If the phenomena you are highlighting is that Animal Welfare gets a smaller share of funding than people would prefer, it seems very strange to 'blame' AI messaging, since AI risk also gets a smaller share of funding that the surveys suggest would be preferred. Based on your methodology, the phenomena to explain is why does global welfare get so much more.

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.

Hot take: the fact that we kill more animals per year than the total number of humans who've ever lived, and ~99% of them are factory farmed, I think animal agriculture is a moral atrocity that dwarfs all human problems (including throughout history). 

I'm curating this because it strikes me as an important piece of collective knowledge, and I'd like to further incentivise people to share takes like this. 

Interesting analysis!

One hypothesis: animal advocacy is a frequent "second favorite" cause area. Many longtermists prefer animal work to global health, but when it comes to their own donations and career choices, they choose longtermism. This resembles voting dynamics where some candidates do well in ranked-choice but poorly in first-past-the-post.

Larks makes a good point - AI risk is also underfunded relative to survey preferences. The bigger anomaly is global health's overallocation.

My very quick guess is that's largely founder effects. I.E. GiveWell's decade-long head start in building donor pipelines and mainstream legibility, while focusing on global health. 

Animal advocacy uniquely prompts people to align moral belief with personal behaviour. It’s not necessary to do this in order to be effective at reducing animal suffering, but if you don’t, then the incoherency is always lurking within. That creates a level of psychological friction that other cause areas don’t have - we aren’t directly contributing to malaria or x-risk in the same way most of us are implicated in factory farming. It’s plausible that this shows up as a gap between what people endorse in surveys and how resources get allocated.

I’m not sure we should expect stated preferences and real-world allocations to line up neatly. Large funders may be counterbalancing where the rest of the community drifts in its actions, and in that sense divergence isn’t obviously a bad thing. 

If we do think the gap is a problem, I think fixing careers is an under-explored avenue. Animal advocacy still seems like a hard place to build a stable, respected long-term career. Retention, senior leadership depth, and longevity all seem thinner than in other cause areas. My hunch is that this cause area ends up being a ‘seasonal’ phase, with talent drifting toward better-resourced areas that can better place senior talent. 

Late to this, but something I didn’t catch in the comments—Global Health looks overfunded in your calculations, but my sense is that Global Health is quite efficient at spending money. Much of the money in global health goes directly to programmes and beneficiaries, or working-class talent that often gets excluded as ‘not what we mean’ in these kinds of surveys. I would argue, too, that the other cause areas here are often quite talent-dense. Under these terms, it’s probably still valid to argue that Animal Welfare is under-resourced relative to Existential Risks though :)

Agreed completely! As a fundraiser myself, and working on raising funds for animal welfare for the past 12 years, I have seen and experienced this "decline" of the animal welfare topic within the EA movement in the recent years. 

Five years ago, when you attended an EA Conference, you would see entire floors, panels, discussions and speakers from the Animal Welfare movement, divided into the different interventions, type of advocacy, activities. Today, you're lucky if you see one topic on animal welfare, one panel (usually on hot things for the EA community such as Insect farming), but no longer playing a protagonist role in the gatherings. 
I understand also how many people in the movement would want to mix things. Have AI in the same conference where you have AW, and global catastrophe and future pandemics. But what happens when you do this, is that inevitably you prioritize one in detriment of the other. And now AI has taken the room completely because its just the hot thing to be discussed at the moment. 

I don't want to say one is more important than the other. I'm not here for that and who am I to judge on this. But there's enough space to have dedicated discussions on all, and to incentivize funding on it all. 

Perhaps is also up to us, the users and individuals within the EA movement, to point that out and to start promoting, requesting and claiming that we want animal welfare to have a more prominent role again. 

Agreed, I'm always surprised by these low donations numbers.

I keep in mind that EA is one of the movements that helps animals the most in the world, especially farmed and wild animals, which are so important. This is great and much, much more better than the average.

But given that animals are so numerous and often live in terrible conditions, there still is be an important imbalance.

I see no rational reason to spend only 7% of donations on the vast majority of individuals in the world.

One difference worth highlighting: animal welfare is probably the only thing on this list you can contribute to without working or donating. I suspect that if you tried to come up with a more general "How much have you changed you life for this cause?" question AW would get a boost from the large amount of vegans. 

Hmm this is interesting because I'm actually not sure whether to treat the survey numbers or the funding numbers as the better signal of what the community actually believes! Surveys capture what people say when asked in the abstract. Funding decisions capture what people do when they have to make tradeoffs with real stakes. To me, neither is obviously more "true"
When I answer a survey about ideal resource allocation, I'm not doing the same kind of thinking as when I'm actually deciding where my money goes. surveys feels more like "what do I want the world to look like" whereas the donation feels more like "given my uncertainty about sentience, tractability and what others are funding, where's my/our marginal money best spent." These can reasonably diverge as you can see.
That said, I do think your lost in translation hypothesis is true in a way. The discourse is more AI-dominated than the MCF survey would predict or at least feels so. And if the community's stated preferences are roughly right but people are deferring to a perceived consensus that doesn't actually exist, that's a coordination failure worth pointing out!
Also resonate with @SiobhanBall's point about psychological friction. Animal advocacy is the one cause area where most of us are personally implicated and that creates a kind of discomfort that's easy to avoid by just... focusing elsewhere. A kind of moral responsibility offsetting. I'd be curious whether the stated/revealed gap is smaller for vegans in the community!

This seems to assume that EA funds ought to be distributed “democratically” by people who identify as EAs or EA leaders. I don’t buy that.

If the goal is good resource allocation, we want funding decisions to track competence about cause prioritization, not representativeness. Randomly sampled EAs—many of whom haven’t spent much time thinking seriously about cause prioritization—don’t seem like the right decision-makers.

And it’s also not obvious that “EA leaders,” as such, are the right allocators either. The relevant property isn’t status or identity, but judgment, track record, and depth of thinking about cause prioritization.

Maybe people donate to animal welfare outside of the EA charity intermediaries. For example, I donate to charities such as PETA and Direct Action Everywhere directly, not through an EA intermediary.

Thanks for this interesting analysis!

One small note: the MCF survey results in your first chart appear to sum to ~104% rather than 100%. It looks like the other two sources in the comparison do sum to 100%, which might make direct comparison a bit tricky.

This could just be a rounding artefact, or perhaps the survey methodology allowed responses that didn’t need to sum to 100% - but given some of the percentage differences between sources are fairly small, it might be worth a quick note explaining the discrepancy (or normalising the MCF data if appropriate).

Flagging mainly because I found myself a bit distracted by this when trying to interpret the comparison, and I imagine other readers might have the same reaction.