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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
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I think people working on animal welfare have more incentives to post during debate week than people working on global health.
The animal space feels (when you are in it) very funding constrained, especially compared to working in the global health and development space (and I expect gets a higher % of funding from EA / EA-adjacent sources). So along comes debate week and all the animal folk are very motivated to post and make their case and hopefully shift a few $. This could somewhat bias the balance of the debate. (Of course the fact that one side of the debate feels they needs funding so much more is in itself relevant to the debate.)
I also expect prioritizing animals over global health in EA to correlate with being more engaged in online EA discussion, in part because I would guess:
"Basically all cost-effectiveness/cost-benefit discussion in animal advocacy is close to the EA community"
Wow that's super interesting and surprises me a bit. How then does an animal advocacy org try to decide whether it tries to target a pig or a chicken corporate farm? I would have thought cost-effectiveness comparisons would have been easier in the animal welfare space given clearer (often) final outcomes and faster feedback loops.
This however I strongly disagree with
"Within global health, it's hard to predictably beat GiveWell charities, and cruxes in global health are mostly pretty technical and kind of boring/tedious for most people, like checking studies and calculations in sheets. Many cruxes in animal advocacy are more accessible or interesting, like consciousness, moral weights, indirect effects, backfire risks. That drives more engagement among animal advocates."
The complexities and range of global health interventions are fascinating and exciting, with new weird ideas almost infinite (cause ideas lists grow and grow every year, look at orgs like CEARCH). There's enormous discussion between how to value and compare tricky things like income, suffering and now new measures like subjective wellbeing.
Also how are cruxes in animal advocacy more accessible? Consciousness and moral weights are less accessible and harder to comprehend than human variables where we can rely on direct reports of our own and others experience even triangulate e.g. DALYs vs WELLBYs.Think how much (fantastic) effort had to go into the moral weights project to generate meaningful numbers like that. It took me a long time digging to even partially comprehend what those numbers mean, wheras the makeup of human DALYs and QALYs are far easier to understand.
I don't even think its so hard to beat top GiveWell charities really, its just hard to beat them within the narrow-ish error bars GiveWell requires (which I love that they require). Things like Lead exposure charities aren't even on their top list!
And on Animal advocates are more activisty - I agree with this statement, and maybe also that it measns more engagement on the forum here. Are they more "doey" though? My very uncertain bet would be that Global health EA people are out running orgs and doing direct work more than animal welfare EA people and so have less time to pontificate on the forum, but I could easily be wrong about that. I'm a bit of a weird exception I think.
Anyway I think its all very interesting :D
(I'm going to commit to not replying further, except maybe to quickly clarify, because I've already spent way too long on this comment.)
EAA = effective animal advocacy, basically the intersection of EA and animal advocacy.
Several animal orgs do make decisions based on cost-effectiveness considerations. I'd just say the ones that do tend to be pretty close to EA. They're likely to be funded by EA grantmakers (Open Phil, EA Funds, ACE). Org leadership and other employees come to EAGs. Other conferences they and their employees attend also have EAs and are supported by EA grantmakers. Their funding and growth have depended a lot on EA funding. EA funders have probably substantially influenced program focus, e.g. towards corporate chicken welfare campaigns.
A lot of this seems true for GiveWell-recommended charities, too, although I'd guess to a lesser extent in relative terms.
About engagement with ideas/research between global health and animal welfare, I'd say:
Fair, but these charities don't beat GiveWell recommendations if you're sufficiently difference-making ambiguity/risk averse or skeptical, which the average EA global health supporter might be. And EAs not like this have fewer barriers to prioritizing animal welfare, where things are less rigorous and the evidence is weaker.
And GiveWell has made grants to reduce lead exposure through their All Grants Fund, which they believe is more cost-effective in expectation than their recommended charities. But EA global health supporters might just donate directly to that fund, too, without engaging much, instead just trusting GiveWell. But I'm really not sure.
That's true.
However, even given these incentives, I would have expected more votes/interactions from people favouring global health - given that it is a very established field that feels instinctively good and well-known by most. Animal welfare was supposed to be the underdog here.
Moreover, there were fewer arguments favouring global health, and they felt much less convincing (personal opinion, but this felt reflected in votes).
So, although there is probably a bias to factor in, I still think that most people on the forum genuinely think animal welfare is the better choice for an additional $100m.
Another data point might be how well organized the animal-advocacy folks seemed to be on the Manifund EA Community Choice project (although I believe Manifund did some outreach as well). I assumed some of the same reasons were in play there.
More generally, discussions on this topic have a flavor of GH being the known quantity and AW being the option with much more uncertainty. Or stated differently, the crux for most participants was going to be predominately how good the marginal dollar for AW is, more so than how good that dollar would be in GH. That's an easier topic for AW people to write on. Also, people are typically more motivated to write in favor of their cause area than in an attempt to deflate the effectiveness of a different cause area.
Quickly throwing in a related dynamic. I suspect animal welfare folks have more free time to post online.
Career advancement in animal welfare is much more generalist than global health & development. This means there's not as many career goals to 'grind' towards, leaving more free time for public engagement. Alternative proteins feel like a space where one can specialize, but that's all I can think of. I'd love to know of other examples.
In contrast, global health & development has many distinct specialities that you have to focus on if you want to grow your career. It's not uncommon for someone's career to be built on incredibly narrow topic like, say, the implications of decentralization for regulating groundwater pollution. There are even 'playbooks' for breaking into the space, and they rarely align with writing EA Forum posts, or really any public writing.