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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...
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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...
Recent opportunities to take action
Trying to craft an answer, may update this as I think some more. Of course, this answer is crafted from my perspective on what is 'best'. You will probably want to consult with your friend as to what they value (as well as discussing this issue with them to help them carefully consider their priorities.)
MSF
I suspect that MSF is as good as best for the institutional 'laying the groundwork' to permit relief in these specific disaster cases, but I don't have hard evidence. (E.g., latest GiveWell evaluation of MSF in 2012.)
Note that (I recall reading discussions of) the work of an organization like MSF is particularly hard to analyze with a GiveWell-style CEA, both because:
... they do many things and it's hard to isolate costs or earmark funds specific activities, and because
... much of their work has harder-to-immediately-measure benefits, such as providing an environment to permit further aid and an international presence, and (maybe) building institutions.
That's not to say we shouldn't try to measure this; I think we should!
Open Philanthropy's choices
I defer to the careful judgment and research of Open Phil, who recently gave :
Regular malnutrition is not the same thing as famine relief, I think, but there may be some overlap.
This is why we need rigorous evaluation of a wider set of charities/causes
(One of my hobby horses)
As I've argued before, the case you present offers an example of one reason (of several reasons) why we should fund and do systematic measurement and evaluation of 'harder to evaluate' charities and causes.
I hope that the use of Fermi estimation involving meta-analysis of existing (limited evidence, calibrated judgment where evidence is lacking, quantified uncertainty, and MonteCarlo estimation will enable this more. See Hazelfire/QURI work here. I'm also hope that Sogive can move in this direction. I'm also interested in fostering multiple independent evaluations of the same programs and charities to get a sense of our reliability here.