Rockwell
Beware Silver Bullets: Are we making “welfare tech” into the next animal advocacy bubble?
EA gives permission to care about many things
Do you anticipate extending the deadline? I’d love to route some people your way but three days from now is pretty tight.
Consider directly supporting regional EA organizations. Funding is overwhelmingly coming from the same few sources, which makes these organizations more vulnerable and more subject to their funders’ visions.
I started writing a long reply on the many parts of this I disagree with, and I may finish that over the weekend. In the meantime, I just have to ask: What on earth is going on with the fearmongering around vitamins and supplements?
First off, even the most dedicated vegans will tell you that to stay vegan you need to take medicine to not die—B12.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone refer to a vitamin as “medicine” before, and the way you repeatedly do in this piece reads to me as some odd scare tactic. I think we’re actually as an EA community really in favor of vitamin supplementation (just search “Vitamin A” on the Forum) and most people would not consider fortified foods medicine.
In my opinion, fortification is pretty amazing! The discovery of vitamins was pretty amazing! I think both should be celebrated, not stigmatized.
I’m reading the way you talk about this as weirdly “anti-science wellness influencer” coded, but am I missing something here?
1:1 career advising links that may be relevant to you:
You can speak to all of them; you don’t have to choose just one!
Hi Magda, thanks for your thoughtful question and for the work you’ve already been doing to help animals. It’s wonderful to hear that you’re looking for ways to use your veterinary skills in a more impactful way.
You may want to check out Probably Good’s profile on veterinary medicine, which explores several paths beyond direct clinical practice that could align with your interests and flexibility needs.
At this stage, it might be helpful to zoom out and reflect on the specific problems you most want to help solve, whether that’s a specific niche in animal welfare, zoonotic disease risks, or something else entirely. From there, you can explore the kinds of work already happening in those areas and consider where your skills and experience might best fit in, whether directly (e.g. veterinary consulting or public health work) or more indirectly (e.g. strategy, research, or advising roles). That kind of problem-first lens can be especially useful when you’re navigating a career pivot and want to maximize impact. And I think the more you dig in, the more you’ll be surprised by the options available to you, as well as the work of other former veterinarians.
Thanks so much for sharing your background and questions. It’s great to see someone with a strong technical foundation and leadership experience thinking seriously about contributing to alternative proteins.
I’ll offer a few thoughts based on general trends we’ve seen and conversations with professionals, but I strongly encourage you to speak directly with people working in alt proteins—especially engineers and scientists—who can offer deeper, field-specific insight.
Should you spend time in the conventional food industry?
This can be a valuable path if you’re strategic about it. Some people build strong technical skills (e.g. in process engineering or regulatory work) that are directly relevant to alt proteins. But many others learn these skills on the job within mission-aligned companies. Whether this makes sense for you might depend on which specific roles you’re excited by and how motivated you’d feel in a less impact-focused context. People already in the industry can often share which early-career experiences they found most formative—or wish they’d pursued.Which subfields are most in need of engineers?
Hiring needs change quickly, so I’d recommend checking in with people on the ground to understand current and likely future bottlenecks. The alt protein industry is in a very different place today than it was five years ago—or than it will be five years from now. If you can, seek out professionals with a longitudinal view of the field who can speak to how skill-specific needs have shifted over time. They’ll have a more nuanced sense of which engineering capabilities are most scarce and which are likely to be in high demand as the sector scales.What types of roles or orgs are best for early career capital?
There are meaningful tradeoffs here:Startups can offer broad responsibility and fast learning, but often come with less stability and mentorship.
Larger companies may provide more structured training and help you build deeper technical expertise.
Nonprofits aren’t typically engineering-heavy, but might be worth considering if you’re drawn to ecosystem-building, funding strategy, or policy.
In general, the best opportunities tend to be role-specific rather than org-type-specific. Talking to people who’ve taken different routes can be especially helpful in identifying which environments will set you up well for future impact.
Suggested next steps
Browse job boards like AltProtein.Jobs by Tälist or the GFI career portal to reverse-engineer what skills are in demand.
Reach out to 2–3 engineers working in different parts of the alt protein sector (e.g. fermentation, cultivated meat, plant-based) to get their take on emerging gaps and skill needs.
Keep in mind that your technical skills—especially in modeling, optimization, and data analysis—could be valuable across other high-impact areas too. That’s not to pull you away from alt proteins, just to encourage long-term flexibility if your interests evolve.
Unfortunately, eggs cause an incredible amount of suffering beyond the killing of male chicks and the environmental conditions of farmed hens, including in pasture-based farms. Laying ~30x more eggs than you naturally should is physically exhausting, is psychologically harmful (amped up hormones that create an experience akin to PMS), and results in extremely high rates of ovarian cancer, impacted egg material and consequent slow death by sepsis, and reproductive prolapses—all left untreated. This is not to mention the experience of the parents (“breeder flocks”), the forced orphaning of social animals, the stress of transport, the prevalence of disease and parasites, osteoporosis, broken bones, predation, barn fires, ventilation shutdowns, extreme temps, being killed, watching you know get killed, or any other endemic harm of the egg industry.
All of that said, I’m thrilled for a future in which so many male chicks are spared. But the egg industry is fundamentally an atrocity.
Quick flag that I might change the post title, as I assumed from “Arkose is closing” that closure was a definite, not something you are still working to prevent.
Thanks! I wasn’t sure the best terminology to use because I would never have described 80K as “cause agnostic” or “cause impartial” and “big tent” or “multi-cause” felt like the closest gesture to what they’ve been.
To the extent that this post helps me understand what 80,000 Hours will look like in six months or a year, I feel pretty convinced that the new direction is valuable—and I’m even excited about it. But I’m also deeply saddened that 80,000 Hours as I understood it five years ago—or even just yesterday—will no longer exist. I believe that organization should exist and be well-resourced, too.
Like others have noted, I would have much preferred to see this AGI-focused iteration launched as a spinout or sister organization, while preserving even a lean version of the original, big-tent strategy under the 80K banner, and not just through old content remaining online. A multi-cause career advising platform with thirteen years of refinement, SEO authority, community trust, and brand recognition is not something the EA ecosystem can easily replicate. Its exit from the meta EA space leaves a huge gap that newer and smaller projects simply can’t fill in the short term.
I worry that this shift weakens the broader ecosystem, making it harder for promising people to find their path into non-AI cause areas—some of which may be essential to navigating a post-AGI world. Even from within an AGI-focused lens, it’s not obvious that deprioritizing other critical problems is a winning long-term bet.
If transformative AI is just five years away, then we need people who have spent their careers reducing nuclear risks to be doing their most effective work right now—even if they’re not fully bought into AGI timelines. We need biosecurity experts building robust systems to mitigate accidental or deliberate pandemics—whether or not they view that work as directly linked to AI. And if we are truly on the brink of catastrophe, we still need people focused on minimizing human and nonhuman suffering in the time we have left. That’s what made 80K so special: it could meet people where they were, offer intellectually honest cause prioritization, and help them find a high-impact path even if they weren’t ready to work on one specific worldview.I have no doubt the 80K team approached this change with thoughtfulness and passion for doing the most good. But I hope they’ll reconsider preserving 80K as 80K—a broadly accessible, big ten hub—and launching this new AGI-centered initiative under a distinct name. That way, we could get the best of both worlds: a strong, focused push on helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with AGI, without losing one of the EA community’s most trusted entry points.
Exciting! Am I right in understanding that Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research is no longer operational?
Room Full of Strangers
That makes sense! My best guess is that this is an evolving situation many in the community are paying attention to but that those more in the weeds are part of larger, non-EA-specific discussion channels, given the scope of the entities involved and the larger global response. But I could be off the mark here. I base this largely on my own experience following this closely but not particularly having anything to say on e.g. the Forum about it.
I disagree with the implication that those focused on other cause areas would actively downvote a post, rather than just not engage. I haven’t seen evidence of people downvoting posts for focusing on other cause areas and I worry it spreads undue animosity to imply otherwise.
I won’t claim it is sufficient to the urgency of the current funding cuts, but there have been many posts, quick takes, and comments in the past few weeks about this issue, including one four days ago already announcing The Rapid Response Fund with 90 upvotes at time of writing.
My primary advice is to avoid rushing to any judgements. The criticism came out yesterday and neither organization was aware of it in advance. I assume Sinergia and/or ACE will respond, but it makes sense that that might take at least several days.
Thanks for the post! Quick flag for EAIF and EA Funds in general (@calebp?) that I would find it helpful to have the team page of the website up to date, and possibly for those who are comfortable sharing contact information, as Jamie did here, to have it listed in one place.
I actively follow EA Funds content and have been confused many times over the years about who is involved in what capacity and how those who are comfortable with it can be contacted.
“There seems to be movement towards animal welfare interventions and away from global health interventions.”
What is this based on? I don’t believe this tracks with e.g. distribution of EA-associated donations.
1. I think it’s really telling that we independently landed on nearly the exact same examples!
2. Thank goodness we got our act together and published this before you publish yours 😅