TylerMaule

• TylerMaule 7 Feb 2026 15:56 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: TylerMaule’s Quick takes

  Potential Animal Welfare intervention: encourage the ASPCA and others to scale up their FAW budget

  I’ve only recently come to appreciate how large the budgets are for the ASPCA, Humane World (formerly HSUS), and similar large, broad-based animal charities. At a quick (LLM) scan of their public filings, they appear to have a combined annual budget of ~$1Bn, most of which is focused on companion animals.

  Interestingly, both the ASPCA and Humane World explicitly mention factory farming as one of their areas of concern. Yet, based on available data, it looks like <5% of spending in this category is directed toward factory-farmed animal welfare — despite factory farming accounting for the overwhelming majority of total animal suffering.

  Given that factory farming is already in scope for these orgs, and that is responsible for the vast majority of animal suffering, it would seem quite reasonable for these orgs to increase their spending on FAW several-fold. I doubt their donors would object!

  

  

TylerMaule’s Quick takes

• TylerMaule 6 Feb 2026 14:15 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: TylerMaule’s Quick takes

  Should GiveWell offer Animal Welfare regrants on an opt-in basis?

  The GiveWell FAQ (quoted below) suggests that GiveWell focuses exclusively on human-directed interventions primarily for reasons of specialization—i.e., avoiding duplication of work already done by Coefficient Giving and others—rather than due to a principled objection to recommending animal-focused charities. If GiveWell is willing to recommend these organizations when asked, why not reduce the friction a bit?

  A major part of GiveWell’s appeal has been its role as an “index fund for charities.” While ACE and similar groups offer something comparable for animal causes, GiveWell has a much larger donor base, and donors often prefer to consolidate their giving into a single recurring contribution. An optional Animal Welfare allocation could serve those donors better while remaining consistent with GiveWell’s stated reasoning.

  Why doesn’t GiveWell recommend organizations focused on animal suffering?
  GiveWell has not prioritized research into organizations focused on animal suffering in part because there are two organizations we know well that are investigating this question: Open Philanthropy and Animal Charity Evaluators. We have limited research capacity, and would guess that we may come to similar conclusions as those groups about which groups to recommend, although we would likely have a different research process[...]We generally point interested individuals to these two organizations when they reach out to us for recommendations in this cause area.

• TylerMaule 24 Jan 2026 16:25 UTC

  44 points

  18 ∶ 7

  on: Reflec­tions on Far­mKind’s Jan­uary me­dia campaign

  Accepting that this campaign was debatable ex-ante and disappointing ex-post, I think it’s helpful to view it in the context of the broader reality:
  
  Given the dire^[1] status quo, I am generally grateful when thoughtful, conscientious actors like FarmKind take the initiative to try new approaches in the hope of unlocking positive change for animals. Although this campaign didn’t achieve its aims, it’s good to see that it generated some useful lessons—and, most importantly, I hope the harsh reaction won’t unduly discourage future attempts to test new ideas.

  1. ^

     Factory farming is arguably the moral atrocity of our time, and still getting worse despite current best efforts

• TylerMaule 14 Jan 2026 15:34 UTC

  30 points

  10 ∶ 0

  on: EA is un­der­fund­ing an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy ac­cord­ing to our own preferences

  Thanks for posting this! My thoughts on “what’s going on here?”:

  1. The simplest high-level explanation is that the surveys capture ‘thought leaders’, which is distinct from the set of people who control the money, and these groups disagree on allocation. I guess my prior expectation would not have been that these numbers match, but perhaps I’m in the minority there?

  2. More specifically, as you mentioned, Coefficient Giving is responsible for ~2/​3 of the grant dollars in this data set, so to a significant extent this reduces to comparing Dustin and Cari’s preferred allocation to that of the surveyed EA population.

  3. It’s notable that Global Health is the only category to receive more funding than the survey mean (and more than double at that). Here it’s both true that CG consistently gives a larger fraction, and that GiveWell top charities are the only ‘EA orgs’ to achieve any significant ‘mainstream appeal’ to date; e.g. the amount that GiveWell directs from non-CG sources per year is 3-4x the entire Animal Advocacy budget in this data set (and likely very little of that is coming from EA survey respondents).

  Perhaps there is room for more EAs to shift their giving to Animal Advocacy in response to the above, and/​or more optimistically to find animal-centric messaging with as much mainstream appeal as GiveWell.

• TylerMaule 14 Jan 2026 14:43 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Aidan Alexander’s comment on: His­tor­i­cal EA fund­ing data: 2025 update

  Thanks for bringing this up Aidan. I raised this topic in both of my versions of the Historical Funding post, and I remain interested in doing this properly if and when I get sufficient time and data. What I have found so far is (a) accessing the bottom-up data for ~all relevant charities seems to be much more difficult than I would have imagined, and (b) I’ve floated this project to a few people and the interest seemed lukewarm (probably mostly due to their sense of intractibility).

• TylerMaule 17 Dec 2025 19:22 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Where did you donate this year?

  FarmKind, Anima International, THL UK, SWP, FWI, ACE, RP, The Centre for Feed Innovation, Scale Welfare, Arthropoda, Indonesian Cage-Free Association, Across Species Project Indonesia

• TylerMaule 26 Nov 2025 8:48 UTC

  15 points

  8 ∶ 0

  on: Dona­tion Elec­tion Dis­cus­sion Thread

  I continue to think that animal welfare—in particular the fight against factory farming—is severely under-funded, even compared to other worthy options such as GiveWell top charities.

• TylerMaule 20 Nov 2023 22:29 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Hamish McDoodles’s comment on: Open Phil Should Allo­cate Most Neart­er­mist Fund­ing to An­i­mal Welfare

  Thanks! Small correction: Animal Welfare YTD is labeled as $53M, when it looks like the underlying data point is $17M (source and 2023 full-year projections here)

• TylerMaule 2 Oct 2023 16:14 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Milli🔸’s comment on: His­tor­i­cal EA fund­ing data

  Both posts contain a more detailed breakdown of inputs, but in short:

  1. 80k seems to include every entry in the Open Phil grants database, whereas my sheet filters out items such as criminal justice reform that don’t map to the type of funding I’m attempting to track.

  2. They also add a couple of ‘best guess’ terms to estimate unknown/​undocumented funding sources; I do not.

• TylerMaule 1 Sep 2023 11:06 UTC

  14 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: LTFF and EAIF are un­usu­ally fund­ing-con­strained right now

  If you expect to take in $3-6M by the end of this year, borrowing say $300k against that already seems totally reasonable.

  Not sure if this is possible, but I for one would be happy to donate to LTFF today in exchange for a 120% regrant to the Animal Welfare Fund in December^[1]

  1. ^

     This would seem to be an abuse of the Open Phil matching, but perhaps that chunk can be exempt

• TylerMaule 1 Sep 2023 11:02 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: LTFF and EAIF are un­usu­ally fund­ing-con­strained right now

  the comparison-in-practice I’m imagining is (say) $100k real dollars that we’re aware of now vs $140k hypothetical dollars

  That is very different from the question that Caleb was answering—I can totally understand your preference for real vs hypothetical dollars.

• TylerMaule 1 Sep 2023 7:45 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: LTFF and EAIF are un­usu­ally fund­ing-con­strained right now

  So these are all reasons that funding upfront is strictly better than in chunks, and I certainly agree. I’m just saying that as a donor, I would have a strong preference for funding 14 researchers in this suboptimal manner vs 10 of similar value paid upfront, and I’m surprised that LTFF doesn’t agree.

  Perhaps there are some cases where funding in chunks would be untenable, but that doesn’t seem to be true for most on the list. Again, I’m not saying there is no cost to doing this, but if the space is really funding-constrained as you say 40% of value is an awful lot to give up. Is there not every chance that your next batch of applicants will be just as good, and money will again be tight?

• TylerMaule 31 Aug 2023 7:56 UTC

  15 points

  5 ∶ 0

  in reply to: calebp’s comment on: LTFF and EAIF are un­usu­ally fund­ing-con­strained right now

  A quick scan of the marginal grants list tells me that many (most?)^[1] of these take the form of a salary or stipend over the course of 6-12 months. I don’t understand how the time-value of money could be so out of whack in this case—surely you could grant say half of the requested amount, then do another round in three months once the large donors come around?^[2]

  1. ^

     As for the rest, I don’t see anything on the list that wouldn’t exist in three months.

  2. ^

     Daniel’s comment says “there are a whole host of issues” with this approach. I’d be curious to know what those are, and how they aren’t worth unlocking 40% additional value.

• TylerMaule 30 Aug 2023 22:28 UTC

  18 points

  5 ∶ 2

  in reply to: calebp’s comment on: LTFF and EAIF are un­usu­ally fund­ing-con­strained right now

  IDK 160% annualized sounds a bit implausible. Surely in that world someone would be acting differently (e.g. recurring donors would roll some budget forward or take out a loan)?

  I would be curious to hear from someone on the recipient side who would genuinely prefer $10k in hand to $14k in three months’ time.

• TylerMaule 6 Aug 2023 17:16 UTC

  51 points

  7 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: Univer­sity EA Groups Need Fixing

  Regarding the funding aspect:

  • As far as I can tell, Open Phil has always given the majority of their budget to non-longtermist focus areas.

    • This is also true of the EA portfolio more broadly.

  • GiveWell has made grants to less established orgs for several years, and that amount has increased dramatically of late.

• TylerMaule 7 Jul 2023 12:52 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: An­nounc­ing Man­i­fund Regrants

  IMHO seems possible to be rigorous with imaginary money, as some are with prediction markets or fantasy football. Particularly so if the exercise feels critical to the success of the platform.

  I think the site looks great btw, just pushing back on this :)

• TylerMaule 6 Jul 2023 11:02 UTC

  9 points

  6 ∶ 9

  in reply to: Austin’s comment on: An­nounc­ing Man­i­fund Regrants

  Could you not dogfood just as easily with $50 (or fake money in a dev account)?

• TylerMaule 24 Jun 2023 7:51 UTC

  7 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: LukeDing’s comment on: The flow of fund­ing in EA move­ment building

  You may find this spreadsheet useful for that type of information

• TylerMaule 20 Jun 2023 11:09 UTC

  17 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: Third Wave Effec­tive Altruism

  Substantially less money, through a combination of Meta stock falling, FTX collapsing, and general market/​crypto downturns^[3]...[3] Although Meta stock is back up since I first wrote this; I would be appreciative if someone could do an update on EA funding

  Looking at this table, I expect the non-FTX total is about the same^[1]—I’d wager that there is more funding commited now than during the first ~70% of the second wave period.^[2]

  I think most people have yet to grasp the extent to which markets have bounced back:

  • The S&P 500 Total Return Index is within 6% of its all-time high; only ever spent ~4 months above today’s value

  • META is −26% from ATH, but now highest since Jan ’22 and ~10 months ever above this price

  1. ^

     Dustin’s net worth looks to be about about -$7Bn from the peak (per his preferred source). Meanwhile, GiveWell (2-3x), Founders Pledge (3x), and GWWC (1.5x) numbers all seem to be higher

  2. ^

     I still think that the waves framing is useful and captures the prevailing narrative tbc