You’re right! I swear I read it like 3 times before asking 😳

I think I got confused because in both the text and figure 3, that sentence comes after a heading about “the odds of quitting smoking” so I read the subsequent “less likely”s to mean “less likely to quit smoking” instead of “less likely to smoke”. Sorry about that

Thanks for this analysis! I’m a bit confused: In the places where this post says that people are less likely to quit if their spouse, friends or co-workers quit, is that a typo and you mean to say more likely to quit? Or is this written as intended?

Thanks for raising this!

What about applying for funding from non-EA funders? I know that most of these funders won’t be interested in EA charities because they don’t fit into their view of what good charities look like, but the non-EA funding landscape is big and there are definitely funders out there that could be convinced to fund some EA projects. My sense is that many many EA orgs don’t even try to access this funding.

Granted - it’s a lot of work, and may take years of relationship building, and all of that is a distraction from execution. But the rewards are significant because the counterfactuals of that funding is far ‘cheaper’ than the counterfactuals of the money orgs take from EA funders. Plus I think fundraising from non-EA funders is really good practice for EAs at communicating about effective charity work in ways that are appealing to non-EAs. This is something we’re generally very bad at, and becoming good at it is a necessary condition for us to really grow the base of support and resources for this movement, so I think we should lean into opportunities to engage with the non-EA world instead of staying in our silo

Hey Christoph, I think it would be a real shame if you let not helping some amount of animals through diet change stop you from helping any animals at all - especially when you can actually help far more animals though donating than you can through diet change. Making being vegan the price of admission to being a part of the solution to factory farming is a sure fire way to ensure that we never solve this problem. Far more helpful is to allow everyone to do what they’re willing to do to solve it, regardless of their diet.

I don’t think the animals who would experience drastically less suffering because of your donations care whether you’re being hypocritical in the eyes of some. Those animals, and I, think that you and the world are far better off if you eat meat and donate to help animals than if you just eat meat ❤️

By the way, we’ve made a tool just for people like you, to figure out how much you’d need to donate to do as much good for animals as going vegan (https://www.farmkind.giving/compassion-calculator). If you want to do the same amount of net good as doing vegan, you can offset your meat consumption twofold

Very happy to talk this topic through with you some more if you’re interested as I’d hate to lose you as animal donor for this reason

Hive, Fish Welfare Initiative, FarmKind

Thank you for writing this Martin!

I don’t think they’re doing explicit cost-effectiveness analyses at this level of detail for the grants they’re assessing. They don’t have the time (consider how many hours they have per grant vetted), and the evidence to make those analyses anything more than multiplying a bunch of guesses together just won’t exist for many applications. Instead, they’ll be looking at other forms of evidence, like the strength of the theory of change, the strength of the team, the quality of thinking displayed in the team’s plan and their track record

On the funding amount discrepancy: It could be that they don’t do all of their giving through the funding circle

Hey Caroline! Fun to interact outside of emails. I agree it’s not about changing people‘s values, but I think that most people’s values (if they allow themselves to think about it) support taking action against factory farming. They just have other forces like food preferences, social norms and misinformation about the issue holding them back. What’s great about donating is that people can do it without changing their diet or dealing with the social costs that come with that. So I’m hopeful that this can be the easier on-ramp that gets far more people to begin taking action on this issue 🤞

Good question Abraham!

The impact fund does help more animals, because it includes the Shrimp Welfare Project, but we recently decided to stop displaying the number of shrimp helped, because for the average donor we think this is counterproductive:

But this means that the number of animals helped that we display for a given donation is lower for Impact Fund than Climate Fund which I agree is confusing. I'll think about what we can do about this. Thanks for pointing it out!

Note: There's also the matter of how much each animal is helped, which is a way that a charity with a lower animals helped per dollar could still be more impactful per dollar. You can see the spreadsheet underlying these impact estimates here.