Thanks Siobhan!

I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation soon, but unfortunately I had a medical emergency and I'm still not feeling myself, so it might be another day or two until I have the headspace to reply to your comments. Thanks for your patience.

CC @Vasco Grilo🔸 

Thanks so much to everyone who has engaged with this post! Just wanted to let you know that I had a medical emergency and unfortunately I'm still not feeling myself, so it might be another day or two until I have the headspace to reply to your comments. Thanks for your patience.

CC @SiobhanBall, @minthin, @Becca Rogers 

[6 of 6] "What would make you know it’s not working?"

There are three levels at which you might answer this question:

(1) How would you know if field-building was the wrong strategy?

• If AI changes the nature of research so much that academia becomes irrelevant.
  • This seems the most plausible way our field-building strategy could be wrong, but so far we haven't found a strategy that seems more robust to the huge uncertainties created by AI. If you have an idea for an alternative strategy that seems reasonably likely to be much more robust than field-buildi

[5 of 🧵] Re adding a campaigning arm:

P.S. To shift gears for a moment: if it were up to me, I’d keep WAI primarily a research organisation; but I’d add a small, focused campaigning arm to push for welfare improvements informed by that research.

I don't want to steal anyone's thunder, but for now I'll just say:

1. I totally agree the movement should have something like this (thought it would be most effective if separate from WAI).
2. There's some really exciting news coming on this front, which will likely be announced within the next week or two. Keep your eyes on the EA Forum!

[4 of 6] "What conditions would trigger a move from foundational research to applied work?"

I really do like arbitrary binaries for things that obviously aren't that simple ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"!), but in this particular case I think the binary might actually be too reductive to be useful. Still, I'll attempt to give a direct answer once I've done some quibbling.

First of all, applied work is already happening. There are many things people are doing to wild animals (typically for anthropocentric or biodiversity conservation reaso... (read more)

Stream-of-consciousness meta commentary I jotted down before writing my actual replies:

Can I just say: Hell fuckin’ yeah, let’s fuckin’ go, I fuckin’ love EA. This is the noblest possible use of the EA Forum: Bluntly calling people on their shit in a way that is not just polite but also deeply compassionate and clearly in good faith. I’m just so glad that my life path took me into a community that works together with this particular cocktail of conflict and collaboration. I love you guys :’)

[3 of 6] “When does WAI expect to produce its first real-world intervention or policy shift e.g. is there anything concrete expected this decade?”

Mandatory annoying disclaimer: For the reasons discussed in my preceding comment, I don’t think “time till first intervention implementation” is a useful proxy for the pace of field growth or the fidelity of its trajectory.

But to answer your question:

First past the post: Backyard bird habitat improvements in 1-2 years

WAI funded Ross MacLeod and colleagues to validate the use of eye temperature (a... (read more)

[2 of 6] Why hasn’t WAI implemented interventions yet?

In short: Because that’s not what we’ve been trying to do.

If we had been spending the last six years trying to find interventions that could be implemented as soon as possible, and our progress to date is all we had to show for it, then that would be extremely disappointing. If that’s what we’d been aiming for and this is where we landed, then I think it’d be fair to say we failed — or at the very least, we definitely shouldn’t be an ACE-recommended charity.

What we have been doing instead is ... (read more)

[1 of 6]

Hi Siobhan! Thanks so much for sharing your concerns and giving us a chance to explain our work! 

I'm embarrassed to say I failed to find a brief way to answer your questions, so you'll have to forgive my lengthy staggered replies. I've posted them in separate comments to allow for discussion to proceed in different directions across separate threads.

Thanks for calling that out, Nitin! I was worried my succinctness wasn't giving them enough credit.

I've met several of your colleagues, and it's clear they're not pawns in your game. They are mission-driven people who are unusually clear-eyed about what they value, unusually ambitious about doing good, and unusually creative about how to do it. That seems to be a big part of why they're taking steps most conservation orgs haven't: they understand that responding to existential threats with appropriate urgency doesn't rule out doing good in other ways (and ... (read more)

Here's a link to the full text of Nitin and Derek's paper, from this part of Nitin's post:

I worked for five years as WWF India’s national lead for elephant conservation, but I have also been active in wild animal welfare, publishing arguably the highest-profile peer-reviewed article on animal welfare in conservation and incorporating animal welfare into elephant conservation policy.

I think it's worth noting that Nitin did win a grant from the EA Animal Welfare Fund last year, but ended up turning it down to work at CXL (where he seemed likely to have a bigger impact, which seems to have been true).

I'm the executive director of @Wild_Animal_Initiative (WAI), one of CXL's partners on this project, so I just wanted to weigh in to underscore how important this project is and how well-qualified Nitin is to lead it.

Rodent fertility control

Rodent fertility control is the near-term intervention we are most excited about, by far. In large part that's because it advances progress on several levels at once:

• Directly reducing human-caused harm (i.e., slow, painful deaths by anticoagulant rodenticides) in the short term (i.e., starting in 1-7 years) at fair

I like that you estimated the cost-effectiveness, but I do not think it illustrates "animal welfare science could lead to the development of large-scale, highly cost-effective interventions"

I was worried I didn't articulate this claim clearly enough in the original post, so I appreciate you giving me the chance to clarify!

I did not mean to say "This is highly cost-effective relative to other animal welfare interventions" or "This is about how cost-effective I expect wild animal welfare interventions to be."

I was aiming for something more like: "I don... (read more)

Such a great question! If we were to do a more rigorous cost-effectiveness evaluation, this would be one of the first things we'd try to add to the model.

As is too often the case with cause-specific mortality, we couldn't find any great data on this. But based on our quick read of the literature and our general knowledge of natural history, @Simon Eckerström Liedholm and I think the leading candidates for counterfactual causes of raccoon death might be: 

• hunting and trapping (see, e.g., this study of raccoons in central Mississippi)
• vehicle collisions
• pr

Thank you for this important post!

I'd like to add that another important aspect of frog welfare is the welfare of frogs living in the wild, of which there might be something like hundreds of billions[1] to hundreds of trillions[2].[3]

I think the most tractable way to improve the welfare of as many wild frogs as soon as possible is to invest in efforts to establish the foundations of wild animal welfare science, explore avenues for translating wild animal welfare science into real-world policy change, and build grassroots support for such policies. Relevant... (read more)

You make a great point about the parallel to the meat-eater problem, and I agree that, for similar reasons, it's probably still a good idea to advocate for chicken welfare reforms.

However, I don't think reductio ad absurdum is a compelling argument in this case.

This post's argument seems absurd not because it leads to some kind of internal contradiction, but rather because it argues for something that's way outside the things people normally think are good ideas. I don't think "seems absurd to most people" is a reliable indicator of "is not ethically sound... (read more)

Thanks so much for this thoughtful post, Vasco! It is so heartening to see people taking arthropod welfare seriously.

While I agree that chicken welfare reforms could plausibly harm arthropods more than they help chickens, I don't think that means we shouldn't support chicken welfare reforms. For the same reason I reject the meat-eater problem, the logic of the larder, and the logic of the logger, I think that to get to a society that maximizes utility over the long term, we will probably need to take some steps that decrease utility in the short term.

That ... (read more)

My understanding is that TNF hasn't posted a list because at least one of the charities felt it would be a PR risk for them to be named in association with this commitment. But one could roughly deduce it by looking at which 2023 OP grantees (a) received recurring grants from the OP Farmed Animal Welfare Program and (b) weren't working on farmed vertebrates.

Wild animals and weirdness

Section 4 ("The weirdest stuff will put people off the moderate stuff") argues that perceptions of the weirdness of a given cause or intervention "create blocks to uptake and prevents people from supporting the more moderate parts of the same movement." 

Insofar as this is true, it's important to know the degrees of perceived weirdness. To my pleasant surprise, I've found that wild animal welfare seems much less weird to most people than it does to most EAs. This is based on my experience working at Wild Animal Initiative for ... (read more)

Would you mind expanding on your comment? I don't know what exactly you mean by it.

A few thoughts related to wild animals

• General: Thanks so much for mentioning wild animals! They make up such a large majority of animals that I think it's a really good practice to allude to that part of the picture even when you don't want to cover it in depth.
• Dodging the question: There are many interventions that would only be beneficial if you knew whether animals in the affected population(s) had net-positive or net-negative lives on average. But I've had so many conversations with people who seem to think we can't do anything until we answer that que

You might be interested in this talk on what exactly fitness means in an evolutionary context and why we shouldn't expect it to reliably select for traits that give wild animals happy lives: https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/what-is-fitness

I agree! I erred on the side of dryness in the post because I'm really worried that "good news" will be misinterpreted as "okay everything is fine now." 

But that doesn't mean this isn't worth celebrating! It's freakin' awesome!! Easily a contender for the biggest karmic harvest any philanthropist has reaped this year. 

It's especially impressive given that the Navigation Fund is so new, yet they were willing and able to make a big fast pivot. I don't know what exactly it entailed for them, but I can say I've learned from Wild Animal Initiative's G... (read more)

Faunalytics published the results of their benchmarking research (I haven’t read them yet): https://faunalytics.org/compensation-in-farmed-animal-advocacy/

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 $... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

That's incredibly generous! Thank you so much, James!! 

Thank you so much! I've been wondering about exactly this... but wasn't productive enough to research it yet. 😅

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... (read more)

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.

This seems interesting and helpful!

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... (read more)

Thanks so much for sharing your perspective! That’s basically what I’ve been doing so far.

But I’ve started feeling the urge often enough that each appreciation donation makes me worried about my overall approach to appreciation donations — which seriously distracts from the warm fuzzies I was trying to buy in the first place.

I would think if an organization had operational constraints, it would still have room for more funding, just the funding would be spent on expanding operations.

Great point!

tl;dr: I don't think "slow and steady" growth is a problem, only "slow and unsteady" growth.

speed of hiring - an organization can only spend money to hire and expand so quickly and maybe they are already saturated

Actually,  I don't think expansion speed alone should be considered a factor in room for more funding. If there are no mission constraints or relative timing constraints, should it matter to me when the organization spends my money? If not, why not donate now so they'll have more to use once they are no longer saturated?

I was trying to define... (read more)

Hi Max!

I may not have much to add, because I know you've thought a ton about this and I'm obviously not on the AWF panel. But for what it's worth, here's how I would rate those categories, in descending order of expected impact:

1. Research to inform future interventions
2. Advocacy to raise concern about the subject
3. Current interventions to improve wild animal welfare

Most of all, I think we should be measuring projects by how they contribute to the formation of a movement around wild animal welfare. That points in a slightly different direction than if we just thi... (read more)

Hi Michael and Abraham!

The answer depends on which type of longtermism we're talking about.

As an organization, Wild Animal Initiative is committed to the position that animals matter equally regardless of when they exist. 

That is, we exist to help as many wild animals as we can as much as we can. All else equal, it doesn't matter to us whether that happens in our lifetimes or in the long-term future, because it feels the same to the animals in either case. We're not in the business of warm fuzzies -- despite the warmth and fuzziness of many of our cli... (read more)

My guess is that the EA AWF's grantees almost always have room for more funding. In addition to the reasons I think effective orgs generally tend to have room for more funding, the EA AWF does an excellent job highlighting neglected orgs in neglected areas.

I think the grantees least likely to have room for more funding are individuals, teams of less than 4 people, and high-impact projects within lower-impact organizations. But these are also the cases where it tends to be easiest to cold-call the grantee and get the full answer in a quick call. For example... (read more)

I'm sure others have much more considered thoughts on how to evaluate and communicate room for more funding, but here are some I've been musing on.

I've found it more productive to frame the question in the negative: "Why wouldn't this charity have room for more funding?" 

I think that's because it only takes a few things to constrain a charity's growth, but when the org has room to grow, there are many directions it can grow. So when I try to think of the ways a charity could grow, I'm almost always going to underestimate the number of opportunities th... (read more)

Funding is also a major constraint in wild animal welfare.

At Wild Animal Initiative, our core objective is to establish a self-sustaining academic field dedicated to improving wild animal welfare. This welfare focus is a major paradigm shift from the naturalness focus that currently dominates conservation biology and related disciplines.

That means one major constraint is the availability of interested scientists. Many researchers need to be persuaded before they can develop relevant projects.

However, we've been finding that we consistently underestimate th... (read more)

[Observations from inside the charity pipeline]

As Mikaela said, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has a lot of leverage to strategically diversify the effective animal advocacy movement:

The EA Animal Welfare and ACE Recommended Charity Fund sometimes act as a pipeline, where a nascent project will seek support from the EA Animal Welfare Fund before growing into a more established charity that receives support from the ACE Recommended Charity Fund. One example of this pipeline is Wild Animal Initiative, which has received EA Animal Welfare Fund grants since 2017 (

[Adding some unoriginal thoughts on risky donations]

As Mikaela said, which fund you donate to depends in large part on how safe/risky you want your donations to be:

In contrast, the EA Animal Welfare Fund tends to donate to more numerous, often earlier-stage projects that are higher-risk and, arguably, higher-reward.

When I first got involved in EA, I thought "high-impact donations" obviously had to be "safe donations."

Over the past several years, I've changed my mind. I now think EAs should generally lean toward riskier donations than the average donor, for... (read more)

In some cases, I am wary of us funging Open Phil or OWA or some other funder. E.g., potentially at times with some corporate chicken campaigns in a neglected region, or even with larger promising groups based in Europe or the US.

Because Lewis Bollard is both a manager of the EA AWF and a program officer at Open Philanthropy, does his involvement reduce the likelihood of funging with Open Phil?

This was such an interesting discussion! Jordan, I was particularly impressed by (and grateful for) the way you continued to clarify the nature of your concerns while simultaneously remaining open to the new evidence and arguments others shared.

And for what it's worth, I think "Other people are doing this thing wrong!" is a great reason to do that thing yourself. I hope anyone with concerns about wild animal welfare will join the movement and make it better -- or at least voice those concerns as productively as you did.

In the time since Abraham wrote this comment, Animal Charity Evaluators recommended one of the orgs he started as a Top Charity! So ACE definitely counts now, and Abe needs to update his resume.

I also think Abe was right to count ACE as working in wild animal welfare before, because their early explorations directly contributed to the formation of the field. For example, the intern that carried out their 2016 survey on attitudes toward wild animal welfare is now a researcher at Wild Animal Initiative. (You can see some of Luke Hecht's recent work here.)

(That said I do think "deeply understand" doesn't quite do the job.)

I feel the same way, even though I'm relatively strongly opposed to EA jargon, and even though I  don't know the specific connotations from Stranger in a Strange Land.

Here's the compromise I've settled on: "to grok" -> "to grok, to really deeply understand." 

That is, I'll use the jargon and immediately follow it with the translation. It's inelegant, and I've only used it in conversation so far. Not sure I'd be comfortable with so many redundant words in text. But I like that t... (read more)

Agreed! I appreciate the correction.

Thanks for sharing Catia's dissertation! I hadn't seen that before and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Anecdatum: This is consistent with my recent experience measuring my own happiness!

I recently started using UpLift (a cognitive behavioral therapy app developed by our friend Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking.org) to manage some mood changes that might be mild depression. The app prompts you to rate and reflect on your happiness several times each day.

Each time I tried to rate my mood, I thought:

"Huh, I don't feel that great. But I do feel better than before. So I have to say a higher number this time. Dammit, I can't even measure my mood... (read more)