A few years ago, spending on animal welfare reforms in EA was so limited that running rigorous, informative studies to reduce the movement's uncertainty might have cost more than the movement's spending on the campaigns themselves. But as you mention, now that the funding bottleneck might be easing, such studies would inform much larger amounts of spending, and the expected value of information looks much higher. It thus seems like a very good time to raise an issue that would have been much harder to make progress on in the past (though as Lewis Bollard's comment notes, the challenge is still daunting).

I found the post well-written and balanced, and the discussion in the comments mostly helpful. Strongly upvoted.

Thanks for engaging!

I would say I feel good when I hear that a given place has banned bullfighting, and find the practice horrifying. My claim is in the context of the animal welfare movement and how it should spend its resources.

Bullfighting causes intense suffering to a few thousand bulls, for a few hours each. This makes it a very small issue in a consequentialist, most likely less than 0.000001% of the suffering caused by the egg industry on a yearly basis. Then, the counterfactual impact of a single spectator at a bullfight on the outcome is probably low. It doesn't seem like something altruistic resources are well-spent on.

Meanwhile, I don't see attitude change as a clear a step toward a better world for animals. "A better world for animals" is a hideously complicated thing, and currently has little to no correlation with people's attitudes. French people burnt cats alive for fun in the 16th century, but factory farming didn't exist and human-caused suffering to animals was surely <1% of what it was today. A more pro-animal nation may contain more animal suffering (more pesticides, eating smaller and more numerous animals...). And I currently have no reason to believe that there is less total suffering in countries that have banned bullfighting entirely.

I keep admiring AIM's dedication to continuous iteration in the service of impact!

"EAG London this Saturday, 12–1pm: Office hours with Aaron and the AIM team. Drop in to ask questions, kick ideas around, or just say hi. Find it on Swapcard."

Still not seeing this on Swapcard. Am I alone in this?

Low confidence flag, but from what I've heard, even GiveDirectly would be saturated quite early by that amount of money, and not be able to distribute it. If anyone has a figure on where that threshold is (or thinks I'm wrong), I'd be interested!

Nothing super constructive to say, but two years later, I still think about this post a lot and keep coming back to it to read some specific bullets. It's somewhat moving, but also very content-dense, one of my favorite pieces of writing/information on here. 

I generally find pieces about how people's views and drives evolve helpful on many levels, and I'd welcome more of them, even from much less senior people. I try to keep track of this for myself: it's useful for gaining insights into, for example, what actually influences my priorities over time and how contingent those drives are.

I appreciate you raising this and I'm interested to see how people will answer. However, some weak counter-considerations come to mind:

• Many grants go to individual independent researchers for relatively short periods of time, requiring a much higher amount of grantmaking time per FTE than other areas (say, global health) - I realize that this is perhaps not that strong of a consideration, given that many grantmakers mainly fund organizations
• Grantmakers want the field to keep growing quickly, and I assume "creating new grantees" is time-consuming. That means that the current ratio of grantmakers to AI safety FTEs is maybe not the best metric

Abraham has mentioned the new charity briefly on the Hive Slack.

"What exactly do you mean by moving goalposts?"

Quick answer: it's a reference to this paragraph.

Reading a (free) book by Magnus Vinding two years ago is what got me into effective altruism, and I now work full-time on (hopefully) improving the lives of others. I'm very excited by this book, and have loved the chapter drafts that have been released early. 

Fun fact: the draft chapter "healthy habits" from this new book convinced me to go from a night owl to a regular bedtime person, which is the single most transformative lifestyle change I've ever made. I'm awake for 2 hours more per day on average, and am less sleepy. 

Really appreciate this sort of cluster thinking exercise, thanks for sharing! ~20% dying from parasites intuitively shocked me upon reading, even though it checks out, given the abundance of parasites in the wild.