I am a generalist with a focus on data and research.
I work as a researcher for Animal Advocacy Africa.
I participated in Charity Entrepreneurship’s Research Training Program in 2023.
Moritz Stumpe
Karma: 248
Thanks for your comment! And no worries about not polishing, I will do the same, so it will also be a bit long :)
I agree with your concern and it is something I’ve also thought about before (in other contexts as well). However, I see two reasons for why working in high-population countries should indeed be favoured:
At Animal Advocacy Africa we’re currently working on recommendations and implementation guides for advocates that aim to mitigate the rise of industrial animal agriculture in Africa. Based on our research, policy work is the top recommendation and I do think the expected value of this is higher in high-population countries. The reason is that it is hard to know where policy work is more likely to be successful (which you also mentioned). As long as we don’t have an indication that it is significantly less likely to be successful in higher-population countries, it seems fair to focus on the factor that we know will be important: the expected impact, if successful.
For work besides the area of policy/regulations (e.g. working with farmers or certain public outreach interventions, which are our recommendations #2 and #3), I agree that scale considerations can be overblown. If we cannot cover the whole population anyway, there is no limit that should really matter. However, I think scalability and potential flow-through effects are important to consider here. If we can get a successful model to work for some part of a large country, there is the potential to scale this much further or to have it scale automatically across the country (e.g. word of mouth).
In short, there is a lot of upside to working in such large countries and as long as I don’t have evidence that working in smaller countries is much more tractable I would keep focusing on the large ones. However, if there is clear evidence that working in a specific country is likely to be significantly more tractable, we should give this consideration a lot of weight. Unfortunately our rough model is not well-suited for such nuances, so it should definitely be combined with contextual knowledge/factors.
That said, I think it is a good point that the weight might be too high and these weights are mostly based on our intuitions anyway. So it’s great that you are challenging this. I think it would probably be fruitful to do some kind of MC simulation on how the scores change if we vary the weights of different parameters. Maybe I’ll find time for this somewhere down the road.
Thanks for your perspective, I’ll definitely let you know about our further research :)
Thanks for your inputs, this is great. I also didn’t expect you to have the perfect answer. It’s a very tricky problem.
I’ll incorporate these considerations in our research!
Thanks for your research on this Aashish! Very relevant for our work at Animal Advocacy Africa.
I’m getting the sense that policy work / lobbying could be a good idea (since your uncertainty around this has reduced as a result of your evidence review), but it should be targeted at something else than subsidies, since their path to impact is quite long and unclear? For example lobbying for better animal welfare standards might be more promising as it more directly addresses the problem (has a shorter ToC)?
Do you have an opinion on this? Or any other interventions you think might be more promising than addressing subsidies?
Have you seen this post on second-hand battery pages in Africa? Do you think an intervention focusing on this issue would be promising? If so, what kind of intervention? Should this be focused on the exporting or importing countries?
I would be curious to get your opinion on this, as we (Animal Advocacy Africa) are currently considering different strategies to recommend/pursue.
Thank you!
Also linking CE’s own previous research here. Note that we did not really look at this previous report when we conducted our own research and came to the topic with fresh eyes.
Thanks both!
I just wanted to add to Zuzana’s response that our basis for the statement in question is also based on what we have learned out about cage-free corporate campaigns. From our understanding, the threat of a “bad cop” campaign is often enough for companies to sign commitments. So yes Jojo, your interpretation is correct I would say.
Thanks for adding that helpful perspective!
We did not make the comparison to QALYs since the program looked at global health/development and animal interventions separately. So we only compared animal interventions to other animal interventions. My personal perspective is that animal interventions indeed tend do be much more cost-effective, which is why I focus on that area.
It might also be interesting to note that CE’s own previous research (which we did not really look at when we conducted our own research) estimates ~20-30 welfare points per dollar, which is somewhat higher than our best guess of 12 WP/$.
Thank you Zuzana!
If you haven’t yet, I can recommend this article that I linked in the post which gave me some food for thought on the interplay between farming for meat and leather.
Please also note that the statement “demand for leather products is on a downward trajectory on a global level” is based on that article and I didn’t dive deeper into this, since this was only a shallow review. Would have to do more detailed research to be very confident in this.
Thanks for the links to those other pieces that address similar issues. I wasn’t aware of most of them and they are suuuper interesting/relevant! Seems like I have some more reading and researching to do.
I think I agree with what you referenced from 80K. I see virtues and good character as the foundation on which you can then build in a more maximizing way. Satisfying certain personal needs and wants also fits into this foundational category. Of course, how exactly one balances these aspects highly varies from person to person.
And these decisions are highly context-dependent, yes. What I wrote is only a very high-level frame. In practice, it is of course very important to consider which aspects of “common sense morality” we really want to follow, just as it is very important to reflect on which personal needs and wants we should really follow or prioritize. This is a tricky balancing act that I am constantly trying to master. And social norms are always in flux as well.
For instance, I certaintly don’t think it is okay to farm animals in ways that make them suffer unnecessarily, even though it is common practice and might be commonly seen as morally acceptable. This also means that I act in ways that deviate from the norm (i.e. plant-based consumption). But society around me is also adapting and some data suggests that a majority of people actually find the way we treat farmed animal abhorrent (they just don’t act on it or rationalize their behavior).
All of this to say: Yes, moral common sense is vague and constantly changing. Yes, we always need to reflect on it and not follow the majority blindly. But I think it is beneficial to find certain core value and virtues to adhere by (and those should be ones where we are confident that they are not overall harmful).
Thanks Aashish!
Important points and I agree that common sense morality is underdeveloped here. I suspect that there are some things that are relatively universal (like love and care for the family or generosity), but yes, the focus/weight of different aspects will vary.
Thanks for your comment! This helped me to think about my argument further.
I agree that the conception of common sense morality is quite underdeveloped here and can be interpreted in different ways. It acts somewhat as a placeholder and I would like to explore this a bit further with more time. Public opinion might not even be a reliable proxy for what I mean here. Maybe virtue ethics would have been a better choice than common sense morality. For instance, I think Oskar Schindler exhibited many important virtues (though my knowledge about the historical facts is limited), while at the same time thinking quite utilitarian.
I agree that in practice there are not as many differences between utilitrianism and common-sense morality (or virtue ethics) as one might initially anticipate. I think that most people in the EA movement already accept this, but I do think there are parts of the movement that neglect “basic virtues”. See my disclaimer about the essay being more of a reminder than a critique.
Thanks for your reference to Schindler’s List. That film is one of my all-time favorites and also highly interesting from an EA perspective. It might be nice to have a series of posts or something like that on exploring EA themes in popular movies, series, books, etc. (if this doesn’t exist already).
Hi Helene, nice writeup! You might enjoy this podcast from 80K with Hannah Ritchie, if you haven’t heard it already. There are some nice bits in there about agricultural productivity (incl. fertiliser use).
Thanks for your comment Hayven!
Yes, if there is one key takeaway from the report, I think it would be that someone with more local knowledge on China should investigate the Shandong guidelines in more depth. I was quite excited to see these guidelines and my research seems somewhat promising, but this needs to be validated further.
It seems like we are also aligned on the other points :)
Thanks for your perspective and transparency Sjir! That seems reasonable from my prior perspective and how I read your report.
Thanks for your work on this!
I am interested in how you would prioritise between ACE’s Movement Grants (MG) and their recommended charities. What would you recommend, if you had to recommend one of them, and why? From how I read your analysis, it seems that you think that MG are the better option. Do I read that correctly?
Thanks for the explanation Bob. That absolutely makes sense! I was somehow assuming that negative results would count as zeros as well.
Thanks and congratulations to the RP team for your work on this. This is incredibly thorough and useful!
Having looked at the whole Moral Weight Project sequence in some detail, I have some uncertainties around the following question/objection that you list above:
“Your literature review didn’t turn up many negative results. However, there are lots of proxies such that it’s implausible that many animals have them. So, your welfare range estimates are probably high.”In your response you write that this is a good objection.
However, as I understand it, whenever proxies were unknown, you assumed these to be zero (i.e. not present). For instance, in your methodology writeup, I read: “Assigning proxies labeled “Unknown” zero probability of being present is certainly leading to underestimates of the welfare ranges and probabilities of sentience.”
Somehow I cannot square these two statements. Can you solve that seeming contradiction for me?
Yes, this has certainly updated my view on prioritisation between big and small countries. So thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I think it’s a good idea to reduce the weight of scale, though probably not as much as you might. Aashish and I might update this as soon as we got around to talking about it and are aligned.
In any case, we encourage people to just take the model, make a copy, and change parameters themselves, if it seems useful for their purposes.