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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...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
I honestly think that talking about both numbers should be doable even for a brief conversation. Many things are very cheap to provide to people (e.g. a hot meal), so it seems like an intervention being low-cost wouldn't be too compelling on its own. You could try working the figures in together, like so:
"It costs about $5 to provide medication to one child. Normally, that just (describe the normal effect of the medicine; reducing symptoms?). But sometimes, it actually saves the child's life. Research shows that it only costs about $2300 to save one child from dying." (This may sound too "certain" and not hedged enough, but I think you sometimes have to make allowances for that if the conversation is very short.)
If I'd done more research on Malaria Consortium, I'd also try to figure out what "avert a death" or "save a life" means in this case; I'd like to be able to say that every $2300, on average, probably leads to one child living a long and healthy life who would otherwise die, but I don't know whether that's what the number represents here.
Those are really good points! The hardest thing about this is trying to simplify it without losing them in the details/statistics/numbers - but also not oversimplifying it that people don't believe you or are skeptical.
What's interesting is if the $2300 to save a life would resonate with the average person. I know when I first read about this, I didn't think much of it. But then when I saw it in comparison to the $50k guide dog for blind person in the US, that really drove home the point for me.