I really like this framing, especially the push against “problem hunting” when there’s already an overwhelming amount of neglected suffering in front of us. Animals are not “one issue” but instead, the majority of moral patients. This is underappreciated, even within EA.
One thing that resonated from Ransohoff’s piece, though, is the idea that we don’t yet have the ecosystem to absorb a huge influx of capital. I think that applies here too. Even if we take the case for prioritising animals as seriously as we can, it’s not obvious the field is currently set up to productively deploy funding at the scale you’re pointing to (multiple interventions, geographies, and organisations) without hitting bottlenecks or diminishing returns.
That seems less like a reason not to prioritise animals, and more like a reason to invest heavily in building out the space itself: more people, more organisations, better-developed intervention areas, and especially more work on neglected animal populations (which is why what we're now doing feels particularly valuable).
The AI × animals point also feels important and still quite underexplored. It does seem like it falls between existing buckets in a way that makes it easy to overlook, despite potentially being central to the long-term picture.
Overall, I agree with the core concern. There’s a real risk that a wave of new funding ends up looking for new, legible problems while continuing to underinvest in ones that are already vast, tractable, and unsolved. Making sure that doesn’t happen for animals seems like one of the key challenges for this next phase.
I really like this framing, especially the push against “problem hunting” when there’s already an overwhelming amount of neglected suffering in front of us. Animals are not “one issue” but instead, the majority of moral patients. This is underappreciated, even within EA.
One thing that resonated from Ransohoff’s piece, though, is the idea that we don’t yet have the ecosystem to absorb a huge influx of capital. I think that applies here too. Even if we take the case for prioritising animals as seriously as we can, it’s not obvious the field is currently set up to productively deploy funding at the scale you’re pointing to (multiple interventions, geographies, and organisations) without hitting bottlenecks or diminishing returns.
That seems less like a reason not to prioritise animals, and more like a reason to invest heavily in building out the space itself: more people, more organisations, better-developed intervention areas, and especially more work on neglected animal populations (which is why what we're now doing feels particularly valuable).
The AI × animals point also feels important and still quite underexplored. It does seem like it falls between existing buckets in a way that makes it easy to overlook, despite potentially being central to the long-term picture.
Overall, I agree with the core concern. There’s a real risk that a wave of new funding ends up looking for new, legible problems while continuing to underinvest in ones that are already vast, tractable, and unsolved. Making sure that doesn’t happen for animals seems like one of the key challenges for this next phase.