I suppose we don't know perfectly well!

I think the default is that the matching funds go to non-effective animal charities that are good at marketing or have big donor bases. So depending on if those are net-positive or net-negative, there might be a slight cost to the counterfactual.

The funds themselves presumably come from Every.org's operating funds, which aren't particularly impact-oriented. But maybe they came from a more effective donor!

I'd guess the counterfactualness is similar to EA Giving Tuesday (which sadly doesn't happen anymore).

FWIW, my guess is that this will be much more expensive (though I'm extremely sympathetic to the overall post and direction). I asked one of the scientists working on shrimp stunning research because I happened to be sitting next to them when I read this post, and they guessed $4M-$6M to do the efficacy research as you describe for stunning alone. Similarly, malarial nets cost $100 of Ms over decades of development to get to the point they are at today, not including things like the RCTs to test if they worked, etc.

I think that some of these things will be worth paying for, but I think that animal advocates will need stomachs as big as their eyes for paying for research if we want to make progress on these issues (and this is part of the reason that I believe most animal welfare dollars should be going toward research).

Thanks for writing this!

I also have this bug on mobile (Safari, iPhone 17) - I think a lot of the reason I don't like the featured section much is I often look at the Forum on mobile, but never bother to log in, so it defaults to Featured whenever I go to the home page (and I'd prefer no images / more text density generally).

This comment section felt a bit brigaded here, which I don't love.

I'm sympathetic to debating strategic disagreements in the animal welfare movement, and appreciate you bringing these ideas up and pushing for what you believe is the right approach.

There were 2 things that stood out to me:

We need to go beyond Peter Singer’s utilitarian approach, which has had a limiting impact on campaigns giving preference to concerns about animal suffering and welfare reforms. What is needed are a deontological philosophy and a holistic, ecological systems approach.

I don't think utilitarianism gives a preference to welfare reforms — it's that welfare reforms have a strong track record of being effective, while these other approaches don't. Peter Singer himself wholeheartedly embraces animal liberation, literally! If the utilitarians thought that things beyond welfare reforms would work, and were cost-effective, they'd do them. It isn't because of their principled commitment to utilitarianism that they disagree.

Secondly, I think that many of the donors and EAs would stop being EA donors or EAs at all if deontology became the norm. At least speaking for myself, I am not aligned with EA because it is EA, but I'm aligned with EA because it is more aligned with my values (which are very utilitarian). I suspect this is true for many EA-motivated people. If EA changes, it doesn't mean the donors will change their values.

The campaign was inspired by: (1) the “AI Windfall” entering the animal movement

I think an important question for people who aren't excited about new funding entering the space going to welfare reforms is "why are these new donors are interested in funding animal welfare work at all?" 

I think the answer is because cage-free campaigns, etc. demonstrated that helping animals at scale was possible, and because welfare-motivated advocates demonstrated that something could be done to help animals effectively. 

No animal welfare advocate controls where these donors give — if the movement today decided to pivot to plant-based advocacy and stop doing welfare stuff, it's plausible significantly less money would be donated to helping animals. There isn't a pot of unlimited money controlled by animal advocates — there are donors who have specific values and priorities, and organizations who will make the case to those donors that their work should be funded. The pitch should be to the donors (who actually will decide these things), not to EA as a whole, and has to overcome the fact that you're pitching against the thing that might have gotten many of them excited about animal advocacy in the first place.

I think my main goal with this isn't necessarily about restricting users, but having new users show that the understand community norms (e.g. about how to be clear about reasoning, etc) prior to posting. I agree filters might help too! (I left the downvote comment because I want to encourage people on the forum to be transparent about why they downvote, myself included).

Yeah, that's fair — I guess I think that while posts shouldn't be filtered on content ~at all, they should be moderated on stylistic things, and part of the reason I like rate limiting is that it helps people get used to what I view as good community norms (e.g. reasoning transparency, etc). So maybe that's why I am more sympathetic than others to heavy-handed moderation.

I also found how they worked / what they were really ambiguous for a long time, so had happened to look into it at some point.

I agree!

I believe Renaissance Philanthropy isn't exactly itself a funder or funded by any one donor, but is instead a collection of Funds, each of which have their own donors (and many of which are multi-donor), while RenPhil provides operational infrastructure. They have more information on the model here. So the question might be better targeted at the specific funds than RenPhil itself, and some of the funds do report their donors (e.g. see the bottom of this page).

I'm excited to see more diversification in the EA animal welfare funding space. Thanks for doing this!

(this is at -1 karma when I left this comment). I'm interested in why folks downvoted this? I understand disagree voting, but was surprised by the downvote, so would be helpful to hear your perspective.