Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
On October 22nd starting at 10:00am Pacific Time, Every.org is matching donations to select animal welfare organizations at a 2:1 rate, up to $2,000 per donor per nonprofit (so if you give up to $2,000, they will contribute up to $4,000 and the nonprofit will get up to $6,000). The first donation a donor makes to each eligible nonprofit will be matched, and donors can get the match for multiple $2,000 donations. So, you can get more than $2,000 matched by donating $2,000 one time to multiple...
When speaking to candidates who are considering working with us at 80,000 Hours, I often hear people worry about replaceability.
The familiar version of the worry is about whether the organisation will hire someone else in your place. If it will, then the difference you make by taking the job is only the difference between you and them.
There are a couple of well-known answers to that. The person hired in your place probably cares about the world too, and would go on to do somethi...
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.