Thomas Billington’s EAForum account. I am the co-founder of Fish Welfare Initiative. I also work as a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Associate at The Mission Motor.
My particular areas of passion are:
Creating change for farmed animals in low and middle-income countries
Bringing better monitoring and evaluation to the animal movement
Great news! Thanks so much for this awesome work 🙂 I’d be interested to hear:
What convinced farmers to sign up?
How long is the expected timeline to full transition to cage free? Will this be supported by The Animal Welfare League?
Is the commitment legally enforceable? or is this more of an MOU (memorandum of understanding) style of agreement?
Do you have plans for monitoring farmer’s progression on the commitment? Do have any expectation on follow-through rates?
Just noting though that this would be a false dichotomy.
I agree that we shouldn’t have a universal ban on co-living and that bureaucracy is bad all else equal. But this doesn’t seem like the only option available. As Xavier_ORourke said above: “we can all contribute to preventing [the bullet pointed actions] by judging things on a case-by-case basis and gently but firmly letting our peers know when we disapprove of their choices”
I feel that our tendency as EAs to think of ourselves as analogous to one org where we can “ban” something is an issue within itself. Intuitively, there feels a lot of value gained by thinking of ourselves more like social a movement, where we are only ever in the business of making cultural norms instead of rules.
Thanks for this, gavintaylor!
I’ve currently been compiling a list of lessons EA has that seem applicable over a wide array of cause areas/ charities. It seems like it is relevant to this post, so here’s a link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18phuLs60GGlNIRh85D0y4YA3BXTLfy_1m0D2jj7SZDo/edit
(as of now it is still in it’s infancy, but I’m planning to continue working on it)
Interesting question! I have upvoted. A (very) minor issue (and it perhaps is just me), but you may want to consider adding in what ‘ACE’ stands for, took me a minute to realise that Animal Charity Evaluators hadn’t gone completely off the wall.
A well written post with a good level of depth into an important topic. Thank you! If I were to give a suggestion, I would say that I don’t find the title a very good flag of the content.
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This isn’t a Task Y (at least it doesn’t obviously fulfil your outlined components), but a small-scale interaction with EA not currently mentioned would be the 80,000 Hours careers guide emailing scheme. This sends you a part of their careers guide each week for you to read and interact with. This supposedly takes 180 minutes to complete over 12 weeks. This seems like it may have up-scaling capabilities, too.
Another potential quick-fix similar to this could also be a more robust internship system within EA. 80,000 Hour’s job board has internships, and we could encourage people to utilise it to help fill some of the place of a Task Y (lower-commitment, can have a clear positive effect, includes career capital).
However, I would stress that neither of these ideas seem like they would completely fulfil the role of a good Task Y.
Here are some individual podcasts I would recommend as being especially good sources of conversation for podcast discussion meetings:
From The 80,000 Hours Podcast:
#45 - Prof Tyler Cowen’s stubborn attachments to maximising economic growth, making civilization more stable & respecting human rights
#25 - Prof Robin Hanson on why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do
#24 - Stefan Schubert on why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause
Also,
Sam Harris’ Waking Up - #44 - Being Good and Doing Good with Will MacAskill
Here are some of the notes I thought would make good discussion points from our event on the 80,000 Hours’ podcast episode. 25 ‘Why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do, according to Prof Robin Hanson’:
- Are we at university just to show off?
- Should we all cave to religion for practical reasons? If it is practically useful, why isn’t everyone religious?
- How does EA incorporate for people wanting to show they care? Wear badges?
- Showing we care vs big-headedness
- Are we EAs to show off?
- Should we be saving all our money till we hit a peak point of effectiveness in our 40s?
- Should we start an NGO interested in streamlining marginal charity?
(I’m a big fan of posing ideas for NGOs within the podcast talk)
- Should we all start a pact that we will put all our money together and in 200 years time give it all away? What would be the optimal amount of time to wait?
(Interestingly, this question sparked a movement in the group where about half of us were convinced that this was highly effective, and for the next few weeks we would bring it up. The idea was only quelled when we saw a stat about how much more charities valued a donation now against the same amount next year—it was more than any interest rate we could hope to get on our stored cash)
- Would you pay $50 to know hospital death rates for the surgery you’re about to undergo?
- Should we be selling EA to everyone?
- Are we a youth movement?
- Is identity the most important part of EA?
Interesting concept! A few considerations on your impact calculation, though:
The 500 users would all need to be non-EAs (as EAs probably would’ve given similar if not the same amount to effective charities anyway, perhaps only using the app for its UI, progress tracking etc.). Also, I don’t know if you have already considered this, but the 500 members would have likely counterfactually given money to (albeit probably less effective) charities anyway, and so you would need to consider this in an accurate estimation of your impact.
Another thing to consider is that the range of charities you provide can have big effect on your impact calculation. Your EA investors would have, presumably, given their money to top EA causes, and if your users don’t use their money as effectively as this it will lessen your impact.
Another thing to consider is that your EA investors actually potentially wouldn’t have given their money to charities, but to another EA start-up. That makes the counterfactual much harder to properly understand (evidently they thought that giving to Sparrow had higher expected value than top EA charities, and presumably they could’ve found another group with similar expected value).
Although none of this probably makes much difference when considering your higher user counts, I would worry that your lower estimates may be misleading.
Interesting post. It is a shame that people have to travel so far to get to one of the ea hubs. I was interested in the offices in Oxford you referenced. What offices were these? They sound like a fantastic place to get do some work done on an ea project!
Hey, Tom from Fish Welfare Initiative here.
We really appreciate the time and thought given to evaluating FWI and the fish welfare space more generally from a current cost-effectiveness lens. Of course, we are aware that FWI’s programming as it currently stands is not as cost-effective as cage-free or broiler campaigns, we understand that this is the prioritization of some donors, and so we think this is something that is important for potential supporters to understand (see our best arguments against donating to FWI).
Our general stance on the value of Fish Welfare Initiative is that we are a project with both high levels of learning for the movement and overall promise to become significantly more cost-effective in the future. We believe that working in low and middle income countries like India is critical for the long-term success of our movement, and thus having research and action firmly rooted in the field is necessary. We, therefore, find comparing our work at this stage to the estimated effectiveness of some of the biggest successes of our movement to only be a small negative update.
The broader point of the post, however, is also that aquatic animal welfare projects like FWI may struggle to become as cost-effective as other projects when discounted for fishes’ “welfare range”. We find this valid as a concern for some to have. However, we also feel that welfare ranges are a relatively nascent field of study, that true success in the animal movement likely involves significant work for fishes, and that the learnings from FWI’s work cross-apply beyond just fishes. So again, we find this only a small negative update.
Also to note, FWI does not endorse the numbers used by IPA or this review as to the magnitude of suffering alleviated by FWI’s programming. These numbers are based on Ambitious Impact’s original cost-effectiveness calculations, which are a far-cry from our actual work. Real numbers on how much suffering we alleviate on average per fish is something we are working on building a process for (see our welfare assessment protocol), but the in-field complexities mean that we do not believe it can be assessed through secondary research.
FWI, of course, is a biased opinion on all this (although we do believe we have a very intimate understanding of the ground situation), and so it would be reasonable to take our opinion with some salt. We are always open to feedback, and thank you again to Vasco for putting this together.
Fwiw, one area where we do strongly agree with you is on your assessment of Shrimp Welfare Project. They’re awesome, and we encourage people to support them.