as “cruelty-free” for animal testing), I suspect there may be diminishing marginal returns in terms of cost-effectiveness (people already know what “cage-free” is and the companies that were easy to convince have already been campaigned against).
Thanks Sofia!
Yeah, this is a reason why I love communities like Hive. I can always signpost people towards joining the community or posting on the help request channel first to see if the community can help them. If they are unwilling to take the extra 10 minutes to access a free resource, then yeah, it seems like they’re probably unlikely to follow through on whoever I introduce them to as well.
Absolutely agreed. One effective approach is to create requirements that provide inherent value and enable community feedback. For instance, ask them to write up their ideas in a public forum post and include an ask about whether others are working on similar projects or would find the work valuable.
This serves as both a filter (if others people respond and say this work wouldn’t be useful or someone else is already covering it, then you have a graceful way to say no) and be a useful contribution to the community.
“People are not as on the ball as you think, the market is very far from efficient”
Couldn’t agree more!
I’ve tried A and C in the past, and I would say it really depends on what you want to do specifically and what you’re well suited for.
A.) There are a lot less competent super connectors in other in large hub cities than you would think. This is not a skill that is taught, and most people who are good networkers are not thinking about the wider ecosystem or what it means to be a responsible steward of the network. I do think that large hubs have a big repository of people who could become great super connectors, though so the potential for a multiplier effect is higher.
B.) It depends on how strategic you think a certain hub can be. Are there a bunch of already value-aligned people there or businesses/industries that could be allies? If so, then it would be worthwhile to start developing that network now, like planting a seed for a tree that will grow in a couple of years.
C.) You need to consider the startup costs for moving. I did this for a year (NYC, Bay Area, London every month or so) and found it quite exhausting. Every time you go to a new place, you have to figure out where to live, where to co-work, and what events to go to. The people that you met the previous time you were there may also be doing very different things, so it’s hard to be fully up-to-date on what’s going on. If you can do things strategically timed with certain high-value events, then this might be worthwhile. For example, @SofiaBalderson and I tend to go to London (for 1-2 weeks) at the tail end of the Ambitious Impact charity incubation programs that focus on animal welfare charities so we can get to know the new founders well.
You might also be interested in learning about my prior (failed) attempt at establishing a nomad hub.
Nice, I’m glad that it’s useful for you! I think it would be super cool if we had a super connectors group chat at the next conference to quickly triage potential connectees!
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.
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.
Thank you for this writeup! Coincidentally, I also did a recent announcement about a gap of people pushing forward on nonhuman welfare risk reduction through the EU AI Act Code of Practice.