This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
"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).