All of Ula Zarosa's Comments + Replies

Hi Grace, as you know, I think this is really great video, and I think you lead it super well, and I would gladly watch more content with you like this. I was wondering if you are at liberty to share the cost of making this video - it looks very good, professional, great image, and audio quality. And if not too much trouble, I am assuming this is part of the bigger campaign - including ads etc. I would be curious after you run it, if you will be able to share learnings. I think at EA, we shy away a bit from creating public-engaging content and big social m... (read more)

Sorry, I don't have time to read the article, is Anima International not building something like this already?

Thank you Joy, this means a lot to the whole CE Team <3 

Thank you for posting this, Joey. I think people too often talk about things like this in the abstract, not knowing the realities of the market. Two considerations I have when considering salary:

1. Counterfactuals: Money, at the end of the day, is a limited resource. When considering the counterfactuals, I personally would feel unethical accepting a super high salary from CE, as I think the counterfactual of this money would be, e.g., one less high-impact organization being founded. In the early days, some of our charities started with just $25K-$50K grants;

This is super exciting and very much needed. Farmed animal welfare is still super neglected, funding is far too small, and there are not enough EAs working on this cause area. Hopefully, we all can help in getting this book a lot of hype, so maybe it will even inspire new people to join the movement. 
 

A very promising intervention and I am so excited that you decided to found it (I am also very biased as I work for CE :) ). Thanks for taking the challenge and I wish you a quick success! With your combined experience and high focus on impact, I am really hoping you will change the import situation not only in New Zeland. Best of luck!

I asked ChatGPT about this: 
"In general, a country within the European Union (EU) cannot unilaterally ban a specific type of food that has been approved for sale and consumption in the EU. EU food regulations are set at the EU level and are designed to create a single market for food products, with a high level of protection for human health and consumer interests.

However, there are some limited circumstances in which a country may be able to restrict or ban certain types of food within its borders. For example, if a specific food product poses a sign... (read more)

We discussed the episode with David yesterday at our meetup and we really loved it. A lot of people agree with some of his views, and we were trying to draw some conclusions on the next steps for the animal movement. Super useful! Therefore, can't wait for the next episode. Hopefully coming soon? :) Thanks for doing it <3 
Also: love the name, love the branding!!!
 

@Ren Springlea I asked my best friend who has 20+ tattoos and two children about her experience of pain (also inspired by @Molly 's comment).  This is what she wrote: 

"Having had many tattoos, some of them several hours long and having given birth twice as well as having experienced intense contractions following a termination of a pregnancy, I would not even attempt to compare these pains as they are on an entirely different scale.

I have tattoos over all parts of my body, including areas widely thought of as incredibly painful and I had many a s... (read more)

Probably one of the coolest things I have ever read on the EA forum. Thank you so much, Ren! I was looking for something like this for years now. I always had this thought: how would it be if we treated animal suffering seriously? If we see them as humans for a bit. The conclusion was always: we will devote our lives, freedom, time, and strength to help them on a totally different level than we do now.

This post helped me see the suffering of animals much better than I have ever seen it before while reading hundreds of articles about their experiences. This... (read more)

Already in our content calendar :) 

Thank you for your comment, Nick. I used the word "reach" because it is difficult to objectively measure the impact of some of our charities, given their age. We wanted to give people a sense of their current progress despite this. Reach can also give a sense of the potential scale of the intervention. We also tried to include some estimated cost effectiveness to show the sense of level of impact per dollar. However, overall we do agree with the general sentiment that, sadly, people tend to look at more vanity level metrics like reach, funding, etc. Of cou... (read more)

Thank you for your comment, Yadav.
Regarding success rates, we expect the net impact per charity to generally improve because both our program and outreach have gotten stronger. This improvement could still happen even with the overall success rate of our charities decreasing, with more charities shutting down but more charities having large wins, especially in policy. Over time, we expect some of our charities to shut down, with our general estimate being that one in five will.

Regarding cost-effective ideas, we recognize this as a legitimate concern and so... (read more)

P.S. I am also very excited to see the first organization working on insects, especially coming from an evidence-based and cost-effective framework. 

Are you assuming that the insect industry will grow rapidly and that your organization has chosen to work exclusively with the industry/governments/policymakers to ensure the highest possible animal welfare standards? I'm curious to know if you have researched alternative intervention strategies before deciding on this particular approach. Is it safe to assume that this trend is inevitable, and that it's impossible to halt the industry's growth by launching campaigns targeting people's aversion to insects as a food source (or similar)? So have you explored methods to stop this practice altogether, or are you from the get-go primarily focused on animal welfare?

Looks amazing. Thank you so much! 

After careful consideration, we added one more idea to the list above: An organization that aims to reduce stock-outs of contraceptives and other essential medicines by improving the way they are delivered and managed within public health facilities. To learn more please check the longer description above. 
You can start this intervention through our July-August 2023 Incubation Program as well. The deadline for applications is March 12, 2023, and you can apply here: https://bit.ly/IP2023Apply

It would be amazing if you keep on working on farmed animals. Your work on it so far was extremely helpful and partially lead to the creation of some cost-effective charities. The field is also extremely talent-constrained, and I want to cry whenever I hear "I was into animals but now I want to work on AI" at EA conferences. I know you can still change your mind but just want to say, that counterfactually it seems to me that you are much more needed on the farmed animals side than you will ever be on the x-risk reduction. 

Hey, I wonder if there is a way to make this post, or posts like this, easier to read in the future. My friend suggested Chat GPT3, and it worked quite well, helping me understand what is written here. I wonder if maybe in future publications you can trial it out, and then do a little summary for people that don't work with scientific studies/ statistics/ whatever it is, that makes it hard to understand with a quick read. It's not a criticism, it's just a suggestion, but I think from now on I will use chat GPT3 as a helpful tool :) 

Thank you so much for the curation!  I have added the information about using the same form (https://bit.ly/IP2023Apply)  to apply for the February-March 2024 Incubation Program. 

We give the possibility to apply early because there is a significant number of applicants who are cause-neutral (they focus more on the high-impact career path than on a specific intervention). There are also applicants that know they want to focus on a specific cause area, but they trust the CE research team to pick the best intervention in that cause area. 
M... (read more)

Hi Miguel, I forgot to remove this idea from the form (it's now updated). It's an idea from our "maybe" list that we're still considering but we have not made a final decision on it yet (hence it's not on the list above). 

@Lizka  I want to suggest this post for curation and definitely putting it back on the Front Page :)  I think someone by mistake tagged it as "Community" while it is extremely valuable content that should be at the Front Page. 

The animal movement would tremendously benefit from M&E consultations or even a separate organization that will help create M&E plans and give people the know-how to do it in-house. 

I scrolled the comments to write exactly the same comment as Judith :) Basically wanted to ask authors to take e.g. plant-based campaign (e.g. replacing meat meals with vegan meals in canteens or something more difficult even) and show how one can go about it. So sort of step-by-step M&E guide. That would be super valuable I think. 

Another appreciation goes to @James Ozden for basically everything he posts in the EA forum. I highly appreciate his work for animals and his participation in numerous discussions here.  

I am upvoting because I am observing Andrew Skowron's and fellow activist investigators' work for years now, and they are extremely dedicated, super hard-working, and created a lot of press coverage for animals through their work! This is not yet well-measured work, but I think at some point EA will come up with better systems of measuring impact for animals, and this kind of work might play a big role in e.g. policy changes (fur-free campaigns that are heavily based on video footage).

Yep, I can appreciate the span of 22 years of veganism, and now live in London, where I can go to any random pub and get vegan options. There is also an amazing plant-based boom happening in my country - Poland, so I am joining this gratefulness! :) 

I am super grateful to @OllieBase for EAGxes. I participated in 3 events last year: Prague, Berlin, and Rotterdam, and they were all really great! All of them were very welcoming, the people I met were great, and the events were run smoothly.  As a person working specifically in outreach, I highly appreciate how helpful Ollie has been to our team, and how his kind attitude translates to other organizers. Grateful also to them, for all their hard work and making participation effortless for us. Big hugs!!!

I am joining you with appreciation for Shrimp Welfare Project. I work for CE so I am biased but I am also an animal activist for 22 years now, and I think it's incredible how quickly this charity moved from concept to potential impact. Just signing an agreement that will make them reach 125 million animals per year is incredible: https://www.shrimpwelfareproject.org/post/mou-with-mer-seafood
They have further collaborations in progress. It will be probably the first organization ever to impact billions of animals in a short time span (the org was just launched in September 2021 :) 
 

As usual, I recommend checking our participants video about their experience in the program: 

Would love to see the draft calculations from point 4 as well.

I was pretty sure this was written by Brain Tomasik, until he was mentioned in the text :) 
Very mindblowing piece, thanks to the author! 

Great idea!

Great post, I will also be looking into Michael St Jules comments. Would love to see response from Animal Ask who I think did some thinking on the topic. 
Do you plan to suspend or evaluate other campaigns, where the impact is not clear-cut (e.g. Jasna Strona Mocy, maybe others)? Can this be interpreted as Anima moving into an even more effectiveness-focused direction?

I don't agree with that, Karolina. There are dozens of EA terms that were so far extremely poorly translated to Polish; even "doing the most good" is very problematic in translation to Polish. I think for Polish, we need a professional translator, like Elżbieta de Lazari (Peter Singer's translator), who will tackle classic EA terms, because, when translated literally, they sound horrible and make the EA language very awkward and unappealing. I already saw many EA Poland group translations that sounded quite poorly. It was very clear to me that a translator... (read more)

1. Training seems to me like a good idea, if it can be online (to a large group - e.g. all organizers) very specific, so as you mentioned: if this situation occurs -> do this (e.g. if a person reports mistreatment of this sort, we do XYZ),  free, and mandatory, it could be very helpful. 
2. The centralized page or e.g., an add-on/button in Swapcard.
3. It should be announced in the intro speech who these designated people are (it should be 1 male and 1 female member), and I saw a great idea in EAGxPrague, where they put the photos and contact details to

I feel like this is a great post, and we should start a conversation here, e.g., by brainstorming problems and solutions. Stopping a conversation just because someone should actually do it, might not be the best way to go, because what guarantees that someone does? At least with this post, we can see if people actually systematically thought about it and already came up with some solutions that could be useful. I have a few ideas for improving EAGs that I would love to share and get feedback on. 

I was afraid of you because you were my boss, so I could not criticize your work and behavior, and I was scared to do it for a long time. I also know you as a very manipulative manager (just a subjective experience, no evidence here), so I was very afraid of you, and even given the above response, I still am.  On the day you quit, I was about to talk to the leadership about quitting unless I no longer have to work with you. Luckily you quit, and I was able to stay in my highly impactful work. But yeah, I am still afraid of you, and it is very saddenin... (read more)

"one particular disgruntled ex-employee" - I am not an ex-employee, but happy to confirm working with you is not a pleasant experience for an employee. So there are at least two people in the EA community. I expect if CEA investigates, there would maybe be more? 

I would be very curious if there were any complaints about Nonlinear founders' work ethics sent to Community Liaison, that would confirm the points brought up here?
It would be great if the community at least investigated things that were brought up here in the comments, and actually talked with ex-employees about their experience. 
My experience working with Katherine Savoie (this is the previous name of Kat Woods) was very negative.
Based on the gossip below, it looks like a pattern other people also experienced. I wonder if Community Liaison has inves... (read more)

Yes, we have! In our very recent post on the EA forum we actually linked to our ideas list from the previous rounds:  “You can see the full initial list of about 275 ideas, along with a summary of our prioritization process here.”
We would like to include more information like this in the future. However, we always need to be mindful about how much people would update based on more shallow research and how much time would it take to communicate it well, e.g., polishing these earlier stages for publishing. In the past, sometimes people over-updated... (read more)

When it comes to mentors during the program, multiple team members are available; it depends on the expertise needed for a given problem. Long-term mentorship is often decided based on the cause area in which a given mentor has more experience in, but it is not set in stone. As for external expertise, the same rule follows; we will have mentors in multiple areas available, e.g., fundraising, research, M&E etc. So the mentors/advisors are mostly based on needs and there is an opportunity to talk or work with multiple.

We have published a post on our scaling plans here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EL3dKu5XcfjYhdjFX/ce-is-scaling-our-3-year-plan-and-current-hiring-round and they are now in progress, with the goal of doubling the quality and quantity of our charities in the next three years. Both, regional branches and cause area branches were part of the discussion when we were making the plan and our next evaluation point is coming this November, so we can’t exclude them completely. Some ideas included: India branch of CE, and only animal-focused CE, a... (read more)

I want to add to Steve's answer: 
We did extensive user research when we were starting out, both among prospective candidates and among actual successful charity founders, to find out what the barriers are and design the program to address them. Since then we haven’t done systematic research of this sort, but are constantly updating based on hundreds of conversations we have every year with people who could be a good fit, and partly based on that, modify the support we offer to address their concerns. 

Coommon barriers for applying to the program:&... (read more)

It's pinned at the top at the moment, although we were told that people tend to skip the pinned posts. We could probably talk about it more in a separate post. Thanks for the question!

We will open another application round (probably March/April 2023) where people will be able to apply for the late June-August 2023 program. However, we always encourage everyone to apply early, cause it increases the chances of getting in.

I have just sent you a message about it (apologies for the late reply, we get a lot of contact emails at the moment). From the deadline (31st October) it should take us up to 6 weeks to process the applications. We are happy to accommodate circumstances like this during this period. 

We would love to see some kind of integration between what used to be the EA Hub, Swapcard, and EA Forum. It would be amazing if the EA movement could basically have its own ecosystem that combined the functionalities of LinkedIn (all people having professional, accessible work profiles in one space/database) and the forum (the profile is connected to our EA forum posts), with the additional feature that would allow the user to quickly apply to any conference from the profile, and transfer the data to Swapcard (or another conference app).  So an all-i... (read more)

Our goal is to find two-three very good ideas each research cycle. So that would mean approximately four-six top ideas per calendar year. In our near-term scale-up plan, we could increase our capacity to maybe eight top ideas per calendar year (we are just talking about ideas we want to see launched through our Incubation Program). 

Great suggestion, changed that!