Principal — Good Structures
I previously co-founded and served as Executive Director at Wild Animal Initiative, and was the COO of Rethink Priorities from 2020 to 2024.
Nice, these are good questions, but probably don't capture all the cruxes in my view.
1. I think this seems moderately unlikely to me? I'm not sure what would drive down prices further than where they are now, as it seems like a large portion of the cost are the proteins themselves, and not production.
2. This also seems like it relies on crossing technological hurdles that are really hard.
3. I think this seems possible? But I'd put below 50% on it, and if it does happen, I'd expect something more like the climate movement, where lots of people think it is important but don't really take substantial steps to act on it.
4. I think that reaching 20% vegetarian seems possible in some countries, but I think I'm a lot more skeptical it'll go much higher.
I think it does seem plausible to me that there would be a meaningful reduction in the amount of meat consumed over this period in developed countries, but also expect that might come with more chicken/fish consumption that would offset animal welfare gains anyway.
I think another crux more important to my pessimism is that I don't feel very convinced that price/taste competitive meat alternatives will cause a significant increase in their adoption.
Yeah, I think this just seems pretty likely to me due to thinking that most animals are juveniles / die as juveniles, and the amount of time an animal has to be alive to accumulate good experiences to outweigh a painful death is probably higher than this. Things that have made me slightly less certain about this are me thinking it is more likely than I used to that adult animals in the wild live good lives, and me thinking that it is less likely than I used to that insects/some other invertebrates experience suffering, especially juvenile insects (though I probably still put a higher credence in this than many people).
I think it is pretty plausible I'm overconfident here though.
But, I also think this belief is mostly irrelevant to EAs / wild animal welfare advocates, unless you think there are special reasons improving welfare is easier on one side of the spectrum than the other, which I don't really have strongly held opinions on.
Thanks for the questions!
Corporate campaigns
Did you mean to change one of the years in the two statements of this form?
I'd love to hear more about this. How much value do you think e.g. the median EA doing direct work is creating? Or, put another way, how significant an annual donation would exceed the value of a talented EA doing direct work instead?
Reflections on a decade of trying to have an impact
Next month (September 2024) is my 10th anniversary of formally engaging with EA. This date marks 10 years since I first reached out to the Foundational Research Institute about volunteering, at least as far as I can tell from my emails.
Prior to that, I probably had read a fair amount of Peter Singer, Brian Tomasik, and David Pearce, who might all have been considered connected to EA, but I hadn’t actually actively tried engaging with the community. I’d been engaged with the effective animal advocacy community for several years prior, and I think I’d volunteered for The Humane League some, and had seen some of The Humane League Labs’ content online. I’m not sure if The Humane League counted as being “EA” at the time (this was a year before OpenPhil made its first animal welfare grants).
This post is me roughly trying to guess at my impact since then, and reflections on how I’ve changed as a person, both on my own and in response to EA. It’s got a lot of broad reflections about how my feelings about EA have changed. It isn’t particularly rigorously or transparently reasoned — it’s more of a reflection exercise for myself than anything else. I’m mainly trying to look at what I’ve worked on with a really critical eye. I make a lot of claims here that I don't provide evidence for.
I’m sharing this because I think the major update I’ve had from doing this is that while I’ve generally done many of the “working-in-EA” things that are often presented as high impact, I personally feel much more tangibly the impact of my donations, and right now, if I think what’s made me feel best about being in EA, it’s actions more in the earning-to-give direction than the direct work direction.
My high-level view of my impact over this period is something like:
I became pretty convinced that factory farming was a moral tragedy as a little kid, I believe due to exposure to either PETA content or PETA Kids content. My brother was also vegetarian, which was a compelling enough reason for me to also become vegetarian. I volunteered for a lot of animal welfare organizations, especially in college. I also did a lot of direct action-type advocacy for animals in college. I was already a fairly hardcore utilitarian at that point, and had mainlined Peter Singer, David Pearce, Timothy Sprigge, and a bunch of other wacky utilitarians. I spent a significant amount of my time in college staying up until the early morning talking about wild animal suffering and other animal issues with my closest friend while playing the video game Super Monkey Ball. This did not help any animals but was incredibly important to how I think about animal issues now.
At some point around 2011 or 2012, I saw a frog that was hit by a bike and dying, and was really distraught over it. I’m not sure why, but this was oddly transformative for me, and I just internalized animal suffering from it really directly in a way I hadn’t before. I also have a fairly strong memory from when I was 20 or 21 of spending an afternoon in the rain putting worms back from the sidewalk into the grass, and feeling bad about them dying naturally. I formed fairly strong views about animals in nature living awful lives, and beliefs about my obligations to help them.
In 2014, I was targeted by a Google Ad for The Foundational Research Institute, I believe on a topic related to wild animal welfare. I think this was my first exposure to EA formally, though I’d read studies on The Humane League Labs website, had read Animal Liberation, Famine, Influence, and Morality, and some other books that informed EA ideas.
I did some volunteering for FRI, read a lot of Brian Tomasik’s website, and also did some experiments at a cat shelter on reducing the impact of outdoor cats on animals. In 2016, I started working at Mercy For Animals, running corporate animal welfare campaigns. I also formally started Utility Farm, a nonprofit that would later merge with Wild-Animal Suffering Research into Wild Animal Initiative. I’ve done a bunch of other things in the EA world since.
This is my best effort to estimate how my credence in various beliefs have changed since 2014, based on notes and exercises from that period of my life.
Belief | 2014 | 2024 | Change |
Most suffering/welfare is and will be experienced by wild animals | 90% | 90% | +0% |
I have a deep ethical obligation to reduce as much animal suffering as possible | 95% | 60% | -35% |
People generally have a deep ethical obligation to change their diet to help animals | 85% | 20% | -65% |
We can make meaningful progress on abolishing factory farming or improving farmed animal welfare by 2050 | 75% | 10% | -65% |
We can make meaningful progress on abolishing factory farming or improving farmed animal welfare by 2100 | 85% | 15% | -70% |
Most experiences are negative / suffering dominates in the wild | 85% | 80% | -5% |
I have an obligation to reduce suffering, but not to increase happiness | 75% | 65% | -10% |
I have strong moral obligations to help whoever I can as effectively as possible, independent of location, relationship, etc. | 75% | 80% | +5% |
I have strong moral obligations to help whoever I can as effectively as possible, independent of time | 30% | 40% | +10% |
I have a strong moral obligation to ensure future, positive lives occur | 5% | 10% | +5% |
I have a strong moral obligation to prevent future negative lives from occurring | 85% | 35% | -50% |
Large scale philanthropy by individuals often threatens democratic institutions, and this is often bad, independent of the benefits | 85% | 60% | -25% |
The best animal welfare interventions target farmed vertebrates | 95% | 10% | -85% |
Farmed vertebrate welfare should be an EA focus | 90% | 15% | -75% |
EA as a movement is/will be positive for the world in the long run | 90% | 30% | -60% |
Most people interested in EA should earn to give | 60% | 85% | +25% |
It was good for animal welfare that the EAs “won” the abolitionist/welfarist debates | 80% | 95% | +15% |
I have some long-held views that haven’t really changed:
My views have also changed in a bunch of ways:
I care a lot more about money
I care a lot more about status
My commitment to doing good feels deeper
I feel more morally compromised
Overall, when I look at my first 10 years engaging with EA, I feel mainly like things are just ambiguous to me. I feel a lot more positive about some donations I made than anything else — in particular large donations to brand new projects that probably helped accelerate them a lot. The animal work I’ve done feels promising but ambiguous. This post feels very melancholy, but ultimately, I still feel excited about trying to do impactful work in the world.
I'm confused why you'd say this -- I mention this several times in my post as a reason for donation matching?
Yeah, I agree I was ambiguous here — I mean that it might be useful to see the tradeoffs more directly — e.g. the scale of the costs anti-matching people see against the theoretical upside of running matches (especially if the effects are potentially not major, as David Reinstein suggests). I think I see matching campaigns as much more like marketing than dishonesty though, and if I felt like they were more like dishonesty I might be more against them.
One thing I've thought about since writing my original comment: I think plausibly the degree to which one should think matching is bad ought to be somewhat tied to what the organization is doing. E.g. The Humane League or GiveWell aren't trying to promote effective giving generally (maybe GiveWell a bit more) — they're trying to move funds to specific impactful things, and so I maybe think our tolerance for hyperbolic marketing ought to potentially be a bit higher. I could see the case for an organization that was dedicated to effective giving specifically (e.g. Giving What We Can?) not doing matching due to the issues you outline as being stronger, since one of their goals is helping donors think critically about charitable giving. Maybe GiveWell is more ambiguously between those two poles though. Similarly, is FarmKind's goal to move money to theoretically impactful animal groups, or to promote effective giving? Not really sure, but I'd guess more the former.
I think I'm broadly sympathetic to arguments against EA orgs doing matching, especially for fundraising within EA spaces. But there are some other circumstances I've encountered that these critiques never capture well, and I don't personally feel very negative when I see organizations doing matching due to them.
I also think I generally feel bad vibes about this kind of post. I don't know how to reconcile this with the EA I want to see, but if I imagine starting a new potentially cool project aimed at making the EA ecosystem more funding diverse, and immediately get a prominent person making a really big public critique of it, it would make me feel pretty horrible/bad about being on the forum / pursuing this kind of project within EA. That being said, I don't think projects are above criticism, or that EA should back off having this kind of lens. But it just makes me feel a bit sad overall, and I agree with another commenter that donation matching debates often feel like isolated demands for rigour and are blown way out of proportion, without the potential benefits (more money for effective charity) being considered.
Maybe I feel something like this kind of critique is great, and debates about matching are great, but this as a top-level post seems a lot more intense than comments on the FarmKind announcement post, and the latter seems like the right level of attention for the importance of the criticism?
"WAI does not appear to be unbeatable and therefore other charities in this space might be better uses of funding"
I was basing my comment on you asserting WAI was several orders of magnitude less cost-effective then other charities in the space. I absolutely agree that WAI might be less cost-effective than other groups, but this claim is a lot less extreme than the first one you made. I'd still love to see your estimate if you have it, because I'd appreciate a more critical lens on WAI's theory of change than I've seen before.
Regarding other charities based on scientific research, you can largely tell that they're working within a year or two of them launching. The evaluation doesn't require academics. It doesn't depend on anyone taking published research seriously; the interventions help regardless of whether or not anyone takes the evaluation seriously.
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I didn't claim there was anything wrong with the scientific method. I claimed there was something wrong with academia. Apologies if I am misinterpreting you, but you seem to imply that other charities are around equally as dependent on academia. I think that's clearly false.
I think this is interesting but probably incorrect — while other charities don't have interventions that involve academia, any kind of claim about their effectiveness, and any ability they have to develop interventions is heavily reliant on it. We can't tell at all if they are working without academics. Basically everything EA affiliated groups have done to help animals (cage-free campaigns, alternative proteins, welfare reforms, etc) have relied incredibly heavily on academia - they just happen to work on the other side of the academic research than WAI.
Taking Shrimp Welfare Project as an example (primarily because I suspect from a neartermist lens, SWP is far and away the most cost-effective animal charity, likely more cost-effective than WAI, and a great opportunity for donors right now too), they exclusively do welfare interventions. We literally would have no idea if they are helping animals without animal welfare science (like the science WAI funds). We might know that their interventions impacted a lot of animals, but we wouldn't know the sign or degree of it at all. The only reason we have any idea that SWP, for example, is so impactful, is because of academic research. And SWP was only able to make determinations on what interventions to do based on that science. If you're uncertain that science can be trusted as you express in your initial point, you'd have to throw this out all. The issues in science you point to are very very real. But that doesn't mean we can't make progress on animal issues based on scientific research, and that doing science well to support future interventions isn't important.
Nice, these are great points.
On some specifics: