Published on July 21, 2021 1:08 AM GMT

This post was written by Buck and Claire Zabel but it’s written in Buck’s voice, and “I” here refers to Buck, because it’s about grantmaking that he might do. (Claire contributed in her personal capacity, not as an Open Phil grantmaker).

In addition to accepting applications for EA groups in some locations as part of my EAIF grantmaking, I am interested in evaluating applications from people who run groups (in-person or online, full-time or part-time) on a variety of related topics, including:

Reading groups, eg for The Precipice or Scout Mindset

Groups at companies, online-only groups, and other groups not based in particular geographic locations or universities.

Groups discussing blogs or forums that are popular with EAs, such as Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten or LessWrong.

Longtermist-only, AI-centric or biosafety-centric groups, animal welfare groups, or other groups that address only a single EA cause area. (I might refer these applications to the Long-Term Future Fund or the Animal Welfare Fund as appropriate; both of these funds have confirmed to me that they’re interested in making grants of this type.)

I also welcome applications from people who do or want to do work for existing groups, or group organizers who want funding to hire someone else to work with them. Eg:

Maintaining or overhauling group websites, if you think this is worthwhile for your particular group

Working 10hrs/week on a student group

Running group mailing lists

In cases where the project/expense isn’t a good fit for the EA Funds, but I think it’s worth supporting, I am likely able to offer alternative sources of funds.

I might stop doing this if someone appears who’s able to commit more time and thought to funding and supporting these kinds of groups, but for the time being I want to offer folks who want to work on these kinds of things a chance to request support.

I think that people who put serious time into creating high-quality groups deserve compensation for the time they put in, so please don’t let thoughts like “I only work on this for 10 hours a week” or “I’m happy to do this in a volunteer capacity” discourage you from applying. If you’re unsure if something is a reasonable fit, feel free to email me ([email protected]) and ask before applying. Depending on your cost of living, ask for a rate of $20-50 per hour (this includes employer's payroll tax and would correspond to ~$15-40/h gross salary).

The EAIF application form is here; you should also feel free to email me any questions you have about this.

Published on July 21, 2021 1:08 AM GMT

This post was written by Buck and Claire Zabel but it’s written in Buck’s voice, and “I” here refers to Buck, because it’s about grantmaking that he might do. (Claire contributed in her personal capacity, not as an Open Phil grantmaker).

In addition to accepting applications for EA groups in some locations as part of my EAIF grantmaking, I am interested in evaluating applications from people who run groups (in-person or online, full-time or part-time) on a variety of related topics, including:

Reading groups, eg for The Precipice or Scout Mindset

Groups at companies, online-only groups, and other groups not based in particular geographic locations or universities.

Groups discussing blogs or forums that are popular with EAs, such as Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten or LessWrong.

Longtermist-only, AI-centric or biosafety-centric groups, animal welfare groups, or other groups that address only a single EA cause area. (I might refer these applications to the Long-Term Future Fund or the Animal Welfare Fund as appropriate; both of these funds have confirmed to me that they’re interested in making grants of this type.)

I also welcome applications from people who do or want to do work for existing groups, or group organizers who want funding to hire someone else to work with them. Eg:

Maintaining or overhauling group websites, if you think this is worthwhile for your particular group

Working 10hrs/week on a student group

Running group mailing lists

In cases where the project/expense isn’t a good fit for the EA Funds, but I think it’s worth supporting, I am likely able to offer alternative sources of funds.

I might stop doing this if someone appears who’s able to commit more time and thought to funding and supporting these kinds of groups, but for the time being I want to offer folks who want to work on these kinds of things a chance to request support.

I think that people who put serious time into creating high-quality groups deserve compensation for the time they put in, so please don’t let thoughts like “I only work on this for 10 hours a week” or “I’m happy to do this in a volunteer capacity” discourage you from applying. If you’re unsure if something is a reasonable fit, feel free to email me ([email protected]) and ask before applying. Depending on your cost of living, ask for a rate of $20-50 per hour (this includes employer's payroll tax and would correspond to ~$15-40/h gross salary).

The EAIF application form is here; you should also feel free to email me any questions you have about this.

Published on June 30, 2021 5:05 PM GMT

In this post I summarize key strategic implications from Sentience Institute's five completed social movement case studies and several additional case studies by other researchers, looking for correlations and convergent findings across the different movements and contexts. From this evidence, I argue that the farmed animal movement should take steps to avoid unintended consequences from incremental tactics; use a more diverse range of institutional tactics; use fewer individual diet change tactics, primarily as a complement to institutional tactics; explore opportunities to bypass public opinion; and focus less on issue salience. I also argue that the nascent movements to protect the interests of future sentient beings (e.g. artificial sentience) should focus first on building a credible, professional movement but subsequently invest in a broader range of social movement tactics when promising opportunities arise.

INTRODUCTION

Sentience Institute has now published five social movement case studies. This post provides a summary of the strategic implications from this work so far.

The main goal of these case studies is to glean strategic insights for social movements encouraging moral circle expansion (MCE), especially the farmed animal movement and the nascent movements to protect the interests of future sentient beings (e.g. artificial sentience). Other social movements, including the broader effective altruism movement, may also benefit.

We have argued:

Individual historical cases can therefore provide inspiration for potential tactics and perhaps build our intuition, but we should not place much weight on strategic knowledge gained from a single case, because causal relationships may not replicate in different contexts and may seem to work in contradictory ways. Note, however, that weak evidence can still be useful and should not be disregarded as it is often all we have available.

Even if we are not very confident about individual hypothesized causal relationships, we may be able to place significant weight on the strategic knowledge gleaned from history if we see that certain correlations reliably replicate across different movements and across different contexts.

In this post, I identify correlations and convergent findings across the different movements and contexts that SI has studied so far.

METHODOLOGY

The movements we have studied so far are:

The British antislavery movement

The US anti-abortion movement

The US anti-death penalty movement (including brief discussion of Europe)

The US prisoners' rights movement

The international Fair Trade movement

We have a separate post discussing methodological considerations such as why we have chosen to focus on these particular case studies. Our research on this topic is incomplete, so I also draw on similar reports by other researchers associated with the effective altruism community:

Animal Charity Evaluators’ case studies of childrens’ rights (UK, Sweden, and New Zealand) and environmentalism (US and Europe).

Mauricio Baker’s case studies of antislavery and climate change, both with a broad international focus.

Włodzimierz Gogłoza’s case study of the US antislavery movement.

To identify big-picture trends, I assigned scores to each movement[1] for a number of different variables:

Success — whether the movement encouraged institutional changes, change to individuals’ behavior, change in public opinion, or acceptance by targeted institutions. Where I refer to “successful social change,” I am referring to the average of these four submetrics.

My rough impression of the proportion of resources spent by each movement on various tactics.

The position taken by each movement on other strategic tradeoffs, e.g. confrontation vs. nonconfrontation.

I then estimated Spearman’s correlations between the variables and tested for statistical significance (p < 0.05), though there are many limitations to this sort of correlational historical evidence a...

Published on June 30, 2021 5:05 PM GMT

In this post I summarize key strategic implications from Sentience Institute's five completed social movement case studies and several additional case studies by other researchers, looking for correlations and convergent findings across the different movements and contexts. From this evidence, I argue that the farmed animal movement should take steps to avoid unintended consequences from incremental tactics; use a more diverse range of institutional tactics; use fewer individual diet change tactics, primarily as a complement to institutional tactics; explore opportunities to bypass public opinion; and focus less on issue salience. I also argue that the nascent movements to protect the interests of future sentient beings (e.g. artificial sentience) should focus first on building a credible, professional movement but subsequently invest in a broader range of social movement tactics when promising opportunities arise.

INTRODUCTION

Sentience Institute has now published five social movement case studies. This post provides a summary of the strategic implications from this work so far.

The main goal of these case studies is to glean strategic insights for social movements encouraging moral circle expansion (MCE), especially the farmed animal movement and the nascent movements to protect the interests of future sentient beings (e.g. artificial sentience). Other social movements, including the broader effective altruism movement, may also benefit.

We have argued:

Individual historical cases can therefore provide inspiration for potential tactics and perhaps build our intuition, but we should not place much weight on strategic knowledge gained from a single case, because causal relationships may not replicate in different contexts and may seem to work in contradictory ways. Note, however, that weak evidence can still be useful and should not be disregarded as it is often all we have available.

Even if we are not very confident about individual hypothesized causal relationships, we may be able to place significant weight on the strategic knowledge gleaned from history if we see that certain correlations reliably replicate across different movements and across different contexts.

In this post, I identify correlations and convergent findings across the different movements and contexts that SI has studied so far.

METHODOLOGY

The movements we have studied so far are:

The British antislavery movement

The US anti-abortion movement

The US anti-death penalty movement (including brief discussion of Europe)

The US prisoners' rights movement

The international Fair Trade movement

We have a separate post discussing methodological considerations such as why we have chosen to focus on these particular case studies. Our research on this topic is incomplete, so I also draw on similar reports by other researchers associated with the effective altruism community:

Animal Charity Evaluators’ case studies of childrens’ rights (UK, Sweden, and New Zealand) and environmentalism (US and Europe).

Mauricio Baker’s case studies of antislavery and climate change, both with a broad international focus.

Włodzimierz Gogłoza’s case study of the US antislavery movement.

To identify big-picture trends, I assigned scores to each movement[1] for a number of different variables:

Success — whether the movement encouraged institutional changes, change to individuals’ behavior, change in public opinion, or acceptance by targeted institutions. Where I refer to “successful social change,” I am referring to the average of these four submetrics.

My rough impression of the proportion of resources spent by each movement on various tactics.

The position taken by each movement on other strategic tradeoffs, e.g. confrontation vs. nonconfrontation.

I then estimated Spearman’s correlations between the variables and tested for statistical significance (p < 0.05), though there are many limitations to this sort of correlational historical evidence a...

Published on July 5, 2021 5:20 PM GMT

Rethink Priorities is a research organization aimed at uncovering insights to inform policymakers and major foundations about how to best help people and nonhuman animals in both the present and the long-term future.

You may know Rethink Priorities as the group that runs and analyzes the EA Survey, the annual survey of effective altruists. However, over the past two years, we have also run over 20 survey projects on varied topics including animal attitudes, longtermist policies, and population ethics. We have worked with organisations including the Centre for Effective Altruism, Forethought Foundation, Open Philanthropy, The Humane League, Mercy for Animals, Animal Equality, and The Humane Society of the United States. Our polls have received media attention from Bloomberg and Vox. We have done research to ensure we can deliver polls both accurately and quickly, using demographic reweighting and other techniques, and developing automation to run survey analysis from initial idea to completed report in under a week.

Over the next year, we will be working on projects including examining public attitudes and behaviors towards effective altruism, the psychology of effective giving, message testing around longtermism, and a scale construction project for attitudes towards wild animal welfare. We use a mix of surveys, experimental manipulations, message tests, focus groups, and field experiments.

However, we won’t be able to do all these projects and keep delivering for the organizations we work with unless we can expand our team.

If you’re interested in this, we're currently seeking researchers to join our survey team - apply here by 11 July.

Our survey team is interdisciplinary, with backgrounds in psychology, behavioural economics, political science, data science, and mathematical modelling, and we invite applicants from a variety of disciplines to apply for our role.

What do we do for animals?

We have worked with The Humane League, Mercy for Animals, Animal Equality, The Humane Society of the United States, and Open Philanthropy's Farmed Animal Welfare Team to run polls, surveys, focus groups, message tests, and experimental manipulations to understand a variety of consumer trends when it comes to animal welfare and how to talk about animal welfare in a way that is more likely to resonate with the public.So far, we’ve covered topics such as live-shackle slaughter, attitudes towards insect farming, what motivates consumers to eat less meat, what likely voters think about various hypothetical animal welfare initiatives, laypeople’s opinions of the relative moral weight of various animals, the effects of the pandemic on animal welfare arguments, and the pros and cons of different ways of discussing animal welfare.

Future work in this area will likely involve writing up more of our not yet published work, poll testing more farmed and wild animal welfare interventions for public support, a scale construction project for analyzing attitudes towards wild animal welfare, and more.

What do we do for longtermism?

The same capabilities we have built doing message testing, surveying, and polling for nonhuman animal welfare policy can also be applied to longtermism. We worked with an EA-aligned lobbying group to understand laypeople’s opinions about the long-term future, understand public support for various concrete longtermist policies, and made concrete recommendations about how to talk about longtermism that have already resulted in them shifting communication strategy.

We recently received money from the Long-Term Future Fund to expand our work in this area. We’d like to go into more detail about longtermist messaging and further explore support for various concrete longtermist policies, with the goal of identifying policies that could be adopted in the near-term by the US and UK governments.

What do we do for effective altruism movement building and outreach?

We run the annual EA Survey and we a...

Published on July 5, 2021 5:20 PM GMT

Rethink Priorities is a research organization aimed at uncovering insights to inform policymakers and major foundations about how to best help people and nonhuman animals in both the present and the long-term future.

You may know Rethink Priorities as the group that runs and analyzes the EA Survey, the annual survey of effective altruists. However, over the past two years, we have also run over 20 survey projects on varied topics including animal attitudes, longtermist policies, and population ethics. We have worked with organisations including the Centre for Effective Altruism, Forethought Foundation, Open Philanthropy, The Humane League, Mercy for Animals, Animal Equality, and The Humane Society of the United States. Our polls have received media attention from Bloomberg and Vox. We have done research to ensure we can deliver polls both accurately and quickly, using demographic reweighting and other techniques, and developing automation to run survey analysis from initial idea to completed report in under a week.

Over the next year, we will be working on projects including examining public attitudes and behaviors towards effective altruism, the psychology of effective giving, message testing around longtermism, and a scale construction project for attitudes towards wild animal welfare. We use a mix of surveys, experimental manipulations, message tests, focus groups, and field experiments.

However, we won’t be able to do all these projects and keep delivering for the organizations we work with unless we can expand our team.

If you’re interested in this, we're currently seeking researchers to join our survey team - apply here by 11 July.

Our survey team is interdisciplinary, with backgrounds in psychology, behavioural economics, political science, data science, and mathematical modelling, and we invite applicants from a variety of disciplines to apply for our role.

What do we do for animals?

We have worked with The Humane League, Mercy for Animals, Animal Equality, The Humane Society of the United States, and Open Philanthropy's Farmed Animal Welfare Team to run polls, surveys, focus groups, message tests, and experimental manipulations to understand a variety of consumer trends when it comes to animal welfare and how to talk about animal welfare in a way that is more likely to resonate with the public.So far, we’ve covered topics such as live-shackle slaughter, attitudes towards insect farming, what motivates consumers to eat less meat, what likely voters think about various hypothetical animal welfare initiatives, laypeople’s opinions of the relative moral weight of various animals, the effects of the pandemic on animal welfare arguments, and the pros and cons of different ways of discussing animal welfare.

Future work in this area will likely involve writing up more of our not yet published work, poll testing more farmed and wild animal welfare interventions for public support, a scale construction project for analyzing attitudes towards wild animal welfare, and more.

What do we do for longtermism?

The same capabilities we have built doing message testing, surveying, and polling for nonhuman animal welfare policy can also be applied to longtermism. We worked with an EA-aligned lobbying group to understand laypeople’s opinions about the long-term future, understand public support for various concrete longtermist policies, and made concrete recommendations about how to talk about longtermism that have already resulted in them shifting communication strategy.

We recently received money from the Long-Term Future Fund to expand our work in this area. We’d like to go into more detail about longtermist messaging and further explore support for various concrete longtermist policies, with the goal of identifying policies that could be adopted in the near-term by the US and UK governments.

What do we do for effective altruism movement building and outreach?

We run the annual EA Survey and we a...