Hey Kuhan, I really liked this. Thanks for writing it. It led me to think a bit about how this applies to animal welfare.

What I really like about this, is how your thought experiment encourages altruists to think from the perspective of those they’re trying to help. That principle doesn’t just help humanize EV, it can also help with creating willingness to help individuals regardless of the cause of their suffering. An animal living in a fire zone probably doesn’t care if you’re helping them because humans are to blame or if nature is.

One of the difficulties in animal welfare (but maybe also in other cause areas I don't understand as well) is how uncertain probabilities are in many interventions, not just of success but also of potential backlash or other negative outcomes. 

The other challenge when I try to apply this for animal welfare is that thinking from the individual’s perspective doesn’t necessarily result in the highest EV intervention. A hen suffering in a cage now might prefer a really low chance of a sanctuary rescue over a corporate welfare campaign that likely affects more chickens because the latter will only affect future birds. (And this thought-experiment hen could be super kind and utilitarian, but at a certain point I expect excruciating pain will be the main decision-making factor.) You can make an honest and strong values argument about how we must be willing to weigh the welfare of current and future hens equally, but some of the rhetorical power is lost.

An animal example (which Claude helped me come up with) that I think could potentially work for animal grantmakers is to imagine you’ll be born as a salmon into aquaculture who knows where. A funder can either:

• Fund a program that will definitely improve stunning at one facility, affecting 50,000 salmons
• Fund R&D that has a 20% chance of getting stunning technology adopted across the whole industry, affecting many millions of salmons

I’d prefer not to be born as a salmon at all—and if I were, I might rather die before reaching the smolt phase—but if I knew I’d make it to slaughter age I would hope, depending on the details and the certainty of that 20%, the grantmaker would fund the R&D.

Thanks for writing this Abraham! 

Charity evaluators should think about their impact as partially just “moving money around,” not counterfactual donations.

In simple terms, I see Animal Charity Evaluators doing two things related to this topic:

1. Get donors to say no to good grants so they can say yes to great ones (the moving money around on the margin stuff)
2. Creating impact from being the only reason good work happens (the counterfactual stuff)

As an evaluator that aims to help people help more animals, I currently think this approach will accelerate the journey to a better future. And the faster we get to that kinder world, the more suffering is reduced. It's been tricky to assess though when working on the first becomes opportunity cost to the second to a degree that we're doing less good than we otherwise would. 

Examples of work under one:

• Increasing the quality and rigor of evaluations.
• Strengthening grantmaking decisions and distribution size criteria.

Examples of work under two: 

• Influencing conventional animal donors to dedicate a portion of their giving portfolio to effective animal advocacy.
• Getting conservation-minded animal grantmakers to incorporate wild animal welfare considerations.
• Encouraging traditional grantmakers to incorporate effective giving principles within their cause area.

Though you can only get so far with certain traditional funders in terms of scale (some people just really love pretty predators or donkeys), recently I've seen many are actually craving ways that allow them to do more within their field and to clarify their decision-making internally and to their grantees.

An additional benefit of interacting more with conventional donors is that besides their giving behavior, their moral circle might expand. Which seems particularly relevant for animal advocacy.

(BTW not just GiveWell is trying to calculate their counterfactual, ACE is making an attempt too. The report of the most recently completed fiscal year will actually be posted in the next few weeks, the last one can be read here. But yeah, we found it's pretty difficult to do.)

One more thought: I think your points also apply to the recruitment of board members.

Though I understand the challenge and have this experience (see my other comment) I do see three related cases where it might be even more critical for a start-up or uncertain initiative to hire (and fire) well.

First, hiring in some novel organizations in nascent cause areas might have an effect on the development of a whole field. If there are only a few players, making a wrong hire could change the reputation of the whole space and slow down or reverse progress for the cause. E.g. If you're in wild animal welfare and provide credibility through employment to someone using unscientific methods or who is vocal publicly about highly controversial solutions to wild animal suffering, that could be disastrous for the development of wild animal welfare science. I could see similar risks in EA community building.

Conversely, if you hire the best, it could become easier to attract more high talent, accelerating the path to impact.

Second, in interventions where the reward of success is enormous but the risk of no or negative impact large, it seems critical to hire the best you can get. 

And third, if you’re starting an org that’s trying something new, and you hire someone with average expertise, skills, or drive, or there’s a mismatch between competencies needed and offered, your endeavor might fail. This might lead you, and outsiders, to incorrectly believe the whole intervention isn’t tractable. 

But, if you have short timelines and just need warm bodies who can be easily replaced, I'd likely also invest less in recruitment.

But yeah, I mostly relate to the frustrations of the impossibility of doing some of these ideal recruitment practices.

I find this very interesting to think about. Your reasoning makes a lot of sense to me, and I agree that these practices would make organizations more impactful. But, being in the animal welfare space, these questions feel like fanciful thought experiments (until that Anthropic money comes in, or do we not talk about those dreams outloud?). I know you already know this, but Animal charities don’t have the resources to do rigorous testing of recruitment practices (or to offer competitive salaries). At ACE we can’t afford the time to systematically look at where rejected candidates end up or add prediction steps to the recruitment process—even though I’d really like to. I’ve seen the difference that excellence makes, but the hiring cost is already so time consuming that adding MEL would likely come at the cost of all the work necessary to retain that talent. We’re also too small to get much meaningful data from experiments.

But I could see how a centralized capacity building organization in the effective animal advocacy space could potentially play a role (Animal Advocacy Careers or maybe Sharpen Strategy or High Impact Professionals?). They could collect the data for job analyses, backtest, follow candidates, etc. across multiple organizations. That recruiter would need to thoroughly understand the theories of change for various interventions and organizations. They would also need to understand which competencies and attitudes fit those different contexts best. 

Meanwhile, the charities must be willing to really engage humbly and transparently with this central recruiter and with other animal orgs. Can the EAA community look at the replaceability and counterfactual impact of the movement’s talent pool, without a competitive or scarcity mindset, and encourage their people to move so we collectively do the most good? 

I would like to think about this more, but first I need to raise the money to make sure I can keep my current staff next year and hopefully provide them with COLA and maybe an extra 0.5 FTE in support. (No, not bitter about the lack of funding for animal welfare at all.)

Re: your three identified core competencies, project management is the one I would be most willing to compromise on in a recruiter, because you could potentially mitigate that skill gap with tools or admin assistance. But the ability to be a strategic sparring partner with the hiring manager seems non-negotiable. Same with a desire to test and improve hiring methods because they are determined to figure out the puzzle of getting people in places that sets the org up to do more. You need someone who questions decisions, not a go-fetch headhunter. 

Anyway, I like this obsession with the meta recruiting of obsessive recruiters.

Being the executive director of ACE, I'm obviously quite biased. Then again, I joined ACE because I was convinced of the need for more funding for animal health and wellbeing.

At ACE, once our current busy period has ended, we'll dive into the perspectives and arguments presented in this debate week as a team and likely post here and on our blog our reflection.

After just skimming this week's content, the arguments that I personally find most convincing come down to (1) scale and extent of suffering, (2) how little money effective animal advocacy is currently receiving both in relative terms compared to other cause areas and considering the amount of work that needs to and can get done, (3) that animal suffering is a growing but solvable problem.

The reason I'm not 100% agreeing is that I just do not know the global health space well enough. In the animal welfare sector, we're regularly confronted with outdated or uninformed opinions on tractability, context of the movement, complexity of issues, capacity for subjective experiences, etc. I am likely uninformed of the current opportunities and issues facing human GHW work.