Managing Director at Hive, currently working on Community Management, Resource Pages, MEL, and Fundraising. Effective Altruism and Animal Advocacy Community Builder, experience in national, local and cause-area specific community building. Amateur Philosopher, particularly keen on moral philosophy.
Kevin Xia šø
Karma: 309
I donāt think the concept of moral responsibility in the way I use it requires judgment (i.e., I wouldnāt want to hold someone morally responsible for the sake of their responsibility). Rather, I think moral responsibility here should act as a vehicle to determine where change needs to happenāI think this aligns with my understanding of consequentialism tooāin which case, there is no apparent need for free will. Hope this makes sense!
Nuance in Proxies
IneffiĀcacy, InĀacĀtion and InĀdiĀviĀdĀual Responsibility
Hey Steven, I think itās great that you are looking into animal charities and it looks like you have done some good initial research here :)
There are a couple of points that I imagine many people would want to challenge, especially around invertebrate and wild animal welfare. If you donāt mind writing it out, I imagine your thoughts on factoring in uncertainty in your decision-making (i.e., on low-probability, enormous impact scenarios such as in invertebrate welfare) and your thoughts on aggregating welfare among individuals (i.e., on scenarios where orders of magnitudes more animals are affected, but each to a smaller degree such as in invertebrate welfare and in wild animal welfare) would provide a good base for these discussions to happen.
I think these are important discussions in this context specifically, because if you take neglected animals such as invertebrates and wild animals into account, you may want to explore the EA Animal Welfare Fund or ACEās Movement Grant instead of or in addition to ACEās Recommended Charities. I also want to flag that Faunalyticsā research shouldnāt really be boiled down to āstatisticsā, but I imagine your stance on New Roots Institute (i.e., helping animals directly > education/āone-step-removed?) applies here too.
All of that being said, based on your expressed views, I think you will find Sinergia Animal to demonstrate the best numbers yet.
Lastly, you may find this perspective from ACE worth engaging with, specifically their perspective on ranking charities within recommended charities:
āUpdate the decision-making process so that it directly compares all recommended charities on marginal cost-effectiveness. Our basis for deciding whether to add a Recommended Charity is whether we think it would lead to more animals being helped on the margin (compared to having a smaller number of Recommended Charities), which is conceptually different from ranking charities. Given the types of uncertainty currently faced by the animal advocacy movement when it comes to calculating cost-effectiveness, we decide whether a charity should be recommended based on a range of decision criteria rather than scoring and ranking charities based on our sense of their relative marginal cost-effectiveness. In the future, if we had sufficiently robust evidence to form reliable cost-effectiveness estimates, including evidence or good proxies for speculative work with complex long-term theories of change, itās possible we would move more toward the kind of ranking approach that GWWC suggests. Additionally, we consider relative cost-effectiveness during each Recommended Charity Fund distribution, where we adjust the size of each grant depending on the most up-to-date plans that charities share with us.ā [emphasis added]
Yes! These are instances in which we use Slackās @channel function, which we try to do as rarely as possible, as it notifies basically everyone.
I think you make a really important point! You/āanyone else interested in this may be interested in talking to @Constance Li and her work with @AI for Animals (Website)
ReĀsources for Farmed AnĀiĀmal AdĀvoĀcacy: 2024 Roundup
I donate 10% in the form of a salary sacrifice to Hive. In addition, I regularly donate ~10% spread across other Meta Organizations and Expert-managed funds in the animal space (roughly in order): EA AWF, AAC, Rethink Priorities, and the ACE Movement Grant. I have also made some smaller donations throughout the year to opportunities that I find promising and hope to look further into next year, namely AI for Animals, Animetrics and the Profit for Good Initiative.
ļReflectĀing on Hiveās 2024: What Worked and What Didnāt in Our ComĀmuĀnity BuildĀing Efforts
I think you might refer to SouthWings? Someone shared it on Hive a while ago, saying
āI wanted to let you know about an organization, SouthWings, that offers small airplane flights to activists and organizations in 15 U.S. states (mainly in the Southeast) - they primarily focus on helping orgs document environmental pollution from the air but Iām sure would be happy to work with animal advocates too. I found this service incredibly helpful for my documentary, The Smell of Money, in which we show factory farm pollution captured from a plane.ā
I took the 10% Pledge earlier this year, but was contemplating it a lot for a while before. After taking the pledge, I noticed a couple of insights that I think would have probably made me pledge earlier. I think these insights most directly apply to people who were in a similar situation as I was[1]- but they might be useful for others as well:
You donāt have to donate 10% right away. Today (!) I learned that āwhile studying or unemployed, it is within the spirit of the Pledge to give 1% of spending money instead of the income-based pledge amountā and the 10% kicks in once you start earning a stable income. When I first learned about the pledge, I was still at uni and thought I should wait until I had a full-time job and some comfortable savings. However, even if I were already full-time employed at the time and wouldnāt donate at all for the next 4 years, Iād only have to donate ~11%[2] for the rest of my career to compensate for the lack of donations over my lifetime. As someone having a ~median income in a high-income country, I believe that 11% is very doable. In fact (hot take!) I believe that 15-20% should be the norm for people in my situation.
10% is not as much as you might think. I think for me, there was a strong anchoring effect hereāin my city, most people I know donate something like 30-50ā¬ a month, so 10% (100+ ā¬/āmonth at the time I learned about the pledge) felt like a huge step. Instead of pledging, I decided to just donate what I could āeasily missā. This included instances in which I surprisingly saved money, birthday and Christmas gifts and occasionally deliberate decisions to not purchase āluxuriesā. Tracking all of these was a bit tedious, but it showed me how I could easily donate more than 10%, by reframing my donations around what I could genuinely āeasilyā give away, instead of seeing it in relation to what other people give.
Nowadays Iād recommend people to take the trial pledge, but doing so at 10% for say 6-12 months. My impression (out of my social bubble) is that many people take the trial pledge for 1%; which isnāt bad, but it doesnāt really give you a ātrialā of what the 10% pledge would practically look like.
Probably, the earlier you pledge the better. I have always been a bit of a nerd for social psychology and social norm-setting; and I think there is a plausible case to be made that the earlier you can help cultivate a norm, the more important it becomes to do so. I think Misconception #4 in this post (strongly recommended read!) summarizes the case quite well. Relatedly, as you move through life, youāll probably always find a reason not to pledge yetāwhether you are waiting to enter your first full-time career, building up your safety net, facing a career transition, saving for your first own house, etc.
My tentative conclusion from all of this is that, assuming you expect to have a ~normal salary for the majority of your career and live in a high-income country, it is probably not too early to pledge.
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Part-time student in a high-income country, no real financial risk, because parents are sufficiently well off, expected to earn at least a median income over my lifetime.
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Assuming a forty-year career with the same incomeābut likely, your income would increase throughout your career and it would be less than 11%.
Hive: 2024 AchieveĀments, CurĀrent FundĀing SiĀtuĀaĀtion, and Plans
Iād love to dig a bit more into some real data and implications for this (hence, just a quick take for now), but I suspect that (EA) donors may not take the current funding allocation within and across cause areas into account when making donation decisionsāand that taking it sufficiently into account may mean that small donors shouldnāt diversify?
For example, the recent Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week posed the statement āIt would be better to spend an extra $100m on animal welfare than on global health.ā Now, one way to think through this question is āHow would the ideal funding split between Animal Welfare vs. Global Health look likeā and test whether an additional $100m on Animal Welfare would bring us closer to the ideal funding split (in this case, it appears that spending the $100m on Animal Welfare increases the share of AW from 0.41% to 0.55% - meaning that if your ideal funding split would allocate more than 0.55% to AW, you should be in favor of directing $100m there).
I am not sure if this perspective is the right or even the best to take, but I think it may often be missing. I think itās important to think through it, because it takes into account āhow much money should be spent on X vs. Yā as opposed to āhow much money I should spend on X vs. Yā (or maybe even āHow much money should EA spend on X vs. Yā?) - which I think closer to what we should care about. I think this is interesting, because:
If you primarily, but not strictly and solely favor a comparably well-funded area (say, GHD or Climate Change), you may want to donate all your money towards a cause area that donāt even value particularly highly.
Ironically, this type of thinking only applies if you value diversification in your donations in the first place. So, if you are wondering how much % of your money should go to X vs. Y, I suspect that looking at the current global funding allocation will likely (for most people, necessarily?) lead to pouring all your money into one cause (probably the more neglected one). The exception being that your donations can sufficiently change global funding allocation beyond what youād favorā¦
This would then suggest that there may not really be a case left for any small donor to diversify their donations? (I think this conclusion would be.. kind of strong? I am hesitant to draw it from the sort of quick thinking that went into this, but I think itās fascinating!)
Kevin Xia ās Quick takes
I believe that I, like many visitors on the Forum, would usually be very careful to vote on either end of an extreme. The reason I opted to move all in into animal welfare is that, while I acknowledge and put some credence on views around ripple effects and moral uncertainty (in the sense of placing some weight on societal consensus views), these views primarily have an influence on my view of how global philanthropic spending should be allocated.
However, when it comes to an additional $100m, the (difference of) neglectedness completely wipes out these considerations for me. It appears, that there are $290 Million going into FAW[1] vs. $70 Billion into GHD; pouring another $100m into FAW would effectively grow FAW from 0.41% of global philanthropic (neartermist) funding to 0.55%. I am not sure if this is the ideal way to frame the debate question (I use it really more as a proxy), but I have close to 0 credence that less than 0.55% of global philanthropic (neartermist) spending should be spent on farmed animal welfare.- ^
I focus on farmed animal welfare as opposed to including wild animals, because it seems that thatās what many debate readers have in mind and are discussing here.
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Thank you for writing this up, Max! The more I dive into AI for Animals, the more it seems to be just about the most important (and drastically underdiscussed) topic within the farmed animal movement, both in terms of risks and opportunities.