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¸
Karma: 2,294
Two thoughts:
I think we disagree about whether the harms of lawbreaking are mostly internalized. The degradation of social trust in the deliberative process seems bigger to me than the consequences to the individual? As an analogy, shoplifting is an ordinary crime where individuals do face real consequences, but the diffuse harms to consumers and businesses (goods locked up, stores closing) are large and dominate the social calculus.
The Pigouvian tax comparison doesnât quite work here because paying a tax contributes to public resources that can directly address the harms of the act or improve welfare elsewhere, making the net outcome neutral. Going to jail doesnât repair damaged property or restore trust in the democratic process.
Taking each of these points in turn:
On your first question, I think your framing isnât addressing what happens if other people think the same way. The equilibrium where everyone with strong moral convictions feels licensed to break laws doesnât seem to me like itâs better for vulnerable groups, just more chaotic. I think that to some extent youâre proposing smashing the âdefectâ button in a prisonerâs dilemma and hoping the other side doesnât do the same.
On your second, I agree that itâs not a clear line between flawed democracy and dictatorship, but in the US today this isnât really relevant.
On your third, I think the Willowbrook example is worth thinking about more carefully. As I understand the history, the binding constraint at Willowbrook wasnât legal. Many parents and guardians retained custody and could have legally removed their children. The constraint was that families without resources didnât have a better option. And in the end, legal activism was able to marshal those resources, albeit much more slowly than I would have wished.
I agree that thereâs a sense in which the constraints Iâm talking about focus on less fundamental rights. But I think the more important sense is that they focus on preserving a viable process for living together in a society with people of greatly differing moral views. That doesnât mean we have to leave behind other vulnerable groups, just that we have to try and bring about change for them through democratic means.
Regarding the Mengele example, I think itâs disanalogous because it took place in a dictatorship, where the rule utilitarian and contractualist constraints on action look very different.[1] Iâm really probing at what constraints EAs should have when acting in the context of a democracy (including a flawed one), not what behavior would be correct in Nazi Germany.
- ^
Note that the act utilitarian calculus also changes in a dictatorship too. Following the law in a dictatorship is unlikely to be a successful decision procedure for maximizing utility under epistemic uncertainty.
- ^
MHRâs Quick takes
I have been disappointed by the support some EAs have expressed for recent activist actions at Ridglan Farms. I share othersâ outrage at the outcome of the state animal cruelty investigation, which found serious animal cruelty law violations but led to a settlement that still permits Ridglan to sell beagles through July and to continue in-house experimentation. But I personally think the tactics used in the recent open rescues, including property damage and forced entry to remove animals, violate reasonable moral bounds on what actions are permissible in response to the belief that a serious harm is occurring. My views here stem from contractualist views of democratic legitimacy and from concerns about the non-universalizability of principles that justify lawbreaking, though I think a purely act utilitarian calculus also supports them.
Regarding universalizability, in a society where many people believe that different forms of irreparable harm are occurring (e.g. viewing abortion as murder, climate change as destroying the sacredness of the natural world, immigration as ending western civilization), I worry that moral principles that allow for significant lawbreaking when one believes that irreparable harm is occurring could easily lead to great damage if broadly followed (consider for example what it would be like to live in a country where hundreds of activists were regularly smashing their way into abortion clinics, energy companies, and refugee assistance nonprofits with sledgehammers and crowbars). Regarding the legitimacy of the law, I think reasonable contractualist views can give us obligations to follow the law when the processes by which the law is determined are legitimate, and that democracies with universal suffrage qualify as such (even granting that certain groups such as animals and future generations are impossible to enfranchise).[1] Therefore, I think that if we are trying to make decisions under moral uncertainty and give meaningful credences to rule utilitarian and contractualist views, we ought to reject the kinds of lawbreaking done by the Ridglan activists.
Moreover, I think that even if one rejects this kind of moral uncertainty-based reasoning and is a pure act utilitarian, rejecting lawbreaking in the western democratic context is still a relatively robust decision procedure under epistemic uncertainty. Broadly-followed norms against lawbreaking would have prevented EAâs worst scandal (FTX) without preventing EAâs most significant successes (cage-free reforms, evidence-based health interventions in LMICs). And while there are historical examples of illegal civil disobedience clearly producing good outcomes, I donât think these generalize well to the type of lawbreaking under consideration here. The clearest such historical cases are ones where a disenfranchised group of people broke laws that directly enforced their own exclusion from political participation or basic legal personhood. These cases are self-limiting (and thus pass reasonable tests of universalizability) since the principles justifying such lawbreaking achieve their own obsolescence once participation is granted.[2] Itâs much harder to find historical cases of property-damaging civil disobedience occurring in a democracy with universal suffrage that, in hindsight, appear clearly both effective and in service of a good cause. DxEâs own history is instructive hereâtheir work over the last decade has led to many criminal convictions among its members, as well as several organizational scandals. But their record of concrete wins for animals is at best small-scale and mixed, especially compared to the successes of groups that have purely used lawful tactics like ballot initiatives and corporate campaigns.
One last point in the utilitarian calculus, this time on the more object-level cost-benefit calculation, is that I think EAs who embrace these kinds of illegal tactics may be underestimating the downside risks of endorsing criminal activity. I think there is a set of donors and volunteers that are happy to contribute to legal activism but who would be concerned about being associated with lawbreaking (at a minimum, I would consider myself to be in this group). If people in leadership roles within the EA/âEAA ecosystem endorse illegal action, any foreseen benefits may easily be swamped by the harms of driving away risk-averse donors.
None of this is to say that Ridglanâs treatment of animals is justified, or that the lack of state enforcement against Ridglan for their serious violations of animal cruelty laws is acceptable. However, these harms donât justify using tactics that are neither clearly effective nor robustly permissible across moral views.
- ^
I donât mean to say that literally all lawbreaking is unjustified in a democracy. In particular, if one thinks that a law in the US is unconstitutional, breaking it may be required to gain standing for a legal challenge. But this implies a narrow exception for doing the minimum amount of lawbreaking required to obtain standing; it doesnât imply that the tactics in question at Ridglan are permissible.
- ^
Note that this self-limiting principle only holds when applied to groups of humans denied suffrage. It doesnât extend to cases like animals, where suffrage isnât possible and thereâs no natural bound on how many such groups might be invoked to justify lawbreaking.
- ^
You mentioned that public awareness of broiler welfare, especially the impacts of fast-growing breeds, is very limited, and that raising salience is now a priority. Iâd be curious to hear more about what youâve tried so far and whatâs in the pipeline.
I recently heard Toby Schiønning from Anima International credit catchy naming (âturbochickensâ) as important to their campaign success in Denmark and Norway. THL UK has been using âFrankenchickenâ for a while, so the naming lever has been pulled, but it doesnât seem to have achieved comparable cut-through with UK audiences. Do you have a sense of why, and does your strategy going forward involve testing other framings, or is the bet more that the existing framing just needs more media muscle behind it? If you have any other takeaways from the success of ECC campaigning in Norway, Iâd also be super curious to hear those as well.
One note that I donât think anyone has brought up (though I might have missed something): I think each person reached would mostly get either the health benefits or the cost benefits, not both, since people currently buying pads are already using a sanitary option and people using rags/âcloths arenât spending money on products.
As far as I can tell (both from searching manually and via Claude), none of the RCTs of menstrual cups in low-resource settings have had severe adverse events (see for example https://ââwww.thelancet.com/ââjournals/ââeclinm/ââarticle/ââPIIS2589-5370(23)00438-8/ââfulltext, https://ââbmjopen.bmj.com/ââcontent/ââ7/ââ4/ââe015429). Thatâs enough to give some confidence that adverse events are rare, but not enough to really understand what the true rate is (it seems like all studies together cover at most 10000 person-years of menstrual cup usage in low-resource settings, and my understanding is that among e.g. tampon users in high-income countries, rates of toxic shock syndrome are something like 1-3 per 100000 person-years of usage, with risks for menstrual cup users thought to be broadly similar but less certain due to smaller sample sizes). Also, the RCTs have generally involved some kind of hygiene education, which Iâm not sure Nickâs $7.5 accounts for.
If the rate of severe complications was 1 per 10000 person-years of menstrual cup usage (which seems at the higher end of what could be theoretically compatible with the evidence we have so far) and women still wanted to use the cups when informed of the risks, that actually wouldnât change Nickâs BOTEC very much (say an average severe adverse event led to a 15 DALY loss, we have 0.0598-15*7.5/â10000 = 0.04855 DALY/âCup). Accounting for cup hygiene education costs might be the more meaningful change to the BOTEC, but I donât think it would change things by more than 50%. That would leave menstrual cups still looking like a potentially promising intervention.
So overall after looking at this, I donât think that the infection risk concern is a slam-dunk reason against menstrual cups as an intervention. But it seems like if future wellbeing-focused research returned promising results, it would be prudent to fund a big trial that tried hard to monitor for severe adverse events before going to large-scale implementation.
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
We believe that effective giving organizations generally find it easier to fundraise from sources other than meta organizations. These sources might include a tipping function, and individual donors. Because of this, we generally cap our support of EG orgs at 50% for more established groups.
GWWCâs transparency page fits with that
Grants from philanthropic foundations. As of early 2025, ~50% of our funding comes from Coefficient Giving. We are not currently funded by any other philanthropic foundations.
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.
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.
On (1): You say:
I think that this is at best weak evidence. Activistsâ decisions of whether or not to commit crimes are surely influenced by norms, not just the expected intensity of punishment. The recent history of climate activism in the UK is a good example. As far as I can tell, nothing changed about UK law to cause the rapid rise of high-profile lawbreaking by Extinction Rebellion and then Just Stop Oil in the 2018-2023 timeframe. The UK government did in the end stop the activists through increased legal penalties (going from typically no prison time for nonviolent lawbreaking when motivated by ethical concerns to 4+ year prison sentences becoming common for the more serious cases). But something other than threat of prison time was keeping climate activists from using these tactics in the early-to-mid 2010s.
On (2):
I agree that a Pigouvian tax doesnât require restitution (as I indicated with including âimprove welfare elsewhereâ as something that can be done with the tax revenue). But the classical formulation (in which the optimal tax rate fully eliminates deadweight losses) does require that a dollar of consumer/âproducer surplus and a dollar of tax revenue produce the same social welfare. If a dollar of tax revenue produces less social welfare, then the deadweight loss cannot be eliminated.
To make this more concrete, I want to dig into an example based on your comment about driving in a world with a carbon tax. Consider taking a long trip by car rather than train under 3 different taxation schemes. Letâs assume you value the convenience of the car over the train at $101, the social cost of your carbon emissions is $100, and that all consumers in this world have identical marginal utilities of money.
World A: No carbon tax. You take the trip, gaining benefits you value at +$101 while causing social costs of -$100. In this world, we might say that youâve done the right thing by driving (since this maximizes utility overall), but that for fairness reasons you might be obligated to donate some money to others, since your utility-maximizing decision also acted as a transfer from others to you.
World B: Carbon tax of $100 on the trip, returned as an equal dividend to all people. You take the trip, gaining net benefits after the tax of $1. The rest of society ends up net neutral (though there might still be particular winners and losers). In this world, youâve done the right thing by driving, and have no further obligations.
World C: Carbon tax of $100 on the trip, which the government will use to buy $100 of consumer goods and dump them down an old mineshaft. You take the trip, gaining net benefits after the tax of $1. The rest of society still experiences the social costs of -$100, which the tax doesnât do anything to reduce. In this world, youâve clearly done the wrong thing by driving, since you caused a net utility loss of $99.
My claim is that doing crimes is similar to deciding to drive in World C. The âtaxâ on crime is imprisoning the criminal, which causes them to pay large costs in terms of their lost freedom and ability to work and doesnât do anything to benefit society. And in fact itâs worse than World C, since the rest of society needs to pay the additional costs of arresting, prosecuting, and jailing them. So I think the Pigouvian tax analogy does not hold here, and itâs wrong to think that the harms of crime are properly internalized.