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by tobycrisford 🔸
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Animal welfareCause prioritizationCommunityEffective givingDietary change
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Many vegans are critical of the kind of corporate outreach campaigns on animal welfare that effective altruists like to fund. They believe that the best form of animal activism is vegan outreach, by which I mean: direct advocacy to individual members of the public with the aim of persuading them to become vegan.

My usual response to this is: "I think it's great to have both". But I was thinking about this recently, and realised: I don't fund both. My animal charity donations go exclusively to the charities recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators, or EA funds, and it seems like almost none of these are now focused on vegan outreach to individuals.

When I realised this, I immediately reached for the standard EA argument: sure, it's great to have both, but I should fund the one that is currently more effective on the margin. Another way of saying the same thing is: I need to look at what everyone else is doing, and give my money to the area that I think is underfunded, relative to what the balance would look like in my ideal world.

The trouble is, I'm not sure that this is the corporate outreach campaigns. My impression (would be interested to see data on this) is that EAs now contribute a huge share of the funding within the world of organisations that are working to end factory farming? If this is true, and if I view vegan outreach just slightly more favourably than the Open Philanthropy Project do, then maybe thinking on the margin means that I should be putting all of my donations into vegan outreach to individuals?

I don't think I'm actually going to do this. I probably just want to fund both. This would be similar to how I fund both global health and animal charities, rather than try to solve the hard problem of figuring out which is the more effective cause on the margin. But if I want to fund both, which charities should I give to in the vegan outreach space?

Currently I can only find two charities on ACE's recommended list which sound like they do some individual vegan outreach: Dansk Vegetarisk Forening and New Roots Institute. But the review for the first makes it sound like they have been recommended because of their corporate and policy outreach campaigns, rather than their individual outreach work. And the review for the second makes it sound like they have been chosen because they help to train the next generation of animal advocates (who presumably will then go on to do corporate welfare campaigns!)

Is there anyone trying to answer the question of figuring out which charities do the best job of vegan outreach, taking the cause of effective vegan outreach for granted?

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emre kaplan🔸

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Here's my understanding of the current state of evidence, keep in mind that I am not a researcher or grantmaker:

  1. To my knowledge there is no scientifically rigorous experiment showing that some intervention has a statistically significant effect on the number of vegans.
  2. Vegan education organisations also don't tend to report the number of counterfactual vegans they create, to some extent because of measurement difficulties.
  3. My guess is that most effective ways(having conversations about veganism with people who trust you) of spreading veganism can't be funded to scale up.
  4. Probably education initiatives produce small effects but we don't have sufficiently powered studies to catch these effects. So we have very little data to compare vegan education initiatives to each other.
CC7
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Points 1 and 4 suggest that donors interested in this type of work might want to fund more research to find effective interventions.

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tobycrisford 🔸3
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Thanks a lot for this answer! That sounds very plausible.

I think a lot depends here on whether:

i) We think there may well be a meaningful effect for vegan education initiatives but we can't measure it in a controlled experiment, or

ii) We think there is no meaningful effect for currently popular vegan education initiatives.

(By 'meaningful', I basically mean an effect big enough that I might consider donating, which is admittedly a bit vague)

I think CC makes a good point. Whichever of these possibilities is true, it feels like there is still scope for someon... (read more)

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Jason
Yes, but that is often in cases where (1) there are few/no interventions in the cause area amenable to RCTs or other high-reliability ways of assessing results (e.g., AI safety), or (2) the intervention has some added benefit that compensates for the less solid evidentiary base (e.g., if it works, foreign aid policy work would be massively more cost-effective than traditional GiveWell-style work). So I'd expect many EAs to consider weaker-evidence programs only if more weaknesses in the evidence base for corporate campaigns were identified and/or benefits for the vegan outreach interventions that compensate for a weaker evidentiary basis are identified.
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tobycrisford 🔸
I think (2) is the relevant one here. Maybe in the not too distant future there will be a massive shift in global public opinion, and the farming of animals (at least at industrial scale) will become a thing of the past. If you think most farmed animals lead lives so bad that they would be better off not being born, then the impact of this change would be huge. (And if you're a non-consequentialist vegan who doesn't like to view the issue in these terms, then it's harder to quantify the impact, but you probably care even more about doing everything possible to make this scenario happen) I think this is what is hoped for by the vegans who prioritise outreach. The idea would be that outreach either increases the probability of this scenario becoming reality, or it means that this scenario happens sooner than it otherwise would. I think this is a conceivable way that vegan outreach could have the kind of huge, hard to measure, benefit you're talking about. Of course there's a whole argument to be had here. I'm sure lots of people would find this scenario so implausible as to not be worth considering (or they would think it will only happen if and when we get good cheap lab grown meat, or that we can't do anything to influence if and when it happens... etc). I wasn't really trying to start that argument with this question, but just asking what someone who wants to give some weight to this argument in their donations should do.

Oisín Considine

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I don't really have a concrete answer for you, however I am also interested in this topic and have some resources which may be of use to you, namely this article by Social Change Lab on how philanthropists can support social movements, and this forum post, along with the other posts of the series, on how EA can incorporate an "abolitionist" frame of animal advocacy alongside the current advocacy strategies that are more canonical in the EA movement currently (more quantifiable/measurable and "welfarist"), and this post of that series provides some potential avenues for animal advocacy from a more "abolitionist" outlook which may potentially prove to be effective. On top of this there is another forum post about promoting Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning within the broader animal advocacy movement where it generally lacks relative to the more "EA-aligned" animal advocacy.

Maybe this is a bit of an aside (though still probably relevant), but I have been involved in the Plant-Based Universities campaign at my university over the past year (so I may be a little biased here) and this is one initiative which is not exactly aiming to change peoples' attitudes towards animals and veganism directly, but which aims to make change on the institutional level, yet a large part of this does still involves individual outreach among students. This campaign, although it seeks transformative (as opposed to incremental) change, is still in some sense quantifiable as you can see how many universities have transitioned (though of course the broader aim is to bring about a societal shift in attitudes, which is more difficult to quantify yet undoubtedly holds much positive value). There exists a similar initiative in the US in Allied Scholars for Animal Protection (though they also focus on many other initiatives too).

Hopefully this is of value to you, even if I kind of danced around an actual answer to your question.

tobycrisford 🔸2
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This is a fantastic answer, thank you!

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Oisín Considine
No problem at all :)
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Jason4
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I'd note that vegan outreach, as defined in your post,[1] is only one type of demand-reduction strategy that could be employed. Other options might include direct advocacy with the goal of reducing the listener's meat consumption, advocacy for meat taxes to force consumers to partially internalize welfare and environmental costs (driving down demand), and so on. 

The "[m]any vegans" to whom your first paragraph refers may be disposed to vegan outreach over other forms of demand reduction for ideological reasons rather than because they view them as more effective per dollar spent. (Or maybe they do believe other demand-reduction strategies are less effective.) Based on what we know about behavior change more generally, I would guess that getting four people to reduce meat consumption by 25% would be easier than persuading one to reduce it by 100% -- but I could easily be wrong.

That being said, my starting point would be that your money would go further in middle-income countries, both because work there is cheaper and because less of the population potentially open to veganism may have been exposed to the message yet.

  1. ^

    I.e., "direct advocacy to individual members of the public with the aim of persuading them to become vegan."

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