Currently grantmaking in animal advocacy, at Mobius. I was previously doing social movement and protest-related research at Social Change Lab, an EA-aligned research organisation I've founded.
Previously, I completed the 2021 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Before that, I was in the Strategy team at Extinction Rebellion UK, working on movement building for animal advocacy and climate change.
My blog (often EA related content)
Feel free to reach out on james.ozden [at] hotmail.com or see a bit more about me here
Yep fair enough! That was one bit I wasn’t sure about and can definitely see the downsides of sharing too early. I guess the trade-off I was considering was Vetted Causes’ time spent on the evaluation but definitely think an advance finished version with two weeks notice would be something most groups would be happy with.
Love that you wrote this up and shared Emre! I definitely think we need more people having this kind of discourse publicly so appreciate you contributing.
I wanted to share some mostly anecdotal things from my experience in AR and XR in what seems to have worked for building deep/committed engagement from volunteers & activists:
Which also has a bunch of downsides but more on that another time..
IMO the risks you state are much less severe relative to missing key information about a specific charity (as likely happened with your Sinergia work) and therefore misleading people. This also makes people less likely to take your claims seriously in all future reviews.
Risk 2: Unconscious biases from interacting with charity staff.
When we evaluate a charity, we want to evaluate them based on their work, not based on how much we like their employees. Accordingly, we do not want to acquire unconscious biases.
If anyone has solutions to this problem, please let us know below, as it would make us more open to showing reviews to charities before releasing them. We would also like to acknowledge that we may be misunderstanding what people are suggesting when they say they'd like us to show our reviews to the charities before publishing them. If this simply entails sending them an email and nothing more, we are more open to that than having meetings with charity employees to discuss their review.
To clarify, yes I think most people think you should just share a Google Doc of your review and give the organisation time to leave comments about factual inaccuracies or other relevant context. I don't think anyone is suggesting you meet with organisations and discuss things via a call. If anything, it's best to share your review relatively early so you don't spend 100s of hours, as you claim you did with Sinergia, down some rabbit hole which may just be a lack of understanding or context-specific issues.
Very cool work, thanks Saulius & Nuno for doing it and Anima for commissioning!
I'm particularly interested in the stopping new factory farms campaign and am keen to understand how you think about this. I drew some very rough graphs to help me get my head around this and curious if you are modelling this in a similar way. I'll leave aside the impact on the price of meat, although, I anticipate there may be some small increase when supply is more constrained.
Specifically, you note that you estimate that this will delay farms by, on average, around approx. 7 months. I'll just assume this is 1 year for the sake of simplicity so this may look like this:
To describe what I'm thinking: the production of meat is essentially shifted to the right by 1 year, but follows a pretty similar upward trajectory (although I don't think the trajectory matters too much). Therefore the difference in animal suffering (assuming that's the same as meat production) is the difference in areas under the curve, shown by the beautifully scribbled light blue area.
However, I think this only holds if you think that there will come a time in the future when meat production will start going down. If you think it will have the same total peak and trajectory in both cases, then all you are doing is having a very similar amount of meat production/animal suffering, just delayed by a year. As seen by the small light blue area below, it makes sense there would be some small impact on animals.
But, for example, if you think the world is going to end or there will be some factor (e.g. very tasty and cheap cultivated meat) that causes meat production to decrease in a given year, then this will have counterfactually reduced animal suffering by reducing the height of the meat production peak, as seen below.
Is this roughly how you're also thinking about this? I would be curious for an economist to weigh in also / look into this further as I'm sure there are a bunch of other relevant factors besides the duration of the delay that would affect overall meat / animal suffering averted e.g.: