I work as an engineer, donate 10% of my income, and occasionally enjoy doing independent research. Iâm most interested in farmed animal welfare and the nitty-gritty details of global health and development work. In 2022, I was a co-winner of the GiveWell Change Our Mind Contest.
MHRđ¸
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I second Vascoâs desire for the dashboard to be maintained again!
This is really cool! One possible issue: If I filter to Coefficient Giving and then sort by date, I see no grants since September:
But if I go to an example fund from CG, such as their Farm Animal Welfare Fund, I see more recent grants:
Oh thanks! I didnât see that!
You mentioned survey research by Rethink Priorities a couple times in the post. However, the survey found that âthe Donation message [a pure pitch to donate] was rated as more compelling than the Diet distancing message [a pitch to donate that specifically called out that one doesnât need to go vegan to help animals].â The difference in effect sizes was small, but Iâm skeptical that the survey really supports the theory of change you were going for here.
RP used to have an AI Governance and Strategy team, and if I understand correctly, that team spun out into IAPS. Can you elaborate on why that team was spun out, and why you think it would now be a good fit to restart that team within RP?
Looking into this a bit more, from this thread it seems like OPâs grants database may currently be missing as much as half of their 2025 GCR spending.
This is really awesome work, itâs great to have someone put this together!
Hopefully the drop in @GiveWellâs grants is just a timing or reporting issue and not nearly as large as it seems. Maybe theyâll be able to clarify further!
If you wanted to extend this and cover more EA grants, I know Farmkind has a public database of grants from their platform that would be great to add. It also would be awesome if this could capture high-impact donations from Founders Pledge, but Iâm not sure they provide granular enough data to be able to track by year and cause area. Maybe talking to @Matt_Lerner could shed some insight?
This yearâs recommendations have a pretty wide range of methods: institutional meat reduction, policy advocacy, corporate campaigning, producer outreach/âsupport, and academic field building. Was having a wide range of approaches represented among the recommended charities something you were intentionally aiming to have, or just happenstance from the evaluation results?
Thanks so much for all the research and effort that went into this! This is a really exciting group of organizations.
I was, however, curious about one aspect the numeric cost-effectiveness estimates. Itâs great to see these as part of ACEâs process, and I definitely learned a lot from them! But I was surprised to see how narrow the estimates were for the two Shrimp Welfare Project programs, given how radically uncertain I think basically everyone is about some of the key parameters influencing the results. Am I right in understanding that this disconnect is largely coming from ACE using AIMâs suffering-adjusted day estimates per animal impacted, and those estimates not including uncertainty ranges? If so, would ACE consider trying to add uncertainty estimates on those numbers in future years?
Listed cost-effectiveness estimates:
AWO:
ECC: 4-126 SADs/â$
Cage-free: 8-67 SADs/â$
SWP:
HSI: 43â53 SADs/â$
SSFI: 464â840 SADs/â$
SVB:
IMR: 6-14 SADs/â$
THL:
Cage-Free: 17â351 SADs/â$
BCC: 2â89 SADs/â$
WAI: Unknown SADs/â$
Nice post and visualization! You might be interested in a different but related thought experiment from Richard Chappell.
My perspective on this (or more generally on the question of whether the future is likely to involve realizing a large fraction of the possible value it could have, whatever form it turns out âvalueâ takes) is perhaps a bit more hopeful. In my view, the question only makes sense if we are moral realists. If there are no objective facts about morality, then I donât see why we should care whether our own preferences or someone elseâs win out. Furthermore, I think worrying about these questions is probably pointless unless two other things are true: that we have some way of discovering moral facts and that those discoveries have some way of influencing our actions. Unless those two are somehow true, we have no reason to think our efforts can in expectation increase the amount of value realized in the world.
So far this is a somewhat pessimistic take, but Iâm optimistic in a world where all three of these conditions are true, which in some sense is (IMO) the only world where this conversation makes any sense to have. In that world, we should expect that increasing the amount of things like intelligence, time to devote to research/âreflection, and focus on studying moral questions in expectation leads toward getting closer to the true morality. Welfareans (or more broadly whatever target will produce the most true value) may indeed get enough advocates just by virtue of society making more progress on these moral questions. As an example, society today includes lots of advocates for groups like women, LGBT people, people of color etc., when historically the only advocates were a âtiny subset of crazy people.â But of course moral progress is at best an extremely messy and incrementalâfactory-farmed animals are the victims of lots of people being either indifferent or wanting to maximize something other than welfare (profit, tasty food for humans etc.), and the impact of animal advocates has not been sufficient to prevent a massive explosion of suffering.
Still, on net I lean towards thinking that given the opportunity for study and reflection (and given the three conditions described above), we can be optimistic that we will drive toward the things that matter. Therefore, focusing on the efforts to prevent existential catastrophe or value lock-in may be among the best things we could do to ensure that weâre not leaving a huge fraction of the possible value of the future on the table. That may be easier said than done, since preventing value lock-in in practice means preventing people with maximizing ideologies from successfully carrying out that maximization at least for some period of time. But that makes me hopeful that existing EA efforts may not be too far off the mark.
Manifesting
Do you have views on Tradewater as an offset provider? Their claim is that they can offset at $19/âton, and Giving Green seemed to think that was credible a couple years ago.
Great post!
Mill was working as a colonial administrator in the British East India Company at this point in his life, right? Could there have been a role for cognitive dissonance in driving his depression?
You may be interested to read some of MacAskillâs older writing on the subject https://ââwww.lesswrong.com/ââposts/ââFCiMtrsM8mcmBtfTR/ââ?commentId=9abk4EJXMtj72pcQu
Gotcha, that makes sense! Even if producers slaughter at a lower weight, I think the number of chicken-days of life per kg of meat shouldnât change much relative to what goes into the WFP analysis. So I donât think that producers slaughtering earlier changes the quantity of time spent suffering very significantly, just whether itâs distributed among fewer longer-lived chickens or more shorter-lived chickens.
Agreed, this post seems like it goes way against standard forum norms if this is correct
I think itâs worth noting here that (if Iâm understanding it right) the alternative breeds recommended by the better chicken commitment are slower-growing but donât have a lower max weight. And the welfare footprint project numbers on pain durations already account for the longer time to reach full weight.
Iâm a big effective giving fan, but my instinct had previously been that one should expect the multiplier on marginal funding to EG orgs to be about 1. My thinking was that CG gives both direct grants to global health charities and meta grants to EG orgs, and a reasonable model of how they might approach grantmaking is to equalize the cost-effectiveness of the marginal dollar given to each. This post made me think more about that assumption, and looking at CGâs writing on effective giving, they say
GWWCâs transparency page fits with that
So we canât assume that CG is filling EG organizationsâ budgets until their multiplier is about 1. Moreover, if EG orgsâ multipliers are >1, then giving to them has the double impact of both directly raising their budgets and unlocking more funding from CG.
The one thing Iâm still having trouble with is why, if EG orgsâ marginal multiplier >1, non-CG large donors havenât filled the gap. There are a number of donors to GiveWell giving $5m+/âyr, and presumably GiveWellâs donor relations team has engaged closely with all of them. If GiveWell was confident they could raise more money total for their top charities if donors gave to EG orgs instead, why havenât they advised some of their top donors to shift to meta giving? Disagreements about time discounting might play a key role here. GWWC uses a 3.5% annual discount rate for their best-guess impact evaluation that found a 6x multiplier, and a 5% discount rate for their conservative impact evaluation that found a 0.9x multiplier (note that the conservative impact evaluation had more differences than just the change in discount rate). At an even higher discount rate (to e.g. account for concerns about AI), it might be very hard to achieve a >1x multiplier via EG orgs. Other possibilities could be that GiveWell is risk averse, that these kinds of candid conversations arenât really possible to have in practice, or that itâs just hard to find donors who are willing to give to meta orgs even when asked to.
An alternate way to square this is that maybe EG orgsâ marginal cost-effectiveness just isnât >1, even accepting a relatively low discount rate. GWWCâs impact evaluation only assessed the average giving multiplier, and the marginal giving multiplier could be at or below 1x due to diminishing returns, even while the average was 6x.