• My main uncertainty re: the specific debate question is whether the AW space can absorb an extra $100m in funding anytime soon (e.g. within the next 5 years).
  • This seems pretty relevant from the perspective of the ecosystem, but much less relevant to the choices I face as an individual person / donor.
  • So the question as written is not the one I care about most for my personal decision-making.
• I’m mostly interested in whether I should be donating differently. In the past few years, I’ve given a substantial chunk of my donations to animal focused charities.
  • A lot of that is motivated by being bought-in on the general importance of focusing on non-human animals (particularly small animals), as opposed to ‘near-term’ human welfare (via global health interventions).
  • I could imagine reducing my animal focused donations if any of the below happened:
    • I changed my mind on the importance / tractability of prioritising welfare improvements for smaller farmed animals (currently what I’m most excited about within the AW space).
      • E.g. I haven’t delved into the two envelopes problem as much as I’d like, and I’m worried this might change my mind if I understood this better?
      • This is a potential crux because I feel substantially more confused about the current marginal ROI of corporate campaign work for larger animals + wild animal focused work.
        • This is mostly because I haven’t spent much time digging into these areas.
    • I thought the marginal animal giving opportunities no longer looked that great.
    • There are some unusually good GH giving opportunities I haven’t been tracking right now. E.g. I think some of the EA-driven accomplishments with lead exposure have been incredibly exciting.
      • I have a general worry that using the donation decision protocol of “FIRST choose a cause area to focus on, and THEN choose the interventions to support” is not quite right and might lead to missed rare opportunities.
      • Mostly this seems probably fine from the perspective of an individual donor though. E.g. I’m not aiming purely to maximise the impact of my donations, I’m also aiming to bound the time I spend figuring this out.
  • I’m not sure yet where I’d give if I updated negatively on the marginal ROI of AW donations. I’d want to think about this more.
• I don’t think I’d change my job in the short term based on this question alone. But it seems plausible this might change what I focus on within my job.

I would almost certainly add an animal welfare charity to my charitable giving portfolio. 

I previously had the Good Food Institute in the portfolio before financial challenges led me to trim it, so I might bring that back, or do some more research into the most effective animal welfare charity and add it alongside AMF and GiveDirectly as my primary contributions.

Given that it seems a solid majority of EAs on the forum seem to strongly favour animal welfare with very rigorous arguments for it, and my propensity to weigh "wisdom of crowds" majority opinion as evidence towards a given view, I'm actually leaning towards actually doing this.

I do give a fraction to animal welfare and if I changed my mind I would give it to global health.

With my temperament and personality im a "direct work" kind of guy. As much as I might like to think otherwise, I don't think I'm likely any time soon to have the temperament or drive to work well in Meta or earn-to-give.

Given that, if my mind was changed here all it might mean is that I would give a small amount more to animal welfare orgs (given my very low salary by most people here's standards). I doubt given my stage of life (ancient), emotional biases and competitive advantage it is likely to make sense for me to do direct work for animal welfare orgs even if I believed it was quite a lot more cost effective, although if my mind was changed a lot this wouldnt be out of the question.