All of James Özden's Comments + Replies

Obviously, I don't speak for OP or EA AWF fund but they literally only publish 1-3 sentences per grant so I'm not surprised at all if they don't mention it, even if it is a consideration for them. That said, I might just be projecting because this was partially the reason why I supported giving them a grant!

Agree though that stunners aren't literally a one-off and never touch again, but as you mention I think the overall cost of the intervention to animals helped is significantly better for shrimp stunning in my opinion, as well the avenue for industry adoption being much more clear and more likely.

Yeah good point re Shrimp Welfare Project! I should have said "most animal funders don't want to subsidise the animal ag industry without a clear mechanism for passing these costs over to the industry".

For example, in the case of SWP, my understanding is that SWP wants to get these relatively cheap stunners ($50k and only a one-off cost) for a few major producers to show both producers and retailers that it is a relatively cheap way to improve animal welfare with minimal/no impacts on productivity. Then, I believe the idea is to get retailers (e.g. like th... (read more)

FWIW in the early stages of Healthier Hens, I heard some of the following pieces of feedback which IMO seem significant enough that it may have been a bad decision for CE to recommend a feed fortification charity for layer hens:

• Feed costs are approximately 50% of costs for farmers, so interventions that make feed even more expensive are likely to be hard to achieve
• CE's report focuses on subsidising this feed for farmers to lessen the potential risk of the above point, but I think misses the crucial factor where most animal funders don't want to subsidise t

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We are looking for a strategic leader to join our team as interim Director. This role will be maternity cover for our current Director and will be a 12-month contract from July 2024. As Director, you would lead our small team in delivering cutting-edge research on the outcomes and strategies of the animal advocacy and climate movements and ensuring widespread communication of this work to key... (read more)

No I didn't sadly - I started using Readwise instead to capture learnings from books & other mediums, as it's got better UX than Anki in my opinion. Still yet to make a good list of concepts/facts though so ideas welcome!

Oopsie, thanks for the flag Toby! Will change

Great to see more advocacy and advocacy evaluation-related content on the EA Forum! Sharing a few things that might be of interest to you / others

• Founders Pledge has a great document on evaluating policy organisations that puts forward some interesting considerations on evaluating the counterfactual impact of an org e.g.
  • "We gather evidence from independent referees and written sources to confirm or disconfirm the charity’s own account of their impact. Below is a hierarchy of testimony evidence, ranked from the most to least desirable. 
    •  1. Well-in

I want to make some Anki cards to learn/reinforce some important concepts, research findings & facts related to animal advocacy. Any recommendations for key facts, research outputs or concepts to include? E.g. things like how many animals are killed in China, components of the BCC, etc etc

You might be interested to ask in this Facebook group (I would love to help and thinking similar things but know approximately nothing)

Thank you, I appreciate you engaging in a civil way too, as well as this comment!

I would be curious to hear more about the reasons behind your decision to focus specifically on getting folks into GCR-related careers, rather than other common EA cause areas, if you’re happy to share!

I disagree because at least one of the statements I quoted above is not “feelings” as you state, and they literally talk about what might be the downside of some political actions (e.g. closer to analysis on the conflict and potential resolutions).

Agreed! In that case, why not include both sides of the story to paint a fair picture, given the author thought it was fine to include more political / less-neutral statements?

Not Ofer but I think he laid it out pretty clearly:

The author mentioned they do not want the comments to be "a discussion of the war per se" and yet the post contains multiple contentious pro-Israel propaganda talking points, and includes arguments that a cease-fire is net-negative. Therefore it seems to me legitimate to mention here the following.

I feel similarly to Ofer - this post has many interesting personal reflections, which I'm glad the author shared. At the same time, it seemed like there were several pro-Israel comments that feel similar to the r... (read more)

This is super interesting Jamie, thanks for writing it up! FWIW I would be interested in the marketing successes and failures of LEAF as well as pre-post cause prioritisation changes, if they weren’t too time intensive to write up.

(The former is for me thinking about podcast marketing and the latter is general interest)

THL's corporate campaigns is our best guess donation opportunity to maximise expected impact (alongside the AWF). If we thought we could have easily justified any one of ACE's other recommendations was better - or even just as good - from that perspective, we would have recommended them, but we currently can't. And please note that "justifying" here isn't about finding "certainty of positive impact": we are looking for the expected value case (as we do for the AWF and our other recommendations as well).

Based on your paragraph below from the ACE Report, I'm... (read more)

One reason why we are moving more slowly is that our current estimates of the gap between marginal animal and human funding opportunities is very different from the one in your post – within one order of magnitude, not three. And given the high uncertainty around our estimates here, we think one order of magnitude is well within the “margin of error” .

I assume that even though your answers are within one order of magnitude, the animal-focused work is the one that looks more cost-effective. Is that right?

Assuming so, your answer doesn't make sense to me bec... (read more)

Agree with lots of the above. 

It also just seems very bizarre that the GWWC's animal fund pays out half to EA AWF and half to THL. Surely if you thought that EA AWF was a good evaluator or donation opportunity for donors, you would just let them manage the entirety of the fund? As then EA AWF would be able to distribute to THL if they actually thought THL was the most effective use of funds on the margin. And if not, even better, as they can give to more effective opportunities.

Also responding to the below points in your ACE evaluation report: 

We

Thanks for sharing this! It's great to have some honest and open conversations about the GWWC pledge. 

FWIW I think perceived wisdom is that around 6-12 months of living expenses is pretty good as an emergency fund, which might help in terms of your runway value curve. For example, that might look like £1.8k per month (which I think is roughly the UK average) x 6-12 = £10-20k. Ideally, this would be in instant access savings, rather than stocks (but this isn't true in my case). 

Other thoughts: I think unless you expect your situation to change dra... (read more)

This is a beautiful post - appreciate your transparency, honesty and (not least) your generosity!

Sorry Johannes, I can't believe I never replied to this! Better late than never I hope. 

In terms of how we selected these academics, we created a list of about 100 academics whom we had read their papers and thought they were high quality or they were the editors of top journals in the field (in Sociology and Political Science). We asked them to fill out the survey (just over 50% of this list replied) and we also asked them to send it to 2-3 other academics who they thought would be well-placed to do the survey too. 

Off-topic but asking for personal interest:

Would you be up for explaining (briefly) how you calculate your podcast metrics? E.g.

• Total listening time estimate using March 2022 method (40% Apple up to Nov 2019 then '75% in the Big 3')
• Big 3 subscriber estimate at end of period

(I couldn't figure out what Big 3 was in this context nor your March 2022 method)

With much of the $200B/year in Official Development Assistance going to interventions of question effectiveness and over a trillion dollars sitting in private foundations, the EA movement can and should open the aperture of how it thinks about what it recommends beyond the marginal donation. 

We're optimistic the movement could influence existing pots of money orders of magnitude larger than what it does today, thus doing even more good in the world. This could perhaps have been more clearly argued in the post, open to your thoughts / feedback!&nb

You say it's upcoming but would very much love to hear your thoughts on influencing minor political parties vs working with dominant parties!

This is super interesting, thanks to you Ren and the Animal Ask team for doing such a cool bit of research!

One question re funding - I assume that most of these countries have laws to prevent outside money coming into electoral campaigning in that country (e.g. the US and the UK). Do you know if this is likely the case? As I can see that being a very clear barrier why this approach might be hard without local major donors in specific countries.

I assume that's not what Elizabeth was talking about though, given the lack of relation to nutrition, so I'm still not sure if her comment about punishment is reasonable in this context. 

Less relevant but I also think the ACE example is slightly different as it was penalising charities for views that they disagree with, rather than investigating questions it doesn't like.

(FWIW I also think ACE has changed sufficiently since that incident that I think it's unlikely to happen again, but who knows) 

EA vegan advocacy has both pushed falsehoods and punished people for investigating questions it doesn’t like.

What evidence do you have that it has punished people?

Thanks for sharing this - I really appreciate the transparency!

A quick question on the attendees: Are there any other (primarily) animal advocacy-focused folks within the 43 attendees or is it just Lewis? I don't know the exact breakdown of meta EA efforts across various cause areas but I would be somewhat surprised if meta animal work was below 2% of all of meta EA spending (as is implied by your 1/43 ratio). There are several notable meta EA animal orgs doing work in this space (e.g. Animal Charity Evaluators, EA Animal Welfare Fund, Farmed Animal Funder... (read more)

Very glad to hear this is still happening!

Are you planning on asking any question related to farmed animals? If so, which ones? And if not, would you be up for doing so?

If you’re not yet but would consider it: I’m happy to talk to a few relevant US folks to suggest some questions. Obviously RP has a very solid animal welfare so asking them is potentially an easier option but happy to do so regardless if you think it’ll be useful.

That's interesting to hear. What's the reasoning for the non-limiting patent being preferable over the pure open-science approach? 

This is great, thanks for sharing this!

I'm trying to do more of this myself e.g. via a triathlon fundraiser I'm doing (coincidentally, with 1 of 2 recipients also being THL UK!). I've also done a post about this on Twitter and Facebook, to hopefully encourage some of my less philanthropic friends to get involved. Would be curious to hear what feedback or engagement you get.

Eh I disagree - most people rarely, if ever, speak to their friends and family about their donations so I think it's unlikely for much to spread via that medium. On the other hand, people very often share meals with friends, family and other folks where the topic of animal welfare is much more likely to come up and be discussed (e.g. "oh you picked the vegan option, how come?". 

What is some RP research that you think was extremely important or view-changing but got relatively little attention from the EA community or relevant stakeholders?

What are some of your proudest 'impact stories' from RP's research? E.g. you did research on insects and now X funders will dedicate $Y million to insect welfare 

Doing some napkin-math:

• Rethink published 32 pieces of research in 2022 (according to your database)
• I think roughly (?) half of your work doesn't get published as it's for specific clients, so let's say you produced 64 reports overall in 2022.
• Rethink raised $10.7 million in 2022.
• That works out to around $167k per research output.

That seems like a lot! Maybe I should discount a bit as some of this might be for the new Special Projects team rather than research, but it still seems like it'll be over $100k per research output. 

Related questions:

• Do you thi

Meta-comment: For the future, it might be better for GPI to not post several summaries/working papers at the same time. I can currently see four GPI posts on the EA Forum homepage and this makes it a bunch less likely that I will read all 4 (personally, I can only handle so much academic global priorities research at once). A suggestion is that spreading this content out over e.g. 4 weeks might increase uptake/reading but just my personal opinion!

To what degree is the content on OWID decided by OWID vs influenced by donors?

For example, I vaguely remember seeing that Longview had donated to OWID then also noticed OWID’s newer work on longtermism. Was there any relation between these and generally how do you try to maintain editorial independence when soliciting donations from foundations/donors who have specific objectives?

Small relevant bump that if anyone is interested in hearing more about this work, we're actually organising a webinar about it! It'll be on Monday 5th of June, 6-7pm BST and you can sign up here.

Social Change Lab is hosting a webinar on Monday 5th of June around our previous research that radical tactics can increase support for more moderate groups. If you want to hear more about our research, some slightly updated findings and ask questions, now is your time!

It’ll be on June 5th, 6-7pm BST and you can sign up here.

I'm hiring for a new Director at Social Change Lab to lead our team! This is a hugely important role so if anyone is at all interested, I do encourage you to apply. Any questions, please feel free to reach out as well. 

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Social Change Lab is a nonprofit conducting and disseminating social movement research to help solve the world’s most pressing problems. We’re looking for a Director to lead our small team in delivering cutting-edge research on the outcomes and strategies of social movements, and ensuring widespread communication of this work to key st... (read more)

This is only somewhat related but I would be keen to get your thoughts Brian on this talk and related paper on positive wild animal welfare? They argue that wild animal welfare isn't necessarily so clear cut to be negative and there are some positive elements as well that we often don't discuss. I'm no expert and you've probably thought about wild animal suffering more than most people so I would be very curious to hear what you think.

There's a lot in the talk but I found the slides below particularly interesting to think about (timestamp: 30:13) as it imp... (read more)

Thank you for the kind words and great feedback! This initially slipped our mind but tanks to your comment, we're now doing so :)

Thanks for the feedback! We actually ran this by some people who thought it was okay but on second thought, it does look a bit too curled up for our liking. We'll be changing it shortly so thanks for the nudge :)

If you can, could you elaborate more on what caused this uncertainty at/after the retreat?

Can you share any other examples of what you've asked?  Feeling somewhat uncreative on how to apply LLMs to day-to-day work!

+1 to different presentation - a few graphs and/or tables would have helped me get my head around this much quicker! Very interesting research so thank you for doing it :) 

I think there are tradeoffs here though (and I have also talked to women who like the status quo and I assume men do).

Just flagging that this sentence made me quite uneasy. Of course when you're talking about removing the institutional power of an oppressing group (e.g. men, white people, humans, etc.) that group will not want to lose their power or status. This doesn't make it any less important or moral though!

An exaggerated version of this might look like "There are some trade-offs to giving black people the right to vote. Most white people enjoy our po... (read more)

Adding to your points, I think the Time article is very likely understating (I think by a significant margin) the amount of sexual harassment or otherwise unwanted male advances. For example, there was only one case about Owen in the article but he himself admits (see below quote) there were at least 4 other occasions where his actions might have been misguided / overstepped the mark. 

Was this incident an isolated case? Yes and no. I think this was by some way my most egregious mistake of this type. However, in my time in EA there have been four

I’m very much a layman to the field of nuclear risk but I found this piece extremely engaging and interesting! I definitely think applying the principles of robust diversification to important issues is a key way for EAs to bring value, and would love to see it applied to other cause areas.