I sometimes worry that focus on effectiveness creates perverse incentives in strategic settings, leading us to become less effective. Here are a few observations illustrating this concern.

Effectiveness-focused advocacy creates perverse incentives for adversaries

When we conduct cage-free campaigns, the target companies frequently ask us why they are being targeted instead of some other company. While trying to answer that, one immediately realises the following tension. If we say that "because targeting you is the most effective thing we can do", we incentivise them to not budge. Because they will know that willingness to compromise invites more aggression. 

When dealing with an effectiveness-focused movement, our adversaries are further incentivised to prevent concrete results. While other movements will have to be destroyed through pressure, an effectiveness-focused movement will easily go away if you just prove to them that they can be more effective elsewhere.

For that reason, in our campaign target selection, we mainly focus on the number of animals affected by the brand and the gap between perceived quality and the reality as these criteria do not lead to perverse incentives.

Sometimes you have to fight back even when it’s not the most effective thing to do

I think this is also one of the reasons behind people's disassociation with EA. People are too quick to abandon EA because EA teaches them to do so.

If an adversary wants to weaken EA, they can damage the brand to make life difficult for movement members. Against EA, they have a significant advantage: EAs want to do the most good - an extremely high bar. As soon as associating with EA no longer aligns with doing the most good, members rationally drop the association. The bully will face minimal resistance since the members will run away to somewhere else where they can be more effective after slightest aggression.

Religious rules survive because they are stubborn

Many religious rules are stubborn, black and white, and context-independent. Pork and alcohol are haram in Islam and that's the end of the story. It doesn't matter if drinking alcohol would help you assimilate into the dominant culture and gain influence, or if social convenience suggests compromise.. This inflexibility allows religious rules to survive even when practiced by minorities facing significant pressure. Flexible rules tend to dissolve when confronting strong opposition.

We might need more commitment devices

It's possible to dismiss these concerns as naive consequentialism and argue that true consequentialism requires commitment devices for such cases. But do we have enough commitment devices in our community?

For me, the biggest reason our cage-free work in Turkey survived was that starting the work itself functioned as a commitment device. I feared that stopping midway would embolden adversaries against future advocates and signal to companies that welfare campaigns were merely temporary fads. I was afraid of making animals worse off by quitting, and this helped me persevere during difficult periods when I have considered "maybe this isn't the most effective thing I can do right now."

I don't think this is an easy problem to solve. Flexibility is deeply woven into EA through cause-neutrality, scout mindset, pragmatism and small identities. Other movements preserve their obstinacy through a combination of dogmas, soldier mindset and refusal to consider effectiveness. It's a challenge to find ways to preserve EA's strategic edge while making it more stubborn.