I am a generalist with a focus on data and research.
I work as a researcher for Animal Advocacy Africa.
I participated in Charity Entrepreneurship's Research Training Program in 2023.
It's a tough question and something I've tried to wrap my head around as well. All of the threads in the comments here are quite helpful!
This point you've made, Sam, is also something I have thought about:
Saving human lives doesn’t just contribute to the problem of animal consumption, I hope it it also accelerates the solutions to factory farming.
Awareness of animal welfare issues tends to increase as people get richer and have more space to think about something other than their immediate needs. Of course, factory farming is worse in richer societies, but I think those societies are also closest to overcoming factory farming / the worst farming practices (veganism is more popular, bans of cages, mandatory pre-slaughter stunning, R&D into alt proteins, etc.). This hinges on a few assumptions, which can be debated, but I tend to find it plausible.
That said, I still exclusively support animal charities at this stage, since I think they are anyway far more cost-effective at improving sentient lives (see the points made by Vasco Grilo and Ben Millwood made in this thread).
Thanks Vicky and no worries at all about the response time!
That makes sense. The footnote makes me realize again how little I know about the practicalities of cage free farming (and other farming systems). I'm glad someone is doing the research on it!
Seems reasonable to try out something new, given that it's a major welfare issue. Fingers crossed!
Thank you for sharing and good luck with incubating these latest ideas!
Could you share a bit more about why you feel positive about the keel bone fracture topic, even though Healthier Hens has not been very successful in addressing this so far (to my knowledge)? Is it because this new recommendation takes a different angle, not focusing on feed fortification? Or what is your reasoning behind this?
Yes, this has certainly updated my view on prioritisation between big and small countries. So thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I think it's a good idea to reduce the weight of scale, though probably not as much as you might. Aashish and I might update this as soon as we got around to talking about it and are aligned.
In any case, we encourage people to just take the model, make a copy, and change parameters themselves, if it seems useful for their purposes.
Thanks for your comment! And no worries about not polishing, I will do the same, so it will also be a bit long :)
I agree with your concern and it is something I've also thought about before (in other contexts as well). However, I see two reasons for why working in high-population countries should indeed be favoured:
In short, there is a lot of upside to working in such large countries and as long as I don't have evidence that working in smaller countries is much more tractable I would keep focusing on the large ones. However, if there is clear evidence that working in a specific country is likely to be significantly more tractable, we should give this consideration a lot of weight. Unfortunately our rough model is not well-suited for such nuances, so it should definitely be combined with contextual knowledge/factors.
That said, I think it is a good point that the weight might be too high and these weights are mostly based on our intuitions anyway. So it's great that you are challenging this. I think it would probably be fruitful to do some kind of MC simulation on how the scores change if we vary the weights of different parameters. Maybe I'll find time for this somewhere down the road.
Thanks for your research on this Aashish! Very relevant for our work at Animal Advocacy Africa.
I'm getting the sense that policy work / lobbying could be a good idea (since your uncertainty around this has reduced as a result of your evidence review), but it should be targeted at something else than subsidies, since their path to impact is quite long and unclear? For example lobbying for better animal welfare standards might be more promising as it more directly addresses the problem (has a shorter ToC)?
Do you have an opinion on this? Or any other interventions you think might be more promising than addressing subsidies?
Have you seen this post on second-hand battery pages in Africa? Do you think an intervention focusing on this issue would be promising? If so, what kind of intervention? Should this be focused on the exporting or importing countries?
I would be curious to get your opinion on this, as we (Animal Advocacy Africa) are currently considering different strategies to recommend/pursue.
Thank you!
Thanks for the initiative Abraham! This seems like an interesting and valuable experiment.
One crucial question I have: Is it somehow possible to make sure that I can make tax deductible donations? I live in Germany and Effektiv Spenden does not cover all of these cause area options, as far as I know / can see. For instance, I don't think I could donate tax-deductibly to any of the EA Community Building options from Germany.