Hey Vasco! I just read the summary here, so my apologies if I'm missing something important.

I think I disagree with the line of reasoning you're following. For instance, you say:

>>I estimated its HSI has been 0.0292 % as cost-effective as HIPF accounting for effects on the target beneficiaries, and soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes.

It would be very surprising to me if we can know with any degree of confidence that exploratory research into highly speculative areas is >3000X more cost effective than Shrimp Welfare Project's mai... (read more)

Thanks for your nice post Annika! It was a pleasure having you here, and you are definitely right that this internship would not have happened had you not gone out of the way to pitch yourself to us.

One of the reasons we were keen to have you was that you are an EA student group leader. This is probably relevant for other students seeking internships or jobs as well: Being an EA student leader often means something to recruiters at EA organizations. For instance, I know that one of the reasons I was accepted into the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Pro... (read more)

Thanks for your comment. A few points/pushback:

1 - The animal movement has grown a lot, but that doesn't mean it has grown enough. I think about this in the same way I think about efforts to eradicate extreme poverty: Such poverty has diminished significantly over the past few decades, but it still probably needs more (and cleverer) allocation of resources to truly be eradicated. Animal welfare, IMO, is in a much earlier stage still (but that's not to say we haven't made progress!).

2 - Various orgs do offer student internships (which is great), but I don't... (read more)

All makes sense!

>>But maybe this brings about a larger, more diverse pool of talented advocates that attract people in their cities and countries, and more local hubs grow? 

Some truth to this I'd say, but it's just tradeoffs. Obviously the best thing is for there to be lots of fully remote roles, AND lots of in-person roles and, especially, in-person communities. 

>>Do we have examples from other movements in the past that grew geographically disconnected through small communities and achieved their goals or managed to change the game?... (read more)

>>A hybrid of your approach (that could be logistically easier to implement) could be (for example): running a hiring round to select highly agentic and motivated scrappy generalist students, placing them in a non-profit that needs them to work online (because that's where most of the work is), and then placing them in hubs for socialising in the movement and participating in the actions that are happening. They could take on a lead role in organising protests/Revolutionist nights and the like, while they are in the hub, while working 9-5 in an effec... (read more)

Fair thoughts, thanks for the input! A few responses here:

>>I was a bit surprised by the "steep dropoff after graduation" claim. I think this is very likely to be true, but this could give the - very false - impression that there are many motivated students in the movement, which is not what I've observed.

I do think there are a lot of motivated students in the movement though, particularly in the US and UK (I'm less sure about other countries). Though perhaps to your point, even in these countries I think these students tend not to actually be gettin... (read more)

Thanks for your input!

>>I would add public institutions to the mix. Internships in regional / federal governments, or international organisations. They tend to have already good systems to run internships. 

Seems like a good idea! I'd particularly be keen to see interns placed with some animal-sympathetic politician for one of their placements, as that could build some pretty useful skills. Are there other potential placements here in the realm of public institutions that you see making sense?

>>I wonder, where does this hunch (or knowledge)... (read more)

Of course, and thank you for the kind words Sarah!

Hey, just chiming in here on behalf of the organization I co-founded (Fish Welfare Initiative). We went through AIM’s charity incubation program in 2019—their first formal cohort.

The following are a couple points I had:

1 - Echoing requests for evidence

As some people have already commented above, insofar as you have serious criticisms about various charities (CE or otherwise) it’d be helpful for you to provide some evidence for them.

In particular, it’d be interesting to learn more why you think AAC is “okay”, why Animal Ask “hasn’t had much impact”, and/or ... (read more)

Thanks Joel! And same to you—hope the research is going well

Thanks Ben! Yeah, I think we are often focusing more on the 1.1M we feel like we should have added to that, but definitely feels good to have had that impact still :)

Thanks for posting this! I'm obviously biased (I work at Fish Welfare Initiative), but I think it's really important that people have a more intuitive understanding of the suffering these animals endure.

In addition to FWI, I wanted to highlight a few other organizations that people might be interested in looking into if they want to donate to help mitigate the horrors of this ongoing atrocity:

- Eurogroup for Animals
- Compassion in World Farming
- Aquatic Life Institute
- Equalia
- Animal Equality UK
- Albert Schweitzer Foundation

Hey Nuño, thanks for doing this! This is interesting to see.

Fwiw, your placement of FWI in the ranking here broadly tracks with my own impressions of it, specifically that we're currently about an order of magnitude less effective than what I view as some of the currently most effective organizations. (This is of course something we're working to improve.)

You're very kind Andres. We're very grateful for what SWP does as well!

Seeing people take an idea from scratch and go out into the world to implement it is one of the things that inspires me most about many people in EA. Props to you all for having the audacity to do this, and more importantly props for building one of the most promising early-stage NGOs this community has created

I've enjoyed reading your work occasionally throughout the year—interesting stuff.

As a general point, posts like this push back against the seeming increasingly popular narrative that EA isn't funding constrained right now. Or more specifically, this post speaks to the fact that we can have a load of money but not be distributing it adequately to all the small non-profits (like SI) that could make good use of it.

Fish Welfare Initiative is now live on every.com! Thanks @WilliamKiely for making us aware of this opportunity.

https://www.every.org/fishwelfareinitiative/f/improve-the-welfare-of-farmed-fish-in-india

Do the fund managers ever do fun things together?? :)

What are your favorite productivity tips?

What books do you most recommend for someone looking to spend their career fighting for animals?

The recent grantees are very welfare-reform heavy, and there are relatively few organizations here who are taking an abolitionist approach (even though many, like THL, advocate achieving abolition through welfare reforms). This portfolio of grantees is fairly common in EA giving: Welfare reform organizations are invested in very heavily right now (for which they're all very grateful :).

I sometimes get concerned though that our movement puts too great of confidence in incremental welfare reforms as like "the best thing", thus stifling innovation. I feel thi... (read more)

What approaches or ideas do you wish the animal welfare fund would have invested more heavily in sooner?

Do you think industrial factory farming will ever end? If so, when do you think it will?

By end I mean something like there are like 95% fewer animals being farmed, and the ones that are farmed are farmed in more natural, extensive system (e.g. pastures or extensive fish ponds).

And do you think animal farming will ever end? If so, when do you think it will?

Are there ideas or approaches that you would have liked to seen receive funding, but where there weren't any or sufficiently strong enough proposals?

More generally, what do you think our movement is neglecting right now?

Thanks for this post!

I shared it in a slack group, and someone asked the following question:

Hi, I'm a little unclear regarding the impact of donations for the oxygen cylinders versus focused Social Media / lobbying efforts to thank and encourage medical gas companies such as Air Liquide to do more to help out. My inclination is lobbying could be much higher leverage than donations; what do you think?
 

I understand the question to be about the value of taking action/volunteering vs. the value of donating (noting that we can do both).

Do you have an opinion on the impact of this sort of action?

Could you please rename Fish Welfare Initiative? Initiative is also really hard to spell.

Thanks so much alexrjl! I sent you a private message

I think it's good to have a balance.

It's about balancing the ad to appeal to both A) really talented/good fit people who may have other options but are more likely to apply if they see they check a ton of boxes, and B) the talented but less apparently a great fit applicants (which you may want to cater to if you're not finding enough of the first type, and also because the best applicants don't always look that way on paper). And of course demographic/diversity reasons push the balance somewhat more towards B.

We did end up going with a few "requirements" and a longer list of "good to haves", and I think that worked well. Will do again in the future.

For some reason we did not consider compensating them for their time (probably due to our generally tight startup budget), although we probably will in the future. Thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks for the advice! I think #3 in particular is important, as it's easy for someone trying to be nice to cause even more issues by not being sufficiently clear or blunt

I think these are all valid points, and yeah the words are just stereotypes. Worth using caution with these sorts of simplistic decoders (but I still think they're somewhat helpful). I think you could probably pay for a better one but I doubt that's worth the money.

We did also ask people of different genders to review the ad before putting it out, and I definitely think that was worth the time cost.

Thanks for the report!

I'm interested in whether I should avoid honey consumption personally (and if so, how vocal I should be). Aside from the article you cited from Michael Greger, do you have an opinion or further evidence one way or the other on this?˙

Thanks for the report!

I'm interested in whether I should avoid honey consumption personally (and if so, how vocal I should be). Aside from the article you cited from Michael Greger, do you have an opinion or further evidence one way or the other on this?

Thanks Sam for mentioning us! I'm half the co-founding team of Fish Welfare Initiative (ie one of the fish people), and we are now looking for funding. If you're interested, you can check out our website or email me directly.

At the moment, we're looking to fill a roughly $30K funding gap to get us to June.

I went through the program last year and found it useful (I'm now launching Fish Welfare Initiative). I'd be happy to talk with anyone if they have questions about what it's like on the inside

Hey, thanks for doing that Em! And we're currently not accepting public donations :)

UPDATE: We are now looking to fundraise to fill our funding gap until June, and would love to connect with donors who may be interested. Feel free to reach out to me at haven@fishwelfareinitiative.org

Thanks for this awesome tool! The links here are bringing me to a "This item might not exist or is no longer available" page. Is there a newer version published?

John Oliver (the comedian) did this piece on chicken farming. It's the best attempt I know of to broadcast how terrible chicken farming is to the public, and completely stays away from animal welfare issues.