All of kierangreig's Comments + Replies

My understanding is that there is still more money within farmed animal welfare and global poverty than opportunities for funding.

For farmed animal welfare, as per the title: ”We need more nuance regarding funding gaps”, I think it is indeed more nuanced than “there is more money than opps for funding in farmed animal welfare.” 

Quickly consider the likes of:

• Some of the more outstanding bigger orgs can absorb much more funding, pretty productively (think e.g. THL, GFI, CIWF, MFA, etc.) Across those outstanding big groups alone, quite likely we could ea

Hey! Good q :) Apologies for the slower reply- I was OOO for a few weeks. 

So in addition to all those grants being for EA Superstars... I think we may have just made an error in the copy and pasting process between Google Docs and posting here and on the ea funds site. :) 

Specifically the "*" elsewhere (e.g., on Contentful) indicates bolding or italics and we had all these heading parts bolded or italicized (for other grants too) previously. 

I have removed all the * now.

Thanks for asking about it!   

First, I think this is a  really good flag on an important issue and a great first post :)   

As others mentioned CIWF have a good Octopus farming report highlighting the terrible consequences for animal welfare (underrated but I believe that Octopus could live 2-3 years in these conditions). I believe CIWF also presented the report to the Animal Welfare Intergroup of the European Parliament! They have also written to various places (governments, governors etc.) trying to have the practice outlawed or shut down. 

Specifically within ... (read more)

> Also, how do you judge their expected marginal cost-effectiveness? Do you do back-of-the-envelope calculations? Compare to previous projects with estimates? Check the project team's own estimates (and make adjustments as necessary)? All of the above? Any others?

It varies by project and depends on who the grant investigator is. 

If a) the project is relatively well-suited to a back of the envelope and b) a back of the envelope seems decision-relevant, then we will engage in one. Right now, a) and b) seem true in a minority of cases, maybe ~10%-25% ... (read more)

Hi Michael, 

Good questions, and appreciate you raising them. I am going to split the responses because they’re somewhat long. 

>How do you think the expected marginal cost-effectiveness of the grantees compares to the large effective animal advocacy charities like The Humane League?

Tl;dr: Main things I think about are i) the generally lacking evidence base leaves it unresolved, ii) risk and variance across the respective portfolios, iii) "big-picture" takes about the different portfolios, and iv) dynamics at the community level, as well as, wha... (read more)

Thanks, Ben! :) 

This was really cool! Thanks a bunch for writing it up :) 

For those interested, it somewhat reminded me of Some Case Studies in Early Field Growth and Establishing a research field in the natural sciences.

One quick observation that is probably a small thing or not right: 

For the 8 fields that reached establishment, the median time between a field’s origin year and establishment year[3] was 18 years, with the quickest field (Genetic Circuits) becoming established after 5 years, and the slowest (Clean Meat) becoming established after 63 years (the

This round, we report five anonymous grants after receiving advice from internal and external advisors, and further weighing the pros and cons of public reporting. We consider these grants to have a high expected impact, and report that there were no conflicts of interest in evaluating them. 

Thanks for this post! I believe this is the first time that the Animal Welfare Fund is giving anonymous grants, but someone can correct me if I'm wrong. I was aware that the EAIF and LTFF are now able to do this, but I wasn't aware that the AWF is now able to do this too.

Thanks! Yeah, that is right, this is the first time. 

Anyway, maybe EA Funds should indicate in their Apply for Funding page and the application form that the AWF will consider funding applications from grantseekers who wish to remain anonymous in public reporting? It currently says th

Definitely! :)

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)

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)

Yes, definitely helps! :)

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)

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

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)

I would say the current focus areas are: 

1. Large-scale and neglected animal populations (for instance, farmed fish and wild animals) 
2. Large-scale and neglected geographies (for instance, China and India) 
3. 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)

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&

> 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

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

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

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 P₀ at 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)

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)

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

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

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! 

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

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:

• Nailing the fundamentals
• Doing the rights things rather than doing any old thing efficiently
• Reflective Practice
• Establishing Productive Habits
• Task Management Systems

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

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)

Some differences here:

• For the counterfactual that someone unknown to me dropped ~$17.5M in the fund only a few weeks out from the payout, I think this round we would have perhaps would have given something like $3M-$4M out. This is because due diligence for larger grants takes longer than only a few weeks for us to do. However, in the round following we would look to do ~2.5-3.5X that $3-4M for something like $7M-$14M next round. 
• Alternatively, if, instead, we knew that 6 months in advance there would be a sum like that (~$20M), then I would imagine w

Thanks, Ben! That all seems fair enough for these purposes. 

Fwiw, I think that number might be more the arithmetic mean of some observations. Interpreting it as a geometric mean seems like it doesn’t strongly violate much, but I think the geometric mean is going to be a little bit lower. 

But yeah, I doubt it makes much of a difference in the scheme of things! 

Thanks again for sharing all this :)  

Thanks for writing this! I found it a really interesting series and kudos to you for sharing earlier-stage thinking publicly. I definitely know that I can find sharing such thinking pretty daunting! 

Small point:

>ACE estimates that the average vegetarian stays vegetarian for 3.9-7.2 years, implying a five-year dropout rate of 53%-77%. 

I think that 3.9-7.2 is their estimate for (i) the average vegetarian adherence length, but you might be interpreting that here as more like (ii) the median length of vegetarian adherence? 

From that ACE repor... (read more)

Here’s a relevant thread from ~5 years ago(!) when some people were briefly discussing points along these lines. I think it illustrates both some similar points and also offers some quick responses to them. 

Please do hit see in context to see some further responses there!

And agree, I would also like to further understand the arguments here :)

Yeah, good point. I think I was counting that within 6. Thanks for drawing attention to that factor specifically!

Sure! Here are some of my quick(ish) thoughts that don’t necessarily represent those of others on the fund:

1. Generally not wanting the fund to be more than ~50% of any group's budget. That could cause over-reliance on the fund, hurt their fundraising efforts with other funders, and possibly disincentivize other funders from contributing to promising groups.
2. Larger groups often do a variety of programs, some of which may be much less impactful. There’s some reason to be wary of funging less impactful programs and that may generally lean on

Thanks for writing this up Saulius! I think it is a really useful addition to the literature on EAA and I could see myself returning to it multiple times in future. You seem good at writing such content! :)

Some thoughts that I had after reading this piece:

- I think there’s a decent chance that if one were to dive deeper into captive invertebrates then this could lead to discoveries of tens of billions of animals that are in captivity that the movement currently largely neglects

- One important point I think worth highlighting about the numbers is th... (read more)

Sorry for my slow reply! I think that I missed the notification for this.

You’re right I accidentally linked the wrong article. IIRC, this was the article that I should have linked. I believe that it outlines the high-moisture twin-screw extrusion method, a method which decades later proved important for the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger.

I hope this helps! Would be curious about any takes you have in this area.

[Fwiw: I previously worked at ACE and now work at Farmed Animal Funders. I'm also on the committee for EA Animal Welfare Fund]

Thanks for writing this, Ben! It is an interesting analysis. Here are some thoughts that I had while reading:

• What could also be interesting would be looking at the concordance/ disconcordance between some of the regranting funds in this area (e.g., EAA fund, EA Animal Welfare Fund, and OWA.)
• What could also be interesting for Open Phil and ACE is comparing and contrasting the funding allocations across the concordant groups.
• S

Thanks for completing this analysis on the advantages and disadvantages of the INT framework! I particularly like you clearly enumerating your points.

I think there are some important points not adequately covered in the alternative INT framework and discussion of cost-effectiveness estimates. Namely:

(1) To a significant extent cause prioritization involves estimating long-term counterfactual impacts

(2) Neglectedness could be instrumental to estimating long-term counterfactual impacts because the more neglected a cause the more potential to translate to greater far future trajectory changes, as opposed to accelerating proximate changes

Really interesting article!

Various approximations of the total number of insect individuals range between 1017-1019 (Williams 1960 , Hölldobler & Wilson (1990), Bar-On et al. (2018)).

I think that 17 and 19 should be exponents :)