All of ClimateDoc's Comments + Replies

We ourselves raised £30k seed funding for our org from someone who owned a dairy farm. He was looking for an org with a bold, abolitionist strategy.

I read that as saying that this dairy farm owner wanted to support a campaign to abolish use of animals by humans - is that right? Surprising if so! I wonder how they square that with owning the farm.

Thanks for posting an update about the outcomes and your reflections. It sounds like the right lesson that it would be good to consult more widely in the movement before trying similarly risky approaches.

I just wanted to ask a somewhat technical question about the estimate of the amount raised:

We estimated donations attributable to this campaign by looking at donations that (a) occurred after the first news coverage and before January 18th, (b) came from donor who had never donated through our platform before, (c) weren’t attributable to any other source [

There hasn't been backlash to this campaign from average people, only EAs and animal advocates.

I think non-EA animal advocates count as being part of the general public in Nick's usage? From what I've seen it's been going down badly with them so far...

Thanks for engaging Aidan. Things may be clearer once we see any follow up I guess, but this strategy seems like it could come across as duplicitous, and rather risky not just for the organisations involved but also the wider EA movement, given the desire to seem trustworthy after the events of the past couple of years.

Thanks Thom for responding. I wasn't actually aware of who FarmKind were when I wrote my post above. It looks like a very good project overall, thanks for your work in the space.

Your response doesn't answer for me the question of why it was decided to create such an anti-vegan campaign (at least in its webpage). I can see there could be a lot of good done by persuading people who are unlikely to try a vegan diet to donate. But something along the lines of "If you don't want to be vegan but want to help animals, try this instead" or even "If you hate Veganu... (read more)

I doesn't seem "lighthearted" to me - it seems quite serious. OK, the browser "game" is quite silly. But if it's meant to be lighthearted then that seems to have not come across to quite a lot of people... Trying to appeal to people who don't want to adopt a vegan diet is fine, but I don't think attacking another group's effort and the idea of veganism in general is.

It doesn't really seem honest to me. It ignores all the experiences of people who didn't find it particularly problematic or even positive to do Veganuary.

Encouraging such donations could be good, and advocating for diet change doesn't seem to be favoured in EA. Advocating a "moral offsetting" approach to meat consumption is probably controversial I guess, but within realms of the plausibly reasonable. There doesn't seem to be anything gained by being negative about veganism though, and not doing that would seem robustly better.

Edit - perhaps it could be argued that a campaign against veganism may more effectively raise attention than if no criticism were made. That would still seem to me to be an excessivel... (read more)

There is a new "Forget Veganuary" campaign, apparently part-funded by the EA Animal Welfare Fund: 
https://www.forgetveganuary.com/
https://www.farmkind.giving/about-us/who#transparency (the "Transparency" link on the campaign page)

Reddit link to news article that calls this a "meat-eating campaign" and discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1px018m/veganuary_champion_quits_to_run_meateating/ 

The idea seems to be to promote a message to not give up animal products, but rather donate to organisations that effectively campaign to... (read more)

What do you think it is about going vegan that would prevent you from donating more? I'm still not sure of the causal link.

Out of interest, what is it you consider so effortful about becoming vegan that it would so substantially reduce the effort you could put towards other causes? Do you think it is knock-on effects of enjoying food less, effort required to learn to change your meals, effects from finding it harder socially, or something else?

The actual effort to change to a vegan diet isn't that high in my view, at least if you have access to a decent supermarket (having done it) - it's just learning to make some different foods and remembering to buy some multivitamins once... (read more)

I think there are at least two relevant aspects here - the impact of ceasing insect farming and the question of which policies should be supported.

On the impact of ceasing insect farming, a consideration that it's not clear to me has been taken into account is what the land would be used for if not for growing food for insects - it wouldn't necessarily become wild, rather it could be used to grow other crops, and thereby have no large effect on wild animal welfare. Rates of deforestation seem to indicate there is plenty of demand for arable land. Also, bio... (read more)

It sounds like the benefit under this argument comes from reducing wild land. You could do that without causing lots of other insects (or other farmed animals) to suffer e.g. grow crops and burn them for energy instead, or manage the land to keep insect numbers down. So I don't find this argument very persuasive that we should think of this as a positive benefit to intensive farming of insects or other animals, even supposing that insects (or other animals) have overall negative lives in the wild. Perhaps this isn't the right location to discuss this in depth, though.

Relevant news article from today, on a report saying people are unlikely to be willing to eat insects - just thought I'd share: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/25/eating-insects-meat-planet

One of the main points of the article is that insect farming is bad for insect welfare, so Vasco's comment seems on-topic enough for me. Maybe the link to that part of the argument could have been stated more clearly.

Maybe it seems repetitive if you see such comments a lot, but then it suggests that main posts are repeatedly neglecting the argument. Perhaps it would be better for main posts just to point out that this argument exists in their caveats and link to a discussion somewhere. If it might change the whole sign of whether something is good or bad, ... (read more)

I had a look, it seems to presume the AI-owners will control all the resources, but this doesn't seem like a given (though it may pan out that way). 

I realise you said you didn't want to debate these assumptions, but just wanted to point out that the picture painted doesn't seem inevitable.

I don't really follow why one set of entities getting AGI and not sharing it should necessarily lead to widespread destitution.

Suppose A, B and C are currently working and trading between each other. A develops AGI and leaves B and C to themselves. Would B and C now just starve? Why would that necessarily happen? If they are still able to work as before, they can do that and trade with each other. They would become a bit poorer due to needing to replace the goods that A had a comparative advantage in producing I guess.

For B and C to be made destitute direc... (read more)

Are there roles in your current organisation that you think would be more enjoyable and could move into, say more at the level of making direct contributions?

Also, have you very thoroughly thought through the risks of retiring on $700k? I've seen in various discussions that it's common for people to think that a 4% withdrawal rate is likely sustainable to enable early retirement with low risk, but there are various reasons why that's probably optimistic, so just thought I'd flag it in case that's what this is based on. Maybe it's not...

My understanding of these "reasoning" approaches is that they seem to work very well on problems where there is a well-defined correct answer, and where that can be automatically verified. And it seems reasonable to expect much progress in that area.

What is the thinking of how much of human reasoning work is to do with problems like these?

As a counter-example, in my own particular work on climate prediction, we do not get rapid feedback about what works well, and it is contested what methods and frameworks we should even use i.e. it's not possible presentl... (read more)

It's not clear to me why the aim ought to be to sample randomly amongst all people - it seems like a different population could reasonably be chosen!

Sounds interesting. I had a go at the tool, but was a bit perplexed that the "lottery story" it showed me was for a Romanian earning $2,500/month, which doesn't seem like the kind of life that people's attention needs to be most drawn to or represents people that would be helped by effective development charities (it even says this person is at the 86th percentile of global income). And then below that it talked about ending hunger, eradicating disease etc., which didn't relate to the story. I'd focus it on stories about the kinds of people that effective charities would actually help. I tried to get it to generate another story to see what else comes up, but it wouldn't.

I guess it's hard to know without being in Mill's head. Though from what I've read it doesn't sound like he ever really wavered from favouring Britain having India as a colony.

I think this is an interesting analysis, but as others have indicated it could be better to frame this in terms of something like how these potential harms from saving human lives could be offset by donations to animal welfare charities, say.

Well, everyone will have their own emotional journey - not everyone with motivations to do good will have an experience like Mill's! But the point to not make improving social welfare the sole target and to have alternative sources of satisfaction seems to me quite common in discussions around EA and mental health, at least for those who do have difficulties.

I came across this extract from John Stuart Mill's autobiography on his experience of a period when he became depressed and lost motivation in his goal of improving society. It sounded similar to what I hear from time to time of EAs finding it difficult to maintain motivation and happiness alongside altruism, and thought some choice quotes would be interesting to share. Mill's solution was finding pleasure in other pursuits, particularly poetry.

Mill writes that his episode started in 1826, when he was 20 years old - but he had already been a keen utilitari... (read more)

Whilst I salute the effort and progress here, this post does seem rather full of spin, given that from what I can tell the court ruling was against the animal advocates. I'd rather see posts that present the facts more clearly.

They seem to say so in their intro video on this page: https://extinctionrebellion.uk/the-truth/the-emergency/. OK they say due to climate and ecological destruction, but it doesn't really matter for this. The point is just that disagreeing with experts doesn't generally seem to prevent an organisation from becoming "successful". (Plenty of examples outside climate too.)

It seems to be a big part in the UK cf Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil.

One of the advantages of the climate protest movements is that they have a wealth of scientific work to point to for credibility.

Scientific work doesn't give particular support for the idea that climate change will create a substantial extinction risk though, and that doesn't stop the activists there. I'm not saying you're wrong or the OP's approach is justified, but public perceptions of activist groups' reasonableness seems only loosely linked to expert views (I've not seen much evidence of the "then they can go on to check what experts think" bit happening much).

The Humane League is what comes to mind - searching for them in the forum may bring up recent estimates of their cost effectiveness - I don't know offhand.

But I thought I'd also say sorry you weren't offered a meal respecting your ethical choice - it seems like an extraordinary thing to happen today (depending on where you are in the world).

I thought I'd follow up on how I wrote a will leaving money to EA charities, following my previous question about it here. I ended up drafting a will myself and haven't yet had it checked by a solicitor. I've gone down this route as I'm still youngish and so having some probability of the will failing does not seem like something worth spending hundreds of pounds to avoid at present - if I were 20 years older, I may have considered that worth it. For context I'm resident in England, and these steps are not necessarily good to follow in other countries - I ... (read more)

Are there any good research articles that do a decent job of isolating the role of reducing mortality rates? Review articles would be particularly useful.

Here's a link to the GiveWell-commissioned research that I have: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3635855 .

There was some Givewell-commissioned research that did find that saving lives likely leads to future population increases. I imagine there's a fair amount of uncertainty, but it seemed to be the best information available at the time I was looking into this a few years ago. I could dig it up if it's of interest and difficult to find.

Even if the current population isn't consuming much factory-farmed meat, if it's children's lives being saved, the amount they consume over the next half century or so may be substantial as the countries develop and adopt more industrialised food production. Also, saving lives today seems likely to increase population in future (I recall a GiveWell-commissioned study on this), so potentially leading to greater factory-farmed meat consumption.

I came across this account of working as an IPCC author and drafting the SPM by a philosopher who was involved in the 5th IPCC report, which provides some insight: link to pdf - see from p.7. @jackva   

Yeah I think that it's just that, to me at least, "politicized" has strong connotations of a process being captured by a particular non-broad political constituency or where the outcomes are closely related to alignment with certain political groups or similar. The term "political", as in "the IPCC SPMs are political documents", seems not to give such an impression. "Value-laden" is perhaps another possibility. The article you link to also seems to use "political" to refer to IPCC processes rather than "politicized" - it's a subtle difference but there you... (read more)

Whilst policymakers have a substantial role in drafting the SPM, I've not generally heard scientists complain about political interference in writing it. Some heavy fossil fuel-producing countries have tried removing text they don't like, but didn't come close to succeeding. The SPM has to be based on the underlying report, so there's quite a bit of constraint. I don't see anything to suggest the SPM differs substantially from researchers' consensus. The initial drafts by scientists should be available online, so it could be checked what changes were made ... (read more)

"IPCC reports are famously politicized documents"

Why do you say that? It's not my impression when it comes to physical changes and impacts. (Not so sure about the economics and mitigation side.)

Though I find the "burning embers" diagrams like the one you show hard to interpret as what "high" risk/impact means doesn't seem well-defined and it's not clear to me it's being kept consistent between reports (though most others seem to love them for some reason...).

Thanks. OK, so currently the situation is one of arguing for legislation to be proposed rather than there being anything to vote on yet?

Are there particular "key legislative changes" that this could help achieve, or are they hypothetical at present?

"At a certain point, we just have to trust the peer-review process"

Coming here late, found it an interesting comment overall, but just thought I'd say something re interpreting the peer reviewed literature as an academic, as I think people often misunderstand what peer review does. It's pretty weak and you don't just trust what comes out! Instead, look for consistent results being produced by at least a few independent groups, without there being contradictory research (researchers will rarely publish replications of results, but if a set of results don't ... (read more)

A very interesting summary, thanks.

However I'd like to echo Richard Chappell's unease at the praising of the use of short-term contracts in the report. These likely cause a lot of mental health problems and will dissuade people who might have a lot to contribute but can't cope with worrying about whether they will need to find a new job or even career in a couple of years' time. It could be read as a way of avoiding dealing with university processes for firing people - but then the lesson for future organisations may be to set up outside a university structure, and have a sensible degree of job security.

Thanks, it's good to know it's had input from multiple knowledgable people. I agree that this looks like a good thing even if it's implemented imperfectly!

Thanks for putting together the doc.

For the suggested responses, are they informed by expertise or based on a personal view? This would be useful to know where I'm not sure about them. E.g. for the question on including images, I wondered if they could be misleading if they show animals (as disease and other health problems aren't very visible, perhaps leading people to erroneously think "those animals look OK to me" or similar).

I also wonder if there's a risk from this that products get labelled as "high" welfare when the animals still suffer overall, red... (read more)

the second most upvoted comment (27 karma right now) takes me to task for saying that "most experts are deeply skeptical of Ord’s claim"  (1/30 existential biorisk in the next 100 years).

I take that to be uncontroversial. Would you be willing to say so?

I asked because I'm interested - what makes you think most experts don't think biorisk is such a big threat, beyond a couple of papers?

I guess it depends on what the "correct direction" is thought to be. From the reasoning quoted in my first post, it could be the case that as the study result becomes larger the posterior expectation should actually reduce. It's not inconceivable that as we saw the estimate go to infinity, we should start reasoning that the study is so ridiculous as to be uninformative and so not the posterior update becomes smaller. But I don't know. What you say seems to suggest that Bayesian reasoning could only do that for rather specific choices of likelihood functions, which is interesting.

It's a potential solution, but I think it requires the prior to decrease quickly enough with increasing cost effectiveness, and this isn't guaranteed. So I'm wondering is there any analysis to show that the methods being used are actually robust to this problem e.g. exploring sensitivity to how answers would look if the deworming RCT results had been higher or lower and that they change sensibly? 

A document that looks to give more info on the method used for deworming looks to be here, so perhaps that can be built on - but from a quick look it doesn't... (read more)

Hmm it's not very clear to me that it would be effective at addressing the problem - it seems a bit abstract as described. And addressing Pascal's mugging issues seems like it potentially requires modifying how cost effectiveness estimates are done ie modifying one component of the "cluster" rather than it just being a cluster vs sequence thinking matter. It would be good to hear more about how this kind of thinking is influencing decisions about giving grants in actual cases like deworming if it is being used.

Something I've wondered is whether GiveWell has looked at whether its methods are robust against "Pascal's mugging" type situations, where a very high estimate of expected value of an intervention leads to it being chosen even when it seems very implausible a priori. The deworming case seems to fit this mould to me somewhat - an RCT finding a high expected impact despite no clear large near term health benefits and no reason to think there's another mechanism to getting income improvements (as I understand it) does seem a bit like the hypothetical mugger p... (read more)

What good solutions are there for EAs leaving money to charity in wills, in terms of getting them legally correct but not incurring large costs?

I've found this 2014 forum post that looks to have good info but many of the links no longer work - for example, it has a broken link to a form for getting a free will - does a resource like that still exist somewhere?

There's also the GWWC bequests page. When I tried their "tool", it directed me to an organisation called FareWill - has anyone used them and found it to give a good result?

I get the impression that th... (read more)