Hi David, thanks for engaging! Responding to your questions below.
In terms of the present funding allocation, it is much more focused on farmed than wild animals. An important factor contributing to that is there are very few opportunities that we can support on the wild animal side at this point. The promising opportunities for wild animals that exist now receive funding from us and are some of our bigger grantees. But there’s only so far we can go with research there, and we haven’t yet identified some promising wild animal welfare intervention that groups could implement. That contributes to there being significantly ...
Thanks for the question, Vasco :)
It is possible to donate specifically to a single area of RP?
Yes. Donors can restrict their donations to RP. When making the donation, the donor should just mention what restriction is on the donation, and then we will restrict those funds for only that use in our accounting.
If yes, to which extend would the donation be fungible with donations to other areas?
The only way this would be fungible is if it changes how we allocate unrestricted money. Based on our current plans, this would not happen for donations to our an...
Is AWF considering hiring a fundraiser to help fill this funding gap?
No, not considering hiring for strictly a fundraiser at this point. However, we are interested in adding other positions that could contribute to fundraising (as well importantly contribute in other ways).
Specifically as mentioned in the post:
We also have some plans for significant growth next year through some internal expansion plans in the works (e.g., possibly adding further fund managers, hopefully at least one who is full-time, and doing more active grantmaking).
To that ...
Sadly, I don't think that approach is correct. The 5th percentile of a product of random variables is not the product of the 5th percentiles---in fact, in general, it's going to be a product of much higher percentiles (20+).
As something of an aside, I think this general point was demonstrated and visualised well here.
Disclaimer: I work RP so may be biased.
This is already here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KhptcGeYBuhFRoBjA/lying-is-cowardice-not-strategy-1
It still depends somewhat on how fundraising goes, but it's pretty likely in 2024 Rethink Priorities budget (excluding a number of groups that we fiscally sponsor) will be around $11M.
I think that the specific extrapolation of our budget completed here was importantly off because we did a number of hires over the course of 2022, so the reported spend for that year didn't fully capture total recurring costs of the new headcount (as those new hires started at various points throughout that year).
Thanks for your engagement!
Yes, for instance, as mentioned in the appendix, some non-fictitious examples for Global Health and Development are:
...We produced numerous research reports for Open Phil assessing the potential of global health and development interventions, looking for interventions that could be as or more cost-effective as the ones currently ranked top by GiveWell. This included full reports on the following:
- The effectiveness of large cash prizes in spurring innovation (the report was also shared with FTX Future Fund, and anothe
Interesting point and thanks for raising, Saulius. :)
That specific grant actually hasn’t been made yet. Though we approved of it, I believe it’s waiting on the university to finalize something before the funds are allocated. So, I am going to strike it from the list of grants at the top of the report (I was meant to do this before but forgot to do this even though I removed it from the paragraphs of the payout report, my apologies).
To further address your point though, I think the counterfactuals here are tricky to think about and I wouldn’t confidently cl...
Good flag! :)
Fwiw, looks like rerunning the analysis with the relative bounds on chicken moral worth being a ten-billionth to a thousandth of a human, rather than a twenty thousandth to 10 humans, still outputs a mean cost-effectiveness ratio of CCCW to MIF of ~1.3.
So though it is a pretty significant factor, choosing different values there seems unlikely by themselves to directionally change the output.
I also don't think that the expected moral weight of more than twice that of a human is that intrinsic to Muehlhauser numbers. See...
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:
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 ...
> 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% ...
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...
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
Somewhat building on one that is currently mentioned on the page. Advocates have secured thousands of corporate pledges for cage-free eggs globally since 2015. That’s built global pressure for legislation, e.g. the European Commission, UK governments, and various US states have cited corporate progress as a major motivator for them to act. (I think as of latest figures about ~100M (?) US hens were cage-free vs. about 20M in 2015, when the campaigns started ramping up.) In the US, the cage-free flock size has dramatically increased in size these past few years. See, e.g., p.4.
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,...
Sure.
Very quickly, here are a few ideas/interventions that seem interesting to me:
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...
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:
However, I think the bottleneck here may be more about finding talented p...
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...
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...
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:
In terms of challenges, quick thoughts:
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...
I would say the current focus areas are:
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...
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 ...
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:
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:
In terms of lessons learned, I would quickly say:
> 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:
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:
Thanks, Max! :)
There certainly are. Here’s what we listed in our RFP:
We’d be interested in hearing from you if:
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,...
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...
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...
Great question! Multi-decade forecasts are hard, so take all these quick thoughts with some salt :)
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:
On THL UK and OBRAZ being exceptions, briefly, a few thoughts:
THL UK:
Sure. Before doing that a couple of quick notes. First, I think it takes a while for grants to mature and impact to play out, so that makes it difficult to judge at this point which were the biggest hits from the past year. Second, there are some grants that I have a COI with, but think may have been hits from 2022, but nonetheless won’t list them here. Third, as some further background context, the general categories of grants that I am most excited by are early-stage support to aligned groups, working on neglected animals, or in neglected places.
Th... (read more)