Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
I want to start by noting that I am amazed and somewhat in awe of what's been accomplished by the EA animal welfare movement. I am enthusiastically supportive of all campaigns that make living and dying conditions less bad for farmed animals.
I worked on such campaigns for almost 20 years, and I'm proud of that work.
That said, I do think it's a strategic error that the EA animal movement has so thoroughly moved on from advocacy for animal liberation and diet change.&n...
Author: Grace Ryba (she/her), Executive Director
TL;DR:
* BluePerch is a new animal welfare grantmaker.
* Grant applications aren't open yet - we're aiming to open applications in roughly mid-2027.
* We welcome early expressions of interest from potential grantseekers so we can notify you when applications open - express your interest here or see further details below.
* We're also seeking boa...
One of my biggest regrets in EA is not having spoken out more boldly about how one of the most pressing outreach concerns by a lot was political diversity and how major EA figures/orgs openly supporting Democratic politics as an EA intervention was a major error.
Many people might of course be sympathetic to such causes and might well support them privately, but I think it is critically important for EA to be a big tent that is mostly politically neutral, and in recent years we've lost a lot of ground there.
I have believed this and spoke out about it in minor ways and in private since seeing talk of phone banking for Hillary as an EA intervention -- which struck me as surprising misconduct at the time -- but I now think I probably should have made a bigger deal of it.
I'm not sure my speaking up would have solved things, but I regret not being more open about it since things seem to have gone really wrong on this front recently. Unfortunately, this error now seems very relevant to the current AI safety debates...