Reflections on a decade of trying to have an impact

Next month (September 2024) is my 10th anniversary of formally engaging with EA. This date marks 10 years since I first reached out to the Foundational Research Institute about volunteering, at least as far as I can tell from my emails.

Prior to that, I probably had read a fair amount of Peter Singer, Brian Tomasik, and David Pearce, who might all have been considered connected to EA, but I hadn’t actually actively tried engaging with the community. I’d been engaged with the effective animal advocacy community for several years prior, and I think I’d volunteered for The Humane League some, and had seen some of The Humane League Labs’ content online. I’m not sure if The Humane League counted as being “EA” at the time (this was a year before OpenPhil made its first animal welfare grants).

This post is me roughly trying to guess at my impact since then, and reflections on how I’ve changed as a person, both on my own and in response to EA. It’s got a lot of broad reflections about how my feelings about EA have changed. It isn’t particularly rigorously or transparently reasoned — it’s more of a reflection exercise for myself than anything else. I’m mainly trying to look at what I’ve worked on with a really critical eye. I make a lot of claims here that I don't provide evidence for.

I’m sharing this because I think the major update I’ve had from doing this is that while I’ve generally done many of the “working-in-EA” things that are often presented as high impact, I personally feel much more tangibly the impact of my donations, and right now, if I think what’s made me feel best about being in EA, it’s actions more in the earning-to-give direction than the direct work direction.

My high-level view of my impact over this period is something like:

• $30,000 in counterfactually good donations.
• Overall unclear results for animals, though hopefully will have a big impact for future (primarily wild and invertebrate) animals, primarily because my work hasn’t really borne fruit in terms of direct impact yet.
  • I might have helped directly cause a few million animals to suffer mildly less bad deaths on factory farms, but it is unclear to me if this is counterfactual.
  • I think I was among the first handful of people to try to seriously get donors to take insect welfare seriously, and to get animal advocacy organizations to take insect welfare seriously, starting in around 2017.
    • I think importantly I failed to do this well, and if I had succeeded, insect welfare harms from farming could be lower. Other people obviously had an effect here too, but I think not being strategic about this feels to me like the biggest failure I’ve had as an EA.
  • Co-founded or helped found three high-impact orgs (Wild Animal Initiative, Arthropoda Foundation, and one other), all of which I think I can claim would likely not have existed if I hadn’t worked on them.
    • Counterfactually meaningfully contributed to another 2 organizations launching (and advised on many more).
  • Caused the insect welfare world to focus slightly more than they otherwise should (in my view) on insect farming compared to insecticides. I’m uncertain of the counterfactual, but I can imagine worlds where I lobbied harder for insecticide-focused work would have been better for insects.
• Mild benefits from my operations work, mainly through providing some extra high-trust capacity at critical times to organizations.

Background

I became pretty convinced that factory farming was a moral tragedy as a little kid, I believe due to exposure to either PETA content or PETA Kids content. My brother was also vegetarian, which was a compelling enough reason for me to also become vegetarian. I volunteered for a lot of animal welfare organizations, especially in college. I also did a lot of direct action-type advocacy for animals in college. I was already a fairly hardcore utilitarian at that point, and had mainlined Peter Singer, David Pearce, Timothy Sprigge, and a bunch of other wacky utilitarians. I spent a significant amount of my time in college staying up until the early morning talking about wild animal suffering and other animal issues with my closest friend while playing the video game Super Monkey Ball. This did not help any animals but was incredibly important to how I think about animal issues now.

At some point around 2011 or 2012, I saw a frog that was hit by a bike and dying, and was really distraught over it. I’m not sure why, but this was oddly transformative for me, and I just internalized animal suffering from it really directly in a way I hadn’t before. I also have a fairly strong memory from when I was 20 or 21 of spending an afternoon in the rain putting worms back from the sidewalk into the grass, and feeling bad about them dying naturally. I formed fairly strong views about animals in nature living awful lives, and beliefs about my obligations to help them.

In 2014, I was targeted by a Google Ad for The Foundational Research Institute, I believe on a topic related to wild animal welfare. I think this was my first exposure to EA formally, though I’d read studies on The Humane League Labs website, had read Animal Liberation, Famine, Influence, and Morality, and some other books that informed EA ideas.

I did some volunteering for FRI, read a lot of Brian Tomasik’s website, and also did some experiments at a cat shelter on reducing the impact of outdoor cats on animals. In 2016, I started working at Mercy For Animals, running corporate animal welfare campaigns. I also formally started Utility Farm, a nonprofit that would later merge with Wild-Animal Suffering Research into Wild Animal Initiative. I’ve done a bunch of other things in the EA world since.

My potential impact

• Donations
  • I’ve donated approximately $52,000 directly to what I consider to be high-impact charities, and reserved an additional $38,000 for future giving opportunities. I think that I should count this as something like $30,000 in counterfactually good donations.
    • I think I was pretty convinced by EA reasoning when I first encountered it, and had I not worked directly on projects, I probably would have taken the GWWC pledge by 2016. I think that my earning potential from 2016-2022 outside of EA was roughly $30,000-$50,0000 higher than within EA. From 2022 to now, I think my earning potential was roughly $25,000-$100,000 outside of EA. Looking at my donations as a percentage of my income over the past 10 years, (including funding reserved for future giving), I expect that this means:
      • 2016-2019: $30,000 in additional donations
      • 2020-2024: $15,000 in additional donations.
    • However, I think I would have donated this funding primarily to farmed animal welfare work that I no longer think is particularly impactful, and I should have viewed them with more skepticism at the time, though it was above the bar I’d apply today until 2019 or 2020.
    • I suspect this means that I should discount some counterfactual donations from 2020-2024 to nearly $0, and I should assume the counterfactual is closer to $30,000 in high impact donations.
  • Provided feedback or directly recommend grants totalling around $5M.
    • I think these probably changed how something like $500k was used in expectation, but probably in ways that mostly washed out, so it’s unclear what the impact is to me.

• Corporate Campaigns
  • I ran corporate campaigns for Mercy For Animals, primarily on broiler welfare, though to a lesser extent on cage-free, and won some commitments from major corporations.
    • I think that it’s possible that these commitments will lead to controlled atmosphere stunning being implemented on some farms, but for the most part the other commitments won’t be implemented fully, so it’s hard to assess their impact directly.
    • I think they still plausibly will improve the lives of millions of animals, and I was paid relatively little (~$35,000 / year), so it was probably fairly impactful.
      • I think MFA had a pretty easy time hiring campaigners, and would have found someone else good if they hadn’t hired me.
    • I think most of my counterfactual impact on corporate campaigning has come via advising on campaigns since I left Mercy For Animals, and by pushing mildly behind the scenes for a shift in campaigning tactics that I think will potentially be significantly more impactful than what major groups are doing now.
      • I still generally suspect corporate campaigns are no longer particularly effective, especially those run by the largest groups (e.g. Mercy For Animals or The Humane League), and don’t think these meet the bar for being an EA giving area anymore, and haven’t in the US since around 2017, and outside the US since around 2021.
    • I think I can take credit for basically helping a few million animals experience death in a marginally better way over the next decade, which is great! Controlled atmosphere stunning seems better for many chickens, but for many it probably doesn’t make much of a difference compared with live-shackle slaughter.
      • It’s unclear to me if this is counterfactual because MFA could have hired someone else to do it.

• Founding organizations
  • I co-founded Wild Animal Initiative and one of its predecessor organizations, and served as its first Executive Director.
    • I am biased, but I think WAI remains one of the most promising ways for EAs to help animals.
    • My best guess at when there will be cost-effective wild animal welfare interventions that meet my bar for confidence has been steadily declining, primarily due to WAI’s work.
    • I don’t currently feel convinced that there are highly cost-effective ways to help farmed vertebrates in the near future at scale, so I suspect the vast majority of value in the next few decades for EAs will be from helping wild animals and invertebrates.
  • I helped launch Arthropoda Foundation, and some other insect welfare initiatives from within EA.

• Research Impact
  • Hiring good researchers
    • I served on the hiring committee and worked to hire an individual researcher who I think would not have worked on EA issues without our job offer at all, and who I think has 10-20x the impact of the average researcher in EA animal welfare, including anyone we would have hired otherwise.
  • Conducting direct research
    • I’ve published 4-5 papers on wild animal welfare or invertebrate welfare, most importantly making some estimates of the number of insects farmed for food or feed. I think this paper has mattered not because it was particularly insightful, but because no one else had published anything like it, and it made a citable figure for academic journals, and is good for communicating impact.
    • I think some of my research could be bad. For example, Saulius Simcikas is highly skeptical of my suggestion that cochineal suffering could be reduced by reducing cochineal harvesting. If Saulius is correct and I am incorrect, I think this mildly misled some people, including people in influential positions. However, I don’t think any action has been taken on it.
    • I think that my research has generally caused interested EAs to focus too much on farmed insects, and less on insecticides. I am somewhat inclined toward thinking that insecticide-caused suffering is both more tractable and larger in scale. I’m now working on a insecticide project though, so trying to correct this.

• Cultural Impact
  • I’ve written a bunch of EA Forum posts on various cultural issues/concerns/trends in the EA community, and community dynamics. I think these are largely not impactful, though have caused some mild changes in donation behavior among some people.
  • I think I can roughly take a large amount of credit for
    • Preventing wild animal welfare from becoming a weird forgotten corner of 2010-2020 EA, like many other causes
      • In 2017 and 2018, I lobbied hard for the wild animal suffering-focused individuals to abandon its more radical edges, and to adapt the name wild animal welfare instead. I also oversaw the consolidation of groups within the cause area into Wild Animal Initiative, both of which kept the space afloat, and made it look much more legitimate to external scientists and funders.
      • I think that there was one other person who could have been in this position at the time (Persis Eskander), but they had gone to a different role.
    • Getting the EA world into insect welfare (to some extent)
      • I think that my work on insect welfare is likely the most impactful things that I’ve done — I think that besides Rethink Priorities direct work on invertebrate welfare, and Meghan Barrett’s work to normalize the academic work on insect welfare, my direct contributions have probably been particularly important (though not that much has moved there!)
      • I pushed major groups to work on this issue earlier than anyone else I know of besides Brian Tomasik, though I was mostly unsuccessful.

• Impact Through Operations
  • I don’t really think my ops work is particularly impactful, because I think ops staff are relatively easy to hire for compared to other roles. However I have spent a lot of my time in EA doing ops work.
    • I was RP’s COO for 4 years, overseeing its non-research work (fiscal sponsorship, finance, HR, communications, fundraising, etc), and helping the organization grow from around 10 to over 100 staff within its legal umbrella.
    • Worked on several advising and consulting projects for animal welfare and AI organizations
      • I think the advising work is likely the most impactful ops work I’ve done, though I overall don’t know if I think ops is particularly impactful.

My beliefs in 2014 compared to now

This is my best effort to estimate how my credence in various beliefs have changed since 2014, based on notes and exercises from that period of my life.

How my thinking about EA has changed over time

I have some long-held views that haven’t really changed:

• I’ve always been fairly skeptical of the degree to which EA unquestioningly embraces major donor philanthropy, despite having created the only viable alternative I’ve ever seen to it (lots of medium-sized donors!)
• I’ve always been uncomfortable with the concentration of power in EA.
• I’ve always felt surprised by the lack of experimentation / deference to Silicon Valley norms / lack of interest in alternative organizational structures.
  • Likewise, I’ve always felt disappointed by the lack of interesting funding mechanisms, especially ones that try to capture group beliefs about impact / hedge across beliefs more explicitly.
    • I have a project forthcoming on this I am really excited about though!

My views have also changed in a bunch of ways:

• I’ve become highly skeptical of most farmed vertebrate welfare work, and the organizations working on it.
• I’ve lost some faith in “EA leadership” to be either moral leaders / people who can effectively guide a community, especially after the FTX political events.
  • The closest I came to “leaving EA” was in April 2022, right before peak FTX-hype. I wrote a draft post about what I believed was likely both illegal and harmful election manipulation occurring within EA, and never published it (it’s unclear to me if I was correct — SBF and others were accused of related crimes later, but as far as I can tell haven’t been charged for them). I felt incredibly disheartened and sad that a community I thought was really dedicated to taking morality seriously seemed so easily bought into something that seemed so sketchy. I considered leaving my job at RP, and completely disassociating with EA. While the FTX collapse was obviously awful, for me personally there was some level of validation/relief in it, as I felt really bad during peak-FTX funding about how things were going.
• Post-FTX, the lack of turnover in leadership has made me really worried.
• I think I can credibly claim to have been EA-adjacent from well before it was cool, but I feel a lot more adjacent now.
• I’m a lot more convinced we can cost-effectively help wild animals in the near future than I was when I ran Wild Animal Initiative (ironically?)

Things that changed about me from exposure to EA

I care a lot more about money

• Before I was interested in EA, I made very little money, and didn’t feel like it mattered much. I thought that I was mostly going to help people/animals through volunteering, and felt happy with what I had.
• EA was far more status-oriented than the spaces I worked in before, and generally a lot more focused on the compensation from direct work roles/better paying.
• I think being in EA and aging both have caused me to just care about how much money I make a lot more than I did before.

I care a lot more about status

• I previously primarily worked in fields that were fairly non-hierarchical / didn’t have massive power dynamics (because they were small and decentralized). EA feels very different. Status matters a ton here. People respond uncritically to poorly argued posts from powerful people, over-index on the views of those with funding / status, and generally seem to want to move up a status hierarchy. This seems really natural for the way EA has structured itself, and it’s caused me to care a lot more about it too.

My commitment to doing good feels deeper

• I feel a lot more committed to doing good than I used to. I think I’m a lot less certain about how, or that I can. But it feels more important to me.

I feel more morally compromised

• EA has exposed for me how easily I can become entangled in things that feel compromising — that I am doing what seems good, but simultaneously participating in something harmful. I also think I generally feel like having a positive impact is harder without this kind of moral compromising. 

Overall, when I look at my first 10 years engaging with EA, I feel mainly like things are just ambiguous to me. I feel a lot more positive about some donations I made than anything else — in particular large donations to brand new projects that probably helped accelerate them a lot. The animal work I’ve done feels promising but ambiguous. This post feels very melancholy, but ultimately, I still feel excited about trying to do impactful work in the world.

Expected value maximization hides a lot of important details.  

I think a pretty underrated and forgotten part of of Rethink Priorities' CURVE sequence is the risk aversion work. I think the defenses of EV against more risk-aware models seem to often boil down to EV's simplicity. But I think that EV actually just hides a lot of important detail, including, most importantly, that if you only care about EV maximization, you might be forced to conclude that worlds where you're more likely to cause harm than not are preferable.

As an example, imagine that you're considering a choice that can cause 10 equally possible outcomes. In 6 of them, you'll create -1 utility. In 3 of them, your impact is neutral. In 1 of them, you'll create 7 utility. The EV of taking the action is (-6+0+7)/10 = 0.1. This is a positive number! Your expected value is positive, even though you have a 60% chance of causing harm. In expectation you're more likely than not to cause harm, but also in expectation you should expect to increase utility a bit. This is weird.

Scenario 1

More concretely, if I consider the following choices, which are equivalent from an EV perspective:

Option A. A 0% chance of causing a harmful outcome, but in expectation will cause +10 utility

Option B. A  20% chance of causing a harmful outcome, but in expectation will cause +10 utility

It seems really bizarre to not prefer Option A. But if I prefer Option A, I'm just accepting risk aversion to at least some extent. But what if the numbers slip a little more?

Scenario 2

Option A. A 0% chance of causing a harmful outcome, but in expectation will cause +9.9999 utility

Option B. A 20% chance of causing a harmful outcome, but in expectation will cause +10 utility

Do I really want to take a 20% chance on causing harm in exchange for 0.001% gain in utility caused?

Scenario 3

Option A. A 0% chance of causing a harmful outcome, but in expectation will cause +5 utility

Option B. A 99.99999% chance of causing a harmful outcome, but in expectation will cause +10 utility

Do I really want to be exceedingly likely to cause harm, in exchange for a 100% gain in utility?

I don't know the answers to the above scenarios, but I think it feels like just saying "the EV is X" without reference to the downside risk misses a massive part of the picture. It seems much better to say "the expected range of outcomes are a 20% chance of really bad stuff happening, a 70% chance of nothing happening and a 10% of a really really great outcome, which all averages out to an >0 average". This is meaningfully different than saying "no downside risk, and a 10% chance of a pretty good outcome, so >0 average".

I think that risk aversion is pretty important, but even if it isn't incorporated into people's thinking at all, it really doesn't feel like EV produces a number I can take at face value, and that makes me feel like EV isn't actually that simple.

The place where I currently see this happening the most is naive expected value maximization in reasoning about animal welfare — I feel like I've seen an uptick in "I think there is a 52% chance these animals live net negative lives, so we should do major irreversible things to reduce their population". But it's pretty easy to imagine doing those things being harmful, or your efforts backfiring, etc. in ways that cause harm.

Equal Hands — 2 Month Update

Equal Hands is an experiment in democratizing effective giving. Donors simulate pooling their resources together, and voting how to distribute them across cause areas. All votes count equally, independent of someone's ability to give.

You can learn more about it here, and sign up to learn more or join here. If you sign up before December 16th, you can participate in our current round. As of December 7th, 2024 at 11:00pm Eastern time, 12 donors have pledged $2,915, meaning the marginal $25 donor will move ~$226 in expectation to their preferred cause areas.

In Equal Hands’ first 2 months, 22 donors participated and collectively gave $7,495.01 democratically to impactful charity. Including pledges for its third month, that number will likely increase to at least 24, and $10,410.01

Across the first two months, the gifts made by cause area and pseudo-counterfactual effect (e.g. if people had given their own money in line with their voting, rather than following the democratic outcome) has been:

• Animal welfare: $3,133.35, a decrease of $1,662.15
• Global health: $1,694.85, a decrease of $54.15
• Global catastrophic risks: $2,093.91, an increase of $1,520.16 
• EA community building: $319.38, an increase of $179.63 
• Climate change: $253.52, an increase of $16.52 

Interestingly, the primary impact has been money being reallocated from animal welfare to global catastrophic risks. From the very little data that we have, this primarily appears to be because animal welfare-motivated donors are much more likely to pledge large amounts to democratic giving, while GCR-motivated donors are more likely to sign up (or are a larger population in general), but are more likely to give smaller amounts.

• I’m not sure why exactly this is! The motivation should be the same regardless of cause area for small donors — in expectation, the average vote has moved over $200 to each donor’s preferred causes across both of the first two months, so I would expect it to be motivating for donors from various backgrounds, but maybe GCR-motivated donors are more likely to think in this kind of reasoning.
• GCR donors haven’t had as high-retention over the first three months of signups, so currently the third month looks like it might look a bit different — funding is primarily flowing out of animal welfare, and going to a mix of global health and GCRs.

The total administrative time for me to operate Equal Hands has been around 45 minutes per month. I think it will remain below 1 hour per month with up to 100 donors, which is somewhat below what I expected when I started this project.

We’d love to see more people join! I think this project works best by having a larger number of donors, especially people interested in giving above the minimum of $25. If you want to learn more or sign up, you can do so here!

Following up with some thoughts I originally had in response to saulius' List of ways in which cost-effectiveness estimates can be misleading. Not sure if there has been other write ups of this effect.

If we incentivize charities' to act as cost-effectively as possible, and if they operate in coordination with other groups working on the same issue, it seems like we might expect in many cases what's best for an individual charities' cost-effectiveness to be bad for the overall cost-effectiveness of the space. This issue is compounded if multiple EA / highly cost-effective charities are operating in the same space.

The issue is something like, charities have relative strengths and weaknesses, and by coordinating to take advantage of those, individual charities might lose out on cost-effectiveness, but overall make  their collective work more effective.

I think this occasionally actively happens with animal welfare campaigns, where single donors are giving to several charities doing the same thing.

An example using chicken welfare campaigns in the animal welfare space:

Charity A has 100 good volunteers in City 1, where Company X is headquartered. To run a successful campaign against them would cost Charity A $1000, and Company X uses 10M chickens. Alternatively, Charity A  could run a campaign against Company Y in a different city where they have fewer volunteers for $1500 (more expensive because fewer volunteers).

Charity B has 5 good volunteers in City 1, but thinks they could secure a commitment from Company Y in City 2, where they have more volunteers, for $1000. Company Y uses 1M chickens. Or, by spending more money, Charity B could secure a commitment from Company X for $1500.

Charities A and B are coordinating, and agree that Companies X and Y committing will put pressure on a major target (Company Z), and want to figure out how to effectively campaign.

They consider three strategies:

Strategy 1: They both campaign against both targets, at half the cost it would be for them to campaign on their own, and a charity evaluator views the campaign as split evenly between them, since they put in equal effort. The cost-effectiveness of each charity is: (5M + 0.5M Chickens) / ($500 + $750) = 4,400 chickens / dollar, and $2500 total has been spent.

Strategy 2: Charity A targets Company X, and Charity B targets Company Y. Charity A's cost-effectiveness is 10,000 chickens / dollar, and Charity B's is 1,000 chickens / dollar, with $2,000 total spent.

Strategy 3: Charity A targets Company Y, Charity B targets Company X. Charity A: 667 chickens / dollar, Charity B: 6667 chickens / dollar. $3,000 total spent across all charities.

These charities want to be as effective as possible — clearly, the charities should choose Strategy 2, because the least money will be spent overall (and both charities will spend less for the same outcome).

But if a charity evaluator is fairly influential, and looking at each charity individually, Charity B might push hard for less ideal Strategies 1 or 3, because those make its cost-effectiveness look much better. Strategy 2 is clearly the right choice for Charity B to make, but if they do, an evaluation of their cost-effectiveness will look much worse.

I guess a simple way of putting this is - if multiple charities are working on the same issue, and have different strengths relevant at different times, it seems likely that often they ought to make decisions that might look bad for their own cost-effectiveness ratings, but were the best thing to do / right decision to make.

I can think of a few examples where charities made less effective decisions explicitly due to reasoning about their own cost-effectiveness, and not thinking about coordination, but I'm not sure how prevalent this actually is as an issue. It mainly makes me a little worried about apples-to-apples comparisons of the cost-effectiveness of charities who do the same thing, and are known to coordinate with each other.