As part of our work, we meet with several (10-30 per year) charities, generally ones recommended by evaluators we trust, or (occasionally) recommended by our own research.
We learn a lot through these conversations. This suggests that we might want to publish our call notes so that others can also learn about the charities we speak with.
Given that we take notes during the calls anyway, it might seem that it would be low cost for us to simply publish those. This would be deceptive.
There is a non-trivial time cost for us, partly because documents which are published are held to a higher standard than those which are purely internal, but mostly because of our relationship with the charities. We want them to feel confident that they can speak openly with us. This means not only an extra step in the process (ie sharing a draft with the organisation before publishing) but also considering whether we should deliberately self-censor (i.e. avoid mentioning some relevant details if we think they are sensitive, so that we can honestly say that we're avoiding mentioning something and it's not because the charity is asking us to).
Understanding how much appetite there is for this will help us prioritise our time. In case it's helpful, spending less time on this likely means spending more time on: reviewing and understanding charities, sharing that information with donors that we work with, further developing our tools relating to moral weights, writing up more about core effective questions like give now / give later, and strategic questions like if/how to apply a worldview diversification approach.
Some previous examples are this (old) set of call notes with NTI, and this (also old) set of call notes with CATF. As can be seen from these examples, the notes simply set out what we learned in a 1-hour call, which largely focuses on better understanding what the organisation does. There often is some analytical content, but it's generally not sufficient to justify a decision to donate, which is justified on other grounds.
This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...