Hi there! I’m an EA from Madrid. I am currently finishing my Ph.D. in quantum algorithms and would like to focus my career on AI Safety. Send me a message if you think I can help :)
PabloAMC 🔸
Karma: 1,363
Social and disruptive innovation strategies for alternative proteins
In the margin and within the budget allocated to AI safety, the EA community has underspent on power concentration problems and overspent on AI control.
“It is appropriate for small donors to spend time finding small charities to support”
For:
Larger donors typically only have the ability to study large donation opportunities.
Against:
I think most small donors (such as myself) are pretty bad at gauging the evidence in areas they are not expert in.
Perhaps a better framing is: “On the margin, should we devote farmed animal welfare resources to improve the animals being farmed (e.g., via corporate campaigns) or devote resources to substituting farmed animals altogether via alternative proteins?”
What about Spanish? I would be interested because I could give it as a present.
Have you considered translating it? It seems to me the typical lectors outside English speaking countries will not necessarily be fluent in that language.
I think GFI has claimed this in the past, and given their role of large coordinator of the area I’m inclined to believe their conterfactual importance. However the problem is that without a downstream model of how dollars convert into averted animal suffering, it is quite hard to prioritise between theories of change.
AGI and the structural foundations of democracy and the rule-based international order
Hi Caroline, thanks for the reply. I think you are very right in that both approaches are complementary and we should support both. There’s even a chance that advocacy campaigns may end up creating momentum from which alternative proteins could benefit. It is also true that alternative proteins may be able to access funds that are not available to corporate advocacy campaigns or similar, not just VC but also government support. That may also be the reason why GFI is highlighting the environmental aspect which is an easier sell outside of EA or animal welfare circles. Still, GFI is itself only charity funding (as far as I know) so we may argue donations to them act as a catalyst. In any case, I posed this question because I think we lack a formal model to make decisions on what types of interventions make more sense. It is as if in the area of Global Health people did not have models that allowed them to compare setting up water infrastructure vs water chlorination or wells. I think parametric models could shed some light on the optimal capital allocation between interventions, or at least make decision making more clear.
[Question] How to compare theories of change in animal welfare?
I think there are good arguments why those actions might have indeed been horrible mistakes. But I’m also quite uncertain about what would have been the best course of action at the time. Eg, there’s a reasonable case that the best we might hope for is steering the development of AI. I unfortunately don’t know.
Let me give a non AI example: I find it reasonable that some EAs try to steer how factory farming works (most animal advocacy), despite I preferring no animal died or was tortured for food.
But on the other hand I believe people at leadership positions failed to detect and flag the FTX scandal ahead of time. And that’s a shame.
I don’t think we see much top-down leadership. There’s eg GiveWell, which I take seriously, but sometimes prioritising between different broad cause areas is very hard, and my understanding is that people in my local community feel the same way and are broadly supportive of diverse points of view.
I fought for EA to mean something simpler— just someone who 1. Figured out the best way to improve the world and 2. Does it— but I lost.
For what it is worth, this is not how I feel in my local EA community. There are people leading effective giving organisations and others who just go on with their usual lives with trial pledges; and I feel we are fairly non judgemental.
I donated to (i) ARMoR (https://www.armoramr.org/), because I am convinced about the quality of their cost estimates and believe targeted policy interventions can be fairly tractable; (ii) and also to the Global Health Fund from Ayuda Efectiva (https://ayudaefectiva.org/fondo-salud-global), in part to encourage others to donate.
New anti-malaria treatment clears phase 3 trials.
I just found that there is a new anti-malarial alternative to artemisinin, the most common antimalarial chemical, which has successfully completed Phase 3 trials. Its nickname is GanLum and apparently has quite powerful effects:
A new drug, called GanLum, was more than 97% effective at treating malaria in clinical trials carried out across 12 African countries, researchers reported Wednesday at the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Toronto. That’s as good, if not better, than the current standard of treatment. If approved by regulators, it could be a powerful new tool against a disease that kills roughly half a million people each year.
This is an important advance because resistance to artemisinin is one of the growing concerns in the fight against malaria.
You may read more in https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/11/12/g-s1-97487/malaria-drug-new and https://www.mmv.org/newsroom/news-resources-search/phase-3-trial-next-generation-malaria-treatment-ganaplacide-lumefantrine .
EU animal welfare consultation (10 min request)
Hey Alex, thanks a lot for the post, and for the work you do at GFI.
Something I would love to read (and might write up this funding season) is how to compare the impact of GFI work with alternative proteins to other animal charities advocating working on corporate campaigns. This is highly non-obvious because GFI work depends on some theory of change, which I find very attractive, but for which I have not found good models. The closest is this post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CA8a9JS3fYb63YWoh/the-humane-league-needs-your-money-more-than-alt-proteins, which compares The Humane League with investing in alternative proteins. I suspect, though, that the GFI would fare better than investing in specific companies. I also believe GFI plays a structural role in the development of alternative proteins, so the model is likely different too.
In conversations with effective altruists, we sometimes hear there’s a perception that GFI is sufficiently or even well-funded. Or that there’s less scope for impact in giving to an established charity.
It is also true that there are not many great cost-benefit analyses or estimates of the funding needs.
Do you have pointers to those two bits of information? Also, is there any reason why the past two years GFI did not go through the Animal Charity evaluators evaluations (see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/waL3iwczrjNt8PreZ/announcing-ace-s-2025-charity-recommendations) ?
Thanks you!!!
I wonder how is ACE selecting charities? I wonder in particular because the Good Food Institute used to be considered a high-impact charity, but I have not seen any updates on that since 2022, when the assessment was broadly positive reference here. Not only that, but it seems GFI was probably one of the largest charities.
What would be the motivation? Is writing a good skill to have and thus merits practising?