All of Cameron_Meyer_Shorb's Comments + Replies

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)

Great point, Eze Paez! I'm glad you added it.

1. For what it's worth, I don't think Jane was trying to say you have to be a utilitarian to support wild animal welfare. I interpreted her comment as mostly referring to the intellectual history of the wild animal welfare movement, which does seem to have its roots primarily in utilitarianism.

2. One of my favorite illustrations of a non-consequentialist/non-welfarist rationale for improving wild animal welfare (backing up your points b and c) is "Legal Personhood and the Positive Rights of W... (read more)

Another argument against this position is its effect on your moral attitudes as Jeff Sebo argued in his talk at EA global in 2019. You could dismiss this if you are certain it will not effect the relative value you place on other being and by not advertising your position as to not effect others.

(FYI, this is the argument I was referring to as the "epistemic" argument in my other comment. Thanks for linking to that talk, George!)

Hi Abraham! Thanks for pointing out that it would be helpful to clarify what is meant by the tradeoff values.

I differ on this point:

if you're just saying, with little basis, that a pig has 1/100 human moral worth, I don't know how to evaluate it. It isn't an argument. It's just an arbitrary discount to make your actions feel justified from a utilitarian standpoint.

I think we should give Jeff the benefit of the doubt here. I don't think his estimates are arbitrary. I think they are honest reflections of the conclusions he has come t... (read more)

Another kind of reason to do both: There is epistemic value to going vegan.

It's legitimately hard to understand the experiences and needs of individuals that are different from us. Most of the time, it's even harder than it needs to be, because we approach them with unfounded prejudices.

Going vegan might be a psychologically necessary step to considering animals' experiences and needs in at least a somewhat objective manner.

(I'm hoping to elaborate on this later, and apologies for the doc-dump, but the elegantly argued and eminently rea... (read more)

One kind of reason to do both: It's not a true tradeoff.

It's easy to spend a lot of money on top-of-the-line vegan cheeses and meats. But it's also quite feasible to meet most people's dietary requirements with vegan foods that cost just as much as, or even less than, animal-based foods. (Shout out to my boi rice-and-beans.)

In that case, we're not trading off dollars for dollars. We're trading off time, effort, and comfort for dollars.

At some point, if you spend enough time on something, it might cut into your earning potentia... (read more)

I think veganism doesn't represent a very good tradeoff, and I think we should put our altruistic efforts elsewhere.

For the sake of this comment thread, let's assume that veganism is a substantially worse tradeoff than other altruistic efforts.

Personally, I think that's likely to be true. For people (like me) who place a high likelihood on the sentience of farmed animals, it's worth considering how the costs and benefits of going vegan compare to the costs and benefits of donating to a nonprofit that is attempting to end animal farming ... (read more)

Here are the main reasons I find it overwhelmingly likely that mammals and birds (and very likely that fish) have morally relevant subjective experiences:

• Behavior. They respond to potentially-painful things in almost all the same ways humans do (except for verbally articulating their experiences in a language I understand).
• Evolution. The best evolutionary rationale I can think of for why humans have subjective experiences is that that might be a good way of motivating us to avoid experiences that tend to be bad for our reproductive fitness. (Note that this

[T]his is the main place where I think I differ from most ethical vegans: I think humans matter much more than these animals.

I agree that this is the biggest difference between you and most ethical vegans!

Let's use this comment thread to discuss differences in estimates of the likelihood that nonhuman animals (or non-me humans) are sentient (where "sentient" means "having morally relevant subjective experiences such as the ability to feel pain").

Thanks so much for writing this, Jeff! I think we talked about this the first night we met. Since then, I've always appreciated your thoughtful objections to veganism. The carelessness with which so many people approach the question really bothers me. It's a real treat to talk with an objector who takes the idea seriously and has really thought through their positions.

Of course, on the facts of the matter, I strongly disagree! There are several different kinds of reasons why. I'll post them in separate comments in the hopes of keeping the conversation focused on one idea at a time. (If that's not kosher on the EA Forum, I hope someone will let me know, and I won't do it in the future.)

Hopefully Wild Animal Initiative will have more answers for you soon! We recently assembled an Academic Advisory Panel in part to solicit feedback on our publications when they don't go through a formal peer-review process.

We're still growing the panel, so please let us know if you or anyone you know might be interested in joining. https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/advisory-panel

I recently learned that many universities require a certain percentage of all grants go to institutional overhead unless the grant maker has a policy against it. So grant-makers can save a lot of money by publicly posting a policy limiting the portion of a grant that can go to overhead.

I'd also love to hear Scott's perspective on this, but in the meantime, I wanted to point out that this is one of the ways The Good Food Institute aims to help potential founders. For starters, I'd recommend these essential resources.

Most plant-based meats get their form and texture through high-moisture extrusion, in which textured vegetable protein is forced through a die like Play-Doh through a spaghetti maker (see Wikipedia for a more technical overview).

Extruders are big, expensive, and sensitive machines. Most startups can't buy their own, so they normally contract with a manufacturer. However, there is a limited number of manufacturers that currently do high-moisture extrusion of textured vegetable protein.

I believe the authors' concern is that because demand for extr... (read more)

Great points, Trammell! Thank you for this post.

Your example comparing the peaceful-psychology hypothesis and the violent-psychology hypothesis is effective, and it stands on its own. However, I don't think it's the best way to represent Steven Pinker's argument, and I think representing that argument more accurately leads in some interesting new directions.

As I understand him, Pinker does not argue humans have a peaceful psychology. Rather, he acknowledges that there are many aspects of our psychology that predispose us to violence, and he ... (read more)