Nice, these are great points.

On some specifics:

1. I think the other consideration is that for really cheap proteins (corn/soy/wheat), chickens and other animals eat much less processed versions that are cheaper than the ones humans eat. But also people seem to like products made from them less. The novel plant protein inputs are a lot more expensive as far as I can tell.
2. Yeah, I think there is a bunch of uncertainty. My sense of the technical hurdles to cost reduction is that they are fairly large, and I'm not sure they super solvable. But I hope I am wrong!
3. Yeah, this seems possible too.
4. Plus I expect health and climate change angles on meat consumption will also more likely than not steadily increase.
   1. I worry these push toward worse animal welfare (less eating of cows, more eating of chicken/fish), not better.
       

Yeah, I agree with everything you say here RE WAW, on both how to present it and the usefulness of the net-positive or negative debate.

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.

I'm pretty uncertain, but I think my best guess is that starting a group/getting someone to start a group working directly on it at the time would have been better than lobbying people to care about it. I suspect that broadly applies.

Thanks for the questions!

Corporate campaigns

• Seems like the majority of commitments happened in prior years and there's been a rapid decline in number of commitments.
• Enforcement is still needed, but not obviously to me that dozens of well funded orgs are needed for it.
• The broiler ask was not tenable from the start, and many campaigners think it'll never be fulfilled at a large scale.
• The well-funded orgs seem like they have lots of internal issues that prevent them from being particularly effective.
• There's been a pretty big break from the tactics I think are most effective for winning commitments, and it would be hard to get well-funded groups to go back to them.
• On WAW specifically, my view is something like:
  • Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren't that far away.
  • The intervention space is so large and impacting animals' lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
  • These interventions will often not involve nearly as much "changing hearts and minds" or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.

Did you mean to change one of the years in the two statements of this form?

• Yes, 2100. Thanks for spotting that!

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?

• I think my view is something more like the talent pool in EA is deep enough (for most kinds of roles, especially junior ones), and the donor diversification issues are large enough that it seems like some kind of shift is warranted. I wouldn't want fewer people doing direct work — I'd want fewer people trying to.

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:

• $30,000 in counterfactually good donations.
• Overall unclear results for animals, though hopefully will have a big impact for future (primarily wild and invertebrate) animals, primarily because my work hasn’t really borne fruit in terms of direct impact yet.
  • I might have helped directly cause a few million animals to suffer mildly less bad deaths on factory farms, but it is unclear to me if this is counterfactual.
  • I think I was among the first handful of people to try to seriously get donors to take insect welfare seriously, and to get animal advocacy organizations to take insect welfare seriously, starting in around 2017.
    • I think importantly I failed to do this well, and if I had succeeded, the animal advocacy space would have been much more likely to prevent the take off of insect farming. Other people obviously had an effect here too, but I think not being strategic about this feels to me like the biggest failure I’ve had as an EA.
  • Co-founded or helped found three high-impact orgs (Wild Animal Initiative, The Insect Institute, Arthropoda Foundation), all of which I think I can claim would likely not have existed if I hadn’t worked on them.
    • Counterfactually meaningfully contributed to another 2 organizations launching (and advised on many more).
  • Caused the insect welfare world to focus slightly more than they otherwise should (in my view) on insect farming compared to insecticides. I’m uncertain of the counterfactual, but I can imagine worlds where I lobbied harder for insecticide-focused work would have been better for insects.
• Mild benefits from my operations work, mainly through providing some extra high-trust capacity at critical times to organizations.

Background

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.

My potential impact

• Donations
  • I’ve donated approximately $52,000 directly to what I consider to be high-impact charities, and reserved an additional $38,000 for future giving opportunities. I think that I should count this as something like $30,000 in counterfactually good donations.
    • I think I was pretty convinced by EA reasoning when I first encountered it, and had I not worked directly on projects, I probably would have taken the GWWC pledge by 2016. I think that my earning potential from 2016-2022 outside of EA was roughly $30,000-$50,0000 higher than within EA. From 2022 to now, I think my earning potential was roughly $25,000-$100,000 outside of EA. Looking at my donations as a percentage of my income over the past 10 years, (including funding reserved for future giving), I expect that this means:
      • 2016-2019: $30,000 in additional donations
      • 2020-2024: $15,000 in additional donations.
    • However, I think I would have donated this funding primarily to farmed animal welfare work that I no longer think is particularly impactful, and I should have viewed them with more skepticism at the time, though it was above the bar I’d apply today until 2019 or 2020.
    • I suspect this means that I should discount some counterfactual donations from 2020-2024 to nearly $0, and I should assume the counterfactual is closer to $30,000 in high impact donations.
  • Provided feedback or directly recommend grants totalling around $5M.
    • I think these probably changed how something like $500k was used in expectation, but probably in ways that mostly washed out, so it’s unclear what the impact is to me.

• Corporate Campaigns
  • I ran corporate campaigns for Mercy For Animals, primarily on broiler welfare, though to a lesser extent on cage-free, and won some commitments from major corporations.
    • I think that it’s possible that these commitments will lead to controlled atmosphere stunning being implemented on some farms, but for the most part the other commitments won’t be implemented fully, so it’s hard to assess their impact directly.
    • I think they still plausibly will improve the lives of millions of animals, and I was paid relatively little (~$35,000 / year), so it was probably fairly impactful.
      • I think MFA had a pretty easy time hiring campaigners, and would have found someone else good if they hadn’t hired me.
    • I think most of my counterfactual impact on corporate campaigning has come via advising on campaigns since I left Mercy For Animals, and by pushing mildly behind the scenes for a shift in campaigning tactics that I think will potentially be significantly more impactful than what major groups are doing now.
      • I still generally suspect corporate campaigns are no longer particularly effective, especially those run by the largest groups (e.g. Mercy For Animals or The Humane League), and don’t think these meet the bar for being an EA giving area anymore, and haven’t in the US since around 2017, and outside the US since around 2021.
    • I think I can take credit for basically helping a few million animals experience death in a marginally better way over the next decade, which is great! Controlled atmosphere stunning seems better for many chickens, but for many it probably doesn’t make much of a difference compared with live-shackle slaughter.
      • It’s unclear to me if this is counterfactual because MFA could have hired someone else to do it.

• Founding organizations
  • I co-founded Wild Animal Initiative and one of its predecessor organizations, and served as its first Executive Director.
    • I am biased, but I think WAI remains one of the most promising ways for EAs to help animals.
    • My best guess at when there will be cost-effective wild animal welfare interventions that meet my bar for confidence has been steadily declining, primarily due to WAI’s work.
    • I don’t currently feel convinced that there are highly cost-effective ways to help farmed animals in the near future at scale, so I suspect the vast majority of value in the next few decades for EAs will be from helping wild animals and invertebrates.
  • I helped launch The Insect Institute, Arthropoda Foundation, and some other insect welfare initiatives from within EA.

• Research Impact
  • Hiring good researchers
    • I served on the hiring committee and worked to hire an individual researcher who I think would not have worked on EA issues without our job offer at all, and who I think has 10-20x the impact of the average researcher in the EA animal welfare space, including anyone we would have hired otherwise.
  • Conducting direct research
    • I’ve published 4-5 papers on wild animal welfare or invertebrate welfare, most importantly making some estimates of the number of insects farmed for food or feed. I think this paper has mattered not because it was particularly insightful, but because no one else had published anything like it, and it made a citable figure for academic journals, and is good for communicating impact.
    • I think some of my research could be bad. For example, Saulius Simcikas is highly skeptical of my suggestion that cochineal suffering could be reduced by reducing cochineal harvesting. If Saulius is correct and I am incorrect, I think this mildly misled some people, including people in influential positions. However, I don’t think any action has been taken on it.
    • I think that my research has generally caused the EA space to focus too much on farmed insects, and less on insecticides. I am somewhat inclined toward thinking that insecticide-caused suffering is both more tractable and larger in scale. I’m now working on a insecticide project though, so trying to correct this.

• Cultural Impact
  • I’ve written a bunch of EA Forum posts on various cultural issues/concerns/trends in the EA community, and community dynamics. I think these are largely not impactful, though have caused some mild changes in donation behavior among some people.
  • I think I can roughly take a large amount of credit for
    • Preventing wild animal welfare from becoming a weird forgotten corner of 2010-2020 EA, like many other causes
      • In 2017 and 2018, I lobbied hard for the wild animal suffering space to abandon its more radical edges, and to adapt the name wild animal welfare instead. I also oversaw the consolidation of groups within the cause area into Wild Animal Initiative, both of which kept the space afloat, and made it look much more legitimate to external scientists and funders.
      • I think that there was one other person who could have been in this position at the time (Persis Eskander), but they had gone to a different role.
    • Getting the EA world into insect welfare (to some extent)
      • I think that my work on insect welfare is likely the most impactful things that I’ve done — I think that besides Rethink Priorities direct work on invertebrate welfare, and Meghan Barrett’s work on normalizing the academic work on the space, my direct contributions have probably been particularly important (though not that much has moved there!)
      • I pushed major groups to work on this issue earlier than anyone else I know of besides Brian Tomasik, though I was mostly unsuccessful.

• Impact Through Operations
  • I don’t really think my ops work is particularly impactful, because I think ops staff are relatively easy to hire for compared to other roles. However I have spent a lot of my time in EA doing ops work.
    • I was RP’s COO for 4 years, overseeing its non-research work (fiscal sponsorship, finance, HR, communications, fundraising, etc), and helping the organization grow from around 10 to over 100 staff within its legal umbrella.
    • Worked on several advising and consulting projects for animal welfare and AI organizations
      • I think the advising work is likely the most impactful ops work I’ve done, though I overall don’t know if I think ops is particularly impactful.

My beliefs in 2014 compared to now

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.

How my thinking about EA has changed over time

I have some long-held views that haven’t really changed:

• I’ve always been fairly skeptical of the degree to which EA unquestioningly embraces major donor philanthropy, despite having created the only viable alternative I’ve ever seen to it (lots of medium-sized donors!)
• I’ve always been uncomfortable with the concentration of power in EA.
• I’ve always felt surprised by the lack of experimentation / deference to Silicon Valley norms / lack of interest in alternative organizational structures.
  • Likewise, I’ve always felt disappointed by the lack of interesting funding mechanisms, especially ones that try to capture group beliefs about impact / hedge across beliefs more explicitly.
    • I have a project forthcoming on this I am really excited about though!

My views have also changed in a bunch of ways:

• I’ve become highly skeptical of most farmed vertebrate welfare work, and the organizations working on it.
• I’ve lost some faith in “EA leadership” to be either moral leaders / people who can effectively guide a community, especially after the FTX political events.
  • The closest I came to “leaving EA” was in April 2022, right before peak FTX-hype. I wrote a draft post about what I believed was likely both illegal and harmful election manipulation occurring within EA, and never published it (it’s unclear to me if I was correct — SBF and others were accused of related crimes later, but as far as I can tell haven’t been charged for them). I felt incredibly disheartened and sad that a community I thought was really dedicated to taking morality seriously seemed so easily bought into something that seemed so sketchy. I considered leaving my job at RP, and completely disassociating with EA. While the FTX collapse was obviously awful, for me personally there was some level of validation/relief in it, as I felt really bad during peak-FTX funding about how things were going.
• Post-FTX, the lack of turnover in leadership has made me really worried.
• I think I can credibly claim to have been EA-adjacent from well before it was cool, but I feel a lot more adjacent now.
• I’m a lot more convinced we can cost-effectively help wild animals in the near future than I was when I ran Wild Animal Initiative (ironically?)

Things that changed about me from exposure to EA

I care a lot more about money

• Before I was interested in EA, I made very little money, and didn’t feel like it mattered much. I thought that I was mostly going to help people/animals through volunteering, and felt happy with what I had.
• EA was far more status-oriented than the spaces I worked in before, and generally a lot more focused on the compensation from direct work roles/better paying.
• I think being in EA and aging both have caused me to just care about how much money I make a lot more than I did before.

I care a lot more about status

• I previously primarily worked in spaces that were fairly non-hierarchical / didn’t have massive power dynamics (because they were small and decentralized). EA feels very different. Status matters a ton here. People respond uncritically to poorly argued posts from powerful people, over-index on the views of those with funding / status, and generally seem to want to move up a status hierarchy. This seems really natural for the way EA has structured itself, and it’s caused me to care a lot more about it too.

My commitment to doing good feels deeper

• I feel a lot more committed to doing good than I used to. I think I’m a lot less certain about how, or that I can. But it feels more important to me.

I feel more morally compromised

• EA has exposed for me how easily I can become entangled in things that feel compromising — that I am doing what seems good, but simultaneously participating in something harmful. I also think I generally feel like having a positive impact is harder without this kind of moral compromising. 

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.

• There is at least one EA sympathetic major animal welfare donor who historically has preferred most their gifts to be only via matching campaigns. While I think they would likely donate these funds anyway, donating to matches run by them (which I believe are a large percentage of matches you see run by animal orgs) would cause counterfactual donations to that specific animal charity. So at least some percentage of matches you see in EA causes funding to move from a less preferred charity to a more preferred one for the matched donors. This matching donor also gives to many projects EAs might view as less effective, so giving to these matches is frequently similarly good to getting matched by Facebook on EA Giving Tuesday.
• I think a much larger portion of donation matching than people in EA seem to believe is more like EA Giving Tuesday on Facebook than completely illusory — the funds would go to charity otherwise, but probably somewhat less effective charity. This probably isn't the majority of donation matches, but I've frequently seen donors make their matching gifts somewhat genuinely. I've worked at probably 3-4 nonprofits that have run donation matching campaigns, including outside of EA. Only once have I seen a match where the charity expected to get the full amount independent of if the match was met by other donors. Of course, the counterfactual here is how good other donation opportunities for the donor might be, but for an EA organization working with a donor who frequently gives to less effective causes, the situation could be very similar to EA Giving Tuesday matches from Facebook.
• I've frequently seen matching campaigns as a way to pitch the matcher on making a larger gift, not the other way around. This obviously isn't transparent / explicitly said, but many normie charities explicitly will go "do a matching campaign!" to a potential major donor, to get them more interested/increase the amount they'll give. Insofar as people believe the match is real, the net effect of this is the matching donor giving more than they would otherwise to that specific charity, and the matched donors also having some level of real counterfactual match.
• For matches, it seems like sometimes, it just straightforwardly would increase the amount the matcher donates (because they are excited about the match, etc). So while the match might not be a true 1:1 match, it probably does counterfactually increase the funding going to the group and charity overall, even if the floor for the increase is 0.
• There is a comment on LessWrong that suggests that matching is good for tax reasons for nonprofits. I don't think this comment is correct on the facts or reason for matches, but donor diversity does help nonprofits pass the public support test, which reduces administrative costs, and matches probably do help organizations achieve this by increasing donor diversity.

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.

...

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.