Let’s Fund: annual review / fundraising / hiring / AMA

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...

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Let's taboo the V-word

lincolnq·2d ago·8m read

“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...

Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level

abrahamrowe, mal_graham🔸·2d ago·16m read

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

Hauke Hillebrandt

Excellent comment!

If the recent Bill Gates documentary on Netflix is to be believed, then Gates first became seriously aware of the problem of diarrhea in the developing world thanks to a 1998 column by Nicholas Kristof. It's hard to assess the counterfactual here (would Gates have encountered the issue in a different context? Would he have taken the steps he ultimately did after reading the Kristof piece?) but it seems plausible that Kristof's article constitutes a cost-effective intervention in its own right (if a not particularly targeted one).

To clarify, the win here was not to influence Gates, because he is already very much on board with clean energy innovation agenda (though perhaps if he really read the article then it might be that it might have ever so slightly shifted his views towards the importance of government vs. private R&D which I feel he doesn't focus on enough).

Rather that he has 50mn followers on Twitter and is considered a public intellectual / authority on climate change (publishing a book on climate change in 2020).

But yes your general point is good, because for instance Reid Hoffman and others retweeted the Gates tweet - so perhaps there might be a very small chance of a "Kristof's effect".

I'm curious if you consider the wide propagation of your research in the news media a "risky and very effective" project, and if your research products have been intentionally structured toward this end.

Yes, the research is intentionally structured for wide-ish dissemination. This manifests in several ways:

I feel there are relatively few and only modest downside risks to this project. For instance, there's little information hazard, however there are some moral hazards. See the "Risks, reservations, drawbacks section of the report" where we write:

"Overall, what these quotes have in common are concerns about the moral hazard of spreading a meme like 'breakthrough technology by itself will solve climate change'. Authors repeatedly caution that additional policies—especially carbon taxes—are needed. We think these concerns are warranted, but do not believe that this suggests that clean energy R&D should not be increased. We believe there is consensus amongst even these climate policy scholars that R&D levels must be increased substantially. Crucially, while the moral hazard aspect of clean energy R&D increases might drag out emission reduction, another aspect pushes more strongly in the other direction and make carbon taxes more likely. For instance, one economic model suggests that "if a carbon tax imposes a dollar of cost on the economy, induced innovation will end up reducing that cost to around 70 cents".[82] Given that political acceptability is mainly a function of cost, making clean energy cheaper might make carbon taxes more likely."

The crowdfunding aspect of the campaign means that the campaign and its topic are at least a little bit optimized for being more readily understood by the wider public. This means that there are other harder to explain topics that are perhaps more neglected and thus might be more effective. For instance, in the report in the Section on Climate change is relatively non-neglected, we write:

"Climate change is a high-profile topic that many people work on. It is funded by both governments and big private foundations. Thus, even though clean energy innovation in particular has been relatively underfunded within the climate policy space, it is conceivable that in the future ITIF might receive grants for their clean energy innovation program from other funders, which lowers the counterfactual impact of donating to this project. In other words, comparatively, climate change is not very neglected. For instance, the risks and expected losses of pandemics are of a similar magnitude than those of climate change, yet the area is more neglected by other funders."

Also, there the page is intentionally structured hierarchically going from less to more in-depth, with summaries at the top and then for people who really want to read all the details there's heavily footnoted analysis further down on the page.

If you have some takeaways from your big success so far, it could be very helpful to post them here- widely taken-up tweaks to make research propagate more effectively through the media are marginal improvements with potentially very high value.

Generally with questions about success, there's of course a lot of survivorship bias and a lot of it was perhaps just luck. Similarly, the first step to make research propagate widely is that you need to spend a lot of time and effort researching and editing until it's the research not only really good but also very readable, which requires a lot of resources/privilege.

So perhaps take the following with a grain of salt- your mileage will vary.

If you want your research be covered by the media you of course need a good pitch and get in touch with a lot of relevant journalists (numbers game). You can have it peer-reviewed by people and say so and so has reviewed it and says it's really good/interesting/novel research.

Then to push the coverage of your research you can find influencers for whom your content is highly relevant. I used social proof and had a few select academics and policy wonks I was connected to retweet/endorse the article because it was very much in their field of expertise even if they didn't have very many followers. Then I used this to contact relevant influencers who in the past had tweeted about climate change and had also in the past retweeted Vox articles (aligned political leaning). You can tell them that so and so has already retweeted it as social proof, and ask if they could perhaps also retweet because it's relevant to their audience.

Then there's a technique called power mapping that I used, where you get in touch with people that are connected to even more influential people. You're connected to many people through only very degrees of separation (small world phenomenon), so you perhaps know someone who knows someone who knows an "influencer". You can see who for instance, Obama follows on twitter and then if you get to those people to to get say Obama to retweet the coverage of your research (because it's on reputable site such as Vox).

Sorry if this was a bit rambly, but I hope you get the general idea.

Let’s Fund: annual review / fundraising / hiring / AMA

Let’s Fund: annual review / fundraising / hiring / AMA

Executive Summary

What does Let’s Fund do?

2019: Big picture activities and achievements

Mission: Short-term metrics

Vision: Long-term goals

2019 Budgets and fundraising

Key focus for 2020

Fundraising Target for 2020

Hiring

Acknowledgments