EricHerboso

• EricHerbosoJun 25, 2021, 3:17 PM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Tsunayoshi’s comment on: What are the ‘PlayPumps’ of cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion?

  There was good reason back then to believe that overpopulation was a real problem whose time would come relatively soon. If it wasn’t for technological breakthroughs with dwarf wheat and IR8 rice variants, spearheaded by Norman Borlaug and others, our population would have seriously passed our ability to grow food by this point—the so-called Malthusian trap.

  Using overpopulation as an example here would be akin to using something like global climate change as an example in the present, if it turns out that a technological breakthrough in the next 5-10 years completely obviates the need for us to be careful about greenhouse gas release in the future.

  Because of this, I don’t think overpopulation as a cause area would make for the best example that you’re trying to make here.

• EricHerbosoApr 20, 2021, 3:28 AM

  16 points

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  in reply to: EricHerboso’s comment on: Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior

  I am concerned that although I explained that the views I put forward here are my own, they are being taken as though it is some official response from ACE. This is not the case. To eliminate any potential further misunderstanding on this, I will not be engaging further on this thread.

• EricHerbosoApr 20, 2021, 3:27 AM

  7 points

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  in reply to: Hypatia’s comment on: Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior

  Clarifying [the specifics of the CARE conference decision] would be helpful.

  Regarding the CARE conference decision, I want to give a disclaimer that I was not closely involved in this decision, so I’m not clear on what the exact reasoning was. I’ve shared my opinions above on the situation, but as this conference took place eight months ago and isn’t related to the core of ACE’s work, I don’t expect ACE to make any further official statements on the matter.

  In my response to Wei Dai, I explain that it’s just not possible for me nor for ACE to share confidential details of this type. I’ve tried to strike the best balance I can of relieving some of the fears that you and others have about ACE’s reasoning in this case, while simultaneously respecting ACE’s policies around how we treat private communication with other charities. I suspect that I have been unsuccessful at this. I’m sorry that I can’t share more on this topic.

  Does this mean…? …Or am I misunderstanding something about ACE’s charity review process?

  It is difficult for me to go into detail here without breaking confidentiality. I’ve tried several times to draft something that I could say generally here, without reference to anything specific. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be possible. All I can do in this case is to refer you to ACE’s Charity Evaluation Criteria, which goes into more detail about Criterion 5: Leadership and Culture.

  [The ACE Movement Grants DEI policy] still seems like harmful policy to me. Even if the overall goal of the grants is to make the movement stronger (including by becoming more inclusive), it’s plausible that there could be some really promising projects from people/​groups who don’t fully align with ACE on DEI.

  I agree that projects can be promising, regardless of the ideals of the people running them. But I disagree that ACE Movement Grants should fund such projects. The most important thing that ACE Movement Grants is trying to do is to help direct the shape of the larger movement. This is important because, unlike GiveWell with global poverty (for example), ACE and other EA funders direct at least 25% of the available funding for farmed animal advocacy. Whereas GiveWell can afford to solely advocate for top and standout charities, ACE is in the unique position of being responsible for a significant percentage of the money moved in some of these cause areas.

  I’m not averse to all kinds of people doing promising projects. If they succeed, hopefully they can one day be recognized by ACE in its top or standout charity lists, as former AMG grantees Wild Animal Initiative, Vegetarianos Hoy, and Essere Animali are now. But while they are still in the ‘promising’ stage, I don’t think it is needed nor even appropriate for ACE Movement Grants to fund them if their values actively turn away BIPGM.

• EricHerbosoApr 20, 2021, 3:26 AM

  4 points

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  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior

  A lot goes into ACE’s evaluation decisions. ACE’s charity evaluation process is extremely transparent; I welcome you to read ACE’s official description of that process if you want more detail generally on this kind of thing.

  Regarding specifics, I’m unfortunately not at liberty to discuss any confidential details of this case beyond what is already explained in our 2020 evaluation of Anima International.

• EricHerbosoApr 20, 2021, 3:25 AM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior

  In general, organizations should respect confidentiality of communications with other groups. This is especially important for ACE, as they rely on animal advocacy organizations feeling comfortable enough to share their internal data with them. While transparency is one of its primary goals, and ACE is already extremely transparent about its charity evaluation process and the reasoning that led to the selection of each of the recommended charities in its reviews, I hope you can understand why ACE also values the importance of retaining a collaborative relationship with other organizations. As such, ACE retains a strong policy against publicly sharing private communications between ACE and the charities they evaluate.

  What links here?

  • EricHerboso's comment on Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior by Hypatia (Apr 20, 2021, 3:27 AM; 7 points)

• EricHerbosoApr 17, 2021, 6:24 PM

  121 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior

  Although I am on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators, everything I say on this thread is my own words only and represents solely my personal opinion of what may have been going on. Any mistakes here are my own and this should not be interpreted as an official statement from ACE.

  I believe that the misunderstanding going on here might be a false dilemma. Hypatia is acting as though the two choices are to be part of the social justice movement or to be in favor of free open expression. Hypatia then gives evidence that shows that ACE is doing things like the former, and thus concludes that this is dangerous because the latter is better for EA.

  But this is a false dichotomy. ACE is deliberately taking a nuanced position that straddles both sides. ACE is not in danger of becoming an org that just goes around canceling free thought thinkers. But nor is ACE is danger of ignoring the importance of providing safe spaces for black, indigenous, and people of the global majority (BIPGM) in the EAA community. ACE is doing both, and I think rightly so.

  Many who read this likely don’t know me, so let me start out by saying that I wholeheartedly endorse the spirit of the quoted comment from Anna Salamon at the end of Hypatia’s post. I strongly believe that the ideals of the enlightenment (open discussion of ideas, free speech, believing ideas based on argumentation and evidence) are necessary in order to do and achieve better. I have been known, in the past, of arguing even for more open discussion of infohazardous ideas, given appropriate spaces.

  But, at the same time, I simultaneously believe that the playing field in which we all live and work together is fundamentally biased against BIPGM. In order to ensure that BIPGM are able to also work in the EAA space, they can’t just be ignored; we have to take a positive effort in order to ensure that they are fairly included. As Howard Zinn once noted, you can’t stay neutral on a moving train.

  (I really don’t want EA to fall into the trap that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony did when they threw Frederick Douglass under the bus. We can simultaneously fight for EAA while also providing a space for BIPGM in the EAA community.)

  Hypatia made several points in the original post. I’ll reorganize them here, in their own words:

  • Blog Post on BLM

    • Making (in my view) poorly reasoned statements about anti-racism; and

    • encouraging supporters to support or donate to anti-racist causes and organizations of dubious effectiveness.

  • Withdrawal from 2020 CARE Conference

    • Attempting to cancel an animal rights conference speaker because of his (fairly liberal) views on Black Lives Matter;

    • withdrawing from that conference because the speaker’s presence allegedly made ACE staff feel unsafe; and

    • issuing a public statement supporting its staff and criticizing the conference organizers.

  • Penalizing Charities Based on Staff Statements

    • Penalizing charities in reviews for having leadership and/​or staff who are deemed to be insufficiently progressive on racial equity; and

    • stating ACE will deny funding to projects from those who disagree with its views on diversity, equity and inclusion.

  I’d like to respond to some of these points, as I think they are incorrect and/​or misleading. I will not be responding to the Blog Post on BLM bullet because I believe that ACE would be better able to clarify that issue.

  Withdrawal from 2020 CARE Conference

  “Attempting to cancel an animal rights conference speaker because of his (fairly liberal) views on Black Lives Matter, withdrawing from that conference because the speaker’s presence allegedly made ACE staff feel unsafe”

  My understanding is that ACE, as an organization, did not intend in any way to cancel this speaker in the sense that you mean here.

  What happened is much more nuanced than you make it out to be. In another comment on this thread, anonymous00 writes up much more of the context behind what was going on. In short, ACE had staff that were going to present at the CARE conference. After they learned that the facebook commenter in question would be on a panel talking about BLM, they indicated to ACE leadership that they felt unsafe going to the conference, and they pulled out. There was no capacity to replace them with other speakers. ACE informed CARE that they were withdrawing.

  At no point here did ACE as an organization deliberately decide to cancel anyone, even if some people affiliated with ACE did express dissatisfaction with him speaking on this topic at the conference. At no point do I think that ACE had any choice but to withdraw from the conference, given the feelings of ACE’s staff that pulled out. You might object that these staff members shouldn’t have felt unsafe. I can understand that point of view, because if I were in their position, I wouldn’t have felt unsafe, even though I am also a BIPGM. (I’m mixed indigenous, hispanic, and white, with the plurality being indigenous ancestry.) But you and I do not get to choose when others feel unsafe.

  Hopefully, anonymous00′s writeup may give more context into why they felt unsafe. If not, I could try to explain further, perhaps with an analogy to make it more clear. But I believe this is beside the point. Organizations cannot tell their employees when they have to feel safe. It’s up to people to make such determinations, and then organizations have to work around those facts.

  “issuing a public statement supporting its staff and criticizing the conference organizers.”

  I agree that the way that ACE handled the communication surrounding these events was ultimately quite poor. While I believe that ACE took appropriate actions here, I don’t think that its communications about those actions were appropriate nor ultimately good.

  In particular, ACE’s statement erred on the side of taking responsibility as an organization for the actions of its employees. I think this is generally good practice. But it gave an impression that ACE was trying to deplatform someone, when that is not what was going on at all. I think that the communications aspect of this situation could have been much better handled.

  Penalizing Charities Based on Staff Statements

  “Penalizing charities in reviews for having leadership and/​or staff who are deemed to be insufficiently progressive on racial equity”

  While your words here are technically correct, putting it like this is very misleading. Without breaking confidentiality, let me state unequivocally that if an organization had employees who had really bad views on DEI, that would be, in itself, insufficient for ACE to downgrade them from top to standout charity status. This doesn’t mean it isn’t a factor; it is. But the actions discussed in this EA forum thread would be insufficient on their own to cause ACE to make such a downgrade.

  “stating ACE will deny funding to projects from those who disagree with its views on diversity, equity and inclusion.”

  While this is true as stated, it is not as inappropriate as it sounds here. The text you pulled is from ACE Movement Grants, which is completely separate from the evaluations used for top and standout charities. This is relevant because the entire point of ACE Movement Grants is to foster the movement to become bigger and better through increased resiliency, and this includes being inclusive. It is entirely appropriate for ACE Movement Grants to have a clause like this, given what they are trying to do. There are further reasons why ACE has something like ACE Movement Grants in place, and that context might further explain why including a clause like this would be appropriate; but in the interest of brevity, I won’t include those reasons here.

  Potentially Harmful to the EA Movement

  “those who disagree with decisions to support that work shouldn’t be branded as racist or ignorant”

  I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, and I believe ACE does as well. Please remember that ACE is unusually lenient about others who hold ideals contrary to what ACE does. Unlike global poverty work, there are actual real companies whose business depends entirely on killing and effectively torturing animals. Yet ACE is continually willing to promote organizations who do corporate outreach with these companies. If anything, ACE is extremely strong on allowing cooperation and promotion with individuals and groups who have views that are completely contrary to what ACE believes in.

  Conclusion

  Ultimately, I think the misunderstanding here is a false dilemma. ACE is deliberately taking a nuanced view on the supposed (false dichotomy) axis of free open discussion and the encouragement of safe spaces. At times, ACE might err on one side or the other; hopefully you can understand that organizations like ACE can and will sometimes fail to live up to their own ideals. But the intended position that ACE is taking is one where we try to foster free open discussion while also trying to make the EAA community a place where BIPGM can more fairly live and work.

  What links here?

  • Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior by Hypatia (Apr 17, 2021, 5:00 PM; 274 points)
  • Jakub Stencel's comment on Con­cerns with ACE’s Re­cent Behavior by Hypatia (Apr 21, 2021, 7:23 PM; 241 points)

• EricHerbosoFeb 11, 2021, 5:37 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Com­plex clue­less­ness as credal fragility

  The issue is that the html is missing both the id attributes that show where the links should take you. What you want is something like:

  In-page anchor links: <a id=”ref1“ href=”#fn1”>&sup1;</​a>

  Linked footnote: <p id=”fn1″>&sup1; <small>Footnote text.</​small></​p></​code>

  Footnote link back to article text: <a href=”#ref1″>↩</​a></​code>

  But what you currently have is <a href=”#fn-E9Mru3HsHeKH8GsTZ-1“><sup>[1]</​sup></​a> for the in-page link and <a href=”#fnref-E9Mru3HsHeKH8GsTZ-1”>↩︎</​a> for the footnote link back to the text. There’s no id=”fn-E9Mru3HsHeKH8GsTZ-1“ nor id=”fnref-E9Mru3HsHeKH8GsTZ-1” in the html to indicate where these links should go.

  A quick fix might be to just enter in the appropriate id attributes in the anchor links to footnotes and in the p tag for each footnote, but I suspect that the long alphanumeric part here means that you’re using some program that has messed this up, so it may be a better use of time to figure out what went wrong with the program.

  EDIT: After searching how to properly format code in comments on the EA Forum, I happened to come across this advice to just use this Google Docs add-on to make including footnotes much easier. It’s likely more worthwhile for you to ignore the advice I made above and instead just use the add-on. (I still don’t know how to make text appear in code blocks, though.)

  EDIT Jan 2022: The EA Forum now supports rich footnotes. Use that instead!

• EricHerbosoJan 24, 2021, 3:18 PM

  9 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Things I recom­mend you buy and use.

  While I think the practice of sharing purchasing recommendations can be good (I love the concept of crowdsourcing research into great purchases!), I am concerned about some of the items that you’ve recommended here.

  The diet books and health supplements you’ve listed are not items that I would personally endorse, and I don’t believe that the EA community as a whole would uncritically endorse them either. While I’m comfortable with EA forum posts that argue for their effectiveness, I am not comfortable with EA posts that give the impression that these are not controversial recommendations.

  Without intending to start a discussion into why these are controversial recommendations, I just wanted to flag that they are, since this post is presented as though the EA community should be already agreed upon their effectiveness.

  However, the non-supplement recommendations you’ve listed here are pretty great! I’d like to especially shout out the saving money section as having several services that I use regularly.

• EricHerbosoJan 22, 2021, 7:13 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Aleksi Maunu’s comment on: Seek­ing part-time con­trac­tor for Face­book group support

  I would strongly argue against this, primarily because it is against Reddit’s rules. Although subreddits do get to choose many of the policies in their own space, vote manipulation is a rule that is enforced site-wide.

• EricHerbosoJan 5, 2021, 3:06 PM

  4 points

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  on: Ret­ro­spec­tive on Teach­ing Ra­tion­al­ity Workshops

  I anticipate these lesson plans being very useful! Thank you for sharing.

  My siblings (aged 13, 17, & 25) and I have a twice-yearly event where I will pick a topic and teach them about it in depth. I plan to use one of these lesson plans in my next meeting with them this summer.

• EricHerbosoJan 5, 2021, 3:00 PM

  5 points

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  in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Ret­ro­spec­tive on Teach­ing Ra­tion­al­ity Workshops

  The problem isn’t that people with aphantasia can’t visualize; it’s that these people are generally unaware that they have it in the first place. (People who know they have it will correct for it in the same way that handicapped people will automatically correct for ‘ableist’ language.) Because of this, I’m not sure what kind of notice would suffice. I think saying to skip the sensory detail step if it doesn’t resonate may work for people with poor phantasia; but for pure aphants like me, the phrase “struggle with sensory detail” won’t pattern match to what’s going on in my head. If you had asked me five years ago whether I struggled with sensory detail, I would have said that I didn’t, because I didn’t know that visual mental imagery was possible at all, and I would have thought that I had a lot of practice with memorizing elements in a scene.
  
  However, people with aphantasia only take up 1-3% of the population. The 10% figure I cited earlier was for people who merely have poor phantasia: their visual mental imagery exists but it is cloudy, in black and white, and/​or is generally not suitable for close inspection. For people with poor phantasia, I think the proposed sentence will work well, as they’ll certainly realize that they “struggle with sensory detail”.

  Regarding the other senses, I can only really speak for myself. I have no visual mental imagery at all, nor can I simulate textures or smells in my mind’s ‘eye’. Regarding sound, I can kind of hear auditory mental imagery, but not well at all. (If you tell me to imagine a cow’s moo, I can think “moo”, but can’t reproduce a cow’s belt in my head. If told to imagine raindrops, I can think “pitter-pat”, but not hear the sound. If told to remember a song, I can runback individual series of notes, but can’t hear the combination of several instruments.)
  
  Anecdotally, I’ve heard many in r/​aphantasia and elsewhere report similar lacks, but it is definitely not universal. A stickied post there claims that half of people with aphantasia report “being unable to simulate any of the 5 [sic] senses”, but it apparently came from a reddit survey and has no other source. Wikipedia says that “many people with aphantasia also report an inability to recall sounds, smells, or sensations of touch”, but they don’t give a citation for this. This may be because the term “aphantasia” was only just coined in 2015 and there may not have been any proper studies yet that have focused on how many people lack mental imagery of senses other than sight.

  Regarding whether the sentence will suffice, I say yes. It may exclude full aphants who don’t know that others have visual imagery, but this is a very small part of the population. The sentence will successfully help people with poor phantasia, which is a far more significant portion of the population, so I think it is sufficient.

• EricHerbosoJan 4, 2021, 5:18 AM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ret­ro­spec­tive on Teach­ing Ra­tion­al­ity Workshops

  For the Effective Planning section, when trying to get across the idea of a Murphyjitsu inner sim, you explained the process by using visualizations. “Imagine biting into this apple. … Picture a good friend, and imagine talking to them. This is something that’s familiar, that you’re good at.”

  I, as well as 3% of the population, have a condition called aphantasia where visualizing a scene like this is impossible for us to do. Another 5-10% of the population have “poor” phantasia; they can imagine a scene like this, but not well at all, and certainly not in a way that they would describe as “something that’s familiar” or that they are at all good at.

  However, that doesn’t stop us from being able to use a Murphyjitsu inner sim. I cannot visualize in the way that your lesson plan asks — I can’t visualize the arc of a ball I intend to throw; I can’t visualize pouring a bucket of water over a friend’s head — and yet the thing that you’re trying to teach here is accessible to me. I can know what my friend would do if I poured water over their head and I know where the ball will go if I do throw it.

  I’m bringing this up because the language that you’re using in this section of the lesson plan excludes people with aphantasia and may make it unnecessarily difficult for people with poor phantasia, even though people with aphantasia like me are perfectly capable of doing the intended ultimate lesson of querying what was likely to have gone wrong when we imagine that a plan has failed. We just can’t do it by “making it sensory”, as you put it in your lesson plan.

  You already covered this under your general recommendation to avoid the typical mind fallacy, so I’m sure that if you knew someone in your workshop had aphantasia you’d do your best to work around it. However, I wanted to highlight this atypical mind capability because of the potentially surprising fact that most people with aphantasia do not realize that they have it nor that it is unusual to be unable to visualize.

  For people with poor phantasia that think that everyone else also has a similar mind, they will take your lesson instructions to imagine these things as an instruction to keep a running list in their head of all these numerous qualities (like how the apple tastes, listing what they see, whether it is hot or cold, whether there’s something that they should hear), and this is the exact opposite of what you’re trying to get across. While you’re looking to get them to use imagination as a way of grasping a situation more easily, your instructions to visualize may inadvertently cause them to instead increase their cognitive load in trying to keep track of all the visualized elements. You say “Modeling a thrown ball requires a lot of effort, algebra, etc.”, but asking people with aphantasia to notice objects, sounds, etc. in their imagination also requires a lot of effort, because they imagine in terms of lists, not in terms of a visual scene. This isn’t a problem if they know they have aphantasia (because they’ll correct for it without you having to say anything), but since most people with aphantasia don’t even know that they have aphantasia, they will misunderstand your instructions and end up doing the opposite of what you’re intending them to do here.

  (For years when others tried to help me meditate by visualizing a scene that they narrated, I would experience a huge cognitive load of keeping track of all those imagined elements, which always kept me from being able to meditate. Counting sheep always made my mind more active, not less. It never occurred to me for 35+ years that my mind was different and that others experienced such visualizations as relaxing.)

  An easy fix for this is to include a single line in the lesson plan about how different people visualize differently, and just explicitly say that if you have poor visualization abilities, then they shouldn’t try to visualize in a way that makes it more difficult for them.

Us­ing Odds in­stead of Prob­a­bil­ities with Bayes’ rule

• EricHerbosoNov 19, 2020, 2:14 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David_Moss’s comment on: How to best ad­dress Repet­i­tive Strain In­jury (RSI)?

  One of the things Max recommends are mobilizations and stretching. While the links he provides explain why mobilizations may be important, they don’t actually do that good a job of directly showing you the stretches in a video.

  For that, you may want to watch Day[9] demonstrate the stretches people in the StarCraft community use before playing in a professional eSports match or before starting any serious practice session.

• EricHerbosoNov 10, 2020, 10:40 AM

  28 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: omernevo’s comment on: New Ca­reer Guidance Or­ga­ni­za­tion: Prob­a­bly Good

  In addition to the other points brought up, I wanted to add that “probably good” has ~4 million google search results, and the username/​url for “ProbablyGood” has already been taken on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This may make the name especially difficult to effectively market.

• EricHerbosoNov 1, 2020, 2:27 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelA🔸’s comment on: Des­per­a­tion Ham­ster Wheels

  Also related is the idea that the moral value of additional information is high when there is relatively low resilience in your credence that the current intervention is best. This leads to the (to me) rather unintuitive conclusion that if you have two research paths that both look to be equally good to look into for potentially improving the world, then, ceteris paribus, it may be better to invest in the research path for which you have less evidence that it is a good research path to follow. From Amanda Askell in the link:

  [I]f the expected concrete value of two interventions is similar, we should generally favor investing in interventions that have less evidence supporting them.

• EricHerbosoNov 1, 2020, 2:06 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: NunoSem­pere’s Shortform

  I suppose I just assumed that scale ups happened regularly at big NGOs and I never bothered to look closely enough to notice that it didn’t. I find this very surprising.

Dona­tion Match for ACE Move­ment Grants

• EricHerbosoOct 26, 2020, 4:28 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sanjay’s comment on: The Ve­gan Value Asym­me­try and its Consequences

  No, the OP’s argument is assuming that the lives of farmed animals is net negative. It’s saying that farmed animal welfare might at most be neutral, which would mean that, on expectation, farmed animal welfare is harmful. Nevertheless, it would be less harmful than ignoring farmed animal welfare would be, which means farmed animal welfare is still net positive.

  Meanwhile, the argument in your link argues that farmed animal welfare may be net negative, but it relies on the opposite assumption that the lives of farmed animals may be net positive.

• EricHerbosoOct 15, 2020, 2:05 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JackM’s comment on: An­nounc­ing our sum­mer 2020 ACE Move­ment Grants

  Before answering your question, it may help to get a little more context about why ACE Movement Grants exist, and how they differ from the charity evaluation work that ACE does. This is important because you may be overestimating the relative importance of individual ACE Movement Grants compared to ACE’s Recommended Charity Fund.

  ACE’s overall goal is to find and support the most effective approaches to animal advocacy. The main way ACE accomplishes this is through ACE’s top and standout charities, which receive the highest (by far) influenced proportion of funds from ACE.

  ACE Movement Grants complement this program by helping to foster a broad, pluralistic animal advocacy movement, which makes it more likely to be more resilient than a narrow, monistic animal movement. The amount of funding received through ACE Movement Grants are significantly lower than the funds influenced through the Recommended Charity Fund.

  Keep in mind that ACE is in a different position than other charity evaluators in the EA community, such as GiveWell. The available evidence supporting any given intervention is limited in animal advocacy. Of the funding that currently goes toward addressing industrial agriculture, ACE and related EA charities influence a majority of those funds. Imagine if GiveWell had much less evidence for their preferred interventions, yet they directed half of all funding to the entire cause of global poverty. In such a world, should GiveWell continue to only fund a handful of charities, or would they be incentivized to direct a much smaller amount of funds to help diversify the movement? The ACE Movement Grants program allows us to consider the effectiveness of the movement as a whole instead of being limited to supporting only a small number of approaches.

  Encompass in particular helps to build relationships with a larger group of advocates, specifically people of the global majority. Their grant goes toward fostering racial equity in animal advocacy organizations, which has the potential to make animal advocacy organizations overall more effective in the long term. To learn more about Encompass, you can read ACE’s 2017 interview with Aryenish Birdie, ACE’s reasoning on why promoting REI might be effective, or the Encompass FAQ.

  For more info on ACE Movement Grants generally, see the ACE Movement Grants page or any of ACE’s blog entries on the topic.