By the way, I ended up buying a copy of Sexual Citizens because of this comment. I found it super interesting (if sad :( ), thanks for the rec!

...I'm a bit embarrassed that it took me fully until the section "anyone who has ever appeared on Love Island or The Apprentice" to realize that this might be satire :P (having opened this a few days post 4/1 lol)

Granted :)

This is interesting, thanks for sharing! :)

I was browsing your BOTEC and wonder if I've found a bug or two in sheet 3 (but it's possible I'm not understanding something about your methodology, I only took a quick look / haven't read this post in detail).

On sheet 3, I think the weights are meant to basically represent how much money is being spent in each org + category, relative to the smallest org you look at? (W. M. Keck Foundation).

But it looks like you're not dividing the total weight per org by the number of focus areas that org has. So i.e. here I think here the weights for Wellcome > AMR should be =round(223.45 / 5), since you list 5 focus areas for Wellcome on sheet 1. I might be misunderstanding something here (only took a cursory check).

Also it looks like you're missing the Therapeutics category for Wellcome + Lab Readiness for Rockefeller, I think? (Maybe some others too). 

I tried fixing this by making some changes (highlighted in green) here, mostly in sheet 3 (starting col L) and a bit in sheet 1. Happy to give you edit access if you request it.

Also sorry if this is too nitpicky, I just like auditing spreadsheets :) Thanks for publishing this!

Nice. Thanks for an incredibly prompt and thorough response!

But speaking for myself, I think the ideas-based outcomes are pretty inflated, and the behavioral outcomes are probably noisy rather than biased, so I believe our overall null on behavioral outcomes.

That makes sense to me. It is kind of interesting to me that the zeitgeist programs you mention are so different in terms of intervention size (if I'm understanding correctly, Safe Dates involved a 10 session curriculum, but the Men's Program involved a single session with a short video?), but neither seem effective at behavior reduction!

for instance, male subjects watch a video on sexual harassment and then teach a female confederate how to golf, while a researcher watches through a one-way mirror and codes how often the subject touches the confederate and how sexually harassing those touches were.

wow... oof...

Thank you for this summary + for conducting this research!

Super interesting, thanks for sharing! I have some possibly dumb questions about the finding that these programs don't change behaviors:

• How confident are you that you're not seeing changes in behavior because of a lack of effect, vs small sample size / people lying in the data / other issues?
• When you say these studies found no effect on "behaviors", how were these measured generally speaking? (Self report, or something else?)

No pressure to respond, reading this made me curious about some other stuff:

• I'm curious how you've updated via this project re: your own fit for starting a charity in this space? Do you have plans to continue trying your hand at starting charities?
• Separately, if you're looking for next project ideas, I'm extremely not an animal welfare expert, but I'd be quite interested for someone to look into the shrimp paste market. I have no useful advice on who should do what in this space though, and probably Ren's opinions are much better than mine on this.
• Please correct me if this is mistaken, it sounds like the cofounder match between you two was: Ren as the research-y wing / domain expert, and you as maybe the more execute-y wing / person with more time and keenness to make this happen (sounds like this was part time for Ren, unsure if this was a part time level project for you?). Sorry if those impressions are wrong! If they are ~correct, I'm curious how well that structure worked for you!
• I'm curious if you have reflections on the strategy of attempting to "blend into industry". When I hear animal advocates talk about this kind of strategy, it makes me feel slightly uneasy, because it seems to maybe imply some level of deceptiveness. I'm tempted to hold out that uneasy feeling, weigh that against the truly immense suffering at stakes, and conclude that this is a feature of the world being bad and having to make sad tradeoffs. (And I worry this whole worry is silly or naive in the face of so much suffering.) But then a voice in my head gets a bit worried about naive utilitarian tradeoffs and sacrificing integrity. But maybe the high integrity move here is to find products that really are positive sum for farmers, and choose to emphasize the parts that you genuinely believe are beneficial. I don't know! Would be curious for your thoughts :)

This is a cool writeup! I really enjoyed reading it, thanks for sharing and congrats on failing fast on your first charity -- it sounds like you did a bunch of ambitious work and made a tough call fairly quickly :)

Things I like about your writing style:

• You write with such a high degree of reasoning transparency, I feel like I could really follow your takes on what happened and why throughout, e.g. the story of "Ren made this spreadsheet with these constraints, and these were the results and why we chose this focus area" - super narratively clear. I feel like you give detail / add color in a way that really helps with epistemic legibility, which I really appreciate / admire :)
• A bunch of moments made me laugh out loud despite the sad underlying topic, e.g., "We also made sure to enjoy our trip and tried some Turkish coffee and petted some of the stray cats." (Awwww), "Also, we realized that some of our questions could be answered using publicly available aerial imagery and spatial data. This was a perk of Ren being a data nerd." (Hahaha 💜 love data nerdery)
• Like others I appreciate how candid this writeup is and your willingness to share vulnerable moments with the forum :) I feel like I've gained better models of what early stage outreach startups go through by reading this post, thank you

I found this post heartbreaking and moving to read. <3 Thank you for writing it, and for trying to help the children you mention in the post!

Thanks Vasco!

You have a graph for the "Number of EA Forum posts with 2+ upvotes (per month)". I think it would be better to have graphs for the number of posts per month and their mean karma.

Curious why — what insights do you hope to gain from this / are there specific questions you have about the Forum that you're hoping to answer with this data?

You have a graph for the "Overall EA Newsletter subscriber count (at the start of each month)". Have you considered having one for the number of subscribers of the EA Forum Digest?

Thanks, we've considered this but haven't prioritized so far. I'd be interested to know if there was a particular reason you think this would be useful, or if it's more that generally having this sort of data available to people would be nice? (Both seem like reasonable motivations ofc!)