@Jamie_Harris thanks for sharing! I will put this on my reading list. :)

I think that would make a great cross-post!

Yeah that was interesting! He was raised vegetarian, ate meat for a while and then went back to it.

Also, re social movements and animals - James Ozden has some useful research.

Yeah he talks about vegetarianism a lot actually! Here's one paragraph about his efforts to promote vegetarianism as a young man in England:

What he describes is one of the problems we want to solve at Allied Scholars for Animal Protection – clubs die when student leaders graduate because there's no larger infrastructure to support recruitment.

Thanks for sharing this on the forum!

Thinking about how past social movements succeeded at large-scale attitude and behavior change seems important, and I'm not sure why there isn't more attention to that kind of thing in EA discussions around animal advocacy.

I recently read Gandhi's autobiography and found some useful stuff there.

Yeah I think this is a good point! Donor-advised funds seem like a good way to benefit from compound interest (and tax deductions) while avoiding the risk of value drift.

Thanks Vasco! 

Another finding I’ve seen is that widespread adoption of a plant-based diet would save ~3.3% of global GDP per year due to healthcare savings. That study also suggest a 6-10% reduction in global mortality, though I think these types of findings are necessarily pretty speculative and contingent on assumptions.

Animal Charity Evaluators estimates that a plant-based diet spares 105 vertebrates per year. So if you’re vegan for 50 years, that comes out to 5,250 animals saved. If you put even 10% credence in the ACE number, where the counterfactual is zero impact, you’d still be helping over 500 animals in expectation.

I’m donating 10% this year, probably all towards nonhuman animal welfare via the ACE Recommended Charity Fund.

• Animal issues seem much more neglected than global health & poverty.
• X-risk seems much less funding-constrained than animal stuff.

If there were an obvious way to support longermist animal stuff, I’d probably allocate something towards that. In particular, I think someone should be lobbying AI companies to take animal welfare more seriously and to get their models to not tacitly support factory farming. I also think digital sentience seems important and neglected, but I basically trust OpenPhil to do a good job funding that type of research.