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Zoë Sigle13
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Hi John, 

Anecdotally and from my perspective, infighting within the animal protection movement has decreased notably over the last decade, but this doesn’t mean it’s gone. Additionally, as you know (but sharing for those reading), infighting is not the only contributor to mental health challenges in our space.

The EA Animal Welfare Fund historically has not funded advocate mental health work directly. Given our limited funds and our niche within the wider funder communities for both the animal protection and effective altruism movements, the EA Animal Welfare Fund is not currently prioritizing funding direct mental health assistance for advocates. However, we are not fundamentally opposed to funding this kind of work if we were to review a strong application demonstrating (amongst other criteria) movement need, an excellent track record, cost-effectiveness (in terms of expected indirect animal impact), and inability to secure sufficient funding from other sources.

With that said, we have funded capacity-building organizations, like Scarlet Spark, where part of their services include improvements to team wellbeing. 

Additionally, the EA Animal Welfare Fund considers interpersonal dynamics and organizational cultures when conducting grant evaluations, whether this means conflicts between individuals within an organization or conflicts between organizations. The community health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism has supported our fund managers in investigating conflict allegations regarding applicants and navigating funding recommendation options (including exit grants and full rejections). We have declined to fund several applications when we see organizations not engaging as respectful team players within the wider movement space. We have also phased out funding for at least one organization where we observed organizational cultural issues that were detrimental to employee well-being and mental health and, in our estimation, the long-term sustainability of the organization’s impact on animals. 

Thank you for caring about the mental health of our animal advocate community. I know your organization, Overcome, coaches at least some animal advocates through mental health challenges, and I have heard (anecdotal) positive testimonials from advocates receiving coaching. To your point of “willingness to use existing services is low,” I encourage animal advocates reading this, who might be in need of mental health support, to reach out to Overcome to assess fit for support.

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See in context
by KarolinaSarek🔸, Neil_Dullaghan🔹 , Zoë Sigle
1 min read 40

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Animal welfareEffective givingAnimal Welfare FundEffective Altruism FundsGiving Season (2024)GrantmakingAsk Me AnythingFarmed animal welfareWild animal welfare
Frontpage

The EA Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) invites you to Ask Us Anything. You can ask questions from now until next Tuesday morning, December 24. We will stop responding at 2:00 PM CET on Tuesday.

About AWF
The AWF’s mission is to alleviate the suffering of non-human animals globally through effective grantmaking. Since its founding in 2017, AWF has distributed $23.3M across 347 grants. This year, we’ve distributed $3.7M across 51 grants. 
You can read about our 2024 year-in-review post and our request for more funding analysis to learn more about our recent work and future goals.

Why Now? 
We believe now is an especially good time for an AMA because:

We are open to questions from interested donors, applicants, past grantees, people interested in jobs at AWF, and others interested in animal welfare. 

Our team answering questions is:

  1. Karolina Sarek, Chair
  2. Neil Dullaghan, Fund Manager
  3. Zoë Sigle, Fund Manager
     

We look forward to hearing your questions!

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emre kaplan🔸20
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What is your bar for funding for some of the most common welfare interventions? On the margin, how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the following welfare improvements:

a. Cage-free transition for egg-laying hens

b. Stunning before slaughter for farmed sea bass and sea bream

c. Transition to ECC/BCC standards

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Neil_Dullaghan🔹 18
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Thanks Emre, 

In practical terms, each grant manager gives a score +5 to -5, with +5 being the strongest possible endorsement of positive impact, and -5 being a grant with an anti-endorsement that’s actively harmful to a significant degree. We then average across scores, approving those at the very top, and dismissing those at the bottom, largely discussing only those grants that are around the threshold of 2.5 unless anyone wanted to actively make the case for or against something outside of these bounds (the size and scope of other grants, particularly the large grants we approve, is also discussed). So the “bar for funding” is when the average of fund manager’s votes is ~2.5 (though we now also have an additional mechanism for comparing applications just above or below the bar).  And the votes take into account not just the welfare improvement from an intervention, but other factors like where it fits into broader theories of change, scalability, the value of funding (analyzing counterfactuals and long-term sustainability). For a list of our criteria, refer to a question in our FAQ: “How Does the EA Animal Welfare Fund Make Grant Decisions?”. 

However, if you mean what’s the bar in terms of impact per $, we’re currently trialing a few different approaches for how we estimate that (see our answers about use of welfare capacity, SADS, and benchmarks), and would like to arrive at a common unit and threshold (or range) that would be constant across species & interventions.  But again, this would just be one input and arguably the estimates shouldn’t be taken literally, but more as providing intuition pumps. 

Regarding how many animals or animal-years should be affected per dollar for the listed welfare improvements, this will very much depend on how those reforms were achieved (corporate campaigns, producer outreach, policy advocacy, strategic litigation, etc.). Unfortunately, at this time we can’t share a cost-effectiveness estimate for these common interventions from averaging the estimates across all relevant grant applications.  There are some publicly shared estimates that we refer to as potential benchmarks (see below). 

On cage-free and broiler welfare: Corporate welfare campaigns over 13 years (2005-2018) to commit corporations to sell only cage-free eggs and higher welfare chicken meat were estimated to impact 10 to 280 animals per dollar spent (9.5 to 120 animal years) (Šimčikas 2019). The author of the report, Saulius Šimčikas, made a comment on the Forum in 2021 about unpublished estimates of chicken welfare reforms, suggesting cost-effectiveness was two to three times lower in 2019-2020 than in 2016-2018 (“According to this new estimate, in 2019-2020 chicken welfare reforms affected 65 years of chicken life per dollar spent.)”. Similar sentiments about the lower cost-effectiveness of such campaigns today are discussed here and here. There’s also the separate cost-effectiveness for various ballot initiatives, including cage-free ones (Duffy 2023) and speculative broiler ballot initiatives (Khimasia 2023), and the various cost-effectiveness analyses from Vasco Grilo. Furthermore, in a comment in 2023, Emily Oehlsen, Managing Director of Open Philanthropy, a major funder of these chicken corporate campaigns, reported that since 2016, “we’ve covered many of the strongest opportunities in this space, and we think that current marginal opportunities are considerably weaker,” and that “We think that the marginal FAW funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis” referencing Šimčikas (2019).
So it seems fair to believe many cage-free and broiler welfare corporate campaigns being funded today are less cost-effective than the 2019-2020 estimate Saulius provided. Sagar Shah also created some prospective fish pre-slaughter stunning corporate campaign estimates suggesting such campaigns in Europe might only affect a few hours of life per dollar spent- though there are many caveats and assumptions in that estimate, including the very important consideration of how one weights excruciating pains. 

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Peter Lofgren17
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What do you do when direct utilitarian computations give unintuitive results, for example if direct utilitarian math said that you should give 80% of the fund to just shrimp welfare?  Is your methodology basically just to rank grant opportunities by utilitarian effectiveness (using best guesses) or do you have minimum percentages per species, or have allocation percentages for measurable interventions vs new/experimental interventions, or other ways of allocating?

I love the EA Animal Welfare Fund, thanks for your work!

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KarolinaSarek🔸7
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Thank you for this thoughtful question and for your kind words about the Animal Welfare Fund! You raise an important point. Let me break down our approach:

First, we don't operate with fixed portfolio allocations or minimum percentages per species. Instead, we aim to maximize the marginal impact of our grants based on our best current understanding. This means evaluating each opportunity on its own merits and seeing if it is above our bar. More about our bar here. 

Secondly, it is worth noting that purely theoretical calculations often differ significantly from practical funding opportunities. While back-of-the-envelope calculations might suggest allocating a large percentage to certain species (like shrimps), we simply don't see enough promising, implementation-ready opportunities in those areas to make such allocations feasible. Historically, we were more limited to the applications we received, but recently we started doing more active grantmaking to generate those opportunities in areas that are cost-effective but neglected, and in 2025 we plan to further invest in it. 

Even still, if those opportunities existed, I think it would be unwise to make decisions purely based on those naive utilitarian calculations. I say naive, referring to the difference between an actual cost-effectiveness and estimated cost-effectiveness. If I knew the actual cost-effectiveness of given interventions, that accounts for all uncertainties:

  • Empirical - e.g., how many shrimps are we actually affecting?
  • Moral - e.g., how to trade off different intensities of pain and what moral weight should be assigned to different species?
  • Epistemological - e.g., how to account for far-future effects vs near-term effects of animal welfare interventions, given complex cluelessness?

that gives me a true number for cost-effectiveness, a “god comes from the sky” kind of situation, then I would rely on it. However, any estimate of cost-effectiveness is going to be a naive one and merely a very uncertain estimate that may miss those important uncertainties. Additionally, I would refer here to the timeless classic “Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased)” by GiveWell. While AWF's approach is different in some places than the one outlined in this GW blog post, I think the main point stands. They conclude that:
“I feel that any giving approach that relies only on estimated expected-value – and does not incorporate preferences for better-grounded estimates over shakier estimates – is flawed. Thus, when aiming to maximize expected positive impact, it is not advisable to make giving decisions based fully on explicit formulas. Proper Bayesian adjustments are important and are usually overly difficult to formalize.”
In light of that all, I think that we have imperfect information and too much fundamental uncertainty to justify extremely undiversified allocation, even if explicitly utilitarian calculation would point to that. 

Additionally, in practice, our fund managers bring diverse perspectives on for example how to weigh speculative versus evidence-backed approaches. This natural diversity helps ensure we maintain a balanced portfolio between proven interventions and those with high expected value but less certain ones.

Currently, we're working on refining our strategic framework, which may introduce additional allocation considerations. That said, our focus on neglected species and interventions already creates an implicit prioritization - we rarely fund work focused on cattle welfare, for instance, as other funders adequately cover this space.

For each grant we consider, we assess whether it meets our cost-effectiveness bar, which is influenced by other opportunities we see in our pipeline. This approach allows us to remain flexible and responsive to the most promising opportunities while maintaining high standards for expected impact.

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Vasco Grilo🔸3
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Thanks for the answer, Karolina!

Additionally, I would refer here to the timeless classic “Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased)” by GiveWell.

GiveWell still relies a lots on the their explicit cost-effectiveness numbers. Elie Hassenfeld, their co-founder and CEO, mentioned on the Clearer Thinking podcast that:

GiveWell cost- effectiveness estimates are not the only input into our decisions to fund malaria programs and deworming programs, there are some other factors, but they're certainly 80% plus of the case.

GiveWell also commented:

  • The numerical cost-effectiveness estimate in the spreadsheet is nearly always the most important factor in our recommendations, but not the only factor. That is, we don’t solely rely on our spreadsheet-based analysis of cost-effectiveness when making grants.
    • We don't have an institutional position on exactly how much of the decision comes down to the spreadsheet analysis (though Elie's take of "80% plus" definitely seems reasonable!) and it varies by grant, but many of the factors we consider outside our models (e.g. qualitative factors about an organization) are in the service of making impact-oriented decisions. See this post for more discussion.
    • For a small number of grants, the case for the grant relies heavily on factors other than expected impact of that grant per se. For example, we sometimes make exit grants in order to be a responsible funder and treat partner organizations considerately even if we think funding could be used more cost-effectively elsewhere.

“I feel that any giving approach that relies only on estimated expected-value – and does not incorporate preferences for better-grounded estimates over shakier estimates – is flawed. Thus, when aiming to maximize expected positive impact, it is not advisable to make giving decisions based fully on explicit formulas. Proper Bayesian adjustments are important and are usually overly difficult to formalize.”

One can estimate the expected value using sceptical priors to weight uncertain estimates less heavily, as with inverse-variance weighting. I think it is good to be explicit, so I suppose the question is whether it is cost-effective, i.e. worth it to invest time to formalise the Bayesian adjustment.

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Vasco Grilo🔸4
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Great question, Peter! Relatedly, have you (AWF's team) considered disclosing which organisations you are not funding because of funding diversity concerns (as opposed to marginal cost-effectiveness without accounting for funding diversity below your bar)?

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Rick Holland9
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Hi Karolina, Neil, and Zoë,

First of all, thanks so much for your work, and for hosting an AMA. I've been continually impressed at the array of initiatives funded by the Animal Welfare Fund, as well as its team's dedication.

My question is this (now that we are in the midst of the Giving Season time of year): when do you recommend donating to the AWF, and when to individual charities?

Rick

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KarolinaSarek🔸16
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Thank you, Rick, for your kind words and thoughtful question! Let me break down when it might make sense to donate directly to individual charities versus contributing to the Animal Welfare Fund.

There are a few specific instances where donating directly to individual charities could be the better choice:

  1. When you have strong specific views about effectiveness or moral weights that differ significantly from our approach. For example:
    1. If you believe certain species should be prioritized based on moral weight calculations that differ substantially from current research.
    2. If you want to focus exclusively on particular intervention types (like corporate outreach) or specific animal groups (like hen welfare).
  2. If you are a large donor who feels strongly about donating to a specific organization and actively wants the experience of donor stewardship by that specific organization, such as regular impact updates or contributing your time and skills as a volunteer or a board member.
  3. When you have unique opportunities to make high-impact donations in areas where AWF faces operational constraints. Fortunately, we don’t have many restrictions in our grantmaking and can fund a wide range of opportunities, but sometimes a grant is too complicated legally and operationally. For example, we can make grants to China, and we can make grants to for-profits, but for-profit in China is a stretch. If you can make grants in such a context, you can reach out to us, and we will be happy to refer you to a particular opportunity. You may also find yourself in a situation where you have the ability to support a talented person you know who would find it hard to put together an application (we try to make it a low-burden process, but can imagine there are still obstacles in terms of language, internet access, etc.).

However, for most individual donors, contributing to the Animal Welfare Fund offers several key advantages and is a better option:

  1. Access to opportunities: Through our open application process, we discover and evaluate promising projects that individual donors typically wouldn't encounter, including early-stage initiatives that aren't yet widely known or opportunities that have to stay private for strategic reasons. 
  2. Evaluation capacity: Our fund managers bring extensive experience evaluating animal welfare projects and maintain a broad knowledge base across different areas. We also can put in a lot of time to evaluate a given opportunity, in many cases much, much more than an individual donor could. 
  3. Information advantage: We often have access to confidential information about organizations and the wider funding landscape that helps inform our grant decisions.
  4. Complex active grantmaking: We can often create new grantmaking opportunities that require a lot of time, knowledge, network, and trust to shape up. Those are also often one of the highest-impact opportunities and are highly counterfactual since they wouldn’t exist if not for those efforts. This would be very hard for individual donors to arrange. 
  5. Operational efficiency: We make the donating and grantmaking process efficient, straightforward, yet robust. For example, you can donate to AWF tax-efficiently, and we can grant to many organizations where you wouldn’t be able to donate tax-efficiently directly yourself, or we conduct thorough due diligence on our grantees and set up a strong grant agreement. 
  6. Ability to have candid conversations, track progress, and conduct MEL: We have a capacity and systems in place that allow us to track grantees' progress and have candid conversations with organizations about their success, but also struggles and learnings that they may feel more hesitant to discuss in public, based on that we can also conduct monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) from the grants we make.
  7. Comparing the value of funding to different projects: We evaluate not only the promise or impact of a project but also the value of marginal funding. It's worth noting that many charities individual EA donors support directly are also AWF grantees, and we can decide to fund them at a larger amount (while ensuring they still have funding diversity and are not too reliant on AWF). With our broader view of the landscape, we can better assess whether additional funding to that charity would be more effective than funding the next marginal opportunity. This kind of comparative assessment is typically challenging for individual donors to make given limited information access.

That said, we respect that donors may have specific priorities or insights that make direct donations more appropriate in their situation. We aim to be transparent about our approach so donors can make informed decisions about what best aligns with their goals. We also care about organizations not being too reliant on AWF as their only source of funding, I think organizations that are unlikely to receive other funding (e.g., from Open Philanthropy or Farmed Animal Funders) are especially good donation opportunities for individual donors. In this case, there are still advantages that AWF has (eval ability, access to info, etc.), so if you are a large donor considering donation, you can reach out to us. 

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Vasco Grilo🔸8
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How do you handle welfare comparisons across species? Do you basically use Rethink Priorities' median welfare ranges as I do, assuming that 1 year of a practically maximally happy life in animals of a given species is as good as N years of a practically maximally happy life in humans, where N is the welfare range?

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Neil_Dullaghan🔹 9
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Thanks for another great question.
Similar to the answer about pain intensities, we’re trialing this in our cost-effectiveness models (though we are using the full range of the RP welfare capacity placeholder estimates, not just the median). ( I, Neil, also an employee in the RP animal welfare department, want to be cautious of any bias before the RP moral weights become a permanent feature). I also think the broader point about the RP placeholder welfare capacity ranges still holds- it is non-welfare capacity range factors that will often be more decisive. Based on the evidence assembled so far, using that methodology, the welfare capacity ranges between species are likely not many orders of magnitude different and so it mostly matters when you're comparing animal populations of similar sizes which just doesn't seem to be the comparison we’re making very often - in most cases, it still comes down to raw number of animals affected or years of suffering, cost to achieve the impact, and probability of success.

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Vasco Grilo🔸8
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Do you estimate cost-effectiveness based on guesses for the intensity of the 4 categories of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP), as I do, and Ambitious Impact (AIM) does? If so, which values are you using?

I think AIM's values greatly underestimate the intensity of severe pain. Feel free to ask Vicky Cox for the doc with my suggestions for improvement.

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Neil_Dullaghan🔹 8
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Thanks for the question!

 

I’d refer you to an answer we gave in a previous post about how the fund has historically relied on a range of factors to judge marginal cost-effectiveness for the majority of grants and it’s less often the case we have the evidence and the grant size merits a formal cost-effectiveness model. Having said that, we are currently trialing different approaches to cost-effectiveness modeling as that becomes a more standard feature of our deep evaluations (see more in our FAQs on our grantmaking process) and making explicit BOTECs a required part of evaluations. Among these, models we’re investigating include how a range of different pain category intensities weightings (as described in Grilo 2024, Ryba 2024, Schuck et al. 2024) could affect our cost-effectiveness estimates. 
There are reasonable grounds to put some credence in the most severe harms causing farmed animals at least as much disutility as the longest-lasting harms they experience (McAuliffe and Shriver 2023, also see Parra 2024, Ryba 2023).We make sure to note in the evaluation if the overall assessment would hinge on such a consideration (or other more philosophical/ fundamental questions where people have reasonable disagreements) to guard against being systematically biased towards one perspective. However, in practice, this may only be a crux for a handful of grant applications (e.g., those focused on pre-slaughter stunning)
Often to make a grant decision we don’t need to get a precise estimate down to the exact total hours of intensity-adjusted pain, just what would one need to believe for this grant to be at least competitive with other opportunities and does that seem like a reasonable belief to hold. 
 

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Aidan Alexander6
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I don’t think they’re doing explicit cost-effectiveness analyses at this level of detail for the grants they’re assessing. They don’t have the time (consider how many hours they have per grant vetted), and the evidence to make those analyses anything more than multiplying a bunch of guesses together just won’t exist for many applications. Instead, they’ll be looking at other forms of evidence, like the strength of the theory of change, the strength of the team, the quality of thinking displayed in the team’s plan and their track record

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Vasco Grilo🔸4
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Thanks, Aidan. You may well be right about what they are doing, but I think a basic version would take very little time, and still be helpful. They would only need to make one estimation of the DALYs averted per animal-year improved or animal helped for each type of welfare improvement, not one estimation per grant. They could make copies of my sheets for broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns, and for improving shrimp slaughter, although I am sure they could do similar sheets in no time. Then they could have these welfare improvements in mind while making guesses for others for which there is no data on the time in pain.

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Vasco Grilo🔸6
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If you had to choose between the best candidate for AWF's fund manager open position, and the 2nd best plus X $/year in donations to AWF, and both these candidates had the same impact if they did not join AWF, and were only available for full-time work, how large would X have to be for you to be indifferent between the 2 options?

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KarolinaSarek🔸12
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One way to BOTEC this is by looking at how much time it saves us and what can be done with that time. Let's assume the 2nd best candidate is half as good as the 1st and therefore saves us half as much time. Instead of saving us 35h per week (40h - 5h management, meetings, review etc.), they save us 17.5h (requiring much more management and oversight to get the same results, which I actually think is conservative), for the same up to $120k spent on salary and benefits.

In the first case, we get 35 × 52 workweeks in a year = 1,820h, and in the second 910h. The cost-benefit analysis is $65 per hour for the first candidate and $131 per hour for the second, with a difference of $66 per hour.

As discussed in our room for more funding post, we currently believe we could conduct more active grantmaking to a value of $2M. If we assume that with 15h, a more senior staff member whose time we saved by hiring can generate an active grantmaking opportunity that costs $200k, and assuming its cost-effectiveness is $1.4 per DALY ( I took the RP CCM DALY estimates (which you helpfully listed here in DALY/k$, and I reversed to be $/DALY), where the Cage-free Chicken Campaign was $1.4 per DALY.), that means 142k DALYs difference. In the 66h difference between candidates, we get 4.4 such opportunities, so 624k DALYs are lost due to hiring the 2nd best candidate. At $1.4 per DALY, that's ~$873k.

Therefore, if the 2nd best candidate is half as good as the first, we would need $873k more to offset it. This could be a conservative estimate, because a half-as-good staff member might simply not generate as good evaluations no matter how much management time they get. Or it could be liberal because we may need more than 15h to generate the next marginal active grantmaking opportunity, or the 2nd best candidate could be more than half as good as the first. I think a range of $500k-$800k is reasonable.

That was a fun exercise; thanks for your question! 

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Vasco Grilo🔸4
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Thanks for the quantitative answer, Karolina!

[...] In the 66h difference between candidates, we get 4.4 such opportunities, so 624k DALYs are lost due to hiring the 2nd best candidate. At $1.4 per DALY, that's ~$873k.

Why did you assume hiring the best candidate would save senior staff 66 h/year instead of the 910 h/year (= (1 - 0.5)*35*52) you seemingly estimated above? This would allow for 60.7 (= 910/15) additional active grantmaking opportunities per year if there was an unlimited supply of these, but there is only 10.0 (= 2*10^6/(200*10^3)) for 2 M$/year of active grantmaking. In this case, there is only room for saving 150 h/year (= 10.0*15) to senior staff, which could be achieved by hiring a candidate at least 8.24 % (= 150/(35*52)) as good as the best. So, if the 2nd best candidate was 50 % as good as the best, AWF would not save anything by hiring the best. In reality, hiring the best candidate would still save AWF money because there would be more opportunities for active grantmaking, but your calculations referred to the savings resulting from AWF's room for additional funding of 2 M$/year. What am I missing?

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KarolinaSarek🔸12
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Why did you assume hiring the best candidate would save senior staff 66 h/year.

The number, is the difference between the first and second candidate in $ cost per h saved (given their salary and how much time they save). The difference would be $66 per h. Later, I accidentally omitted the $ sign in the text, and that indeed created a mistake in further calculations. It turns out that making BOTEC late in the evening is not a good idea, in my case. :) Thank you for catching that error!

To refine the calculations by fixing the error you spotted and adding more considerations:

I say earlier. 
“Let's assume the 2nd best candidate is half as good as the 1st and therefore saves us half as much time. Instead of saving us 35h per week (40h - 5h management, meetings, review etc.), they save us 17.5h (requiring much more management and oversight to get the same results, which I actually think is conservative), for the same up to $120k spent on salary and benefits.

In the first case, we get 35 × 52 workweeks in a year = 1,820h, and in the second 910h. The cost-benefit analysis is $65 per hour for the first candidate and $131 per hour for the second, with a difference of $66 per hour.”

I was aiming to calculate the difference between the first and second candidates. The first would save 1820h (35h × 52 workweeks in a year), the second 910h (35h x 52 workweeks in a year). 
The cost-benefit ratio of that time saved is: for the first, $65 per h ($120000/1820 hours saved per year), and for the second, it is $131 per h ($120000/910h saved), so the difference is $66 per h. 
1820-910=910h difference in a year
And each hour, for the 2nd candidate, cost us $66 more than for the 1st.
910h difference, at $66 per h, the difference in cost is $60060. 
Indeed, in that time, a senior fund manager could in theory, create 60 active grantmaking opportunities (910h/15h) at a cost of $60060. 
So $60060/60 = $1001 difference in cost between candidates for generating one opportunity. 

But you are right; we cannot generate 60 active grantmaking opportunities in a year, no matter the time spent. If we had an unlimited time (something I didn’t assume in the RFMF estimate), I think we could generate more than $2M estimated in the RFMF post, but indeed not 60 opportunities. My guess would be somewhere around 20-30. If we take those numbers and follow your reasoning, there is room for saving from 300h (=20*15) to 450h (=30*15), which could be achieved by hiring a candidate at least 16.4% (=300/(35*52)) to 24.7% (=450/(35*52)) as good as the best. While we have to remember to take into account the higher cost of generating that opportunity in the case of the 2ns candidate. 

A significant limitation to that estimate is that we assume no increase in time when generating the next marginal opportunity. In fact, I expect that each marginal opportunity we generate will require a higher time investment to generate, simply because it will be harder to come up with ideas, find the right people who are not already busy, etc. So let me introduce this refinement to our estimate. For example, the first 10 opportunities may take 15h per idea, the next 10 can take 25h, and probably the next 10 would take significantly more, like 40h. If we take those numbers and the range for the number of potencial opportunities (20-30), the total time to generate 20 opportunities would be 400h (=(10*15)+(10*25)), and the time to generate 30 opportunities would be 800h (=(10*15h)+(10*25h)+(10*40h)). So the potencial of saving 400h-800h is generated by hiring a candidate at least 21.9% (=400/(35*52)) to 42.9% (=800/(35*52) as good as the best. While remembering that generating those opportunities by the 2nd best candidates would have a worse cost-benefit ratio. We also have to remember that in this case, we may need more than $2M for active grantmaking, which further complicates calculating the "better candidate to more funding trade-off". 

However, I will stop this estimate now, because the time for the AMA is running out and I have to get ready for the beginning of the holiday that starts in Poland today. :) If you have any comments about the calculation above, let me know. If I happen to have some free time after the holiday, I may swing back to finish and further improve the estimate, but I cannot commit to that, especially if it would trade off against vetting and selecting the best candidates in the current hiring round ;) Thanks for this exchange and all your questions, Vasco! 

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Vasco Grilo🔸2
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Thanks for the follow-up, Karolina!

So the potencial of saving 400h-800h is generated by hiring a candidate at least 21.9% (=400/(35*52)) to 42.9% (=800/(35*52) as good as the best.

This suggests AWF would not benefit from additional active grantmaking due to hiring the best candidate instead one at least 44.0 % (= 800/(35*52)) as good as them, because both would save enough time to senior staff for the 30 active grantmaking opportunities to be found. Assuming part-time work with a salary of 65.9 $/h (= 120*10^3/(35*52)), hiring the best candidate instead of one 50 % as good as them would save AWF 60.0 k$/year (= 910*65.9). So, at least under this toy model, earning to give may still be a good alternative for the best candidate.

However, I will stop this estimate now, because the time for the AMA is running out and I have to get ready for the beginning of the holiday that starts in Poland today. :)

Happy holidays!

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Vasco Grilo🔸4
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I think the marginal cost-effectiveness of AWF's spending on grants and salaries should ideally be equal. Under these conditions, if the 2nd best candidate is 50 % as productive as the best one, and the salary for full-time work is 120 k$/year, I believe the 2nd best candidate plus 60.0 k$/year (= (1 - 0.5)*120*10^3) would be as good as the best candidate.

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Vasco Grilo🔸5
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What are your best guess for the expected impact of donating 100 k$ to AWF as a fraction of the expected impact of donating 100 k$ to GiveWell's top charities? It would be great if you could give a quantitative answer, and explain how you got it. I would also be curious to know about disagreements you may have with my estimates that:

  • Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
  • The Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) is 64.3 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.

What are your best guesses for the cost-effectiveness of the 3 interventions above? Why?

How do your answers to my questions above change if you assume expected total hedonistic utilitarianism?

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KarolinaSarek🔸5
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As AWF, we haven’t made any direct comparisons between AWF and GW, so we wouldn’t be able to answer that. While I read your cost-effectiveness analysis, and I’m grateful for the work you do to publicly estimate that for a range of charities, I won’t have the capacity to review it in depth in order to point out specific disagreements if they were to occur. 

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Charlotte Darnell5
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I don't have a question top of mind, but wanted to say thanks for doing an AMA, seems like it could be really useful for some people deciding where to give.

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KarolinaSarek🔸4
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Thank you, Charlotte! Indeed, that is one of the reasons why we are excited to do this AMA. 

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John Salter4
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With respect to other causes areas:

  1. Animal advocates seem to spend a lot of energy engaging in mutually destructive conflict with one and other.

  2. Even accounting for the above, mental health seems unusually poor and willingness to use existing services is low

How open are you to funding related interventions?

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Zoë Sigle13
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Hi John, 

Anecdotally and from my perspective, infighting within the animal protection movement has decreased notably over the last decade, but this doesn’t mean it’s gone. Additionally, as you know (but sharing for those reading), infighting is not the only contributor to mental health challenges in our space.

The EA Animal Welfare Fund historically has not funded advocate mental health work directly. Given our limited funds and our niche within the wider funder communities for both the animal protection and effective altruism movements, the EA Animal Welfare Fund is not currently prioritizing funding direct mental health assistance for advocates. However, we are not fundamentally opposed to funding this kind of work if we were to review a strong application demonstrating (amongst other criteria) movement need, an excellent track record, cost-effectiveness (in terms of expected indirect animal impact), and inability to secure sufficient funding from other sources.

With that said, we have funded capacity-building organizations, like Scarlet Spark, where part of their services include improvements to team wellbeing. 

Additionally, the EA Animal Welfare Fund considers interpersonal dynamics and organizational cultures when conducting grant evaluations, whether this means conflicts between individuals within an organization or conflicts between organizations. The community health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism has supported our fund managers in investigating conflict allegations regarding applicants and navigating funding recommendation options (including exit grants and full rejections). We have declined to fund several applications when we see organizations not engaging as respectful team players within the wider movement space. We have also phased out funding for at least one organization where we observed organizational cultural issues that were detrimental to employee well-being and mental health and, in our estimation, the long-term sustainability of the organization’s impact on animals. 

Thank you for caring about the mental health of our animal advocate community. I know your organization, Overcome, coaches at least some animal advocates through mental health challenges, and I have heard (anecdotal) positive testimonials from advocates receiving coaching. To your point of “willingness to use existing services is low,” I encourage animal advocates reading this, who might be in need of mental health support, to reach out to Overcome to assess fit for support.

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Engin Arıkan3
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How often grantees pivot to more modest goals or different tactics after they realise that their initial goals are very hard to reach or their initial idea does not deliver results- after they receive their grants for certain high goals and specific plans in their application? How do you balance holding grantees accountable vs. providing them flexibility?   

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KarolinaSarek🔸16
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I wish I had a more quantitative answer at this point. We have begun tracking grant impact, and forecasting its outcomes using a system that categorizes grants into four possibilities: successful as planned, successful pivot, unsuccessful due to theory of change, and unsuccessful due to execution. Once we've collected more data through this system, we'll be able to provide more precise numbers. :)

For now, I can say that modifications to original outcomes happen fairly often - my rough estimate is in about 30% of cases. These modifications can involve either scaling back to more modest goals or, in some cases, expanding to more ambitious ones.

Generally, we view pivots positively when grantees adapt their outcomes based on new information and the modified outcomes have led to (or are likely to lead to) meaningful impact. In these cases, we increase our confidence in the grantee's ability to execute this type of work while decreasing our confidence in the assumptions underlying the original theory of change. When grantees don't deliver their planned outcomes, we look for evidence that they've learned valuable lessons that will help them either develop more realistic expectations and plans, or improve their tactics to better achieve their goals. 

While we appreciate all the efforts that advocates undertake to improve the plights of animals, we do take track records into account when evaluating subsequent applications. Our tolerance for "misses" before deciding not to fund a grantee depends on several factors, such as our priors about the effectiveness of their work, or the ambition of their undertaking - two misses from a grantee that has been achieving significant impact for years but is now struggling with an ambitious campaign is different from a grantee who misses twice on their moderate goals and hasn't had any positive track record before.

Ultimately, how we balance accountability versus flexibility is highly case-dependent, taking into account the full context of the grantee's work and circumstances.

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Engin Arıkan1
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Thank you Karolina for the detailed answer!

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Vasco Grilo🔸2
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Would you fund interventions decreasing the number of factory-farmed animals with positive lives? I would not, as they would decrease welfare. For context:

  • I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free corporate campaigns increase welfare per living time by 92.9 % and 80.4 %, which are not far from the increase of 100 % that would be obtained for improved conditions respecting neutral lives.
  • Based on Ambitious Impact's pain intensities, assuming hurtful pain is as intense as a practically maximally happy life, both broilers in a reformed scenario and hens in cage-free aviaries have slightly positive lives.
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KarolinaSarek🔸13
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Thanks for the question. This is not a question the fund has to consider very often - we're typically evaluating grants that would affect animals living lives we expect are negative lives. 

It's possible there are some cases where we're evaluating some interventions to reduce the number of farmed animals (e.g., meat reduction or farm prohibitions) where some of the animals who would not come into existence because of the reform would have otherwise lived net positive lives (some have estimated under particular ethical assumptions that cows raised for beef could be living net positive lives), but the vast majority of the impact would still be aiming to affect animals that are experiencing net negative lives and don't have a viable path on the table to achieve net positive lives instead.

To go a bit more in-depth and offer a more personal take rather than speaking for the AWF. Personally, even if I put on my 100% utilitarian hat, I would still have some uncertainty. First, I would need to have high confidence in:

  1. Their lives being in fact, net positive. I think there is too much uncertainty about the welfare of animals and how to approach it depending on ethical theory. For example, if we give significant credence to negative utilitarianism or simply place a high weight on excruciating pain, then even if animals lead decent lives, slaughter at the end of their lives may outweigh it.
  2. Methods to measure and aggregate their welfare, such as temporal welfare aggregation challenges.
  3. Ability to determine where this threshold is and at which point life becomes net positive. Some claim that this concept is not even valid.

But yeah, if I was confident in all of that, or was risk permissive, with a 100% specific flavor of utilitarianism hat on, maybe I would.

But personally, I'm not sure I'm 100% utilitarian, and I have a more complex parliament, where some members/ethical theories say that it wouldn't be ethical (e.g., rights-based). I could imagine a case where more members would agree if, for example, there was no slaughter before natural death would occur for a given individual, and animals would die being completely anesthetized. Additionally, farms would be completely open, where an animal could choose to leave the environment they are in (where they are taken care of, but their products are taken away from them) and choose another one (where perhaps they are not taken care of but are free to fully express their natural behavior (e.g., where their offspring would hatch from eggs instead of eggs being taken away from them)). There are still dilemmas, such as whether truly informed consent is possible for animals, whether the choice to stay implies positive welfare or just status quo bias, and whether providing choice is sufficient for moral permissibility, etc. 

Then there is also the issue of whether we are obligated to bring into life beings who will lead net positive lives. I certainly don't act in accordance with that now, and I think population ethics is something I cannot solve, so I don't know what I would do. ¯\(ツ)/¯ Jokingly, maybe spend my donation budget to fund Peter Singer to figure it out :P 

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Vasco Grilo🔸2
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Thanks, Karolina! It is great to know your thoughts on this and my other questions.

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MichaelStJules4
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Are you effectively assuming that when they are awake and not experiencing hurtful pain or worse, that they are experiencing pleasure as intense as hurtful pain? I would probably assume only pleasure that intense for eating, dustbathing and playing, at most. Foraging might be annoying or hurtful intensity.

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Vasco Grilo🔸4
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Thanks for the question, Michael! Yes, roughly so. With the caveat that pleasure and hurtful pain can be experienced simulataneously, in which case the positive experiences may be less intense (holding the total welfare from positive experiences costant) than hurtful pain (because they could be experienced for longer).

I set the welfare from pleasure to the product between:

  • The lifetime minus 8 h/d of null welfare minus the sum of the time in hurtful, disabling and excruciating pain.
  • The intensity of hurtful pain.

This is based on my guess that the pleasure during the non-neutral time outside that in hurtful, disabling or excruciating pain is as intense as a practically maximally happy life, which I assume to be as intense as hurtful pain.

Ideally, the Welfare Footprint Project would measure the cumulative time in each of their 4 categories of pleasure, and then one could determine the welfare from pleasure by guessing their intensity as a fraction of that of a practically maximally happy life (as I did for pain in my post).

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Vasco Grilo🔸2
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Do you have ideas for cost-effectively moving funding from the best interventions helping humans to the best ones helping animals? Relatedly, do you think the following increase, even if not cost-effectively, the funding going to the best interventions to help animals?

  • Arguing the best interventions to help animals are much more cost-effective than the best to help humans (as I do).
  • Discussing the meat-eater problem. I have heard this may decrease support for animal welfare by associating it with the controversial view that saving human lives may be bad due to increasing animal suffering.
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KarolinaSarek🔸6
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We are excited about efforts to increase the amount of funding that goes to high-impact animal interventions. That being said, we believe there are as many, if not more, promising opportunities to increase funds from these other sources, such as:
a) less effective animal sources, supporting work of animal-focused effective giving and fundraising initiatives such as FarmKind, or Farmed Animal Funders, and cross-cause ones, e.g., Effektiv Spenden and others. I believe AIM had a report offering an impact evaluation of those, but I cannot find it now. 
b) less effective human sources, such as leveraging government R&D funding to be redirected to alt protein. This had significant successes, as described by Lewis in his new newsletter “6. Putting Green into Going Green. Governments invested over $200 million into research and infrastructure advancing alternative proteins, including in the US ($71M via DOC, DOD, and Massachusetts), Denmark (DKK 420M / $59M), Japan (¥7.87B / $51M), the UK (£27M / $34M via two grants), the EU (€12M / $13M) and Beijing (80M Yuan / $11M). New alternative protein research centers, funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, opened in London, North Carolina, and Singapore.” We also think that influencing climate philanthropy has a lot of potential. 
We haven’t evaluated the two methods you described, and I’m not aware of any such estimates, so I cannot comment on their effectiveness. But I think that in any scenario, those interventions I mentioned would be better on the global net, species-agnostic welfare than, e.g., moving from the best interventions helping humans to the best ones helping animals. 

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Vasco Grilo🔸2
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Thanks, Karolina.

a) less effective animal sources, supporting work of animal-focused effective giving and fundraising initiatives such as FarmKind, or Farmed Animal Funders, and cross-cause ones, e.g., Effektiv Spenden and others. I believe AIM had a report offering an impact evaluation of those, but I cannot find it now. 

Here is AIM's report on effective giving incubation.

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Vasco Grilo🔸*2
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Thanks for doing this! As I asked a few weeks ago, do you have any thoughts on whether it is better to donate to the AWF or the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP)? I estimate this is 412 and 173 times as cost-effective as broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns.

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KarolinaSarek🔸9
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Hi Vasco! I indirectly address this question above. Indeed, we think that SWP is a great, highly cost-effective donation opportunity, and we're proud to have been one of their early funders. 

However, I'd be hesitant to make confident broad-stroke claims about comparative cost-effectiveness. That said, AWF have visibility across many different funding opportunities and can allocate funds to wherever they'll have the highest marginal impact. If we believed funding SWP at a larger scale would be more cost-effective than other opportunities we're considering, we could increase our support to them. This would indicate that it's better to donate to AWF since we can make that comparison and choose an opportunity that is more cost-effective on the margin. 

However, some of the grants we make have a high expected value, but their impact is not as certain. At this point, SWP represents a more "certain" opportunity for impact with a proven track record. Some of our grants may help start and scale the next SWP (as they did with SWP in the past), and some will not pan out and achieve 0 impact, so if a donor wants to have a higher certainty of impact, rather than rely on expected value-driven/hit-based giving, then donating to SWP directly may be a better option for them. 

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Vasco Grilo🔸2
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Thanks, Karolina. It makes sense that you think donating to AWF is better than to SWP. As you say, AWF should otherwise fund SWP more. However, I still do not understand how you conclude that. I estimate SWP has been 173 times as cost-effective as cage-free campaigns, but a significant fraction of AWF's funds go to such campaigns. I guess you think I am greatly overestimating the past cost-effectiveness of SWP, but I do not know why.

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