Hi Johannes, thanks for raising this! The usage of honey bees and cochineals for human purposes is indeed massive. The primary reasons why this is not a major focus for us are that we haven't so far found tractable and cost-effective approaches that would help reduce the suffering of those animals in a way that would be more impactful compared to other marginal opportunities we have available. If anyone has identified a promising approach, we're very happy to learn more from them.

 

Hi Vasco! I'm out of the office, but I will address your comment upon my return. 

Thanks for your suggestions! I'm out of the office, but I will address your comment upon my return. 

Thanks for this question - it's indeed helpful to clarify this. Yes, we're seeing many applications that are clearly out of scope and therefore are desk rejected. The applications we typically desk reject are focused on, for example, animal shelters, direct animal care, companion animals, or work not aligned with animal welfare, etc. This accounts for approximately 95% of our desk rejections. Given that the fund's scope is laid out on our website, applicants who carefully review AWF's page should be able to easily determine whether their project aligns with our scope before applying.

Hi everyone, as the Chair of the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF), I want to let you know what these changes mean for AWF specifically. 

I'm excited about the potential this merger has for EA Funds. With CEA's support, we'll be in a stronger position to grow the resources needed to solve the world's biggest problems, increase communication efforts making the impact of projects supported by EA Funds more legible and recognized, and strengthen our capacity—ultimately resulting in more funding going to effective projects.

What will change for AWF:

• Operations for AWF will now be provided by CEA rather than EV Ops, 
• Operational and legal due diligence on grants will now be conducted by CEA rather than EV Ops,
• We will have increased capacity for fundraising and communications, allowing us to better showcase the impact of our grantees and reach more potential donors.

What remains unchanged:

• Mission: AWF still aims to alleviate the suffering of animals globally by providing funding to organizations and projects that most effectively improve the lives of animals in factory farms, bring factory farming to an end, and positively affect other large-scale groups of animals, 
• Positioning: AWF will remain part of EA Funds, and is closely aligned with the effective giving ecosystem and its efforts,  
• Priorities: AWF will continue to focus on providing funding for high-leverage work in neglected areas such as invertebrate welfare, wild animal welfare, farm animal welfare opportunities in the global south, early-stage funding for promising organizations, and other high-impact areas. As planned, over the next few months, our team will be working on refining our grantmaking strategy. 
• Grant recommendation: AWF will maintain its independent grant evaluation and recommendation process (with grants subject to operational and legal due diligence as they were under EV), 
• Grantmaking: AWF will likely remain operationally able to support at least the same type of grants as under EV,
• Funding: All donations to AWF, past and future, will continue to be restricted for AWF usage only, 
• Staff: AWF team members will remain dedicated to furthering the AWF mission,
• Donation platform: Donations for AWF regranting can still be made through Giving What We Can, while we will consider setting up an internal donation platform as well. 

If you have questions about how this merger will affect the Animal Welfare Fund's work, please don't hesitate to ask here or reach out to me directly. While I may be slow to reply, as next week I begin my extended work travel for various conferences, I will aim to reply to most messages.

That's amazing; thank you for this initiative and fundraising for the EA AWF! 

Why did you assume hiring the best candidate would save senior staff 66 h/year.

The number, is the difference between the first and second candidate in $ cost per h saved (given their salary and how much time they save). The difference would be $66 per h. Later, I accidentally omitted the $ sign in the text, and that indeed created a mistake in further calculations. It turns out that making BOTEC late in the evening is not a good idea, in my case. :) Thank you for catching that error!

To refine the calculations by fixing the error you spotted and adding more considerations:

I say earlier. 
“Let's assume the 2nd best candidate is half as good as the 1st and therefore saves us half as much time. Instead of saving us 35h per week (40h - 5h management, meetings, review etc.), they save us 17.5h (requiring much more management and oversight to get the same results, which I actually think is conservative), for the same up to $120k spent on salary and benefits.

In the first case, we get 35 × 52 workweeks in a year = 1,820h, and in the second 910h. The cost-benefit analysis is $65 per hour for the first candidate and $131 per hour for the second, with a difference of $66 per hour.”

I was aiming to calculate the difference between the first and second candidates. The first would save 1820h (35h × 52 workweeks in a year), the second 910h (35h x 52 workweeks in a year). 
The cost-benefit ratio of that time saved is: for the first, $65 per h ($120000/1820 hours saved per year), and for the second, it is $131 per h ($120000/910h saved), so the difference is $66 per h. 
1820-910=910h difference in a year
And each hour, for the 2nd candidate, cost us $66 more than for the 1st.
910h difference, at $66 per h, the difference in cost is $60060. 
Indeed, in that time, a senior fund manager could in theory, create 60 active grantmaking opportunities (910h/15h) at a cost of $60060. 
So $60060/60 = $1001 difference in cost between candidates for generating one opportunity. 

But you are right; we cannot generate 60 active grantmaking opportunities in a year, no matter the time spent. If we had an unlimited time (something I didn’t assume in the RFMF estimate), I think we could generate more than $2M estimated in the RFMF post, but indeed not 60 opportunities. My guess would be somewhere around 20-30. If we take those numbers and follow your reasoning, there is room for saving from 300h (=20*15) to 450h (=30*15), which could be achieved by hiring a candidate at least 16.4% (=300/(35*52)) to 24.7% (=450/(35*52)) as good as the best. While we have to remember to take into account the higher cost of generating that opportunity in the case of the 2ns candidate. 

A significant limitation to that estimate is that we assume no increase in time when generating the next marginal opportunity. In fact, I expect that each marginal opportunity we generate will require a higher time investment to generate, simply because it will be harder to come up with ideas, find the right people who are not already busy, etc. So let me introduce this refinement to our estimate. For example, the first 10 opportunities may take 15h per idea, the next 10 can take 25h, and probably the next 10 would take significantly more, like 40h. If we take those numbers and the range for the number of potencial opportunities (20-30), the total time to generate 20 opportunities would be 400h (=(10*15)+(10*25)), and the time to generate 30 opportunities would be 800h (=(10*15h)+(10*25h)+(10*40h)). So the potencial of saving 400h-800h is generated by hiring a candidate at least 21.9% (=400/(35*52)) to 42.9% (=800/(35*52) as good as the best. While remembering that generating those opportunities by the 2nd best candidates would have a worse cost-benefit ratio. We also have to remember that in this case, we may need more than $2M for active grantmaking, which further complicates calculating the "better candidate to more funding trade-off". 

However, I will stop this estimate now, because the time for the AMA is running out and I have to get ready for the beginning of the holiday that starts in Poland today. :) If you have any comments about the calculation above, let me know. If I happen to have some free time after the holiday, I may swing back to finish and further improve the estimate, but I cannot commit to that, especially if it would trade off against vetting and selecting the best candidates in the current hiring round ;) Thanks for this exchange and all your questions, Vasco! 

Hi Vasco! I answered your question in the recent Ask Us Anything, and here, I have written a more extensive list of when I think it is better to donate to an individual charity and when to a fund. 

Hi Michael! You can find the announcement post and discussion in the comments here. 

Thanks for the question. This is not a question the fund has to consider very often - we're typically evaluating grants that would affect animals living lives we expect are negative lives. 

It's possible there are some cases where we're evaluating some interventions to reduce the number of farmed animals (e.g., meat reduction or farm prohibitions) where some of the animals who would not come into existence because of the reform would have otherwise lived net positive lives (some have estimated under particular ethical assumptions that cows raised for beef could be living net positive lives), but the vast majority of the impact would still be aiming to affect animals that are experiencing net negative lives and don't have a viable path on the table to achieve net positive lives instead.

To go a bit more in-depth and offer a more personal take rather than speaking for the AWF. Personally, even if I put on my 100% utilitarian hat, I would still have some uncertainty. First, I would need to have high confidence in:

1. Their lives being in fact, net positive. I think there is too much uncertainty about the welfare of animals and how to approach it depending on ethical theory. For example, if we give significant credence to negative utilitarianism or simply place a high weight on excruciating pain, then even if animals lead decent lives, slaughter at the end of their lives may outweigh it.
2. Methods to measure and aggregate their welfare, such as temporal welfare aggregation challenges.
3. Ability to determine where this threshold is and at which point life becomes net positive. Some claim that this concept is not even valid.

But yeah, if I was confident in all of that, or was risk permissive, with a 100% specific flavor of utilitarianism hat on, maybe I would.

But personally, I'm not sure I'm 100% utilitarian, and I have a more complex parliament, where some members/ethical theories say that it wouldn't be ethical (e.g., rights-based). I could imagine a case where more members would agree if, for example, there was no slaughter before natural death would occur for a given individual, and animals would die being completely anesthetized. Additionally, farms would be completely open, where an animal could choose to leave the environment they are in (where they are taken care of, but their products are taken away from them) and choose another one (where perhaps they are not taken care of but are free to fully express their natural behavior (e.g., where their offspring would hatch from eggs instead of eggs being taken away from them)). There are still dilemmas, such as whether truly informed consent is possible for animals, whether the choice to stay implies positive welfare or just status quo bias, and whether providing choice is sufficient for moral permissibility, etc. 

Then there is also the issue of whether we are obligated to bring into life beings who will lead net positive lives. I certainly don't act in accordance with that now, and I think population ethics is something I cannot solve, so I don't know what I would do. ¯\(ツ)/¯ Jokingly, maybe spend my donation budget to fund Peter Singer to figure it out :P