The EA movement is quite unusual in the salaries it pays
This is plausible, because EA is weird in a lot of ways ( <3 ). But I think we should have a lot of uncertainty in claims like these. My experience researching salaries (at GFI in ~2019 and at WAI over the last couple years) is that it's really hard to do well, because (a) it's really hard to know when you're comparing apples to apples and (b) there's strong reporting bias in the freely available datasets (I talked with a firm who said they had better methods, but didn't end up paying the minimum $10k they required to access their database).
Faunalytics will soon be publishing the results of their project benchmarking compensation in the farmed animal protection movement (details in their OSF registration, subscribe to their newsletter for updates, report will probably be posted here), which will at least be helpful in understanding the animal advocacy side of the equation (if not the other side, which is the other areas we compete with for talent).
Thanks for sharing your thinking, John! I'll share some opinions and relevant facts below. (Note to other readers: John wrote below that he didn't want to spend more time on this discussion, so if he doesn't respond to this comment, don't take that as tacit agreement. I think time-capping is a really wise and healthy thing to do, so I really want to support his decision.)
Theory of change
My main goal with this post was to share updates, not make a full case for our strategy, so it makes sense that you didn't find it compelling. Here's my attempt at a quick case for field-building:
Staff salaries
In other words: some kinds of work can be done with the kinds of people that are more likely to accept lower salaries. Lots of issues call for pairs of quixotic collaborators or lean quirky startups or tight bands of ruthless activists. Wild animal welfare, it turns out, currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers with highly specialized skills working at a marathon pace more than a sprint pace.* So it's more expensive per head, but if you think those heads can have a big impact, then it's still cost-effective.
* Edit: "Currently calls for middle-class knowledge workers" sounds more exclusionary that what I meant to convey. I was trying to describe the type of work required, not the type of people required. Not everyone working a middle-class job identifies as belonging to the middle class. Many people who come from low-income backgrounds continue to feel out of place for much of their professional lives (in part due to insensitive comments from asshats like me). The wild animal welfare movement calls for everyone who can do the work, and that includes people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
I think more speculative fiction about wild animal welfare would be great! Thank you!
Here's a related thought, but ignore it if it deters you from writing something soon:
When I talk to people who are skeptical of or opposed to wild animal welfare work (context: I work at Wild Animal Initiative), they're more likely to cite practical concerns about interventions (e.g., "reducing predator populations will cause harmful trophic cascades") than they are to cite purely ethical disagreements (e.g., "we should never violate autonomy, even to improve welfare"). There's a chance that speculative fiction could add to that problem, especially if multiple pieces repeat the same tropes. So my ideal medium-term goal would be a body of speculative fiction (ideally a single anthology) that portrays a wide range of futures to reflect the huge uncertainty we currently have about what the biggest problems are and how to solve them.
If it's interesting and motivating for you, perhaps you could imagine your post as an early version of one of the pieces in that anthology. But if adding considerations slows you down, ignore this; anything you write will probably be helpful.
I work in fundraising but don't have any experience with it outside EA; I'd be really interested in reading this piece.
Your thesis also happens to parallel one of the few conversations I've had about TBP: a non-EA friend was talking about what she didn't like about EA; she espoused TBP instead; I asked her a bunch of questions and was generally confused because what she described sounded very similar to how lots of EA funding works.
I'm considering writing about my personal journey to working on wild animal welfare, which was unusually pinbally: loving animals --> learning survival skills and slaughtering a bunch of poultry --> interested in things like rewilding --> working to end factory farming --> working on wild animal welfare at Wild Animal Initiative.
People often find this story interesting when I tell it, and it might help engage or persuade some people (e.g. by demonstrating that I've seriously considered other philosophies toward nature).
But my big hangup is I don't really know who the audience for this piece would be, or what exactly I want to achieve with it. That could have a big effect on which arguments I make, what kind of language I use, and how much detail I go into. (Having an altruistic theory of change is also essential to feeling okay with spending this much time gazing into my navel.)
I'd welcome any thoughts on whether/how to proceed!
Thanks for this post, Max!
tl;dr: Lemme know if you have ideas for approaches to animal-inclusive AI that would also rank among the most promising ways to reduce human extinction risk from AI. I think they probably don't be exist, but it'd be wicked cool if they did.
Most EAs working on AI safety are primarily interested in reducing the risk of human extinction. I agree that this is of astronomical importance, especially when you consider all the wild animal suffering that would continue in our absence.
Many things that would move us toward animal-inclusive AI would also help move us away from extinction risks. But I suspect the majority of those things, while helpful, would not be among the most helpful ways to reduce extinction risk. In other words, we should be wary suspicious convergence; "what is best for one thing is usually not the best for something else."
I'm working on plans to do more to support a rigorous search for approaches to animal-inclusive AI (or approaches to advancing wild animal welfare science broadly) that would also rank among the most promising ways to reduce human extinction risk from AI. In the meantime, I'd encourage anyone interested in the broader subject to consider this narrower subset, and to reach out to me if they're excited to work on it more (cameronms@wildanimalinitiative.org).
To be clear, I also think animal-inclusive AI is worth pursuing for its own sake (i.e., working on animal-inclusive AI seems likely to be among the most impactful things you can do to make the world a better place in the set of scenarios where humans don't go extinct), and I'd be excited to see work on most of the approaches discussed above. In those cases -- especially when building coalitions with people who might have different priorities -- I think it's useful to be transparent about the fact that what we're doing is important, but we don't think it's one of the most promising ways to avoid human extinction.
Faunalytics published the results of their benchmarking research (I haven’t read them yet): https://faunalytics.org/compensation-in-farmed-animal-advocacy/