Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...
TL;DR:
The movement has an evidence problem. To solve it, for each intervention we need to know:
* What types of evidence that intervention needs
* What types of evidence different sources can give us
In this post, we outline a framework for evidencing an intervention through five stages:
...
"Our approach has similarities with that followed by charity analysis organisations like GiveWell and Founders Pledge."
To put it bluntly, why should someone go to (work for, consult the recommendations of, support) SoGive vs other leading organizations you mention? Does your org fill a neglected niche, or take a better approach somehow, or do you think it's just valuable having multiple independent perspectives on the same issue?
Fair question!
GiveWell and Founder's Pledge both do excellent work, so I don't think it would be right to suggest SoGive's approach is fundamentally better - indeed we often build on the work of these two organisations. However, as you say, there is some value in having multiple independent perspectives on a topic.
We are aiming to fill a neglected niche, namely the application of an EA/cost-effectiveness approach to a much broader set of charities than those of most other EA organisations. Think Charity Navigator, but with a focus on impact rather than mostly-irrelevant financial metrics. We think there is scope to nudge a large number of people (most who otherwise won't be aware of EA) to support higher impact charities within and across cause areas, by including a comparison with many of the well-known charities in the UK.
Relatedly, there are also particular topics/cause areas where there is a lot of public interest, but that existing EA orgs have concluded probably aren't going to include the very best charities.
As an example, we are currently undertaking a review of tree-planting charities. It seems unlikely that the best tree-planting charity will be as cost-effective as (e.g.) the Clean Air Task Force when it comes to averting/reducing CO2eq. But there is a lot of interest in tree-planting, both from individuals and corporations. We hope that by having tree-planting charities alongside the likes of CATF, at least some people who are interested in tree-planting will switch donations to CATF (because they actually care about CO2eq), whereas others who (for whatever reason) really really only want to plant trees, will at least switch to the best tree-planting charity.
As I’ve brought up before
I think this is a very important “gap in the market”, especially if done with an eye towards quantifying the uncertainty (think montecarlo).
Makes sense, thanks! It may be worth highlighting that more proactively when you do outreach within EA (and there may be nuanced ways to communicate that even generally).