CEO of Fairer Fields. I have a blog where I write about nonprofit ops and strategy, and sometimes animal welfare.
I previously co-founded and served as Executive Director at Wild Animal Initiative, was the COO of Rethink Priorities, and was the Director of Operations at GovAI.
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:
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.
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.
This is not really directly relevant, but I feel somewhat confused by considering statements made during a trial as strong evidence of someone taking seriously the harm they caused (to be clear, you didn't express this directly, but I've seen other supporters of this decision say this, and Caroline's message suggests I should take her statements in the legal proceedings as evidence). Caroline was directly incentivized to both cooperate to make creditors whole, and to express regret and wrongdoing, because she would spend more time in prison if she did not do these things. I think it would be far more meaningful evidence if she had, for example, come forward and admitted to wrongdoing and helped right things when she did not have an incentive to do so (e.g. whistleblown before things blew up).
I don't really think individual organizations have an obligation to protect the brand of EA as a whole, and ideally they just improve the brand of EA by doing good things themselves. But I'm a utilitarian, and I aggregate. I hope that you're right that she's an incredible hire, and the marginal value Manifund produces by doing this offsets the obviously very large costs the ecosystem will bear due to your decision.
Yeah, I agree with this. I do think the EA Forum still has decent posts, but the frequency is just declining a lot. I definitely think a huge part of this is that lots of former power users mostly do AI stuff now, and the Forum doesn't seem great for AI discussion.
I agree this is playing a role - I think I feel a bit negative about this:
Maybe bringing back the EA Forum Prizes, to incentivize people to post (e.g. in the same way that building an audience on Substack theoretically could earn you money) would help?