Nithin Ravi
Posts 1
Comments32
In the US context, I am curious how tractable mail-in ballot reform is. This was passed in Arizona in 1991 and Colorado in 2013, although I'm unsure what the progress looks like at a large scale.
- funding circles. Note that most funding circles I know require a large budget and are therefore inaccessible for most earn to givers.
- Related: a small group of like-minded donors evaluating a specific organization.
- Give each other recommendations. If you have expertise of specific cause area and you can recommend organizations (especially when you don't have a conflict of interest with them), do talk about it to potential donors during networking events. Or, if you are a donor, do ask.
Thanks for posting this! I tend to agree, it's not my comparative advantage to make grants as a mid-size donor; and it's unlikely that I'll beat the impact/rigor of a fund.
I'm not sure that these particular examples will necessarily solve the issue of groupthink/centralized decision-making as they still rely heavily on a few knowledgeable decision makers. For instance, I found that a lot of decisions in funding circles are deferred to the experts in the room. However, I'm hopeful that they can help. :)
What do you think about losses like these being a trigger for backsliding on other farmed animal work?
For instance, the Animal Ag Lobby saying something like, "Look people don't care about animal welfare. Even progressive cities turned this down." Could this effect trigger something like the EATS act getting passed? I don't have an informed opinion on this, but it seems like a significant backfire risk.
I'm also worried that 308 (Denver's fur ban) would have passed without 309 (Denver's slaughterhouse ban) being right next to it. The Denver Democrats anti-endorsed both measures which may not have happened if the measures were run separately (total guess on that one, but it passed in Boulder which has very similar demographics).
At the same time, perhaps there is very significant social change & radical flank effects from forcing the vote on abolitionist work! Looking for insight.
Hmm, I hadn't considered farmed animals lives becoming net positive as a case against the meat eating problem! Thanks for pointing that out.
> the best animal welfare interventions will be much more cost-effective than the best global > health and development interventions.
I'm a bit confused by this point. It still seems like if we value this framework, we should still be considering flow-through effects in questions of cause prioritization and which GHD interventions to support. I think there are also reasonable edge cases where we may be able to influence GHD interventions to have better positive flow-through effects, if the donor is not onboard with AW.
How about both lens? I could see the 'end factory farming' framing and dreaming big be really good for some folks, particularly young people with lofty ambitions who are not yet in the movement. I think it was particularly helpful for me to have this framing when joining the movement!
We could also advocate for near-term suffering reduction as a lofty goal within itself, given the right context (i.e. within EA)!
This to me drills home how important it is to have a few additional great people – imagine what we could an additional Carolina Galvani, Mahi Klosterhalfen or Ryan Xue.
Hopefully we get a few more James Özden's too :)
EATS act would just allow lower-welfare imports AFAIK. I'm wondering if anyone has an idea of how much this would actually impact welfare (i.e. in a massive state like California, is there enough price incentive to set up factory farms on the border post-EATS?)