JamesÖz 🔸

Karma: 6,306

Currently grantmaking in animal advocacy, at Mobius. I was previously doing social movement and protest-related research at Social Change Lab, an EA-aligned research organisation I’ve founded.

Previously, I completed the 2021 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Before that, I was in the Strategy team at Extinction Rebellion UK, working on movement building for animal advocacy and climate change.

My blog (often EA related content)

Feel free to reach out on james.ozden [at] hotmail.com or see a bit more about me here

JamesÖz 🔸 17 Nov 2025 21:54 UTC
18 points
6 ∶ 3
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: NickLaing’s Quick takes
Given your expertise is in global health, I do think it’s likely that you’re less well-calibrated on how reasonable your animal welfare comments are relative to your global health ones! So you may think it’s a reasonable critique but someone who is a die-hard animal person may have already thought about your comment and know there is a common counterpoint that negates it (which you haven’t heard yet). Obviously, the inverse could be true for global health comments.
But I agree that this shouldn’t have been downvoted on karma grounds!
(Also, sometimes your comments do give me “I am sceptical of most things animal welfare” vibes, so people might be reacting to a real or perceived difference in values about how much animals matter).

JamesÖz 🔸 16 Nov 2025 21:40 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Dilan Fernando’s comment on: Visionary Pragmatism: A Third Way for Animal Advocacy
Intervention evaluators and funders should ensure that interventions are evaluated based on their ability not just to help animals directly, but to build power and generate learning value for the movement.
My impression is that most funders are already doing the above (we are too).
- Fund researchers to look into and advise the movement on:
  which milestones it should aim towards (including confidence levels for those recommendations). This would potentially reap huge benefits with relatively few movement resources—I could imagine even just a team of 3-5 full-timers could go a long way
I don’t think the above is that promising as I think there is not a predetermined set of milestones that lead to victory and instead we should pursue opportunities that are both achievable and important, as they come. I also think political and cultural winds change very quickly, such that many of the milestones set might become impossible or irrelevant. For example, maybe these researchers would have predicted 7 years ago that a major milestone would be major US & EU retailers selling cultivated meat but actually, it turns out the technology is super far off in 2025 and the actual best thing to do for alternative proteins now is getting defence agencies to research cultivated meat (this is a made-up example).
I also think that when this has been attempted, basically nothing useful was generated so it was actually quite a poor use of movement resources.

JamesÖz 🔸 12 Nov 2025 14:31 UTC
11 points
3 ∶ 0
on: The Crisis EA Cannot Afford to Ignore
Thanks for posting this Allegra! I was actually looking into this the other day and one thing that stopped me from giving as an individual donor was understanding exactly how cost-effective groups working on this are. My general understanding is that traditional humanitarian efforts aren’t particularly cost-effective if your goal is to help the most people (I think largely because these efforts raise lots of money through salience and they are not as rigorously designed as GiveWell charities might be—but these might not be true in this case).
Do you have any information or research into Emergency Response Rooms or other groups working in Sudan on how many people they are helping or lives they are saving?

JamesÖz 🔸 11 Nov 2025 17:24 UTC
14 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: ThomNorman’s comment on: Visionary Pragmatism: A Third Way for Animal Advocacy
Yeah I agree with this. Specifically, I don’t think that basically anyone working on cage-free/alt proteins/most pragmatic issues would agree with the statement below (I think approximately everyone thinks we should pursue several effective approaches, not just one).
A search for the (one) most effective approach. For example it’s not uncommon for advocates to say the movement should converge on one specific approach, such as alt-proteins/cage-free campaigns/legal advocacy/whatever — with an implication that we should significantly discount other approaches.
I also agree with your other comment Thom about timelines. I think talking about theories of victory is much more relevant if you think we can end factory farming in 10 years (which people in Animal Rising do). I think it is more like 75 years away, so it makes less sense to discuss the details (especially when it is hard to make good predictions for things 50+ years away).

JamesÖz 🔸 5 Nov 2025 20:53 UTC
18 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: ThomNorman’s comment on: Are we wrong to stop factory farms?
I would +1 to all of the above (and probably in stronger terms!).
Additionally, from yet unpublished research we’ve done in the UK and also talking to people who work on food policy in the UK government, the number one thing people care about for food right now is cost. So the odds of getting any kind of significant progress to block loads of factory farm expansions and/or close existing ones, which will both increase the cost of food, will be extremely small. For example, Labour’s current plan is the weaken planning regulations to allow more chicken sheds to be built (to reduce the cost of food) so for them to do a full U-turn would be a miracle, in my opinion.
I also think these battles will be in a relatively small number of rural constituencies, with relatively small populations, so I don’t expect there to be any major impacts on national public opinion. And as Thom says, most people already say they agree with us, despite paying for lots of factory-farmed meat. So I’m unsure if trying to change the number of people who say they don’t want factory-farmed products in the UK is even a useful goal (but I also don’t know what a better metric might be).

JamesÖz 🔸 5 Nov 2025 16:43 UTC
82 points
11 ∶ 0
on: Are we wrong to stop factory farms?
Thank you for writing this Rose – I think it’s very useful to have some of this discussion in the open and also clearly explained. I’m also a big fan of the way this can be used to gain media and get people involved in animal issues.
However, I disagree on some points, and will explain why below:
1. Your article came across as demeaning to and ignores the great work being done in the movement
“You don’t get there by doing nothing locally and hoping for the best globally.”
“And perhaps most importantly, it offers no coherent alternative except surrender.”
I think implying that EAs or people who have this critique are surrendering is pretty insulting to all the groups doing great work, in the UK and more broadly. For example, The Humane League UK, Open Cages UK, and Animal Equality UK are all doing great work to get hens out of cages in the UK, improving the living standards of meat chickens, winning legal protections for fish, and much more. They have impacted the lives of literally 500 million meat chickens and helped get tens of millions of hens out of cages each year.
To me, this seems like a worrying sign of hubris: only thinking the work you’re doing is “radical” enough or addressing the “real” problem.
2. Stopping new farms could hold back improving the lives of animals
Something you didn’t mention is another aspect people are concerned about: stopping new farms holds back welfare reforms that will tangibly improve the lives of chickens.
Thanks to the amazing work of groups in the UK, 7 major retailers committed to giving their meat chickens 20% more space. Estimates are that this will improve the lives of 500 million chickens each year, out of the total 1+ billion meat chickens raised in the UK. However, giving chickens 20% more space reduces the number of chickens per shed. If you block the extra floor space needed, which some producers are trying to build, other companies may not give their chickens more space. Or, similarly bad, those companies could source more from abroad, often at lower welfare. That’s not the outcome we want. Ideally, we can work on campaigns that don’t make the work of other animal advocates more challenging, which is why I have some mixed feelings here!
Of course, you could try to avoid this via not targeting the higher-welfare farms, which I and others have suggested previously. However, I don’t think you have clarified your position on blocking planning permission for farms where it is required to make welfare improvements. Anima have made this distinction for their campaign in Poland, for example.
3. Stopping imports, or phasing out factory farming, is not easy nor likely to happen soon
I also don’t think the fur farming example supports your point that “Import restrictions become politically inevitable because they’re supported by the movement we’ve built and aligned with farming interests.” – Imports of fur continue to this day, 25 years after we banned it in the UK.
Farmers say they want equal import standards, but their actual top issues are loosening planning rules so they can build more sheds and fighting inheritance tax. Even now, the UK signs trade deals allowing lower-welfare meat. Getting those laws passed is slow and uncertain – we can’t assume they’ll follow automatically.
The UK is currently on track to align veterinary standards with the EU, which means the UK loses the ability to block imports from the EU (our main trading partner) as well as some other countries like the US, Canada, Brazil and more I’m not aware of. This doesn’t make me very optimistic that we should pursue strategies that only seem good if we ban imports. Read more about this here.
Similarly, I disagree with:
“Here’s the deepest difference between our approach and the critics’: we actually believe factory farming can end.”
I also believe it can end – we just have very different timelines. It seems like (but correct me if this is wrong) you think this is possible within the next few years? Personally, I would put it around 20-50 years away, given the strength and size of the industry, and the fact that social change always moves more slowly than people expect. Given that this is an industry that has been stable or growing for the past decades, I think there needs to be pretty exceptional evidence if you think it will end in the next few years.
To be clear, I think it is good to be ambitious and go for big wins. But, I think it has to be moderated with some clear-eyed thinking on what is actually possible, so we don’t spend limited resources on campaigns that have a minisucile chance of winning – like trying to ban factory farming in the UK – and therefore miss a better opportunity to help animals.
4. You overstate how much these wins actually help animals
Stopping a new farm in the UK might prevent animal farming locally, but I think it’s unlikely that the effects are long-lived.
You say:
“We are blocking factory farms that raise an average of 1 million birds per year. If that farm would have operated for 30 years, that’s millions of individual lives spared from industrial confinement. It takes years to identify land, secure planning permission, secure financing, and build a new facility. In the meantime, large numbers of animals will be spared a lifetime of suffering.”
I think this is somewhat true, and it is a complicated dynamic. But I don’t think it’s right to say it takes 30 years to scale up imports or production. For example, you might have:
- Farms abroad that operate at 80% capacity, which can easily increase production and export to the UK (and as you note, these will sometimes have worse standards!)
  - Given that there are many countries we import chicken from, with probably thousands of chicken farms each, I think it’s likely that at least some of them have additional capacity to increase production and cover a UK shortage while farms are built in other countries.
- Farms are built overseas in countries that don’t require loads of regulations and red tape. Given that we import chicken meat from countries like Brazil or Thailand, which will have fewer planning regulations, it will be relatively straightforward for them to scale up production (especially if they just add an extra shed to an existing farm).
- Farms in the UK that operate at 80% full capacity (e.g. they have an unused shed), and they will just ramp up to 100% capacity, which will be extremely quick.
- As a comparison to how others are thinking about the duration of impact, Saulius working with Anima used an average 1 year of impact, although he notes this estimate is highly uncertain.
(Although this is also based on other complex stuff like breeders, hatcheries, catching slots and farms being the right specification for UK buyers).
Other reasons why imports can easily increase:
- The UK almost doubled its chicken imports from 2012 to 2022.
- Imports make up around 25-35% of all chicken consumption in the UK currently, so it already is a pretty major component.
- In economic terms, the supply of meat is elastic: if the market expects a shortage in one place, prices adjust and other producers find it profitable to produce a bit more. So while I agree the world isn’t perfectly static or efficient, it’s not completely messy either – there are market mechanisms that fill the gaps. The USDA even states it themselves: “improved margins are expected to encourage increased broiler production”
But overall, yes, there might be some period of time where supply is reduced, so prices are increased and demand drops slightly. This would be a good outcome! But this also comes at the cost of animals being in worse conditions – this report found 95% of Britain’s current or potential trade partners have lower farm animal welfare standards than the UK. So, it’s not obvious to me which side wins overall for actually improving the lives of animals.
Then I think a reasonable question is: is it the best use of our time and energy to be pursuing things that only help animals for a few months or in unclear ways? Especially if it may clash with the work of other advocates?
5. Movement-building is valuable but not self-justifying.
One of this campaign’s strongest points is that “we are building a movement” and changing public consciousness. I totally agree that movement-building is valuable. Every time we get more people to care about factory farming, whether through fighting a local farm proposal or reading a news story about a campaign, that’s a win. Social change does require people power and cultural shifts, and local campaigns can be a catalyst for that. I also agree that these victories energise activists; feeling that “we can win” boosts morale and engagement for future, bigger fights.
However, I would also note that movement-building is only as good as the direction the movement goes. Building a large, passionate movement is a means to an end – the end being less animal suffering. All of the points above make me unsure whether if this is the best thing to build a movement around. To take an extreme example: we’ve seen very large, well-organised movements pushing harmful agendas in politics (e.g. the anti-abortion movement). The mere fact that we “built a movement” doesn’t guarantee we did something positive for the world.
Overall:
I think we agree on a bunch of stuff: we need to urgently help animals, we should fight it on multiple fronts, and building public support is essential. Where I worry is that stopping one farm might not save the lives we think it does – because those animals appear in someone else’s barn or another country’s statistics, sometimes in worse conditions. Especially if this work makes other animal advocacy campaigns more challenging to win, and it uses our precious time and energy.
One thing I would be curious to hear from you and other people in AR: What evidence would you have to see to change your mind that this campaign isn’t the best use of your time? I think having a few of these in mind is pretty important.
For example, if I had the following evidence, I would be convinced that this campaign is worthwhile pursuing:
- It doesn’t significantly slow down the improvements to giving chickens farmed for meat in the UK more space (e.g. 80%+ of the farms being blocked aren’t the farms with lower stocking density)
- Most (e.g. 80%+) of the additional imports come from countries with high welfare standards (e.g. Germany, the Netherlands, which are two of our current largest import markets)
- We get a government policy commitment that we would ban imports that don’t meet UK minimum standards and this would happen over the next 5 years
- The price increase / supply time lags are bigger than I expected, e.g. a 5% increase in price due to this campaign or a 3-year time-lag to fill the supply gap
Most importantly, I appreciate that this discussion is happening! It shows that we are trying to figure out how to make positive change for animals in this complicated and messy world.
What links here?
- Ben Stevenson's comment on Visionary Pragmatism: A Third Way for Animal Advocacy by Dilan Fernando (15 Nov 2025 18:07 UTC; 5 points)

JamesÖz 🔸 26 Sep 2025 6:46 UTC
7 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: Aidan Alexander’s comment on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate factory farming
My guess is that the people reading the EA Forum are much less judgmental than the average vegan and generally, there will be a selection effect such that people who are actually willing to think reasonably and be 90% vegan won’t be the judgmental ones anyway. So, probably for people here, it’s not harmful to recommend people be non-judgmental strict vegans for signalling reasons.

JamesÖz 🔸 4 Sep 2025 4:20 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Call for questions on animal-focused forecasting tournament
I love this idea! Some questions from me:
- The likelihood of cultivated meat being approved for sale in the EU?
- How many more (and ideally, which) US states will ban cultivated meat by the end of 2025, 2026 and 2027?
- What percentage of companies will follow through on their 2025 cage-free commitments?
- What percentage of companies will follow through on their 2026 BCC commitments?
- Likelihood of [insert major country here] passing legislation to ban cages
  - I would be keen to see this for the UK and also the EU but that is probably just proximity bias!
  - This could also work for other legislation e.g. banning low-welfare imports, fish stunning, etc
- The likelihood of major [insert country here] retailers committing/following through to plant protein ratios (e.g. 40% of total protein sold being plant-based by 2030)
  - Countries that come to mind for this would be UK, US and European countries like Spain, France, etc.
  - It could also be interesting to have a question on if this leads to additional fish & chicken consumption, if data is available
Some context: I work for an animal welfare-focused foundation and these are some things I’ve personally been interested in knowing about over the past 1-2 years!

JamesÖz 🔸 18 Aug 2025 10:27 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: ITN 201: pitfalls in ITN BOTECs
This is great Lizka! Thanks for writing it up and beautifully illustrating it. Relatedly, what do you use for your diagrams?

JamesÖz 🔸 13 Aug 2025 16:41 UTC
58 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Frog Welfare
Very cool, thanks for doing this! It’s a big and neglected topic for sure.
A few months ago, I actually spent a day looking into farmed frog welfare (so slightly different to what you point at, which is the painful procedures done to wild and farmed frogs). I’ll post my exec summary below in case others are interested. You can see the full doc here.
Overall recommendation
Approximately 1 billion frogs are farmed each year for food, and there is a similar number alive on farms at any one time. Despite this, the vast majority of them (93%) are farmed in China, meaning it is very challenging to advocate for ways to improve their lives. The most promising approach would be via targeting US imports of frog legs, which amount to approximately 58-146 million frogs killed per year. However, there are very few organisations working on this and it’s not clear what leverage groups would have to affect US imports or sellers. Overall, I expect that there are more cost-effective ways to help other groups of very populous animals, such as chickens, fish or shrimp.
Executive Summary
- I estimate there are around 1 billion frogs killed each year for food, with around 950 million alive at any one time.
  - See my summary spreadsheet here for calculations and assumptions around lifespan, mortality, etc.
- FAO statistics suggest that 93% of frogs are farmed in China, 5% in Vietnam and approx 1% in Thailand.
- Overwhelmingly, China is the most important country for frogs but the obvious challenge is that there are very limited ways to affect the Chinese animal industry.
  - This is especially true for frogs as most of them are consumed internally, rather than exported
- That said, the US is a moderate importer of frogs, so there is some scope for advocacy. The size of US imports is approx. 58-146 million frogs killed per year.
  - The vast majority of these (99.9%) are imported as frog legs
- For reference, there are approx. 380 million hens and 1.1 billion broiler chickens alive in the US at any one time.
  - Also for reference, there are 400 million fish alive in the US at any one time and my rough guess is that the US imports an additional 800 million farmed fish per year
- The US import market seems more important than the EU market, as the latter is made up primarily of wild frogs caught in Indonesia, rather than farmed frogs.
  - This rests on the assumption that wild frogs have better lives than farmed frogs, which I feel relatively confident about.
  - See Appendix on EU Imports for more information about the EU
- The data is very limited and poor for most aspects of the frog farming industry so I am very uncertain about key factors like:
  - How long does it take for a frog to reach slaughter weight
    I’ve seen disagreements between 2 months to 1 year, which would significantly change the number of frogs alive at any one time
  - To what extent are EU imports mostly wild-caught or farmed? Specifically thinking about how much of Indonesia’s frog production which is 80% of EU imports
  - How much of Chinese frogs are exported or consumed internally?
- Ways you could help frogs
  - Support expansion of California-style live import bans to other states and cities (In Defense of Animals secured a ban on live imports of bullfrogs into California in 2023)
    You could work with wildlife conservation groups that are worried about frog farms spreading diseases like chytrid fungus.
    This would only be limited to live imports (less than 25% of total weight and approx. 2.5-5% of total frog numbers) - roughly 2-7 million frogs per year.
  - Advocate for federal/state import regulations based on environmental damages, zoonotic diseases and biosecurity
    E.g. push for stricter biosecurity requirements around frog imports or support requirements for species labelling and origin documentation
    This would definitely slow the industry down as it’s very informal currently
- My recommendations would be:
  - If interested in exploring some advocacy around US imports, it would be worthwhile to speak with In Defense of Animals and the Bullfrog Action Group which worked on the California Imports Ban
  - Further research (I couldn’t find these very easily)
    What percentage of US frog imports are live vs frozen?
    Which states are the largest importers of frog legs?
  - Consider whether frogs are the biggest bang for the buck we can find to help animals or it might be easier and more effective to focus on other highly farmed species e.g. fish, shrimp or chickens.
    I expect that there are currently much more cost-effective ways to help fish, shrimp or chickens due to existing nonprofit infrastructure, availability of information, non-Chinese markets and leverage over those supply chains.
    Also, it’s unclear to me who are the right groups to work on frogs (basically no one is working on it now so it would need some effort to get this going)

JamesÖz 🔸 20 Jul 2025 10:43 UTC
4 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Carley Betts ’s comment on: Why I am more optimistic about the animal movement this year
I haven’t seen the data she is referencing but 20% seems way too high—that implies like we spend $50-60M as a movement annually on infighting, which doesn’t make any sense at all?
I’m also not sure we should consider organisations fundraising for their own work as infighting—that seems to broaden the definition far further than is useful / what most would consider as infighting.

(I agree the Animal Rising campaign against RSPCA is both regrettable and an example of genuine infighting but I think that’s the most major case recently and I can’t imagine there has been more than $0.5-1M spent on it collectively).
In terms of collaboration, some recent positive examples:
- ICAW & Animal Activism Collective doing grassroots cage-free work together
- Revolutionist’s Night & VARC in the UK being a nice crossover of people from the more grassroots-y + NGO sides of the animal movement
- Eva from Pax Fauna and Dave CH talking about AVA about the benefits of grassroots and corporate work together
- Wayne Tsuing and Lewis Bollard doing a talk at AVA about reconciling each other approaches to help animals and showing respect for each other

JamesÖz 🔸 20 Jul 2025 10:40 UTC
5 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: SiobhanBall’s comment on: Why I am more optimistic about the animal movement this year
If you’re going to make big claims like the one below, IMO you should give specific examples and evidence rather than talking negatively about a large set of organisations.
I have a lot of concerns about how much money is being pumped in to animal welfare orgs with seemingly very little real-world impact coming out—not the case for every org of course, but quite a few.

JamesÖz 🔸 3 Jul 2025 8:26 UTC
28 points
10 ∶ 1
on: Eating Honey is (Probably) Fine, Actually
I see BB did a more expansive reply on Substack but just commenting on a couple of things:
1. Beekeepers are further incentivized to keep their hives living and healthy, which likely is a positive contributor to farmed bee welfare.
This seems not that strong at all? You could make the exact same case for chicken or egg farmers but I don’t think many people would be arguing that those chickens have net positive lives.
1. Finally, the empirical evidence for welfare is both limited and mixed but in my opinion points mildly towards farmed bees having net positive lives, or at least better than pollinators in the wild.
How come you’re using pollinators in the wild as the reference point? I would assume the counterfactual is less honeybees are bred/managed, so the reference point should be whether their lives are worth living at al,l rather than having less suffering than wild bees (taking the latter half of your clause).
1. Bees are not locked down and have exit options like swarming. Thus, revealed preferences point towards them preferring to be in managed hives over wild ones.
Again, it would be perfectly rational for bees to stay in managed scenarios if they believe their lives will go from −5/10 to −8/10 by swarming. But I also generally think this is a weak argument for the reasons BB laid out e.g. bees being bred for docility, queen bees having their wings clipped, in conjunction with pheremones from the queen.
With this, it feels like most of your “On balance, I think it’s likely that farmed bees have net positive lives.” argument falls away.
Also, I’m curious to hear more about your thinking on:
1. I think many EAs take it as a given that insects have net negative lives. I think this is a mistaken inference drawn from swapping intuitions of K-selected species unto the actual experiences of r-selected species.

JamesÖz 🔸 1 Jul 2025 9:33 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Don’t Eat Honey
I’m no expert but my guess (and partially confirmed by some googling) is that they’ve been bred for docility/traits that make them more likely to stay rather than leave. o3 also suggests:
- Queen pheromones – a chemical “social glue” that keeps workers oriented to this queen and this cavity. If the queen dies or her pheromone output drops, cohesion collapses and bees drift or abscond. (So seems like the queen partially acts as an anchor to keep the rest of the bees and as long as her life is devoid of intense stress, she stays.)
- Investment already sunk – comb, brood and the bulk of their honey are immovable. Walking away means writing off weeks of labour and risking starvation.
- Risk calculus – only ~20 % of natural swarms survive to become established colonies; absconding is even riskier.
Absconding (leaving the hive) is triggered by intense stress: chronic overheating, prolonged food dearth, heavy predator or beekeeper disturbance, or severe parasite loads (notably Varroa)

JamesÖz 🔸 1 May 2025 21:54 UTC
10 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Reflections on 7 years building the EA Forum — and moving on
Thank you for your amazing work on building the EA Forum! Having been involved in a few different communities/social issues, there is no discursive & knowledge-sharing infrastructure even close to the quality of the EA Forum. It’s a true asset to the EA movement and no doubt responsible for lots of impact, be it understanding new priority cause areas, high-impact careers or something else!

JamesÖz 🔸 25 Apr 2025 19:42 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: D0TheMath’s comment on: Why you can justify almost anything using historical social movements
Interested to hear more, but I would not expect blocking oil depots to be effective either. Why would it? It may be related but its not so compelling to the average observer. Compare with the example I used, of sit-ins, which are eminently compelling. If you compare ineffective strategies with ineffective strategies you will pick up noise and low order effects.
I mean there are probably a bunch of protests that you don’t think make sense that had positive impacts (see some here) but specifically I would point to Extinction Rebellion blocking roads about climate or Just Stop Oil doing something similar.
I think we agree. Both for the successes and failures you should ask “was this a fluke?”, as you should always do.
I may be being obtuse but are you implying that Extinction Rebellion was a fluke? As if so, I don’t agree with that! My view is that the founders had a pretty good design and plan, based on historical context and research, and with enough attempts, they managed to start something at the right time.

JamesÖz 🔸 25 Apr 2025 12:27 UTC
14 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: D0TheMath’s comment on: Why you can justify almost anything using historical social movements
The social movements that worked had reasons they worked. The structure of the problem, the allies they were likely to find, and the enemies they were likely to have resulted in the particular strategies they chose working. Similarly for the social movements which failed. These are reasons you can & should learn from, and your ability to look at those reasons is the largest order effect here.
I take the point about being too humble but I’m not sure I fully agree with this bit above! Specifically, I think there are some random factors around luck, personal connections and timing that play a big role. For example, the founders of Extinction Rebellion tried some very similar campaigns a year before Extinction Rebellion launched, with no huge success. Then, a year later, Extinction Rebellion exploded globally. Basically, I also think you can do everything “right” but still not succeed. That said, doing certain things do definitely increases your chances of success.
Throwing soup at van gogh paintings have none of these attributes, so it is counter-productive.
We have some research coming out soon on this, and interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a big negative impact on public opinion if a protest is more illogical (e.g. it’s hard for observers to connect the actions of the protest with the goals of the group). The main driver seems to be how disruptive the protest is (e.g. blocking oil depots seems to have comparable effects to throwing soup) although the analysis here is still to be finalised.

JamesÖz 🔸 13 Apr 2025 18:32 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Cost-effectiveness of Anima International Poland
Very cool work, thanks Saulius & Nuno for doing it and Anima for commissioning!
I’m particularly interested in the stopping new factory farms campaign and am keen to understand how you think about this. I drew some very rough graphs to help me get my head around this and curious if you are modelling this in a similar way. I’ll leave aside the impact on the price of meat, although, I anticipate there may be some small increase when supply is more constrained.
Specifically, you note that you estimate that this will delay farms by, on average, around approx. 7 months. I’ll just assume this is 1 year for the sake of simplicity so this may look like this:
To describe what I’m thinking: the production of meat is essentially shifted to the right by 1 year, but follows a pretty similar upward trajectory (although I don’t think the trajectory matters too much). Therefore the difference in animal suffering (assuming that’s the same as meat production) is the difference in areas under the curve, shown by the beautifully scribbled light blue area.
However, I think this only holds if you think that there will come a time in the future when meat production will start going down. If you think it will have the same total peak and trajectory in both cases, then all you are doing is having a very similar amount of meat production/animal suffering, just delayed by a year. As seen by the small light blue area below, it makes sense there would be some small impact on animals.
But, for example, if you think the world is going to end or there will be some factor (e.g. very tasty and cheap cultivated meat) that causes meat production to decrease in a given year, then this will have counterfactually reduced animal suffering by reducing the height of the meat production peak, as seen below.
Is this roughly how you’re also thinking about this? I would be curious for an economist to weigh in also / look into this further as I’m sure there are a bunch of other relevant factors besides the duration of the delay that would affect overall meat / animal suffering averted e.g.:
- If most farms are operating below max capacity and can fairly easily ramp up supply without building new facilities (which would make all of this moot)
- How easily manufacturers/processors can find new suppliers
- If there are any price impacts and how significant they might be for demand

JamesÖz 🔸 22 Feb 2025 6:30 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: Request for Guidance: Reaching Out to Charities Before Publishing Reviews and Our Concerns
Yep fair enough! That was one bit I wasn’t sure about and can definitely see the downsides of sharing too early. I guess the trade-off I was considering was Vetted Causes’ time spent on the evaluation but definitely think an advance finished version with two weeks notice would be something most groups would be happy with.

JamesÖz 🔸 21 Feb 2025 19:24 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Hypotheses on how we can mobilise people for animal welfare
Love that you wrote this up and shared Emre! I definitely think we need more people having this kind of discourse publicly so appreciate you contributing.
I wanted to share some mostly anecdotal things from my experience in AR and XR in what seems to have worked for building deep/committed engagement from volunteers & activists:
- I definitely resonate with the importance of social connections for building engagement. I thought XR and AR did this very well with things like: spending time together in an office, hanging out after work, shared housing^[1], encouraging people to get to know each other more deeply (e.g. via check-ins, emotional sharing, etc) and more. I think this really builds the commitment of activists to not just the mission but also to not letting their friends in the movement down. We’re doing more in-person things with UK Voters for Animals and definitely think focusing on in-person organising is where you build the greatest depth (and lots of people crave it now!).
  - Some useful books on the importance of social activities for organising
    How Organisations develop activists by Hahrie Hahn—also a very good review on the EA Forum here.
    The Making of Pro-life activists by Ziad Munson. There are some especially interesting things from the pro-life movement e.g. apparently 50% of people who join initially don’t believe in pro-life as an issue but they attend social events and essentially become conditioned over time via social norms. Similar to the NRA, the key thing is making fun, enjoyable events which bring people and the advocacy follows on from that naturally once they develop a stronger view on the issue.
- It’s touched on by the book by Hahrie Han but something that I think XR was also really good at was building commitment & empowering people by giving them significant responsibility. For example, when I first joined XR, my first role was to help build XR in 4 countries, which is an insane responsibility to give someone who just joined and is 22 years old. But I found this very inspiring and tried to step up to the plate to deliver. Lots of other people did similar things and it really is inspiring when people believe in you.
  - I think this is a huge difference from the very understandable method of activism which says “we need to make it as easy as possible for people to engage” and only sends people 1-click campaigns to contact companies, etc, without giving them any meaningful responsibility.
  - I really do think the animal movement could do with a bit more of this “empowerment” mindset rather than just giving people very small discrete tasks.
- On your point of single-issue organisations: I actually don’t perceive this as an issue and think it might be more damaging if we try to take a position on all things. If we do, I think we could risk becoming very politically homogenous (even more so than we already are!). When I think of some other successful movement organisations (e.g. XR, ActUp!, SNCC), there wasn’t necessarily a coherent worldview shared by all members and these organisations didn’t (I think) discuss lots of issues outside of their core focus.
1. ^
  Which also has a bunch of downsides but more on that another time..

JamesÖz 🔸

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