Why focus on Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning in the animal cause area?
When we started our international interventions in September 2023, we were quite certain that MEL could increase the cost-effectiveness and impact of interventions in the animal cause area, and avoid doing harm. See e.g. this post about why Anima International suspended the campaign to end live fish sales in Poland (Anima International 2022).
Tools and insights from MEL can help organizations design potentially more (cost)-effective interventions from the start, know if their interventions are on track, and adapt their implementation when necessary.
We also believe MEL can contribute to increasing the evidence base for interventions in the animal cause area. Neill Buddy Shah, a co-founder of IDInsight, observed, “The animal welfare research infrastructure and ecosystem is incredibly...
Malaria is massive. Our World in Data writes: “Over half a million people died from the disease each year in the 2010s. Most were children, and the disease is one of the leading causes of child mortality.” Or, as Rob Mather, CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) phrases...
The Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH) is an EA organization working on cause prioritization research as well as grantmaking and donor advisory. This project was commissioned by the leadership of the Meta Charity Funders (MCF) – also known as the Meta Charity...
Very interesting report. It provided a lot of visibility into how these funders think.
Geographically, India may be a standout opportunity for getting talent to do research/direct work in a counterfactually cheap way.
I would have embraced that more in the past, but I'm a lot more skeptical of this these days. For many tasks, EA wants the best talent that is available. Top talent is most able to access overseas opportunities and so the price is largely independent of current location.
...In terms of age prioritization, it is suboptimal that EA focuses more on
out
Originally posted on my blog
A very interesting discussion I came across online between Cosmicskeptic (Alex) and Earthlings Ed (Ed Winters) brought forth several points that I have wondered about in the past. In one segment, Alex poses the following question: ...
First of all, I think this is a fantastic article. It's very clear and brings some new, interesting points.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but here's my crude summary of what you're essentially trying to get at:
First in-ovo sexing in the US
Egg Innovations announced that they are "on track to adopt the technology in early 2025." Approximately 300 million male chicks are ground up alive in the US each year (since only female chicks are valuable) and in-ovo sexing would prevent this...
How many chicks per year will Egg Innovations' change save? (The announcement link is blocked for me.)
Written by Claude, and very lightly edited.
In a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast, guest Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and the Blueprint project, laid out a thought-provoking perspective on what he sees as the most important challenge and opportunity of our...
"Most charities seem much less effective than the most effective for-profit organizations"
This is a big discussion but I would be interested to see you justify this. I would say many of the biggest GHD achievements and much important work is driven by not for profit organizations like charities and government (global vaccine alliance, university research institutions etc) but obviously it's a complicated discussion.
Obviously a market economy drives much of it, but I consider this more the water we swim in rather than the capitalist system doing the good itself.
I would be interested to hear the for profit businesses which you think are counterfactually doing the most good on the margins
A major goal of Effective Altruism is to study in-depth the rational arguments for funding different projects and assign probability estimates for their effectiveness in comparison to others and thus make better funding decisions. Yet EA appears to have a blind spot with...
Confidence: Likely
Effective altruist earners-to-give might be able to donate more money if, instead of working at big companies for high salaries, they work at startups and get paid in equity. Startups are riskier than big companies, but EAs care less about risk...
I had an idea for a different way to evaluate meta-options. A meta-option behaves like a call option where the price equals the current value of the equity and the strike price equals the cash salary you'd be able to get instead.[1]
If I compare an equity package worth $100K per year versus a counterfactual cash salary of $80K and assume a volatility of 70% (my research suggests that small companies have a volatility around 70–100%), the call option for the equity that vests in the first year is worth $38K, and the call option for the equity that vests in t...
Crosspost of my blog.
You shouldn’t eat animals in normal circumstances. That much is, in my view, quite thoroughly obvious. Animals undergo cruel, hellish conditions that we’d confidently describe as torture if they were inflicted on a human (or even a dog). No hamburger...
While I sympathize with the fact that going vegan is difficult for some, I do want to push back on the idea that the focus spent on adhering to a plant-based diet would be better spent elsewhere "if animals are [your] top focus."
Broadly, the discussion around plant-based/vegan diets avoids the signal value of the dietary and lifestyle choices. If my top focus is non-human animals[1], then it seems to track pretty clearly to me that persons will take me less seriously if I do not make substantial lifestyle changes that indicate this. Whether or not th...
Thanks! For a point of hope, R21 (the newer vaccine) apparently has "less strict" cold-chain requirements.