All of LewisBollard's Comments + Replies

I'm not wild about this campaign either. I've shared this feedback privately with Aidan and Thom, but think there's value to doing so publicly to make clear that EA / the animal movement's moderate wing / FarmKind's funders don't uniformly endorse this approach. (To be clear: I'm writing in my personal capacity and haven't discussed the following with anyone else at Coefficient Giving.)

I'm a huge fan of FarmKind's team. I've personally donated to them and directed funding to them via Coefficient Giving. I thought they did an incredible job during the Dwark... (read more)

Thanks David! That's very kind of you :) And TBC: I wouldn't have skipped the whole newsletter -- just weighing on ideal protein consumption, which was a bit of a digression from the main point. (And I had actually considered just saying something like "I don't know how much protein you should eat, but it doesn't matter because we can't influence it much.")

Totally fair feedback. I agree that I should probably have just argued that the general concept of UPFs is nonsense. My sense is that most of the evidence for the harms of UPFs is correlational and based on studies that look at high consumption of fast food and other junk food that we know is based for you based on high sugar, salt, and caloric levels. (I.e. where you don't need to add UPF to explain why they'd be unhealthy.)

My sense is also that the evidence for food additives like emulsifiers, stabilizers, colorings, and artificial sweeteners posing heal... (read more)

Thanks David. Yeah I agree that something closer to 1.6 gram per kilogram is probably ideal for gaining muscle mass, per what your ChatGPT answers say. But my guess is that most Americans aren't doing the required weights to actually gain muscle mass. And my guess would be that caloric restriction / GLP-1s are surer ways to loss weight. But I'm also far from an expert on any of this, so on reflection I should have just skipped weighing in on this point at all.

Only a relatively smaller number of breeding hens laying ~275 eggs each per year

Yep that's about right. I think it's roughly 7B new male chicks and 7B new female chicks each year. The population of egg-laying hens (~8B) is a big higher than the number of chicks because they each live for a bit longer than a year on average (though that's partly offset by 5-10% annual mortality on egg farms). 

Thanks Manuel! TED will post this on its YouTube channel in the next few weeks. (They stagger out posting talks across the year, and typically post them for a few weeks just on TED.com before they go on YouTube.)

Thanks for doing and publishing this study! It's so helpful to get a clearer picture on this, even if we don't like the answers. As a validation of your findings, in 2015, Chipotle told Vox that sofritas were 3.5% of sales, very close to your 3.8%. 

Thanks Lizka and Ben! I found this post really thought-provoking. I'm curious to better understand the intuition behind discounting the post-AGI paradigm shift impacts to ~0. 

My sense is that there's still a pretty wide continuum of future possible outcomes, under some of which we should predictably expect current policies to endure. To simplify, consider six broad buckets of possible outcomes by the year 2050, applied to your example of whether the McDonald's cage-free policy remains relevant.

1. No physical humans left. We're all mind uploads or somethi

Thank you! I'm not aware of any US certifiers using CCTV, though I know several use unannounced audits to follow up on farms with bad prior audits or allegations of abuse. My sense is that most European certifiers are similar, though I may be wrong.

Sadly both audits and CCTV footage are almost always kept private. My sense is that there's not yet a big enough carrot (i.e. price premium on certified products) or stick (i.e. reputational harm from refusing public CCTV) to push certified farms to agree to this. My guess is it would require a retailer to say "we'll only sell your products if you install CCTV and share the footage." I hope they'll eventually get there. 

Thanks Neil. Good catch, and sorry I'm only replying now -- I hadn't checked the Forum over the break. I assumed that the original article was referring to all cage-free production because:

• The 15% cage-free immediately follows a claim referring to all Brazilian production: “This type of production did not exist in Brazil until 2017. Mantiqueira was the first one. Seven years later, [cage-free] production represents almost 15% of the total."
• The next sentence reads: "We were a driving force." This implies they were a driving force in an industry-wide change,

Thanks for flagging that Hugh. I wavered on whether to include that grant given its inclusion of insect-based protein, which I agree is concerning.

Thankfully most alternative protein grants don't include insects. (And, as CB points out, GFI doesn't include insects in their definition.) But the term is increasingly contested, as insect producers -- with the backing of the pet food and aquaculture industries that are their primary customers -- are pushing for alt protein funds to cover them.

Thanks Fai! Yes I'm trying to express more often the deep appreciation that I feel for the incredible donors and advocates in our space. I'm glad to hear you find it encouraging :)

Hey Lucas, thanks for engaging with the newsletter. A few quick replies:

1. Rethink's 8-20% support in a national poll seems consistent with the 36% result in Denver because (1) Denver is very liberal and very urban, which I expect are the two strongest predictors of support for a ban, (2) as Jason notes below, there are a lot of reasons why people might not want a slaughterhouse in their city, but would oppose banning them nationally, e.g. NIMBYism, (3) a lot of the campaign focused on things unique to this one slaughterhouse, e.g. its uniquely bad animal wel

Great piece, thanks Tyler! I didn't see this before sending out my take on the election results yesterday and, if I had, my take would have been better for it. I agree with most of your analysis, with the exception of this headline conclusion:

I fear the policy landscape for farmed animal protection work is looking more and more bleak.

I think that's true of the EATS Act, which could really hurt state ballot initiative work. But I'm not sure it's true more broadly:

1. I don't think the abolitionist ballot measures did any worse than they would have if brought in

Thanks for the feedback and interesting info! I agree I overstated the importance of 2004-12 R&D. I chose that time period because it felt most comparable to where alt proteins are at, but I should have clarified that earlier R&D was more important.

I based my assessment of the importance of govt R&D policies to reducing solar prices on this IEA analysis -- mostly the graphs showing their assessment that govt R&D policies (both publicly-funding and market-stimulating policies) drove ~two thirds of solar cost-reductions from 1980-2012.

But you... (read more)

Thanks Nick! I agree that "keep it positive" isn't always the right call. In fact, it was very negative footage that first got me to care about factory farming.

My advice was intended for navigating social media algorithms and media editors, who both seem to favor the positive. But I agree the history of social movements suggests you also need to explain the gravity of the issue and elicit outrage.

Thanks Nathan! I like your idea of mapping the key arguments that stop people from helping farm animals. My sense is there are different blocking arguments depending on the ask. For high-welfare meat, I suspect the blockers are:

• "I already buy humane meat" (easy to believe this when most meat is labeled with 'all natural' and other meaningless labels)
• "High welfare meat is too expensive" (true of truly high-welfare, but not necessarily of med-welfare)
• "I have no way of knowing which meat is high welfare" (it's really hard because in most countries the meat in

Things I believe. Though I'm really torn on the Huel vs. Soylent one

Yeah that makes sense. I think you're right that it's plausible that new funding could decrease Open Phil funding in the space. I just think it's low odds, and would only be to a much lower extent than the size of new funding.

Thanks Yves! I'll check out those links and groups. 

Thanks Aidan. I agree that much social change is nonlinear and hard to predict. I also agree that violent opposition preceded some significant social changes, though I'm more inclined to see that as a symptom of the issue having achieved high social salience rather than as a cause of the change.

I studied historic social movements in college and it's been my hobby since, and it's left me wary of extracting general lessons from past movements, since I think they often fit our prior beliefs. For instance, I see in the US civil rights movement a movement that ... (read more)

Thanks Michael. Yeah I agree with those three categories. In practice we support a lot of interventions with much worse short-term cost-effectiveness than cage-free campaigns, in part for information value, in part so we can scale them up if they do work out, and in part for diversification purposes.

Thanks Vasco. On (1) and (2), I think that the grant sizing process is messier than it may seem. So the portion of a group's budget we can be is often a major factor, but not necessarily the limiting one. And I don't think our considerations all boil down to us setting a given target revenue for a group, in large part because we don't want to create a perverse incentive for other funders to not fund groups we do and for our grantees to not fundraise.

On (3), I agree there's some chance that in aggregate your donation will flip a group into a different fundi... (read more)

I think the most likely causes of the decline in plant-based meat sales are:

• A failure to meet consumers' expectations on taste and perceived healthiness. There was a high trial rate with a lot repeat purchase rate.
• A significant turn in the media and popular discussion on plant-based meat from overwhelmingly positive (and high volume) to largely negative (and low volume).
• A reduced willingness to pay the price premium for plant-based meat in a period with higher inflation / a perceived cost-of-living crisis.

I think some good strategies to build career capita... (read more)

I think there's a lot of potential in regulatory reform, though I'm probably more optimistic about its prospects outside the US. E.g. I think DEFRA in the UK or the European Commission are more likely to make meaningful regulatory changes than the USDA.

My top priority US regulatory reform would be to get the USDA to interpret the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act to apply to birds too. Courts have held that its within the USDA's discretion to decide this, but decades of on-and-off advocacy by HSUS and AWI have failed to get them to do so. I do think it's wor... (read more)

Sorry, I can’t share our internal numbers. To date, we haven’t focused on making direct comparisons between GHW and FAW. Instead, we’ve focused on trying to equalize marginal returns within each area and do something more like worldview diversification to determine allocations across GHW, FAW, and Open Philanthropy’s other grantmaking. Luke has written about moral weights in the past, we've commissioned more recent work by Rethink Priorities, and we hope to do more research ourselves in the future -- on moral weights and also on other components of BOTECs ... (read more)

Thanks Rachel. I think there are people trying the kind of holistic systems-change approach you're describing. 

I'm personally skeptical that we have anywhere near the resources to globally destabilize the existing factory farming system. (And I think destabilizing it on a more local basis would have little global impact.) I think the primary drivers of factory farming -- especially the demand for cheap meat -- are so deep-rooted and widespread that they would take immense resources to change.

Instead our focus has mostly been on reducing the suffering ... (read more)

Thanks for the question. I agree that cultural change is important, both for farmed and wild animals. I'm actually thinking about writing a future newsletter on the topic.

Our challenge funding in this area has been identifying funding opportunities that seem likely to influence cultural change on a large scale. As you allude to, it's not clear that a lot of our movement's past efforts at education and awareness-raising have been effective in this goal. And I'm not clear that past movements have achieved this absent a huge organic grassroots movement (civil... (read more)

Yeah both statements are true. The US Better Chicken Commitment lacked a list of approved breeds for many years due to delays at the Global Animal Partnership, which was in turned delayed by a study on breed welfare outcomes at the University of Guelph. My understanding is that a lot of those delays were due to attempts by the Guelph researchers to address concerns from the breeding companies about how to ensure the fairness of the study's methodology. Of course the breeding companies dismissed the study's results -- finding welfare problems wit their fast... (read more)

Whoops, I put this answer under the wrong question. Here it is here. I think Emily’s Forum comment from six months ago remains most relevant here. In particular:

To date, we haven’t focused on making direct comparisons between GHW and FAW. Instead, we’ve focused on trying to equalize marginal returns within each area and do something more like worldview diversification to determine allocations across GHW, FAW, and Open Philanthropy’s other grantmaking. In other words, each of GHW and FAW has its own rough “bar” that an opportunity must clear to be

Thanks Vasco. We actually used to share grantees' applications (with their permission) by default. I suspect you can still find them linked on the older grant pages.

My experience was that this significantly limited the information grantees were willing to share in their application, or forced them to create a second application just for sharing. I was also frustrated at how often these were taken out of context. For example, the meat industry used the Guardian's proposal to us to fund content on factory farming (which we posted) as evidence that the Guardi... (read more)

I agree with Michael that a ban on all fishing, or even just industrial fishing, seems politically infeasible. I think it's possible that an island nation heavily dependent on tourism might do this, but that would probably just increase the catch of unregulated fishing ships outside of their territorial waters. I don't see any path to the world doing this.

The other complication is that a ban on wild-caught fishing might just increase the spread of aquaculture, which is worse for each fish involved. Most wild-caught and farmed fish demand is interchangeable... (read more)

I'm most excited about reforms that can affect the largest numbers of animals, which normally means focusing on political reforms in the largest nations and states where such reforms are feasible. I think the following reforms are currently most feasible:

• Advocating for the next European Commission revives its stalled farm animal welfare legislative revision proposal, and then ensuring its passed by the European Parliament and Council.
• Advocating for key European nations, especially France, Germany, and the UK, to follow through on promised major farm animal

I hope so one day, but I think it's a long way away because there's still so much scope in cage-free and BCC work. In particular, I view the corporate campaign priorities as:

• Completing the EU and US transition to cage-free. They're at ~60% and ~40% cage-free respectively, so there's a lot of work to do to ensure that companies follow through on their cage-free pledges, most of which come due in 2025-26.
• Increasing implementation of existing BCC and ECC commitments. Companies have been slow to implement their broiler welfare policies, especially on breed.&nb

I see lots! Here are the ones that first come to mind:

• Analysis paralysis. I've seen a bunch of philanthropists spend years trying to learn and perfect their strategy before giving any money. I think they'd learn more, and do more good, by viewing giving as an iterative process, where they can give, learn, and strategize simultaneously.
• Wanting to solve every problem at once. I often see philanthropists deride alt proteins because they're still "ultra-processed" or welfare reforms because they don't "change the system." Unfortunately my experience has been t

Interesting question! I think my relationships with grantees has become more formal / professional over the years, and less informal / friendly. I think a few factors drove this:

• Concern about conflicts of interest, or the perception of them, from being too friendly with any group (I now recuse myself from grant renewal consideration for groups where I'm friends with the leaders).
• Relatedly, not wanting to be perceived as having personal favorites, especially given it's easier for US advocates to become friends with me than advocates in other countries.
• Not h

Interesting question! I think we've learned a lot over the years, though this is still far from a science. I think the key factors that we now weigh more heavily than we used to are:

• Organizational and intervention track record. We've always cared about this, but have come to care even more so as we've seen how often past performance predicts future success.
• The presence of feedback loops, or our ability to create them. We've been surprised how how hard it can be to tell if a grant is actually achieving anything, especially if it has a long-term theory of ch

I'm excited about the growing field of the economics of animal welfare, including research papers like the two you mentioned. I'm not sure the field will play a significant role in increasing the spending on animal welfare interventions (though curious to hear how you see that happening). But I see a number of important other roles it can play:

• Influencing public policy, by allowing the integrating of animal welfare benefits into cost-benefit analysis. I've seen a number of animal welfare regulatory proposals be stopped in part because regulators assigned z

I'm excited to see governments spending more on alternative protein research and farm animal welfare improvements. I agree that accelerating this work is a priority.

On alternative proteins, I wrote a little while back about public support for alt protein R&D and how we can accelerate it. We're supporting groups like the Good Food Institute, Food Frontier, and Danish Vegetarian Foundation to do so.

On animal welfare, I'm excited to see the EU and some European governments (e.g. Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, UK) considering funding farmers to adopt highe... (read more)

We haven’t funded much work around this because we haven’t yet found many interventions that we’re confident are tractable at scale. Traditionally, groups like The Humane League and Mercy for Animals did this (both the videos and the A/B testing), but I think they’ve largely dropped it.

My best bet for a group doing this today would be One Step for Animals. I appreciate their narrow focus on online videos to build concern for chickens, and their thoughtfulness with A/B testing and strategic placements. (One Step is not an OP grantee, but I personally donate to them.)

Our farm animal welfare grantmaking is, by total spend, 37% in Europe, 29% in the US, 24% in Asia, and 9% everywhere else. This represents a tradeoff between scale and tractability. In general we have a much lower bar for funding work outside Europe and the US, especially in the largest Asian countries, because we think their scale justifies long-term investments. But because those countries are currently much harder to achieve change in, that work actually looks less cost-effective than our EU and US funding, which has proven much more tractable. We’re st... (read more)

I see a few major challenges:

• Weak demand for plant-based meat. We’re funding advocacy to significantly increase public funding of alt protein R&D, to produce better and cheaper products, which we hope will boost demand.
• Corporations delaying implementing their animal welfare policies. We’re funding additional advocacy to hold companies accountable for their commitments, including through shareholder advocacy.
• The European Commission shelving its proposed farm animal welfare legislative revision. We’re funding advocates across Europe to represent the inte

This is a challenging question, since new interventions in our space typically lack any good data on cost-effectiveness. But in general I’d set a much lower bar than ~10X cage-free campaigns. Instead I think a promising intervention is worth trying if it has an expected value at least as good as cage-free campaigns. E.g. If we think there’s a 50% chance a new intervention will fail and a 50% chance it will be 2X cage-free campaigns, I think it’s worth a shot.

I think this is a fair criticism. For now, I think the costs to longer write-ups outweigh the benefits. I see the costs primarily as:

• The time to write something longer and align with the grantee on acceptable language
• The reduced willingness of groups to share confidential info with us if they know it will end up online
• The risk that people will take our analysis out of context, e.g. making confident statements based on rough cost-effectiveness analyses

The benefit also feels limited given my sense is that few people would read these write-ups, and most would... (read more)

There are two separate funging worries here. First, will donating more to THL mean that OP gives less to THL? Answer: probably not, for a few reasons. (1) One factor limiting our funding for THL and other groups is how much of their budget we're both comfortable with OP being. So donating to them could actually increase our giving by lowering our portion (though see next point that any additional funds will come from elsewhere within the farm animal welfare budget). (2) Room for more funding / neglect is only one consideration in our grant sizing for group... (read more)

In no particular order:

• Double down on what works. Our most successful grants have mostly been cases where we scaled up an already successful campaign or program.
• Focus on tractability. Many projects are focused on large-scale and neglected problems. The distinguishing factor in which ones help many animals is typically how tractable the space they’re operating in is.
• Align on clear goals. Early on we had a number of grants where we disagreed with the grantee on how well things had gone. We’ve found that aligning on specific and measurable goals upfront keeps

Fun question! Here’s a rough hierarchy, with my most optimistic up top. Note that these are averages globally, and some approaches might be much more promising in certain countries, or when done by certain groups.

Corporate animal welfare campaigns
Alternative proteins
Farm animal welfare technologies and innovations
Movement-building in LMICs
Legislative animal welfare advocacy
Movement-building in rich countries
Institutional meat reduction
Litigation for farmed animals
Persuading people to be vegan
Holistic food systems reform
Farm transitions

Of course there are lots of other interventions being tried! Let me know if you want my thoughts on any others.

I think journalism can help farmed animals by reporting regularly on their plight. For an upcoming newsletter, we tracked the number of news articles on factory farming related topics (e.g. farm animal cruelty) against articles on climate change, over the last decade. While both numbers rose, the number of articles on climate change rose at a much faster rate. I think the lack of media coverage of factory farming contributes to political and public apathy on the issue.

I’d especially like to see articles or investigations into the actions of specific corpor... (read more)

• I’ve become more excited about the prospects of investor advocacy to secure corporate animal welfare progress, thanks mostly to the work of The Accountability Board.
• I’ve become more optimistic about the prospects of climate funders supporting alt protein advocacy and research, thanks to the recent entry of several major climate funders into the space.
• I’ve become more pessimistic about legislative reform, after seeing industry successfully defeat or stall popular farm animal welfare reforms in the EU and the UK.
• I’ve become more pessimistic about the likely