I love it, thanks for playing along!

• How did I miss tractability?!? Such a good addition. Seems like I did not see the forest for the trees...
• Neglectedness also seems so obvious! Seems easier to pick low-hanging fruits when there haven't been too many travellers on your road before...
• The Optimizer's Curse is a really nice addition too. I wouldn't say you should avoid those peaks though. Rather: be skeptical of outliers in the terrain and prefer broad mountains over needle-like peaks, esp. when it's foggy.

Thanks Mo! I am no expert on moral uncertainty and how to deal with it, so I'm sure there are much more knowledgeable people than myself to judge. That's also why I don’t want to imply that robustness is the uniquely correct approach. I do like the metaphor of robustness as “directions that are uphill on most maps” and this is the kind of visualisation I hoped the post could spark. I'd be curious to hear more about how different approaches of dealing with moral uncertainty would "aggregate over maps".

Thank you, Vasco!

Thanks Ben. Excited to hear about your research! Please do share that with me/us, as soon as it's ready :)

100% agreed on starting early. And then growing the capacity as fast as we can effectively!

Thanks Maxwell! We're working hard on trying to increase the capacity for the African movement to absorb more of this funding effectively. I hope and think our alumni (like yourself) will play a key part in this!

My vote may be surprising for someone working at @AnimalAdvocacyAfrica. So let me explain:

• I think work in Asia (I am more uncertain about Latin America - so I'll focus on Asia vs. Africa) may be more important overall compared to Africa - because of the reasons mentioned in the post and the sheer magnitude of animal farming there.
• The Asian movement is already significantly larger and more established. Page 17 of Stray Dog Institute's State of the Movement 2024 report shows movement "expenses by the region in which they are spent". Asia receives somewhere around 4-5 times the amount of funding as Africa (hard to disentangle Northern Africa and Western Asia). Spending an additional $500K would only mean something like a 3% increase for the Asian movement, but more like a 10-15% increase for Africa (rough approximations).
• Given its size, the Asian movement is likely better able to effectively absorb significant additional funding and talent - in absolute terms. I don't think the African movement could effectively absorb the kind of funding Asia receives at this point in time.
• In relative terms, things look different. I think the African movement has substantial room for growth and should receive much more attention. Relatively modest absolute amounts in global comparison (like the $500K mentioned above) could go a very long way to grow effective animal advocacy in Africa.
• A simple heuristic, given that I'm very uncertain about the question, could be to aim for similar growth ratios for both movements - at an ambitious rate but one that still allows for resources to be absorbed effectively.

Strongly upvoted!

Being responsible for M&E at a meta organisation myself, we're doing exactly what you wrote: We report the impact we know about. We have a clear internal tracking system. But over the years there have been many instances where we heard about something and said: "Wait a minute, this is huuuge! Why didn't we know about this until now?" And then we reached out to the respective people and tried to better estimate our counterfactual contribution.

There may be better ways to do M&E than we do. But it's hard and proactivity from recipients makes our life much easier.

Thanks for the detailed explanation and really cool to see that you're using ICAPs as well now (we do that same at Animal Advocacy Africa - see our review)!

One question: How would you include the volunteering of one of your co-founders in terms of a cost-effectiveness estimate? I imagine that this leads to an underestimation of your costs and an overestimate of marginal cost-effectiveness (additional funds could not be spent as efficiently, since you cannot add more similar volunteers)? Is this a topic that any funders or evaluators of your work ever raised? (It's a question I'm generally curious about, just thought you may have some unique insights on this due to your situation. Not questioning the cost-effectiveness of your work.)

Thanks for your work, I highly appreciate the community!

Thanks for your interest in our work!

I think the traditional settings are better for animal welfare, though there are huge differences and I've come to realise that traditional vs. intensive is a bit of a false dichotomy (but it's useful for communication purposes). To lay out my perspective in a bit more detail (I am not an animal scientist or anything and more of a generalist researcher who has read some of the work done by Welfare Footprint Project an others, attended some webinars, etc.):

• I assume the worst settings to be the highly intensive settings without any proper regulations (e.g., factory farms in Europe have at least some welfare standards that they need to adhere to, while in many African countries this does not exist which can lead to really bad outcomes). The growth of factory farming in regions without proper regulation worries me a lot.
• Second worst are probably intensive settings with better regulations (e.g., factory farms in the U.S. with enriched cages).
• I also think that traditional/smallholder settings can be quite bad for animals, if their owners do not have the resources to provide proper care for them (e.g., adequate feed, housing, etc.). The upside here is that there usually aren't that many animals farmed in those settings, but the quality of life can be quite bad as well, I think.
• Semi-intensive or somewhat more financially stable forms of smallholder farming seem better. Not sure where you live, but I am thinking about smaller farmers as they still exist in Europe for example, where they are able to provide proper housing, feed, etc. and have not intensified their production as much.
• The best are probably the kind of settings you envision, where farmers have the required resources and intentionally give animals more space and care about their welfare (organic, pasture-raised, etc.). But I imagine this to be more of a Global North phenomenon.

All of these categories are of course still heavy simplifications (e.g., enriched battery cages and deep littre systems for hens could both fall into the better-regulated factory farming settings category). And of course none of this tells us much about which (if any) of these lives are net positive/negative, but we already discussed that :)

You may find the concept of a "animal welfare Kuznetz curve" interesting. Though I'm not sure how strong the evidence behind this is.

Sorry for the long answer, but hope it's relevant/interesting. I think our top priority should be to avoid the worst outcome on this list (the first bullet point), which is what we are trying to do at AAA. Also because the numbers in that category could grow massively (also think about largely unregulated industries such as shrimp or insect farming).

Final point: I think people strongly underestimate the extent to which animal agriculture is already industrialised in parts of Africa (I did so too before digging deeper into this). This 2022 source cites 60% of hens in Africa being kept in cages. There tend to be a lot of smallholder farmers, but they keep quite a small number of animals per capita, so their animal numbers are outweighed by bigger industrial producers.