This is a special post for quick takes by abrahamrowe. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Reflections on a decade of trying to have an impact
Next month (September 2024) is my 10th anniversary of formally engaging with EA. This date marks 10 years since I first reached out to the Foundational Research Institute about volunteering, at least as far as I can tell from my emails.
Prior to that, I probably had read a fair amount of Peter Singer, Brian Tomasik, and David Pearce, who might all have been considered connected to EA, but I hadn’t actually actively tried engaging with the community. I’d been engaged with the effective animal advocacy community for several years prior, and I think I’d volunteered for The Humane League some, and had seen some of The Humane League Labs’ content online. I’m not sure if The Humane League counted as being “EA” at the time (this was a year before OpenPhil made its first animal welfare grants).
This post is me roughly trying to guess at my impact since then, and reflections on how I’ve changed as a person, both on my own and in response to EA. It’s got a lot of broad reflections about how my feelings about EA have changed. It isn’t particularly rigorously or transparently reasoned — it’s more of a reflection exercise for myself than anything else. I’m mainly trying to look at what I’ve worked on with a really critical eye. I make a lot of claims here that I don't provide evidence for.
I’m sharing this because I think the major update I’ve had from doing this is that while I’ve generally done many of the “working-in-EA” things that are often presented as high impact, I personally feel much more tangibly the impact of my donations, and right now, if I think what’s made me feel best about being in EA, it’s actions more in the earning-to-give direction than the direct work direction.
My high-level view of my impact over this period is something like:
$30,000 in counterfactually good donations.
Overall unclear results for animals, though hopefully will have a big impact for future (primarily wild and invertebrate) animals, primarily because my work hasn’t really borne fruit in terms of direct impact yet.
I might have helped directly cause a few million animals to suffer mildly less bad deaths on factory farms, but it is unclear to me if this is counterfactual.
I think I was among the first handful of people to try to seriously get donors to take insect welfare seriously, and to get animal advocacy organizations to take insect welfare seriously, starting in around 2017.
I think importantly I failed to do this well, and if I had succeeded, insect welfare harms from farming could be lower. Other people obviously had an effect here too, but I think not being strategic about this feels to me like the biggest failure I’ve had as an EA.
Co-founded or helped found three high-impact orgs (Wild Animal Initiative, Arthropoda Foundation, and one other), all of which I think I can claim would likely not have existed if I hadn’t worked on them.
Counterfactually meaningfully contributed to another 2 organizations launching (and advised on many more).
Caused the insect welfare world to focus slightly more than they otherwise should (in my view) on insect farming compared to insecticides. I’m uncertain of the counterfactual, but I can imagine worlds where I lobbied harder for insecticide-focused work would have been better for insects.
Mild benefits from my operations work, mainly through providing some extra high-trust capacity at critical times to organizations.
Background
I became pretty convinced that factory farming was a moral tragedy as a little kid, I believe due to exposure to either PETA content or PETA Kids content. My brother was also vegetarian, which was a compelling enough reason for me to also become vegetarian. I volunteered for a lot of animal welfare organizations, especially in college. I also did a lot of direct action-type advocacy for animals in college. I was already a fairly hardcore utilitarian at that point, and had mainlined Peter Singer, David Pearce, Timothy Sprigge, and a bunch of other wacky utilitarians. I spent a significant amount of my time in college staying up until the early morning talking about wild animal suffering and other animal issues with my closest friend while playing the video game Super Monkey Ball. This did not help any animals but was incredibly important to how I think about animal issues now.
At some point around 2011 or 2012, I saw a frog that was hit by a bike and dying, and was really distraught over it. I’m not sure why, but this was oddly transformative for me, and I just internalized animal suffering from it really directly in a way I hadn’t before. I also have a fairly strong memory from when I was 20 or 21 of spending an afternoon in the rain putting worms back from the sidewalk into the grass, and feeling bad about them dying naturally. I formed fairly strong views about animals in nature living awful lives, and beliefs about my obligations to help them.
In 2014, I was targeted by a Google Ad for The Foundational Research Institute, I believe on a topic related to wild animal welfare. I think this was my first exposure to EA formally, though I’d read studies on The Humane League Labs website, had read Animal Liberation, Famine, Influence, and Morality, and some other books that informed EA ideas.
I did some volunteering for FRI, read a lot of Brian Tomasik’s website, and also did some experiments at a cat shelter on reducing the impact of outdoor cats on animals. In 2016, I started working at Mercy For Animals, running corporate animal welfare campaigns. I also formally started Utility Farm, a nonprofit that would later merge with Wild-Animal Suffering Research into Wild Animal Initiative. I’ve done a bunch of other things in the EA world since.
My potential impact
Donations
I’ve donated approximately $52,000 directly to what I consider to be high-impact charities, and reserved an additional $38,000 for future giving opportunities. I think that I should count this as something like $30,000 in counterfactually good donations.
I think I was pretty convinced by EA reasoning when I first encountered it, and had I not worked directly on projects, I probably would have taken the GWWC pledge by 2016. I think that my earning potential from 2016-2022 outside of EA was roughly $30,000-$50,0000 higher than within EA. From 2022 to now, I think my earning potential was roughly $25,000-$100,000 outside of EA. Looking at my donations as a percentage of my income over the past 10 years, (including funding reserved for future giving), I expect that this means:
2016-2019: $30,000 in additional donations
2020-2024: $15,000 in additional donations.
However, I think I would have donated this funding primarily to farmed animal welfare work that I no longer think is particularly impactful, and I should have viewed them with more skepticism at the time, though it was above the bar I’d apply today until 2019 or 2020.
I suspect this means that I should discount some counterfactual donations from 2020-2024 to nearly $0, and I should assume the counterfactual is closer to $30,000 in high impact donations.
Provided feedback or directly recommend grants totalling around $5M.
I think these probably changed how something like $500k was used in expectation, but probably in ways that mostly washed out, so it’s unclear what the impact is to me.
Corporate Campaigns
I ran corporate campaigns for Mercy For Animals, primarily on broiler welfare, though to a lesser extent on cage-free, and won some commitments from major corporations.
I think that it’s possible that these commitments will lead to controlled atmosphere stunning being implemented on some farms, but for the most part the other commitments won’t be implemented fully, so it’s hard to assess their impact directly.
I think they still plausibly will improve the lives of millions of animals, and I was paid relatively little (~$35,000 / year), so it was probably fairly impactful.
I think MFA had a pretty easy time hiring campaigners, and would have found someone else good if they hadn’t hired me.
I think most of my counterfactual impact on corporate campaigning has come via advising on campaigns since I left Mercy For Animals, and by pushing mildly behind the scenes for a shift in campaigning tactics that I think will potentially be significantly more impactful than what major groups are doing now.
I still generally suspect corporate campaigns are no longer particularly effective, especially those run by the largest groups (e.g. Mercy For Animals or The Humane League), and don’t think these meet the bar for being an EA giving area anymore, and haven’t in the US since around 2017, and outside the US since around 2021.
I think I can take credit for basically helping a few million animals experience death in a marginally better way over the next decade, which is great! Controlled atmosphere stunning seems better for many chickens, but for many it probably doesn’t make much of a difference compared with live-shackle slaughter.
It’s unclear to me if this is counterfactual because MFA could have hired someone else to do it.
Founding organizations
I co-founded Wild Animal Initiative and one of its predecessor organizations, and served as its first Executive Director.
I am biased, but I think WAI remains one of the most promising ways for EAs to help animals.
My best guess at when there will be cost-effective wild animal welfare interventions that meet my bar for confidence has been steadily declining, primarily due to WAI’s work.
I don’t currently feel convinced that there are highly cost-effective ways to help farmed vertebrates in the near future at scale, so I suspect the vast majority of value in the next few decades for EAs will be from helping wild animals and invertebrates.
I helped launch Arthropoda Foundation, and some other insect welfare initiatives from within EA.
Research Impact
Hiring good researchers
I served on the hiring committee and worked to hire an individual researcher who I think would not have worked on EA issues without our job offer at all, and who I think has 10-20x the impact of the average researcher in EA animal welfare, including anyone we would have hired otherwise.
Conducting direct research
I’ve published 4-5 papers on wild animal welfare or invertebrate welfare, most importantly making some estimates of the number of insects farmed for food or feed. I think this paper has mattered not because it was particularly insightful, but because no one else had published anything like it, and it made a citable figure for academic journals, and is good for communicating impact.
I think some of my research could be bad. For example, Saulius Simcikas is highly skeptical of my suggestion that cochineal suffering could be reduced by reducing cochineal harvesting. If Saulius is correct and I am incorrect, I think this mildly misled some people, including people in influential positions. However, I don’t think any action has been taken on it.
I think that my research has generally caused interested EAs to focus too much on farmed insects, and less on insecticides. I am somewhat inclined toward thinking that insecticide-caused suffering is both more tractable and larger in scale. I’m now working on a insecticide project though, so trying to correct this.
Cultural Impact
I’ve written a bunch of EA Forum posts on various cultural issues/concerns/trends in the EA community, and community dynamics. I think these are largely not impactful, though have caused some mild changes in donation behavior among some people.
I think I can roughly take a large amount of credit for
Preventing wild animal welfare from becoming a weird forgotten corner of 2010-2020 EA, like many other causes
In 2017 and 2018, I lobbied hard for the wild animal suffering-focused individuals to abandon its more radical edges, and to adapt the name wild animal welfare instead. I also oversaw the consolidation of groups within the cause area into Wild Animal Initiative, both of which kept the space afloat, and made it look much more legitimate to external scientists and funders.
I think that there was one other person who could have been in this position at the time (Persis Eskander), but they had gone to a different role.
Getting the EA world into insect welfare (to some extent)
I think that my work on insect welfare is likely the most impactful things that I’ve done — I think that besides Rethink Priorities direct work on invertebrate welfare, and Meghan Barrett’s work to normalize the academic work on insect welfare, my direct contributions have probably been particularly important (though not that much has moved there!)
I pushed major groups to work on this issue earlier than anyone else I know of besides Brian Tomasik, though I was mostly unsuccessful.
Impact Through Operations
I don’t really think my ops work is particularly impactful, because I think ops staff are relatively easy to hire for compared to other roles. However I have spent a lot of my time in EA doing ops work.
I was RP’s COO for 4 years, overseeing its non-research work (fiscal sponsorship, finance, HR, communications, fundraising, etc), and helping the organization grow from around 10 to over 100 staff within its legal umbrella.
Worked on several advising and consulting projects for animal welfare and AI organizations
I think the advising work is likely the most impactful ops work I’ve done, though I overall don’t know if I think ops is particularly impactful.
My beliefs in 2014 compared to now
This is my best effort to estimate how my credence in various beliefs have changed since 2014, based on notes and exercises from that period of my life.
Belief
2014
2024
Change
Most suffering/welfare is and will be experienced by wild animals
90%
90%
+0%
I have a deep ethical obligation to reduce as much animal suffering as possible
95%
60%
-35%
People generally have a deep ethical obligation to change their diet to help animals
85%
20%
-65%
We can make meaningful progress on abolishing factory farming or improving farmed animal welfare by 2050
75%
10%
-65%
We can make meaningful progress on abolishing factory farming or improving farmed animal welfare by 2100
85%
15%
-70%
Most experiences are negative / suffering dominates in the wild
85%
80%
-5%
I have an obligation to reduce suffering, but not to increase happiness
75%
65%
-10%
I have strong moral obligations to help whoever I can as effectively as possible, independent of location, relationship, etc.
75%
80%
+5%
I have strong moral obligations to help whoever I can as effectively as possible, independent of time
30%
40%
+10%
I have a strong moral obligation to ensure future, positive lives occur
5%
10%
+5%
I have a strong moral obligation to prevent future negative lives from occurring
85%
35%
-50%
Large scale philanthropy by individuals often threatens democratic institutions, and this is often bad, independent of the benefits
85%
60%
-25%
The best animal welfare interventions target farmed vertebrates
95%
10%
-85%
Farmed vertebrate welfare should be an EA focus
90%
15%
-75%
EA as a movement is/will be positive for the world in the long run
90%
30%
-60%
Most people interested in EA should earn to give
60%
85%
+25%
It was good for animal welfare that the EAs “won” the abolitionist/welfarist debates
80%
95%
+15%
How my thinking about EA has changed over time
I have some long-held views that haven’t really changed:
I’ve always been fairly skeptical of the degree to which EA unquestioningly embraces major donor philanthropy, despite having created the only viable alternative I’ve ever seen to it (lots of medium-sized donors!)
I’ve always been uncomfortable with the concentration of power in EA.
I’ve always felt surprised by the lack of experimentation / deference to Silicon Valley norms / lack of interest in alternative organizational structures.
Likewise, I’ve always felt disappointed by the lack of interesting funding mechanisms, especially ones that try to capture group beliefs about impact / hedge across beliefs more explicitly.
I have a project forthcoming on this I am really excited about though!
My views have also changed in a bunch of ways:
I’ve become highly skeptical of most farmed vertebrate welfare work, and the organizations working on it.
I’ve lost some faith in “EA leadership” to be either moral leaders / people who can effectively guide a community, especially after the FTX political events.
The closest I came to “leaving EA” was in April 2022, right before peak FTX-hype. I wrote a draft post about what I believed was likely both illegal and harmful election manipulation occurring within EA, and never published it (it’s unclear to me if I was correct — SBF and others were accused of related crimes later, but as far as I can tell haven’t been charged for them). I felt incredibly disheartened and sad that a community I thought was really dedicated to taking morality seriously seemed so easily bought into something that seemed so sketchy. I considered leaving my job at RP, and completely disassociating with EA. While the FTX collapse was obviously awful, for me personally there was some level of validation/relief in it, as I felt really bad during peak-FTX funding about how things were going.
Post-FTX, the lack of turnover in leadership has made me really worried.
I think I can credibly claim to have been EA-adjacent from well before it was cool, but I feel a lot more adjacent now.
I’m a lot more convinced we can cost-effectively help wild animals in the near future than I was when I ran Wild Animal Initiative (ironically?)
Things that changed about me from exposure to EA
I care a lot more about money
Before I was interested in EA, I made very little money, and didn’t feel like it mattered much. I thought that I was mostly going to help people/animals through volunteering, and felt happy with what I had.
EA was far more status-oriented than the spaces I worked in before, and generally a lot more focused on the compensation from direct work roles/better paying.
I think being in EA and aging both have caused me to just care about how much money I make a lot more than I did before.
I care a lot more about status
I previously primarily worked in fields that were fairly non-hierarchical / didn’t have massive power dynamics (because they were small and decentralized). EA feels very different. Status matters a ton here. People respond uncritically to poorly argued posts from powerful people, over-index on the views of those with funding / status, and generally seem to want to move up a status hierarchy. This seems really natural for the way EA has structured itself, and it’s caused me to care a lot more about it too.
My commitment to doing good feels deeper
I feel a lot more committed to doing good than I used to. I think I’m a lot less certain about how, or that I can. But it feels more important to me.
I feel more morally compromised
EA has exposed for me how easily I can become entangled in things that feel compromising — that I am doing what seems good, but simultaneously participating in something harmful. I also think I generally feel like having a positive impact is harder without this kind of moral compromising.
Overall, when I look at my first 10 years engaging with EA, I feel mainly like things are just ambiguous to me. I feel a lot more positive about some donations I made than anything else — in particular large donations to brand new projects that probably helped accelerate them a lot. The animal work I’ve done feels promising but ambiguous. This post feels very melancholy, but ultimately, I still feel excited about trying to do impactful work in the world.
Thank you for writing this! Was really interesting to read. I'd love to see more posts of this nature. And it seems like you've done a lot for the world — thank you.
I have a couple questions, if you don't mind:
You write
I still generally suspect corporate campaigns are no longer particularly effective, especially those run by the largest groups (e.g. Mercy For Animals or The Humane League), and don’t think these meet the bar for being an EA giving area anymore, and haven’t in the US since around 2017, and outside the US since around 2021.
I would love to hear your reasoning (pessimism about fulfillment? WAW looking better?) and what sort of evidence has convinced you. I think this is really important, and I haven't seen an argument for this publicly anywhere. Ditto about your skepticism of the organizations leading this work.
We can make meaningful progress on abolishing factory farming or improving farmed animal welfare by 2050
Did you mean to change one of the years in the two statements of this form?
Most people interested in EA should earn to give
I'd love to hear more about this. How much value do you think e.g. the median EA doing direct work is creating? Or, put another way, how significant an annual donation would exceed the value of a talented EA doing direct work instead?
Seems like the majority of commitments happened in prior years and there's been a rapid decline in number of commitments.
Enforcement is still needed, but is isn't obvious to me that dozens of well funded orgs are needed for it.
The broiler ask was not tenable from the start, and many campaigners think it'll never be fulfilled at a large scale.
The well-funded orgs seem like they have lots of internal issues that prevent them from being particularly effective.
There's been a pretty big break from the tactics I think are most effective for winning commitments, and it would be hard to get well-funded groups to go back to them.
On WAW specifically, my view is something like:
Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren't that far away.
The intervention space is so large and impacting animals' lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
These interventions will often not involve nearly as much "changing hearts and minds" or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.
Did you mean to change one of the years in the two statements of this form?
Yes, 2100. Thanks for spotting that!
I'd love to hear more about this. How much value do you think e.g. the median EA doing direct work is creating? Or, put another way, how significant an annual donation would exceed the value of a talented EA doing direct work instead?
I think my view is something more like the talent pool in EA is deep enough (for most kinds of roles, especially junior ones), and the donor diversification issues are large enough that it seems like some kind of shift is warranted. I wouldn't want fewer people doing direct work — I'd want fewer people trying to.
Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren't that far away.
The intervention space is so large and impacting animals' lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
These interventions will often not involve nearly as much "changing hearts and minds" or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.
I would love to hear you talk more about this :) What makes you hopeful that scalable interventions are coming, and can you say more about anything you're particularly excited about here? Also curious what "aren't that far away" caches out into in terms of your beliefs -- in 1 year? 3?
I wonder if your opinions are related to the following, which I'd also be excited to hear more about!
I think that my research has generally caused the EA space to focus too much on farmed insects, and less on insecticides. I am somewhat inclined toward thinking that insecticide-caused suffering is both more tractable and larger in scale. I’m now working on a insecticide project though, so trying to correct this.
(Thanks for sharing this post Abraham, I enjoyed reading it :) )
What makes you hopeful that scalable interventions are coming, and can you say more about anything you're particularly excited about here?
The ones that seem most likely in the near future are:
Insecticide interventions like alternative crop insect management approaches, including genetic ones
Less painful insecticides
Fertility control for urban wildlife
Probably a lot more no one has considered
Things that make me think this is on the table:
I think there aren't great alternative animal welfare interventions, but animal interventions have really good returns if you get them right because you can impact so many animals.
We've made some cool progress on validating welfare measures that might be cheap to measure, which could be useful for assessing the sign of interventions.
It seems generally like the academic field building project is going well, so we should expect this to accelerate.
In terms of timelines — I think this is more like 10-15 years. But part of the reason I think that's exciting is that I used to think it would be more like 2050+ before anything like this was on the table. I think I've also just generally decreased my confidence that the problems as are as difficult as I thought before (though I definitely think they are still tricky).
For insecticides, I think my view remains that we are something like 2-5 years of specific lab/field research away from plausibly having a great intervention, so it is sad that progress hasn't been made on it, and given that this also seemed like the case a few years ago, funding the research should have been a priority earlier.
Thanks for writing this, heaps of interesting points. Most surprising and saddening to me was that you think there is a 70% chance EA will be net-negative! Could you explain why you think this? Your various concerns about power centralisation and so forth make sense to me, but to my mind this isn't nearly enough to flip the sign, and EA still seems overwhelmingly good to me.
I was also struck by your melancholy tone - somehow I think I implicitly hoped that if I accomplished all the things you have I would feel more resoundingly happy with my impact! But maybe EAish people are unusually cognisant of missed opportunities and impact that could have been but wasn't.
I don't think it's all net-negative — I think there are lots of worlds where EA has lots of good and bad that kind of wash out, or where the overall sign is pretty ambiguous in the longrun.
Here are lots of ways I think are possible EA could end up causing a lot of possible harm. I don't really think any of these are that likely on their own — I just think it's generally easier to cause harm than produce good, so there are lots of ways EA can accidentally not achieve being overall positive, and I generally think it has an uphill road to climb to end up not being a neutral or ambiguous quirk in the ash heap of history.
The various charities don't produce enough value to offset the harms of FTX (seems likely they already have produced more to me, but I haven't thought about it)
Things around accidentally accelerating AI capabilities in ways that end up being harmful
Things around accidentally accelerating various bio capabilities in ways that end up being harmful.
Enabling some specific person into entering a position of power where they end up doing a lot of harm.
X-risk from AI is overblown, and the E/accs are right about the potential of AI, and lots of harm is caused by trying to slow AI development/regulate it.
There is even stronger reactionary response to some future EA effort that makes things worse is some way.
Most of the risk from AI is algorithmic bias/related things, and AI folks' conflict with people in that field ends up being harmful for reducing it.
Yeah, I think there are probably parts of EA that will look robustly good in the long run, and part of the reason I think that it's less likely EA as a whole will be less likely to be positive (and more likely to be neutral or negative) are that actions in other areas of EA could impact those areas negatively. Though this could cut both in favor of or against GHD work. I think just having a positive impact is quite hard, even more so when doing a bunch of uncorrelated things when some of them have major downside risks.
I think it is pretty unlikely that FTX harm outweighs good done by EA on its own, but it seems easy enough to imagine that conditional on EA's net benefit being barely above neutral (which for other reasons mentioned above seems pretty possible to me, along with EA increasingly working on GCRs which directly increases the likelihood EA work ends up being net-negative or neutral, even if in expectation that shift is positive value), that the scale of the stress / financial harm caused by EA via FTX, outweighs that remaining benefit. And then there is brand damage to effective giving, etc.
But yeah, I agree that my original statement above seems a lot less likely than FTX just contributing to an overall portfolio of harm or work that doesn't matter in the longrun from EA.
Nice, these are good questions, but probably don't capture all the cruxes in my view. 1. I think this seems moderately unlikely to me? I'm not sure what would drive down prices further than where they are now, as it seems like a large portion of the cost are the proteins themselves, and not production.
3. I think this seems possible? But I'd put below 50% on it, and if it does happen, I'd expect something more like the climate movement, where lots of people think it is important but don't really take substantial steps to act on it.
4. I think that reaching 20% vegetarian seems possible in some countries, but I think I'm a lot more skeptical it'll go much higher.
I think it does seem plausible to me that there would be a meaningful reduction in the amount of meat consumed over this period in developed countries, but also expect that might come with more chicken/fish consumption that would offset animal welfare gains anyway.
I think another crux more important to my pessimism is that I don't feel very convinced that price/taste competitive meat alternatives will cause a significant increase in their adoption.
That's interesting, based on thinking that animal protein in the end comes from plant protein, and that animals use up a lot of space, food, and extra infrastructure that is not directly involved in turning plant protein into meat, I'd've guessed that plant protein would be much cheaper than animal protein.
Interesting, hard for me to judge. Reading the Innovations needed section, it seems like most hurdles are in the 3 OOM range, only the growth factor price is 6 OOM off.
My naive reaction is: AI + increased wealth + generally improving science & engineering + increased caring + those are "just" engineering problems -> I'm much more bullish than the authors of the report, who are 9% for:
>50M metric tons of cellular meat will be sold at any price within a continuous 12-month span before the end of 2051.
9%
(For context, the annual production of conventional meat (excluding seafood) in 2018 was 346M metric tons)
I'm maybe at 40%, given that plant-based meat might just do it by itself, or that something disruptive happens that affects R&D broadly, or that it's just unintuitively difficult.
I'm more hopeful this will be more comparable to civil rights / racism / sexism, as there are concrete victims who are suffering (and there is already a broad agreement that animals in human guardianship shouldn't suffer), compared to climate change, which is much more abstract and indirect.
Yeah, I somewhat agree that the steady increase will probably bottom out at maybe 20%. But my hopeful vision is that at 20%, there will be critical mass effects for political action and for the demand of alternative products to lead to a much more mature industry.
Plus I expect health and climate change angles on meat consumption will also more likely than not steadily increase.
Finally, I'm also probably more optimistic about your last point, thinking that price/taste competitive meat alternatives will be huge. I think the Beyond and Impossible "moments" were huge milestones, and a few more "moments" like that will reduce resistance against higher welfare standards & higher prices for conventional meat.
I think the other consideration is that for really cheap proteins (corn/soy/wheat), chickens and other animals eat much less processed versions that are cheaper than the ones humans eat. But also people seem to like products made from them less. The novel plant protein inputs are a lot more expensive as far as I can tell.
Yeah, I think there is a bunch of uncertainty. My sense of the technical hurdles to cost reduction is that they are fairly large, and I'm not sure they super solvable. But I hope I am wrong!
Yeah, this seems possible too.
Plus I expect health and climate change angles on meat consumption will also more likely than not steadily increase.
I worry these push toward worse animal welfare (less eating of cows, more eating of chicken/fish), not better.
Thanks, that all makes sense and moderates my optimism a bit, and it feels like we roughly exhausted the depth of my thinking. Sigh... anyways, I'm really thankful and maybe also optimistic for the work that dedicated and strategically thinking people like you have been and will be doing for animals.
Thank you for sharing your reflections. As I read it I found various aspects that resonated with me, and I suspect that many other people on the EA Forum will feel the same. I'd love to see more of this type of writing (contemplative, reflective, critical/skeptical while being kind) on this forum.
After some discussions with someone offline that were clarifying, I want to clarify my decrease in confidence in the statement, "Farmed vertebrate welfare should be an EA focus".
I think my view is slightly more complicated than this implies. I think that given that OpenPhil and non-EA donors are basically able to fund what seem like the entirety of the good opportunities in this space, I don't think these groups are that talent constrained, and it seems like the best bets (e.g. corporate campaigns) will continue to have decreasing cost-effectiveness, new animal-focused talent should probably be mostly going into earning-to-give for invertebrates/WAW, and that donations should mostly go to groups there or the EA AWF (which should in turn mostly fund invertebrates and WAW). I don't think farmed vertebrate welfare should be the default way that EAs recommend to help animals
Great post! I'm interested in how you are 80% confident that "Most experiences are negative / suffering dominates in the wild". I can understand why you would lean towards it being negative, but why so confident given how little we still understand the experience of animals?
Yeah, I think this just seems pretty likely to me due to thinking that most animals are juveniles / die as juveniles, and the amount of time an animal has to be alive to accumulate good experiences to outweigh a painful death is probably higher than this. Things that have made me slightly less certain about this are me thinking it is more likely than I used to that adult animals in the wild live good lives, and me thinking that it is less likely than I used to that insects/some other invertebrates experience suffering, especially juvenile insects (though I probably still put a higher credence in this than many people).
I think it is pretty plausible I'm overconfident here though.
But, I also think this belief is mostly irrelevant to EAs / wild animal welfare advocates, unless you think there are special reasons improving welfare is easier on one side of the spectrum than the other, which I don't really have strongly held opinions on.
The juvenile animal argument is interesting, as from a total "QALY" perspective, if animals die very young then unless their deaths are extremely suffering-ful and drawn out, the total time for suffering isn't that large IMO.
Yep I completely agree that the belief is (or should be) mostly irrelevent to wild animal welfare advocates, and I think WAW might be more palatable to more people if it was emphasised less. "We have cheap and effective ways of helping wild animals live way better lives" is a better markteing tool than "Wild animals have bad live and are suffering soooo much so we have to do something" (aware I'm strawmanning for emphais a bit here). It only becomes relevant for arguments that look at whether the whole world is "net positive or negative", which I find a bit unhelpful as that discussion doesn't get us closer to making things better.
On that I appreciated these points
"On WAW specifically, my view is something like:
Large scale interventions we can be confident in aren't that far away.
The intervention space is so large and impacting animals' lives generally is so easy that the likelihood of finding really cost-effective things seems high.
These interventions will often not involve nearly as much "changing hearts and minds" or public advocacy as other animal welfare work, so could easily be a lot more tractable.
I think importantly I failed to do this well, and if I had succeeded, the animal advocacy space would have been much more likely to prevent the take off of insect farming. Other people obviously had an effect here too, but I think not being strategic about this feels to me like the biggest failure I’ve had as an EA.
What do you wish you'd done differently and are there any lessons for AI governance which may be in a similar stage?
I'm pretty uncertain, but I think my best guess is that starting a group/getting someone to start a group working directly on it at the time would have been better than lobbying people to care about it. I suspect that broadly applies.
If we incentivize charities' to act as cost-effectively as possible, and if they operate in coordination with other groups working on the same issue, it seems like we might expect in many cases what's best for an individual charities' cost-effectiveness to be bad for the overall cost-effectiveness of the space. This issue is compounded if multiple EA / highly cost-effective charities are operating in the same space.
The issue is something like, charities have relative strengths and weaknesses, and by coordinating to take advantage of those, individual charities might lose out on cost-effectiveness, but overall make their collective work more effective.
I think this occasionally actively happens with animal welfare campaigns, where single donors are giving to several charities doing the same thing.
An example using chicken welfare campaigns in the animal welfare space:
Charity A has 100 good volunteers in City 1, where Company X is headquartered. To run a successful campaign against them would cost Charity A $1000, and Company A uses 10M chickens. Alternatively, Charity A could run a campaign against Company Y in a different city where they have fewer volunteers for $1500 (more expensive because fewer volunteers).
Charity B has 5 good volunteers in City 1, but thinks they could secure a commitment from Company Y in City 2, where they have more volunteers, for $1000. Company B uses 1M chickens. Or, by spending more money, Charity B could secure a commitment from Company X for $1500.
Charities A and B are coordinating, and agree that Companies X and Y committing will put pressure on a major target (Company Z), and want to figure out how to effectively campaign.
They consider three strategies:
Strategy 1: They both campaign against both targets, at half the cost it would be for them to campaign on their own, and a charity evaluator views the campaign as split evenly between them, since they put in equal effort. The cost-effectiveness of each charity is: (5M + 0.5M Chickens / $500 + $750) = 4,400 chickens / dollar, and $2500 total has been spent.
Strategy 2: Charity A targets Company X, and Charity B targets Company Y. Charity A's cost-effectiveness is 10,000 chickens / dollar, and Charity B's is 1,000 chickens / dollar, with $2,000 total spent.
Strategy 3: Charity A targets Company Y, Charity B targets Company X. Charity A: 667 chickens / dollar, Charity B: 6696 chickens / dollar. $3,000 total spent across all charities.
These charities want to be as effective as possible — clearly, the charities should choose Strategy 2, because the least money will be spent overall (and both charities will spend less for the same outcome).
But if a charity evaluator is fairly influential, and looking at each charity individually, Charity B might push hard for less ideal Strategies 1 or 3, because those make its cost-effectiveness look much better. Strategy 2 is clearly the right choice for Charity B to make, but if they do, an evaluation of their cost-effectiveness will look much worse.
I guess a simple way of putting this is - if multiple charities are working on the same issue, and have different strengths relevant at different times, it seems likely that often they ought to make decisions that might look bad for their own cost-effectiveness ratings, but were the best thing to do / right decision to make.
I can think of a few examples where charities made less effective decisions explicitly due to reasoning about their own cost-effectiveness, and not thinking about coordination, but I'm not sure how prevalent this actually is as an issue. It mainly makes me a little worried about apples-to-apples comparisons of the cost-effectiveness of charities who do the same thing, and are known to coordinate with each other.
Reflections on a decade of trying to have an impact
Next month (September 2024) is my 10th anniversary of formally engaging with EA. This date marks 10 years since I first reached out to the Foundational Research Institute about volunteering, at least as far as I can tell from my emails.
Prior to that, I probably had read a fair amount of Peter Singer, Brian Tomasik, and David Pearce, who might all have been considered connected to EA, but I hadn’t actually actively tried engaging with the community. I’d been engaged with the effective animal advocacy community for several years prior, and I think I’d volunteered for The Humane League some, and had seen some of The Humane League Labs’ content online. I’m not sure if The Humane League counted as being “EA” at the time (this was a year before OpenPhil made its first animal welfare grants).
This post is me roughly trying to guess at my impact since then, and reflections on how I’ve changed as a person, both on my own and in response to EA. It’s got a lot of broad reflections about how my feelings about EA have changed. It isn’t particularly rigorously or transparently reasoned — it’s more of a reflection exercise for myself than anything else. I’m mainly trying to look at what I’ve worked on with a really critical eye. I make a lot of claims here that I don't provide evidence for.
I’m sharing this because I think the major update I’ve had from doing this is that while I’ve generally done many of the “working-in-EA” things that are often presented as high impact, I personally feel much more tangibly the impact of my donations, and right now, if I think what’s made me feel best about being in EA, it’s actions more in the earning-to-give direction than the direct work direction.
My high-level view of my impact over this period is something like:
Background
I became pretty convinced that factory farming was a moral tragedy as a little kid, I believe due to exposure to either PETA content or PETA Kids content. My brother was also vegetarian, which was a compelling enough reason for me to also become vegetarian. I volunteered for a lot of animal welfare organizations, especially in college. I also did a lot of direct action-type advocacy for animals in college. I was already a fairly hardcore utilitarian at that point, and had mainlined Peter Singer, David Pearce, Timothy Sprigge, and a bunch of other wacky utilitarians. I spent a significant amount of my time in college staying up until the early morning talking about wild animal suffering and other animal issues with my closest friend while playing the video game Super Monkey Ball. This did not help any animals but was incredibly important to how I think about animal issues now.
At some point around 2011 or 2012, I saw a frog that was hit by a bike and dying, and was really distraught over it. I’m not sure why, but this was oddly transformative for me, and I just internalized animal suffering from it really directly in a way I hadn’t before. I also have a fairly strong memory from when I was 20 or 21 of spending an afternoon in the rain putting worms back from the sidewalk into the grass, and feeling bad about them dying naturally. I formed fairly strong views about animals in nature living awful lives, and beliefs about my obligations to help them.
In 2014, I was targeted by a Google Ad for The Foundational Research Institute, I believe on a topic related to wild animal welfare. I think this was my first exposure to EA formally, though I’d read studies on The Humane League Labs website, had read Animal Liberation, Famine, Influence, and Morality, and some other books that informed EA ideas.
I did some volunteering for FRI, read a lot of Brian Tomasik’s website, and also did some experiments at a cat shelter on reducing the impact of outdoor cats on animals. In 2016, I started working at Mercy For Animals, running corporate animal welfare campaigns. I also formally started Utility Farm, a nonprofit that would later merge with Wild-Animal Suffering Research into Wild Animal Initiative. I’ve done a bunch of other things in the EA world since.
My potential impact
My beliefs in 2014 compared to now
This is my best effort to estimate how my credence in various beliefs have changed since 2014, based on notes and exercises from that period of my life.
2014
2024
Change
90%
90%
+0%
95%
60%
-35%
85%
20%
-65%
75%
10%
-65%
85%
15%
-70%
85%
80%
-5%
75%
65%
-10%
75%
80%
+5%
30%
40%
+10%
5%
10%
+5%
85%
35%
-50%
85%
60%
-25%
95%
10%
-85%
90%
15%
-75%
90%
30%
-60%
60%
85%
+25%
80%
95%
+15%
How my thinking about EA has changed over time
I have some long-held views that haven’t really changed:
My views have also changed in a bunch of ways:
Things that changed about me from exposure to EA
I care a lot more about money
I care a lot more about status
My commitment to doing good feels deeper
I feel more morally compromised
Overall, when I look at my first 10 years engaging with EA, I feel mainly like things are just ambiguous to me. I feel a lot more positive about some donations I made than anything else — in particular large donations to brand new projects that probably helped accelerate them a lot. The animal work I’ve done feels promising but ambiguous. This post feels very melancholy, but ultimately, I still feel excited about trying to do impactful work in the world.
This is really great and I'd encourage you to convert it to a full post! It's absolutely worthy of that honor :)
Thank you for writing this! Was really interesting to read. I'd love to see more posts of this nature. And it seems like you've done a lot for the world — thank you.
I have a couple questions, if you don't mind:
You write
I would love to hear your reasoning (pessimism about fulfillment? WAW looking better?) and what sort of evidence has convinced you. I think this is really important, and I haven't seen an argument for this publicly anywhere. Ditto about your skepticism of the organizations leading this work.
Did you mean to change one of the years in the two statements of this form?
I'd love to hear more about this. How much value do you think e.g. the median EA doing direct work is creating? Or, put another way, how significant an annual donation would exceed the value of a talented EA doing direct work instead?
Thanks for the questions!
Corporate campaigns
I would love to hear you talk more about this :) What makes you hopeful that scalable interventions are coming, and can you say more about anything you're particularly excited about here? Also curious what "aren't that far away" caches out into in terms of your beliefs -- in 1 year? 3?
I wonder if your opinions are related to the following, which I'd also be excited to hear more about!
(Thanks for sharing this post Abraham, I enjoyed reading it :) )
Thanks for the questions!!
The ones that seem most likely in the near future are:
Things that make me think this is on the table:
In terms of timelines — I think this is more like 10-15 years. But part of the reason I think that's exciting is that I used to think it would be more like 2050+ before anything like this was on the table. I think I've also just generally decreased my confidence that the problems as are as difficult as I thought before (though I definitely think they are still tricky).
For insecticides, I think my view remains that we are something like 2-5 years of specific lab/field research away from plausibly having a great intervention, so it is sad that progress hasn't been made on it, and given that this also seemed like the case a few years ago, funding the research should have been a priority earlier.
Thanks for writing this, heaps of interesting points. Most surprising and saddening to me was that you think there is a 70% chance EA will be net-negative! Could you explain why you think this? Your various concerns about power centralisation and so forth make sense to me, but to my mind this isn't nearly enough to flip the sign, and EA still seems overwhelmingly good to me.
I was also struck by your melancholy tone - somehow I think I implicitly hoped that if I accomplished all the things you have I would feel more resoundingly happy with my impact! But maybe EAish people are unusually cognisant of missed opportunities and impact that could have been but wasn't.
I don't think it's all net-negative — I think there are lots of worlds where EA has lots of good and bad that kind of wash out, or where the overall sign is pretty ambiguous in the longrun.
Here are lots of ways I think are possible EA could end up causing a lot of possible harm. I don't really think any of these are that likely on their own — I just think it's generally easier to cause harm than produce good, so there are lots of ways EA can accidentally not achieve being overall positive, and I generally think it has an uphill road to climb to end up not being a neutral or ambiguous quirk in the ash heap of history.
I note that these risks hardly apply to GHD work ;).
Can you explain how FTX harm could plausible outweigh good done by EA? I can't fathom a scenario where this is the case myself.
Yeah, I think there are probably parts of EA that will look robustly good in the long run, and part of the reason I think that it's less likely EA as a whole will be less likely to be positive (and more likely to be neutral or negative) are that actions in other areas of EA could impact those areas negatively. Though this could cut both in favor of or against GHD work. I think just having a positive impact is quite hard, even more so when doing a bunch of uncorrelated things when some of them have major downside risks.
I think it is pretty unlikely that FTX harm outweighs good done by EA on its own, but it seems easy enough to imagine that conditional on EA's net benefit being barely above neutral (which for other reasons mentioned above seems pretty possible to me, along with EA increasingly working on GCRs which directly increases the likelihood EA work ends up being net-negative or neutral, even if in expectation that shift is positive value), that the scale of the stress / financial harm caused by EA via FTX, outweighs that remaining benefit. And then there is brand damage to effective giving, etc.
But yeah, I agree that my original statement above seems a lot less likely than FTX just contributing to an overall portfolio of harm or work that doesn't matter in the longrun from EA.
Really interesting, thanks for sharing. I was particularly surprised about your changes of mind here:
E.g. some spontaneous potential cruxes that might be interesting to hear your disagreement with, in case they capture your reasons for pessimism:
Nice, these are good questions, but probably don't capture all the cruxes in my view.
1. I think this seems moderately unlikely to me? I'm not sure what would drive down prices further than where they are now, as it seems like a large portion of the cost are the proteins themselves, and not production.
2. This also seems like it relies on crossing technological hurdles that are really hard.
3. I think this seems possible? But I'd put below 50% on it, and if it does happen, I'd expect something more like the climate movement, where lots of people think it is important but don't really take substantial steps to act on it.
4. I think that reaching 20% vegetarian seems possible in some countries, but I think I'm a lot more skeptical it'll go much higher.
I think it does seem plausible to me that there would be a meaningful reduction in the amount of meat consumed over this period in developed countries, but also expect that might come with more chicken/fish consumption that would offset animal welfare gains anyway.
I think another crux more important to my pessimism is that I don't feel very convinced that price/taste competitive meat alternatives will cause a significant increase in their adoption.
Chicken: Approximately 6.6 cents per gram of protein
Lentils: Approximately 3.7 cents per gram of protein
Finally, I'm also probably more optimistic about your last point, thinking that price/taste competitive meat alternatives will be huge. I think the Beyond and Impossible "moments" were huge milestones, and a few more "moments" like that will reduce resistance against higher welfare standards & higher prices for conventional meat.
Nice, these are great points.
On some specifics:
Thanks, that all makes sense and moderates my optimism a bit, and it feels like we roughly exhausted the depth of my thinking. Sigh... anyways, I'm really thankful and maybe also optimistic for the work that dedicated and strategically thinking people like you have been and will be doing for animals.
Thank you for sharing your reflections. As I read it I found various aspects that resonated with me, and I suspect that many other people on the EA Forum will feel the same. I'd love to see more of this type of writing (contemplative, reflective, critical/skeptical while being kind) on this forum.
After some discussions with someone offline that were clarifying, I want to clarify my decrease in confidence in the statement, "Farmed vertebrate welfare should be an EA focus".
I think my view is slightly more complicated than this implies. I think that given that OpenPhil and non-EA donors are basically able to fund what seem like the entirety of the good opportunities in this space, I don't think these groups are that talent constrained, and it seems like the best bets (e.g. corporate campaigns) will continue to have decreasing cost-effectiveness, new animal-focused talent should probably be mostly going into earning-to-give for invertebrates/WAW, and that donations should mostly go to groups there or the EA AWF (which should in turn mostly fund invertebrates and WAW). I don't think farmed vertebrate welfare should be the default way that EAs recommend to help animals
Thanks, Abraham, I liked reading this! Good luck for an impactful decade to come
This an incredible set of accomplishments. Thanks for your dedication!
Great post! I'm interested in how you are 80% confident that "Most experiences are negative / suffering dominates in the wild". I can understand why you would lean towards it being negative, but why so confident given how little we still understand the experience of animals?
Yeah, I think this just seems pretty likely to me due to thinking that most animals are juveniles / die as juveniles, and the amount of time an animal has to be alive to accumulate good experiences to outweigh a painful death is probably higher than this. Things that have made me slightly less certain about this are me thinking it is more likely than I used to that adult animals in the wild live good lives, and me thinking that it is less likely than I used to that insects/some other invertebrates experience suffering, especially juvenile insects (though I probably still put a higher credence in this than many people).
I think it is pretty plausible I'm overconfident here though.
But, I also think this belief is mostly irrelevant to EAs / wild animal welfare advocates, unless you think there are special reasons improving welfare is easier on one side of the spectrum than the other, which I don't really have strongly held opinions on.
The juvenile animal argument is interesting, as from a total "QALY" perspective, if animals die very young then unless their deaths are extremely suffering-ful and drawn out, the total time for suffering isn't that large IMO.
Yep I completely agree that the belief is (or should be) mostly irrelevent to wild animal welfare advocates, and I think WAW might be more palatable to more people if it was emphasised less. "We have cheap and effective ways of helping wild animals live way better lives" is a better markteing tool than "Wild animals have bad live and are suffering soooo much so we have to do something" (aware I'm strawmanning for emphais a bit here). It only becomes relevant for arguments that look at whether the whole world is "net positive or negative", which I find a bit unhelpful as that discussion doesn't get us closer to making things better.
On that I appreciated these points
"On WAW specifically, my view is something like:
Yeah, I agree with everything you say here RE WAW, on both how to present it and the usefulness of the net-positive or negative debate.
What do you wish you'd done differently and are there any lessons for AI governance which may be in a similar stage?
I'm pretty uncertain, but I think my best guess is that starting a group/getting someone to start a group working directly on it at the time would have been better than lobbying people to care about it. I suspect that broadly applies.
Following up with some thoughts I originally had in response to saulius' List of ways in which cost-effectiveness estimates can be misleading. Not sure if there has been other write ups of this effect.
If we incentivize charities' to act as cost-effectively as possible, and if they operate in coordination with other groups working on the same issue, it seems like we might expect in many cases what's best for an individual charities' cost-effectiveness to be bad for the overall cost-effectiveness of the space. This issue is compounded if multiple EA / highly cost-effective charities are operating in the same space.
The issue is something like, charities have relative strengths and weaknesses, and by coordinating to take advantage of those, individual charities might lose out on cost-effectiveness, but overall make their collective work more effective.
I think this occasionally actively happens with animal welfare campaigns, where single donors are giving to several charities doing the same thing.
An example using chicken welfare campaigns in the animal welfare space:
Charity A has 100 good volunteers in City 1, where Company X is headquartered. To run a successful campaign against them would cost Charity A $1000, and Company A uses 10M chickens. Alternatively, Charity A could run a campaign against Company Y in a different city where they have fewer volunteers for $1500 (more expensive because fewer volunteers).
Charity B has 5 good volunteers in City 1, but thinks they could secure a commitment from Company Y in City 2, where they have more volunteers, for $1000. Company B uses 1M chickens. Or, by spending more money, Charity B could secure a commitment from Company X for $1500.
Charities A and B are coordinating, and agree that Companies X and Y committing will put pressure on a major target (Company Z), and want to figure out how to effectively campaign.
They consider three strategies:
Strategy 1: They both campaign against both targets, at half the cost it would be for them to campaign on their own, and a charity evaluator views the campaign as split evenly between them, since they put in equal effort. The cost-effectiveness of each charity is: (5M + 0.5M Chickens / $500 + $750) = 4,400 chickens / dollar, and $2500 total has been spent.
Strategy 2: Charity A targets Company X, and Charity B targets Company Y. Charity A's cost-effectiveness is 10,000 chickens / dollar, and Charity B's is 1,000 chickens / dollar, with $2,000 total spent.
Strategy 3: Charity A targets Company Y, Charity B targets Company X. Charity A: 667 chickens / dollar, Charity B: 6696 chickens / dollar. $3,000 total spent across all charities.
These charities want to be as effective as possible — clearly, the charities should choose Strategy 2, because the least money will be spent overall (and both charities will spend less for the same outcome).
But if a charity evaluator is fairly influential, and looking at each charity individually, Charity B might push hard for less ideal Strategies 1 or 3, because those make its cost-effectiveness look much better. Strategy 2 is clearly the right choice for Charity B to make, but if they do, an evaluation of their cost-effectiveness will look much worse.
I guess a simple way of putting this is - if multiple charities are working on the same issue, and have different strengths relevant at different times, it seems likely that often they ought to make decisions that might look bad for their own cost-effectiveness ratings, but were the best thing to do / right decision to make.
I can think of a few examples where charities made less effective decisions explicitly due to reasoning about their own cost-effectiveness, and not thinking about coordination, but I'm not sure how prevalent this actually is as an issue. It mainly makes me a little worried about apples-to-apples comparisons of the cost-effectiveness of charities who do the same thing, and are known to coordinate with each other.