All of kierangreig&#x27;s Comments + Replies

Right. So I still might not be fully understanding.

I guess it seems hard for me to understand thinking both:

A) Diet change has more negative effects on wild animals than positive effects on farmed animals.

And B) Diet changes’ negative effects on wild animals are in expectation greater than the positive effects from further work on wild animal welfare (e.g., of the sort WAI completes).

But maybe I am misunderstanding. Do you think both of those?

Separately, and another quick thought, it could be helpful to more formally model it,... (read more)

2MichaelStJules4moIn short, I think 1. A is reasonably likely to be true. 2. If A is true, then B is very likely to be true, too (I'm less sure about the reverse implication). 3. A's probability itself seems really uncertain to me, and I'm not comfortable picking one number before seeing models. Picking 50% seems wrong, since I don't have evidential symmetry as in simple cluelessness; this is a case of complex cluelessness. On 1, the main reasons diet change would be bad for wild animals would be through wild fishes and wild invertebrates (and Brian Tomasik's writing [https://reducing-suffering.org/vegetarianism-and-wild-animals/] is where I'd start). Because of the number of animals involved (far more fishes and invertebrates than chickens, and there may be generational population effects since you prevent descendants, too, but maybe what matters most is carrying capacity), it seems pretty plausible these negative effects could heavily outweigh the positives for farmed animals. I think one thing Brian might not have been aware of at the time is that many wild fishes are caught to feed farmed fishes, so fish farming might be good for reducing wild fish populations. There's also all the plastic pollution from fishing that plausibly reduces populations, and not just fish populations. On the other hand, maybe the wild fishes get replaced with more populous r-selected species, and that's bad. I think 2 is true, because * I already think the number of wild animals affected will be larger from diet change, since this is a major ecosystem change whereas wild animal welfare interventions will be more targeted. * A implies the negative effects of diet change are quite large (enough to make up for the benefits to farmed chickens and farmed aquatic animals), and the worlds in which A is true but B is not are the (in my view) unlikely ones in which we're radically interfering in nature to help wild animals through population control or genetic intervent

kierangreig4mo5

Sure.

Very quickly, here are a few ideas/interventions that seem interesting to me:

Helping scope whether large and respected enviro groups may lobby on this if funding was available
Helping establish additional university-affiliated research centers that focus on research into pb alts
Helping establish trade associations in important places that don’t really have them right now

Honestly, I think there’s just a lot of underexplored territory in the area. To some extent it is now about us diversifying somewhat, trying a number of differen... (read more)

Yeah, I think I would be interested in a variety of scoping projects.

Briefly, some ideas that seem top of mind for me now are:

Someone thinking more about some very preliminary things that could be done in the policy space
Or more about an organization that might focus on wild animal welfare within cities
Or even more about a generalist group that may be to wild animals what GFI is to alt-proteins (some variety of programs and decent emphasis on movement-building)

However, I think the bottleneck here may be more about finding talented p... (read more)

kierangreig4mo2

Yes, definitely helps! :)

kierangreig4mo2

Fairly sure it was the ACE Research Fund. :)

Yeah, I think your impression of the ratio is correct.

Briefly, as Michael St Jules notes, AWF interfaces with a much bigger community/movement than the LTFF currently does. I think that goes some of the way to explaining the difference in the ratio. Within the respective remits of each fund, it seems the AWF just generally has a more developed movement that it can grant to. The total FAW movement is > $100M per year. My guess is the total EA-aligned LTF movement is now just a pretty small fraction compared to that total. &nb... (read more)

kierangreig4mo10

Thanks for all your questions! :)

>What processes do you have for monitoring the outcome/impact of grants?

We have a ~10 question questionnaire that we send grantees. We send these out 6 months after the grant's starting date - which coincides with the payment date usually. We then send them out every six months and then a final report at the grant’s end date. E.g., if the grant was for an 18-month project, we would send the progress report to that grantee at the 6-month mark, 12 months, and then 18 months.

I feel like I am also just fairly reg... (read more)

I think (and hope) that 5 years from now the AWF will allocate more than $10M in a single year.

Here are some plausible priority areas that come to my mind for the fund on a 2-5 year timeline:

Seeding some groups in the Middle-East and further seeding groups in Africa.
Alt-proteins
Fish welfare.
Field building on wild animal welfare

In terms of challenges, quick thoughts:

Navigating funding weirder/speculative stuff if our donor base has a lot of relatively new EA’s
Maintaining a high level of expertise across some pretty dispar

... (read more)

kierangreig4mo12

Unfortunately, not yet. Pandemic certainly makes it harder. I would be keen for an in-person meet up at some point!

Also, I whole-heartedly blame Jonas for not enough fun. Readers are generally encouraged to please aggressively contact and petition him on our behalf about making things more fun :)

Hmm… on first-pass, two main points I would make:

1) I think that trying to take into account the flow-through effects of just about everything will make you more skeptical of just about everything. Stated differently, I am not sure there is much in particular about diet change and flow effects from it which leads to this being a particular problem for it.

So I think that if you apply that lens elsewhere you’ll run into similar issues. Reality is just really complicated and it’s nigh on impossible to truly know how our actions reverberate throughout. F... (read more)

2MichaelStJules4moI think one way 2 might not be appropriate here is that diet change may have more important effects on wild animals1than on farmed animals, and also more important effects on wild animals than our targeted wild animal interventions2. Say 1. Diet change gives you 100 utility per $ in expectation for farmed animals, and -1000 to 900 utility per $ in expectation for wild animals, and it's very ambiguous, so you aren't willing to commit to a single expected value, and you instead use this whole range of -1000 to 900 (or -700 to 1100 or whatever). 2. Wild animal-targeted interventions give you 100 utility per $. Then donating $1 to diet change and $c to wild animal interventions would give the following utility in expectation: (100-1000) + 100c to (100+900) + 100c, or -900 + 100c to 1000 + 100c, and you need c>9 to make sure this is positive, so you'd spend at least 9x more on wild animal interventions than diet change to ensure a positive expected value. I've written more about this idea here [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Mig4y9Duu6pzuw3H4/hedging-against-deep-and-moral-uncertainty] . 1. possibly counterfactually increasing the populations of wild invertebrates and wild aquatic animals, especially; many wild-caught fishes are also fed to farmed fishes. 2. because the population effects are more important.

I would say the current focus areas are:

Large-scale and neglected animal populations (for instance, farmed fish and wild animals)
Large-scale and neglected geographies (for instance, China and India)
Exploratory work regarding the scaling of alternative proteins (for instance, a novel and potentially scalable intervention on plant-based alternatives)

In terms of projections, I think it is hard to say. There are going to be a lot of inputs into that output. Inputs that will only become known over the next couple of years

Here are some plausibl... (read more)

Hi William,

> What is the EA fund?

Briefly, the EA AWF is a regranting mechanism for donors interested in maximizing their impact on non-human animal welfare. Contributions to it are allocated out to grantees by fund managers three times per year.

> How does it work and how does it make decisions?

As outlined in another question by Karolina. We solicit applications via an open process advertised on relevant sites, Facebook groups, and by individually reaching out to promising candidates. Additionally, we create an RFP and distribute it ... (read more)

4erikaalonso4moI echo Kieran's points on the difference between EA AWF and ACE Movement Grants. The only other distinguishing factor I'd mention is that because the grant managers and processes differ, the projects that end up being funded tend to have different trends between funds. You can find a list of previous Movement Grant recipients on this page [https://animalcharityevaluators.org/donation-advice/ace-movement-grants/#eaaf-distribution-10-20] which may give you a better idea of the types of projects funded as well as the size of those grants for each round.

That is interesting!

Haven’t really thought much about doing it. But I think a lot of that is because I have not really come across anyone who has expressed this desire. It seems interesting, though, and could be worth exploring further.

If someone is curious about doing something like this, I think it is worth reaching out to either me or Jonas.

Sure. :)

Somewhat random sample of past grantees includes:

FIAPO
Essere Animali
Environment & Animal Society of Taiwan
Compassion in World Farming USA

The full list with description regarding the grants are available in our payout reports!

Some specific grants that I have been particularly proud of include early stage grants to:

Crustacean Compassion
Equalia
Rethink Priorities
Wild Animal Initiative
Fish Welfare Initiative
Sinergia Animal

In terms of lessons learned, I would quickly say:

Active grantmaking is important&

... (read more)

> To what extent do you worry that we're underinvesting in approaches outside of incremental welfare reform work right now?

Hmmm… I think it is fair to say that this isn’t in my top-tier of worries. Some things that inform that take are:

Some other major funders, that I am aware of through FAF, focus more on non-incremental welfare stuff but at the same time seem aligned with some principles of EA
As other funders focus more on it, the movement as a whole seems to adequately experiment with and explore some things that look promising from that

... (read more)

In terms of the process, I drafted the RFP and then ran that by the other fund managers. After that, I incorporated their feedback.

Hearing that, I suspect you might be somewhat less interested in the process and more interested in how we reached those areas and ideas. I think a quick response to this is:

All of us fund managers try to stay quite up to date on the body of evidence in our sector
We also routinely have calls with others involved in our sector and bounce ideas off of them, and try to hear their ideas
We then try quite hard to ap

... (read more)

4Peter Wildeford4moCan you say more about what kind of wild animal welfare work you would want to see?

4Peter Wildeford4moCan you say more about what you think a promising new initiative on PB alternatives might look like?

Thanks, Max! :)

There certainly are. Here’s what we listed in our RFP:

We’d be interested in hearing from you if:

You want to tackle some “big-picture” question regarding wild animal welfare
You would like to launch a new non-profit venture, or you would like to trial something new, in the wild animal welfare space
You’re a scientist and want to pursue field-building activities, such as organizing conferences, trainings, courses, or events
You’re a scientist that could add welfare metrics to your current or planned research
You’d like to do some resea

... (read more)

I would be pretty surprised if I was somehow resurrected, or otherwise able to observe, millions of years from now and factory farming was still happening!

In terms of probabilistic predictions as to the chance that factory farming is still around x years from now, I think mine pretty roughly looks like some exponentially decaying function. If you want to model it, I would put P₀at 1 and alpha at ~0.988.

So, I’d guess there are decent chances forms of it are still around at the end of this century, but 200 years from now, I think there are pretty good chances that we will have ended it :)

Not strongly considered longer write-ups at this point. Basically, it takes a lot of work to publicly and extensively communicate our views in the form of longer-write ups. We generally don’t think that work adds much value to our primary output; it’s not a big part of how we make grant decisions, and donors rarely ask about it. So we usually prefer to focus our time on other parts of grant reporting, as well all the other work the Fund requires.

That said, if you have any questions about any of the decisions we’ve made, please feel free to contact us.

Fwiw,... (read more)

kierangreig4mo12

To some extent, we are only able to work with what is available to grant to. And I think we have been pretty good at granting to things as soon as they’re ready. But we could probably have done more to get some projects/NGOs ready for grants.

So the main thing that comes to mind when I think about this, is I think we probably should have started doing more active grantmaking sooner. That would look like us more actively trying to bring new promising projects into existence. And note that could be either through seeding new groups or having existing gr... (read more)

kierangreig4mo7

Good question!

In short, I think it may be important but I feel pretty unsure about what the implications are. I guess it generally updates me somewhat towards some of the more speculative things that fall inside our remit, including wild animals and invertebrate welfare.

But basically, I think that longtermism is still way underexplored... so when we start talking about longtermism’s intersection with something like animal welfare, I think it is just really really underexplored. At this point, there may have been a few blog posts looking at that intersectio... (read more)

Great question! Multi-decade forecasts are hard, so take all these quick thoughts with some salt :)

Amount of funding in our space increases significantly. Sometimes I find it pretty inspiring to think that over the past decade or so, we have almost gone from no field really existing to a budding one. It has gone from <$20M/yr to ~$200M/yr. Predict (75%) that positive trend continues and we would be at >$500M/yr by 2040.
Alt-proteins have significant progress and are really important. Again, it can be inspiring to look back on our pro

... (read more)

Smallest grant we can do through the EA Fund is $1k. If you are interested in something smaller than that, please get in touch and I might be interested in funding in order to reach my personal giving pledge.

Yes and yes to your examples!

I think I would name the categories a bit differently but your point still stands. Fwiw, I would name the categories:

Large-scale and neglected animal populations (for instance, farmed fish and wild animals)
Large-scale and neglected geographies (for instance, China and India)

On THL UK and OBRAZ being exceptions, briefly, a few thoughts:

THL UK:

We think THL UK has been instrumental to the successes of the broiler movement.
The THL UK team plays a major role in OWA’s global & European progress (e.g., last years helped with trai

... (read more)

I think we would be interested and able to do this. However, I am not sure exactly what that would look like. I can think more about this and might look to implement something!

In the meantime, if you’re a donor who is interested in our thoughts, please feel free to contact us.

Another solution is to allocate to the fund, and we can then distribute it from there!

1Cameron_Meyer_Shorb4moI'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 the charity itself has identified. For example, I might think a charity has exhausted the opportunities for a certain kind of campaign, but it probably wouldn't occur to me that they could make all of their campaigns much more effective if they hired an operations staffer with Salesforce expertise. Starting with the negative framing, there seem to be only a few kinds of constraints a charity can have other than funding. Probably not exhaustive, but here's my list: * Mission constraints: Do I generally expect this charity to do high-impact work? If I'm only excited about a few of their projects, then it's less likely that marginal donations will counterfactually increase those projects. * Note that questions of program constraints (e.g., "no more states they could run ballot measures in") often reduce to questions of mission constraints (e.g., "if they run out of states to do ballot measures in, will they identify another high-impact program to launch?"). * Talent constraints: Is the charity able to hire people good enough to continue their high-impact work? * Operational constraints: Does the charity have enough administrative bandwidth to hire staff or expand programs without straining their systems so much that their effectiveness suffers? * Relative timing constraints: Are there comparably cost-effective charities with much more urgent and important funding ne

kierangreig4mo9

Yeah, I feel uncertain about how to weigh these. Here are some things that feel important:

What feels like one of the stronger considerations for me, is I am generally more excited about the EA AWF taking on some of the more high-risk stuff given that it's easier for Open Phil and others to pick up the proven stuff. It’s also easier for the more proven stuff to fundraise from non-EA sources. E.g., with a group like Crustacean Compassion we gave them a few smaller grants, prior to them getting significant Open Phil funding.
All else equal, we look

... (read more)

3Cameron_Meyer_Shorb4moBecause 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?

kierangreig4mo9

I made a doc on this a while ago! :)

Here are my not very informed guesses at where some of the bigger possible productivity gains include:

Also, recommend Lynette Bye's interview with Lewis on this.

kierangreig4mo9

Ha! Excellent question and should be raised in every AMA :)

100 hundred duck-sized horses!

Hard to improve on Will's answer here:

> I’d certainly rather save a hundred duck-sized horses. It’s hard to know how to compare the moral importance of different creatures’ experiences. How many happy chicken-days is as good as a happy chimp-day? The best guess I currently have is to use the logarithm of neural mass. And I think that the total log(neural mass) of a hundred duck-sized horses is much greater than that of one horse-sized duck. There’s just ... (read more)