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...
“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...
Quick-ish answer:
Not all of these are effective. More or less, at the moment, the charities GiveWell rates as effective do make it to those lists, but other charities that are clearly less effective also make it to those lists. The lists are not-cause-neutral or cosmopolitan; they tend to include US-operating charities that are likely to be an order of magnitude less effective
In general I would ~not trust their standards much (from an EA perspective) outside of the Charities Working in High-Impact Causes list. But IIRC that list depends on the union of GiveWell, Founders Pledge, and some other EA and EA-adjacent lists, and thus it's arguably pretty good, depending on who is using it and how. Most/all of the charities on that list are plausibly effective (at least someone in EA would probably argue that they are).
In general CN's recommendations include many things we would not see as important for the effectiveness or ultimate outcome, like 'overhead ratio'. See some other posts I made on this (I just added the 'Charity Navigator' tag and a wiki stub fwiw).
Note that there are some EA people in or working with CN, and I see some real promise! Hopefully one of them will chime in here too.