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abrahamrowe

4601 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)

Bio

Principal — Good Structures

I previously co-founded and served as Executive Director at Wild Animal Initiative, and was the COO of Rethink Priorities from 2020 to 2024.

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211

Topic contributions
1

Thanks! Strongly agree with making it more democratic via some mechanism, and if it survives beyond the first 6 months, I plan on moving it to having some kind of elected oversight group or similar (mainly will figure out how to do that with input from the members). Interesting note on sortition - this seems plausibly like a good use for it. Thanks!

The first month of Equal Hands is complete!

Here are the results: 20 donors pledged to give $4,430 according to the collective preference of the pool.

This resulted in the following donations:

October 2024AWGHDGCREA CommunityClimate ChangeTotal
Pledge Breakdown39.25%26.20%27.40%3.75%3.40%100%
Implied Donations$ 1,738.78 $ 1,160.66 $ 1,213.82 $ 166.13 $ 150.62 $ 4,430.00 
Pseudo Counterfactual$ 2,711.00 $ 1,172.25 $ 354.75 $ 81.50 $ 110.50 $ 4,430.00 
Implied Change-$972.23-$11.59+$859.07+$84.63+$40.12 

 

All but 2 donors met their pledge, and $4,355 was given following the system. Backstopping funders covered the $75 gap left by the two donors.

Interestingly, the net effect (compared to the pseudo counterfactual of the money being distributed by each donor according purely to their preferences) of Equal Hands in October was roughly to move ~$900 from animal welfare to GCR areas. From the data, it looks like the primary cause of this was that animal welfare-motivated donors were most likely to give the largest amounts, but GCR donors were more likely to sign up (especially at the minimum, $25).

We're running 5 more months of this trial, and you can sign up here.

Yeah, I think that's basically what I was thinking (specifically, starting an insecticide charity, or similar project focused on implementing a WAW intervention)

I think it would be pretty hard for me to make that trade off in a workplace context (I think I'm still a deep sucker for impact and in any real version of this is X would be whatever the organization is indifferent towards and I'd donate it). If you forced me to in some hypothetical I'd guess X is quite low for many junior roles (<$10k), but higher for more mid/senior roles (>$50k?). But I think something like the following are true:

  • I'm currently not doing what I suspect would be the most impactful jobs for me to do, in part because what seems reasonable to pay for them (based on market rates, etc) strikes be as being at least $30k-$40k below what I would consider.
    • As recently as a few years ago, I probably would have considered them at that level.
    • My expenses haven't changed in any meaningful way (outside inflation, etc).
    • I think the work I'm doing instead is almost certainly significantly less impactful.
    • I think this is bad, but compensation isn't the only consideration on my mind.
  • I think generally past a certain point, having (or moving) money is strongly correlated having strategic influence within certain spaces in EA, so it seems pretty important.
    • This is obviously not necessarily correlated with having strategic skill

Nice - that's good to know - I was under the impression that it was a good idea, but didn't get much traction. 

I've definitely heard speciesism used both ways, but I think it's usually used without much reference to an exact view, but as a general "vibe" (which IMO makes it a not particularly useful word). But, I think people in the EA-side of the animal advocacy world tend to lean more toward the "it's discriminatory to devalue animals purely because they aren't a member of the human species" definition. I'd guess that most times its used, especially outside of EA, it's something more like the "it's discriminatory to not view all animals including humans as being of equal value" view but with a lot of fuzziness around it. So I'd guess it is somewhat context dependent on the speaker?

Sorry to just see this!

  1. I agree that for many individuals, going vegan could be a good way to help animals! It's not obvious to me that it is easier to do for most of those people than say, donating to a charity at a rate that roughly offsets the harm from it. I don't really think the specific harm of "eating animals" is worse than the variety of other ways that we eat animals, so feel pretty neutral about veganism — it seems like one of many effective things one can do personally to help animals.
  2. I basically don't know if I believe we'll find anything amazingly effective to do for farmed animals beyond cage free campaigns on this timeline, and those impact a pretty small portion of farmed animals.
  3. I feel confused by this personally - I don't think it makes sense that I'd have an obligation to bring positive lives into existence, and feel like there should be some symmetry here, but it doesn't feel exactly the same. I also don't think 35% is a small probability! It seems not unlikely to me that I have this kind of obligation.
  4. I think EAs won it because they spent a lot of money on things that actually worked (e.g. cage-free campaigns) instead of wasting money on diet change advocacy that wasn't very effective, etc. And I think it was good because it actually did something to help animals! I generally just think the EA side of the animal welfare space is more interested in evidence, and less in ideological purity. These both seem very good to me!

Not really, primarily because I don't think the animal welfare world currently has the organizational competency to do any of them successfully at that scale, and not shoot itself in the foot while doing so, with the potential exception of the advance market commitments. I don't think the existing groups have the organizational competency to handle the ~$200M they already receive well, and think the majority that money is already being spent in expectedly worse ways than giving to GiveWell top charities, even if the best animal stuff is incredibly cost-effective. I think that the movement could get there at some point. But if I imagine that much money going to any existing group to be spent in the next 2 years I think it would mostly be wasted.

I think many of these ideas seem feasible in the longrun, and are viable candidates for what to try, though I just generally think that farmed animal welfare is significantly less tractable than wild animal welfare or invertebrate welfare in the longrun, so would rather the funds went to scaling those fields instead of farmed animal welfare. Also, it is not obvious to me that lots of these ideas will beat out global health charities, though I think blue sky thinking is good.

Also just generally, most of those ideas are ones that don't need to be implemented at scale? E.g. Healthier Hens doesn't seem like it has been able to demonstrate that it is cost-effective to donors at a small scale. Why would scaling it up 1000x go better? It seems like if these ideas could absorb $100M, many could be tried now. The one that hasn't been tried at that scale is advance market commitments, but I think the track record for alternative proteins doesn't look great in general right now, and it isn't obvious to me that R&D is the main barrier — see the margarine issues

I also generally think lots of untried ideas look good on paper, but will probably not end up being effective if tried. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try them, but I think the bar has to be higher than "beats GiveWell in expectation from current evidence," because the uncertainty is also a lot higher.

I think that if I were allocating this funding, there is a very low chance I'd choose to allocate any significant portion of it to farmed animal welfare, given that it isn't nearly as neglected as other larger scale animal issues, and I don't think there are good opportunities on the horizon at scales larger than OpenPhil's animal welfare budget. If OpenPhil stopped funding animal welfare entirely, I'd likely want to see something like $50M going to farmed animal welfare, and almost entirely to corporate campaigns for shrimp as well as some cage-free clean up work, and maybe something in the near future on fish that no one has figured out yet.

If I had to guess at "the fastest way we could spend $100M on animals extremely effectively", I'm think it will be something like putting some research into insecticide interventions and scaling them a lot, and definitely nothing implemented by existing farmed animal groups. If there was anything in the farmed animal space, it would be research, but again - I'm skeptical there are good opportunities beyond what OpenPhil can already fund.

I feel pretty disappointed by a lot of the above - I spent several years professionally working on corporate campaigns, and am as animal friendly as they come, but I've just heavily decreased my confidence in the actual scale of tractable opportunities to improve farmed animal welfare as a whole over the last few years — in large part because it seems like very little has worked despite lots of money being poured into the space.

There are 7 days left to sign up for the first month of this experiment!

As of right now, the marginal $25 influences the allocation of about $253 in expectation.

Nice - yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if that period is slower than the last ~5 years, as a lot of the capital that has gone into the space seems like it has been spent, and it doesn't seem like recent capital inflows have been as high. My 4-7x guess is based on a crude estimate done by Sagar Shah of how much production capacity can be bought with the capital that companies have available to do it, with a delay baked in for construction time.

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