Principal — Good Structures
I previously co-founded and served as Executive Director at Wild Animal Initiative, and was the COO of Rethink Priorities from 2020 to 2024.
I think that the animal welfare space is especially opaque for strategic reasons. For example, most of the publicly available descriptions of corporate animal welfare strategy are, in my opinion, not particularly accurate. I think most of the actual strategy becoming public would make it significantly less effective. I don't think it is kept secret with a deep amount of intentionality, but more like there is a shared understanding among many of the best campaigners to not share exactly how they are working outside a circle of collaborators to avoid strategies losing effectiveness.
I think outside organizations' ability to evaluate the effectiveness of individual corporate campaigning organizations (including ACE unfortunately) is really low due to this (I think that evaluating ecosystems of organizations / the intervention as a whole is easier though).
(I don't really want to engage much on this because I found it pretty emotionally draining last time — I'll just leave this comment and stop here):
I think asking for feedback prior to publishing these seems really important. To be clear, I'm very sympathetic to the overall claim! I suspect that most published estimates of the impact of marginal dollars in the farmed animal space are way too high (maybe even by orders of magnitude)
I also think the items you raise are important questions for Sinergia to answer!
But, I think getting feedback would be really helpful for you:
I suspect that in your critique, some of your claims are warranted, but others might have much more complicated stories behind them, such as an organization getting a company to actually follow through on a commitment, or getting a law to be enforced. I think that feedback would help draw out where these critiques are accurate, and where they are missing the mark.
Equal Hands is an experiment in democratizing effective giving. Donors simulate pooling their resources together, and voting how to distribute them across cause areas. All votes count equally, independent of someone's ability to give.
You can learn more about it here, and sign up to learn more or join here. If you sign up before December 16th, you can participate in our current round. As of December 7th, 2024 at 11:00pm Eastern time, 12 donors have pledged $2,915, meaning the marginal $25 donor will move ~$226 in expectation to their preferred cause areas.
In Equal Hands’ first 2 months, 22 donors participated and collectively gave $7,495.01 democratically to impactful charity. Including pledges for its third month, that number will likely increase to at least 24, and $10,410.01
Across the first two months, the gifts made by cause area and pseudo-counterfactual effect (e.g. if people had given their own money in line with their voting, rather than following the democratic outcome) has been:
Interestingly, the primary impact has been money being reallocated from animal welfare to global catastrophic risks. From the very little data that we have, this primarily appears to be because animal welfare-motivated donors are much more likely to pledge large amounts to democratic giving, while GCR-motivated donors are more likely to sign up (or are a larger population in general), but are more likely to give smaller amounts.
The total administrative time for me to operate Equal Hands has been around 45 minutes per month. I think it will remain below 1 hour per month with up to 100 donors, which is somewhat below what I expected when I started this project.
We’d love to see more people join! I think this project works best by having a larger number of donors, especially people interested in giving above the minimum of $25. If you want to learn more or sign up, you can do so here!
Nice! And yeah, I shouldn't have said downstream. I mean something like, (almost) every intervention has wild animal welfare considerations (because many things end up impacting wild animals), so if you buy that wild animal welfare matters, the complexity of solving WAW problems isn't just a problem for WAI — it's a problem for everyone.
Minor question - I noticed that the website states for the climate fund that the same donation will help a lot more animals than the impact fund (over 2x as many - and mostly driven by chickens and pigs). I know the numbers are likely low confidence, but just curious how you're thinking about those, as to me it was unintuitive to have one labelled "impact fund" that straightforwardly looks worse on animal impacts than the climate fund (and also worse on the climate side!). I didn't quite understand why this was happening from looking at the calculations page (though from the charities in each, I definitely have the sense that the impact fund is better for animals!)
I voted for Wild Animal Initiative, followed by Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation (I have COIs with WAI and Arthropoda).
That's too bad! I'll give this feedback to Every.org as they are a moderately aligned nonprofit themselves, and are really receptive to feedback in my experience. FWIW, using them saves organizations a pretty massive amount of bureaucracy / paperwork / compliance-y stuff, so I hope there is a way to use them that can be beneficial for the donors.