Engin Arıkan

• Engin Arıkan 16 Dec 2024 13:50 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Ad­vo­cacy for egg re­place­ment solutions

  Thanks for writing this. It has many interesting points.

  One thing I would like to point out which might be of help is that many processed eggs are in fact processed from lower quality shell eggs (cracked or very dirty ones). Since these are typically not suitable for sale on retail as shell eggs, they are used as a waste product by processors.
  
  This might update the impact of the intervention downwards (given that these are waste products whose substitution might impact fewer animals), but can also slightly update the possibility of change upwards due to consumer preference for alternatives (due to perceived quality concerns, rather than allergies—which can be a better leverage).

• Engin Arıkan 16 Nov 2024 12:35 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Luke Moore 🔸’s comment on: Fund­ing di­ver­sifi­ca­tion over time pe­ri­ods: se­cure fu­ture fund­ing vs. short term fund­ing

  Hi there!
  
  I would say my Kafessiz Türkiye (Cage-free Turkey) cofounding experience followed this pattern, at least partially. Of course, these weren’t the only reasons but I think things could have been different if funding schemes were different. As for Animal Advocacy Careers, I don’t really have a senior position to talk authoritatively about this issue but my subjective view is that again, different decisions about hiring (and increasing size) might have happened if funding schemes were different.
  
  I guess AIM startup space might be a bit different since in AIM there is a significant “education” period that can teach founders to not to fall for “founder mistakes”. Another reason might be that AIM provide a good amount of seed funding that can provide a long runway—something that other organisations don’t have.

  Looking at this again, I guess my observations are mainly focused on animal welfare space—which is something that I should have mentioned in the post (thanks for this). It may be that GHD funding is not like this.
  
  But aside from that, the main argument of the post depends on the fact that most grants are annual or biannual which explains certain dynamics.

Fund­ing di­ver­sifi­ca­tion over time pe­ri­ods: se­cure fu­ture fund­ing vs. short term fund­ing

• Engin Arıkan 29 Oct 2024 18:49 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 4

  on: What should EAIF Fund?

  1. Country and/​or domain specific career advising webcontent

  80000 Hours and Probably Good are great but their advice can be off putting, irrelevant or not useful enough for many people who are not their main audience. Having content about potentially many impactful careers in medicine, academia, or engineering, in Japan, Germany, Brazil, or India can be much more useful and engaging for those people who are in these categories. This can also be done at a relatively low cost—one or two able and willing writers per country/​domain.

  2. “Budget hawk” organisation/​consultancy that aims to propose budget cuts to EA organisations without compromising cost-effectiveness.

  There is a lot of attention towards effective giving like %10 pledges. Another way of achieving similar outcomes is to make organisations spend less (%10 again?). We tend to assume that EA organisations are cost effective (which is true overall) but this does not mean that every EA organisation spends each penny with %100 cost-effectiveness. It is probable that many EA organisations can make cuts to their ineffective programs or manage their operations/​taxes more efficiently. A lot of EA organisations have very large budgets, more than millions of dollars annually. So even modest improvements can be equivalent to adding many GWWC pledgers.

  3. Historical case studies about movement or community building

  Open philanthropy had commissioned some reports. But most of them are about certain policy reforms. Only a few are about movement or community building. I think more case studies can provide interesting insights. Sentience Institute’s case studies were very useful for animal advocacy in my opinion.

  4. Grand strategy research

  This might be already being carried out by major EA organisations. But I can imagine that most leadership and key staff members in EA organisations typically focus on specific and urgent problems and never have enough time and focus on taking a (lot of) step back and think about the grand strategy. Other people might also have better skills to do this too. By the way, I am also more in favour of “learning by doing” and “make decisions as you progress” type of approaches but nevertheless at least having “some” grand strategy can reveal important insights about what are the real bottlenecks and how to overcome them.

  5. Commissioning impact evaluations of major EA organisations and EA funds.

  I think the reasons for this are obvious. There are of course some impact evaluations in EA- GWWC’s evaluating the evaluators project was a good example (But note that this was done only last year, once—and from my perspective it evaluated the structure and framework of the funds, not the impact of the grants themselves). I definitely think there is a lot of room for improvement—especially on publicly accessible impact reports. I think this is all the more important for EA, since “not assuming impact but looking for evidence” is one of the distinguishing features of it.

• Engin Arıkan 29 Oct 2024 17:31 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Silvan’s comment on: Some rea­sons for not pri­ori­tis­ing an­i­mal welfare very strongly

  Thanks!
  
  I definately agree there is a lot of room of improvement in animal ethics. Most animal welfare people are cool with being unconventional but I think this kind of misses the point which is that we might not currently have the right moral framework.
  
  I also think utilitarianism got “some” things right like extreme pain is really immoral, or one should be seeking efficiency (within reasonable limits) etc. But it remains weak and weird by itself, without any additional (and multiple) values and principles.

• Engin Arıkan 29 Oct 2024 17:11 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ASuchy’s comment on: Some rea­sons for not pri­ori­tis­ing an­i­mal welfare very strongly

  Thank you @ASuchy

• Engin Arıkan 25 Oct 2024 15:50 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Felix_Werdermann 🔸’s comment on: An­i­mal welfare is ne­glected in a par­tic­u­lar way: it is frag­ile

  Thanks for the comment!

  And apologies for the late reply—I turned off the notifications after the debate week.

  I think the main argument I tried to put forward was more about the dependency of many organisations to one single major donor and the risks associated with this (and how it would make sense to mitigate this via more donations). And to be clear, I wasn’t criticising Open Philanthropy. I just think that given Open Philanthropy is a bit alone in the field, animal welfare is neglected in a unique way. If there were multiple donors that are equally major as Open Philanthropy, there wouldn’t be such fragility. But as far as I am aware, EAAWF and ACE do not have such funds and do not provide such large grants as of now. They are much smaller than the OP farm animal welfare program.

  I don’t think it would be likely that OP, ACE and EAAWF simultaneously decide to downscale, since OP has multiple causes while ACE and EAAWF have sole focus on animal welfare. So I don’t think having a bigger EAAWF or ACE would result in the same level of fragility, even if organisations still depend on major donors. The main difference would be that many organisations would rely on multiple major donors rather than one single major donor.

  By the way, I am less concerned with which avenue (funds or individual organisations) one should choose to donate. But my initial concern with the “individual” approach was that more individual donors spread more funds to more organisations which at the end would not help to mitigate this fragility if OP withdraws from animal welfare or significantly downscales. In theory, individual donors can also coordinate to channel their donations to fill in the gaps if such an event occurs, but in practice, I think funds would be more able to do this more efficiently. This is more of a practical issue which I don’t have super strong views about.

  On the other hand, “funds vs. individual donors” is another debate where I strongly agree with you that more oversight of individual donors is very needed. As you mentioned, this depends mostly on the level of knowledge of the donors, but I can also add (in favour of the individual approach) that this also depends on the level of engagement of the donors. I don’t expect major funds with limited staff can engage with each of their grantees perfectly. I think individual donors can play a very important role in engaging with these organisations as “shareholders” (or grant managers) and hopefully improve their performance. Of course, donors can do that for funds to some degree as well.

  To reply to the last paragraph: yes, I think this is a fair summary.

• Engin Arıkan 17 Oct 2024 17:30 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Mata'i Souchon’s comment on: An­i­mal welfare is ne­glected in a par­tic­u­lar way: it is frag­ile

  Thanks for the comment!
  
  I am sorry to hear that. I hope you find the necessary funding for your efforts.
  
  I agree that more fundraisers are needed. But unfortunately without more alternative funders, fundraisers might also fail to achieve their goals. Perhaps one short term improvement might be funders being more transparent about their expectaions and their plans so that grantees can adjust themselves to potential outcomes. Being more communicative might also help. Most grantees contact funders only on grant application periods which provides only limited feedback opportunities.
  
  

• Engin Arıkan 17 Oct 2024 17:14 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jeffrey Kursonis’s comment on: Some rea­sons for not pri­ori­tis­ing an­i­mal welfare very strongly

  Dear Jeffrey,

  Thank you very much for your kind words. I really appreciate it. This made my day.

• Engin Arıkan 17 Oct 2024 17:09 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Nicoll Peracha’s comment on: Some rea­sons for not pri­ori­tis­ing an­i­mal welfare very strongly

  Hey Nicoll! Thank you very much. I definately agree that M&E work is very valuable and very needed. Not only because it may reveal how to spend additional 100m but also because it may allow us to better understand how to use the existing ~300m.

• Engin Arıkan 17 Oct 2024 17:02 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Steven Rouk’s comment on: Some rea­sons for not pri­ori­tis­ing an­i­mal welfare very strongly

  Thanks for the comment!
  
  I completely agree that the funding can be absorbed by many organisations who will try their best. I also agree that there are a lot of things that we might reasonably experiment. But overall I am a bit pessimistic about them since earlier and somewhat similar campaigns did not lead to very positive results unfortunately. I also think most of the outcomes are related largely due to the performance of leaders and keystaff—so maybe some new project might succeed afterall! So I guess allocating “some” funding to new initiatives (and new leaders) makes sense but I would not expect a huge win even if we spend 100m on new initiatives. But I might wrong.

• Engin Arıkan 12 Oct 2024 12:58 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Mata'i Souchon’s comment on: Some rea­sons for not pri­ori­tis­ing an­i­mal welfare very strongly

  Thanks for the comment!

  I definitely agree that things could be wildly different if there was a massive cultural change. But as you point out the main question is whether it is doable. I think that the bulk of funding has not gone “only” towards lobbying efforts targeting companies and politicians. There is a lot of “society outreach” work done by existing EA organisations in order to effectively pressure these companies and politicians: like petitions, protests, media outreach etc. So I guess the contrast is not necessarily “corporations” vs. “culture” but rather it is “social change for an institutional short term goal” vs. “social change for an indeterminate long term goal”. I am more supportive of the former because it has better feedback loops and it is also a good test of figuring out what is really doable and choosing the right objectives proportional to our existing capabilities. I think it would be very unlikely that a qualified animal advocacy organisation would fail to generate enough social reaction to convince a retailer to adopt a better welfare standard but at the same time would succeed in generating enough social reaction to achieve transformative legislative progress.

  I guess another problem is that “culture” is very complex and cannot be changed by a small number of actors. This can also explain relative scepticism of funders since they face a practical problem of finding individual giving opportunities—not just deciding the general approach like “culture” or “corporate work”. Their job would be much harder if they need to figure out and evaluate hundreds of different actors from different fields and backgrounds.

• Engin Arıkan 12 Oct 2024 12:02 UTC

  4 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: AxellePB 🔹’s comment on: Some rea­sons for not pri­ori­tis­ing an­i­mal welfare very strongly

  Thanks for the comment!

  I definately agree with your point that we should think more about how to create more social momentum.

  But while I am very open and curious about testing new ideas about this, I am also a bit pessimistic about these efforts. I guess the main difficulty is that we just can’t “short circuit” building a movement. Many things need to come together in a long time period: social conditions, public opinion, elite opinion, corporate culture, competent leaders, team cohesion, patient funders, other stakeholders, etc. And these things need a lot of time to change and mature.

2024-2030 may be a unique “make or break” pe­riod for an­i­mal welfare

An­i­mal welfare is ne­glected in a par­tic­u­lar way: it is frag­ile

Some rea­sons for not pri­ori­tis­ing an­i­mal welfare very strongly

Five Years of An­i­mal Ad­vo­cacy Ca­reers: Our Jour­ney to im­pact, Les­sons Learned, and What’s Next

• Engin Arıkan 4 Mar 2024 12:57 UTC

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Cost-Effectiveness Estimations in Animal Advocacy are Very Contingent on Future Expectations
  
  Although most EAs try to make cost-effectiveness estimations based on “number of animals impacted” or “amount of suffering spared”, overwhelming majority of the expected value of animal advocacy efforts depends on their long term effect.
  
  I will try to show how these estimations have a lot of variance based on different assumptions—which explains the multiple viewpoints in animal advocacy.
  
  I will also try to provide some pros and cons for each approach and try to reveal their assumptions that support their cost-effectiveness claims for the future.
  
  Preliminary outline (draft):
  
  Intro
  a. Cost-effectiveness estimates between different interventions differ by a lot based on different assumptions. Some interventions can be claimed to be x100000000 more cost-effective than others (I don’t agree with Brian Tomasik here). So making the right choices matter a lot.
  b. They heavily depend on expectations about the future. (For example: will there be a vegan awakening or will there be a wave of (moral) animal welfare reforms or will there be technological progress that will provide price-, taste-, convenience- competitive PBMs? etc.)
  c. Cost-effectiveness estimates in animal advocacy are different from global health and development.
  d. Cost-effectiveness claims of different interventions in animal advocacy are typically in conflict with the cost-effectiveness claims of other interventions since they depend on conflicting assumptions—which partly explain the infighting and debates within the movement. And since these cost-effectiveness estimates involve expectations about the future, these debates are hard to resolve.
  
  Then I will try to describe some of the assumptions behind the cost-effectiveness claims of different interventions and provide some pros and cons that support or refute these assumptions.
  
  1. Radical change
  1.1. Radical moral change by “the commons”: (Examples: Mass media and education campaigns—New Roots Institute, Netflix documentaries, mass veg*n leafleting campaigns, best-seller books, Ted Talks, Veganuary...)
  1.2. Radical moral change by “the elites”: (Examples: Community building in leading universities, Animal Law programs in law schools, “academic” publications, lobby groups...)
  1.3. Radical change via technological progress (Good Food Institute, New Harvest, Material Innovation Initiative, Impossible, Beyond..., considerations related to the rise of AI)
  1.4. Radical change due to environmental necessity
  
  2. Reforms
  2.1. Moral reforms (Chicken welfare campaigns, The Humane League—Open Wing Alliance: Mercy for Animals, L214, OBA, Essere Animali, Animal Equality, Sinergia Animal, Kafessiz Türkiye...)
  2.2. Efficiency reforms (Fish Welfare Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project, Future For Fish)
  2.3. Technological reforms (Innovation Animal Ag)
  2.4. Reforms as a path to radical change? (Or radical change efforts as a way to cash in reforms)
  
  3. Should we expect the radical change or reforms to make significant progress in a single country or region at first and have a “spreading effect” afterwards?
  3.1. Are small yet socially favorable countries really important if they will become the first examples of animal liberation?(Switzerland—Sentience für Tiere, Germany—Albert Schweitzer Stiftung, Singapore, Israel—GFI)
  3.2. Are certain regions really important if they will become the first examples of animal liberation that will move other countries towards its vision? (EU policy—Compassion in World Farming, as well as THL and MFA in the US)
  3.3. If these are not going to happen, then should we just simply look at where most animals live and where organisations can run cheaper than in developed countries? (Developing countries: Sinergia Animal , Kafessiz Türkiye, Fish Welfare Initiative...)
  
  3. Wild animal welfare
  3.1. Moral change (Animal Ethics)
  3.2. “Management reforms”(Wild Animal Initiative welfare science research)
  
  4. Contingency due to individual advocates and advocacy groups
  
  5. Diversified portfolios or worldview diversification as sub-optimal and unrealistic solutions --> the need for concentration and making some bets in favor of some viewpoints
  

• Engin Arıkan 21 Jan 2024 13:48 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA In­fras­truc­ture Fund Ask Us Any­thing (Jan­uary 2024)

  In your view, how much of the past EAIF grants were a “win”—similarly or more cost-effective than a typical grant to a Give Well top charity? What would be a rough win/​loss ratio in terms of number of grants and their $ value.

• Engin Arıkan 21 Jan 2024 13:47 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: EA In­fras­truc­ture Fund Ask Us Any­thing (Jan­uary 2024)

  Do you evaluate the impact of EA Infrastructure grants? If yes, how? And do you plan to publish these impact evaluations? If not, what are the challenges?