Founded Giving What We Can Oxford (now EA Oxford) with Max D. (2010)
Founding team of CEA (now Effective Ventures) (2011)
Ran The Life You Can Save with Peter Singer (2012)
Graduated (2013)
Ventured out of the EA bubble (2014-2017)
Ran EA London with David Nash (2018)
Had fun with Daoism (2019-2020)
Supporting EAs in various ways (2021+)
Holly Morgan
Karma: 1,569
Egg Innovations, which sells 300 million free-range and pasture-raised eggs a year
This interview with the CEO suggests that Egg Innovations are just in the laying (not broiler) business and that each hen produces ~400 eggs over her lifetime. So this will save ~750,000 chicks a year?
Agreed. I’ve relied on this as my main source of EA news for the past 6 years.
Happy 10th Anniversary, Jo!! :)
Am I right in thinking that you are no longer EA-specific? Just a generic mental health website?
Yeah I was guessing more like 40:35:15:10 environment:health:welfare:other for UK in general, but that Veganuary had probably been pushing more welfare-heavy messaging so were getting a higher proportion of welfare folks, but still didn’t expect twice environment/health :)
Found it! https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt > click on ”and 7 more links” in the little bio > click on “View email address” > do the CAPTCHA (I’ve also DM’d it to you)
Thanks for sharing!
Personal highlight: “When Veganuary asked participants about their number one motivation for taking part, 18% said the environment, and 21% said their health – but 40% said animal welfare.” I think I would have estimated something more like 25% animal welfare.
Thank you so much for crossposting this!
1,157 corporate pledges are now fully implemented, 89% of the pledges that came due by last year.
!!
So if:
Saulius’ 2019 estimates were otherwise correct i.e. cage-free campaigns do in fact affect 75 chicken-years per dollar (updating 64%-->89% follow-through gives 54-->75 chicken-years)
A free-range egg costs 11 cents more than a caged egg
Modern commercial hens produce 300 eggs a year
Then: It’s ~2,500 times more cost-effective to donate to a cage-free campaign than to buy cage-free eggs instead of caged eggs.[1]
While I agree that we shouldn’t take expected value estimates too literally, that’s one hell of a multiplier. And even if ethical offsetting is generally antithetical to EA values, if your goal is to get chickens out of cages, an estimated 2500x multiplier on the margin[2] is a powerful challenge to buying cage-free eggs yourself.
“You shouldn’t be buying eggs at all!” I hear you cry. Why not? Because personally boycotting commercial egg production robustly makes you >2,500 times more persuasive as an animal welfare advocate? Because being free to consume egg-based products would make such a negligible difference to your productivity over the rest of your life, that it would never lead to you earning an additional $1.50?[3] Indeed you never spend more than $1.50 to give yourself the kind of benefits (yes, benefits) you’d get from being free to consume eggs for the rest of your life?
Epistemic status: Sitting in a cafe in a country with ~no cage-free eggs staring hungrily at a breakfast menu consisting entirely of egg-based options considering breaking my no-meat-or-caged-eggs diet while KC and the Sunshine Band sing Give It Up over the cafe speakers and wondering if the universe is telling me to give up rationalising eating tasty food or to give up rationalising looking more altruistic.
- ^
75*300/(1/0.11)
- ^
Obviously if no one bought cage-free eggs, no one would produce them.
- ^
Here, I’m assuming that cage-free campaigns affect 75 chicken-years per dollar (as above), that you’d otherwise eat 200 caged eggs a year, that commercial hens produce 300 eggs a year (as above), that you live another 75 years, that—very speculatively—going cage-free removes 50% of the suffering, and welfarism.
Note that rather than exhibiting regression to the mean over time, this is remarkably ~15x larger than ACE’s 2015 estimate for online ads.
While these issues are serious, it’s normal for social movements to go through crisis – what’s more important is how we respond to that crisis.
I like CEA’s timely addition last summer of collaborative spirit to the other three values you have here (which they called impartial altruism, prioritization, and open truthseeking).
With apologies for not managing to be quite as eloquent/professional as the others: I have nothing but love, respect and gratitude for you, Nick; you’ve always been so warm, insightful and supportive. I may always think of you primarily as one of the three founding pillars of CEA/EV, but I’m excited to see what you do next :-)
I like this post so much that I’m buying you a sandwich (check your email).
Thank you for sharing! I love hearing “origin stories” from like-minded people and I found this post both clear and inspiring :-)
There’s also an EA for Christians group—if you haven’t already come across them, might be worth checking out!
Thanks for adding a bio, Wes, and welcome!
Feel free to reach out to me for any “help with the 8-week course on 80,000 hours” :-)
Thanks Toby—so, so exciting to see this work progressing!
One quibble:
The value of advancements and speed-ups depends crucially on whether they also bring forward the end of humanity. When they do, they have negative value
...when the area under the graph is mostly above the horizontal axis?
Even if you assign a vanishingly small probability to future trajectories in which the cumulative value of humanity/sentientkind is below zero, I imagine many of the intended users of this framework will at least sometimes want to model the impact of interventions in worlds where the default trajectory is negative (e.g. when probing the improbable)?
Maybe this is another ‘further development’ consciously left to others and I don’t know how much the adjustment would meaningfully change things anyway—I admit I’ve only skimmed the chapter! But I find it interesting that, for example, when you include the possibility of negative default trajectories, the more something looks like a ‘speed-up with an endogenous end time’ the less robustly bad it is (as you note), whereas the more it looks like a ‘gain’ the more robustly good it is .
I also hope that some of the (what I perceive to be) silent majority will chime in and demonstrate that we’re here and don’t want to see EA splintered, rebranded, or otherwise demoted in favor of some other label.
🙋♀️
This is one of my favourite posts on this forum and I imagine the large majority of EAs I know IRL would largely agree with it (although there’s definitely a selection bias there). Thank you! I feel like there have been several moments in the past year or so where I’ve been like, “Man, EA NYC seems really cool.”
Re “best EA win,” I couldn’t pick a favourite but here’s one I learnt a few hours ago: Eitan Fischer—who I remember from early CEA days when he founded Animal Charity Evaluators—now runs the cultivated meat company Mission Barns. The Guardian says, “[A] handful of outlets have agreed to stock its products once they are approved for sale.” 🥳
All done :-) (already had a solar/crank charger+radio). Thank you!
Huh, maybe not.
Might be worth buying a physical copy of The Knowledge too (I just have).
And if anyone’s looking for a big project...
If we take catastrophic risks seriously and want humanity to recover from a devastating shock as far and fast as possible, producing such a guide before it’s too late might be one of the higher-impact projects someone could take on.
That was my first thought, but I expect many other individuals/institutions have already made large efforts to preserve such info, whereas this is probably the only effort to preserve core EA ideas (at least in one place)? And it looks like the third folder—“Non-EA stuff for the post-apocalypse”—contains at least some of the elementary resources you have in mind here.
But yeah, I’m much more keen to preserve arguments for radical empathy, scout mindset, moral uncertainty etc. than, say, a write-up of the research behind HLI’s charity recommendations. Maybe it would also be good to have an even small folder within “Main content (3GB)” with just the core ideas; the “EA Handbook” (39MB) sub-folder could perhaps serve such a purpose in the meantime.
Anyway, cool project! I’ve downloaded :)
I asked Google when chicken embryos start to feel pain and this was the first result (i.e. I didn’t look hard and I didn’t anchor on a figure):