My understanding is that much (most? possibly a large majority?) of Every.org's operating funds and funds for donation matches like this one come from billionaire Uber co-founder Garrett Camp.
While I don't know exactly what Camp and Every's philanthropic goals are, I had a couple conversations with Every's Executive Director a few years ago in the wake of one of their other donation matches that a bunch of EAs participated in, and, based on my understanding developed then, my guess is that someone at Every.org just had the thought "How about we do an animal welfare donation match this giving season. A lot of people from the effective altruism community have participated in our past donation matches and I bet many of them would participate in this one, making it a successful way to attract more donors to our platform and get more people donating."
Whether the decionmaker(s) at Every needed approval from Camp on this $500k precisely or whether he just delegated them the authority to decide how exactly to use these funds I don't know, but don't think it matters much for the expected impact of participating in this match.
Regardless, my guess is that if the $500k doesn't get used up during this match, it will just stay in Camp's hands (or his nonprofit's hands, whether Camp.org or Every.org's hands, unspent anytime soon). That is, I don't think the money is being planned to be donated to these animal nonprofits regardless. Also worth noting that unlike the old Facebook Giving Tuesday matches, I don't think there is a plan for the money to be given away to an assortment of other nonprofits if people don't allocate it to these animal nonprofits via participating in the donation match.
So my guess is that participating in this match increases the overall amount of Camp money going to nonprofits in the near future, and that it is unclear where the Camp money would eventually be spent if it's not allocated to these animal nonprofits as a part of this match.
(It's possible these matching funds are coming from somewhere besides Camp, so again note that this is just my guess.)
So I think there is a true counterfactual impact here, and that for example, if someone thinks that one of these animal nonprofits is the most cost-effective giving opportunity, then now may be a particularly worthwhile time to donate, even if one wasn't planning on donating $2000 more to the nonprofit now before year end, since it will seemingly indeed lead to the nonprofit receiving 3x your donation amount.
Note: If you think that one of the animal nonprofits is only, say, 50% as cost-effective as the best giving opportunity you can identify, I'd discourage you from giving to that animal nonprofit in this match despite the naive expected value calculation (3*50%=150%) suggesting that donating to the animal nonprofit with the match will lead to more good than donating to the best giving opportunity without a match. One reason I'd give for this is that I don't think that we should let large donors incentivize us to allocate our giving budgets to less cost-effective giving opportunities, since that seems like a bad incentiblve. Instead I'd say to the large donor, "It's nice that you are wanting to donate your money, including to these nonprofits that are very cost-effective, but I think it would be better if you donated your money to this other nonprofit instead that will use the money to do even more good. You could also donate to both if you want and that'd be completely fine, but in either case I am going to respectfully decline your match offer in order to allocate my limited donation budget to where I think it will do the most good." In other words, I'd decline to play the matching donor's game and let them know why in the hope that they might decide to change their behavior to support the more cost-effective giving opportunity. If we did a more sophisticated EV calculation than the naive one above, I'd expect this course of action of still donating to the most cost-effective giving opportunity you can identify despite the match offer for donating to the half-as-effective nonprofit with a 2:1 match to come out better. (Note that in addition to declining to participate in the match yourself, you could always find and reach out to the existing donor base for these 50%-as-effective nonprofits and encourage them to participate in the match, assuming they're not open to donating to the best giving oppotunity that you can identify that you're giving to.)
Quick reflections from EAG NYC:
It may well correlate but as Heather Browing puts it we are just "trading intutions". Values "vary widely from 0.56 to 6.05" and the only comparable low income group from IDinsight Beneficiary Preferences Survey puts it at 0.56. Revealed preferences go against this as well with suicide rate in Afghanistan lower than the global average (Although that is a bad measure it alot of ways)
Often its just worth considering that EA Wild Animal folks are massively skewed in their moral weights for suffering often to basically weighting positive experiences at near zero. AIM has some data comparing Excruciating pain to Annoying between community surveys and the literature. For the literature showing trade off people would make the ratio is more like 1 : 30 while the comunity survey is 1 : 4.5 million and Anima international folks are even more skewed at 1 : 200 million. So much of the discussion is coming from a group with very different prefences to the general population. And we don't even know what non-humans would say about this!
At 1 : 30 and a death by predation of a minute even a relatively short life can look overall worth living, at 1 :200 million for the same death even a life of 300 years looks net negative.
So a normal trade offs of pain severity, positive experiences and other goods freedom may go to explain the assocation between animal rights and pro-rewilding
Is anyone else worried about the conflicts of interest from the expected philanthropic money coming from Anthropic and OpenAI people?
FWIW, my guess is that this will be much more expensive (though I'm extremely sympathetic to the overall post and direction). I asked one of the scientists working on shrimp stunning research because I happened to be sitting next to them when I read this post, and they guessed $4M-$6M to do the efficacy research as you describe for stunning alone. Similarly, malarial nets cost $100 of Ms over decades of development to get to the point they are at today, not including things like the RCTs to test if they worked, etc.
I think that some of these things will be worth paying for, but I think that animal advocates will need stomachs as big as their eyes for paying for research if we want to make progress on these issues (and this is part of the reason that I believe most animal welfare dollars should be going toward research).
Thanks for writing this!
The new EA Forum frontpage layout is unserious. My concern is simple: where is the list of the latest posts? The screen is so overwhelmed by "featured posts" and "comments" and "quick takes" that the centerpiece of the whole thing is completely gone. Now I can't see what is going on in EA, or whether there is something that I want to read, which defeats the point of visiting the website. And moreover, hiding such key information gives the appearance of a forum that doesn't care about supporting serious discussion, it sets the wrong tone for the community.
You can see a comparison to LessWrong and Hacker News below.
Current EA forum
Current Lesswrong
Current Hacker News