Donation Election Discussion Thread

I ranked the Shrimp Welfare Project 1st because I think their Humane Slaughter Initiative is the most cost-effective intervention around.

I think animal welfare as a cause area is important and neglected within EA. Invertebrates have been especially neglected since Open Phil pulled out of the space, so my top choices are the Arthropoda Foundation and Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP).

With high uncertainty, I weakly prefer Arthropoda over SWP on the margin. Time is running short to influence the trajectory of insect farming in its early stages. The quotes for Arthropoda's project costs and overhead seem very reasonable. Also, while SWP's operational costs are covered through 2026, Arthropoda's projects may not happen at all without marginal funding, so donations to Arthropoda feel more urgent to me since they're more existential. But all of this is held loosely and I'm very open to counterarguments.

I voted for Wild Animal Initiative, followed by Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation (I have COIs with WAI and Arthropoda).

• All three cannot be funded by OpenPhil/GVF currently, despite WAI/SWP being heavily funded previously by them.
• I think that wild animal welfare is the single most important animal welfare issue, and it remains incredibly neglected, with just WAI working on it exclusively.
  • Despite this challenge, WAI seems to have made a ton of progress on building the scientific knowledge needed to actually make progress on these issues.
  • Since founding and leaving WAI, I've just become increasingly optimistic about there being a not-too-long-term pathway to robust interventions to help wild animals, and to wild animal welfare going moderately mainstream within conservation biology/ecology.
• Wild animal welfare is downstream from ~every other cause area. If you think it is a problem, but that we can't do anything about it because the issue is so complicated, then the same is true of the wild animal welfare impacts of basically all other interventions EAs pursue. This seems like a huge issue for knowing the impact of our work. No one is working on this except WAI, and no other issues seem to cut across all causes the way wild animal welfare does.
• SWP seems like they are implementing the most cost-effective animal welfare intervention that is remotely scalable right now.
• In general, I favor funding research, because historically OpenPhil has been far more likely to fund research than other funders, and it is pretty hard for research-focused organizations to compete with intervention-focused organizations in the animal funding scene, despite lots of interventions being downstream from research. Since Arthropoda also does scientific field building / research funding, I added it to my list.

Here's my longtermist, AI focused list. I really haven't done my research, e.g. I read zero marginal funding posts. This is mostly a vote for MATS.

I would have ranked The Midas Project around 5 but it wasn't an option.

We've just resolved some launch issues with the voting portal. The portal was limited to 30 candidates, so a randomised group of organisations was missing for each voter. 
If you've already voted, consider re-voting with a full list of candidates. 
 

(Edited at 19:35 UTC-5 as I misunderstood how the voting system works)

My top 10 right now look something like:

1. The Midas Project
2. EA Animal Welfare Fund
3. Rethink Priorities
4. MATS Research
5. Shrimp Welfare Project
6. Apart Research
7. Legal Impact for Chickens
8. PauseAI
9. Wild Animal Initiative
10. High Impact Professionals

I ranked my organization, The Midas Project, first on my ballot. I don't think we have a stronger track record than many of the organizations in this election (and I expect the winners will be a few familiar top contenders like Rethink Priorities, who certainly deserve to be there), but I do think the election will undervalue our project due to general information asymmetries and most of our value being speculative/heavy-tailed. This seems in line with the tactical voting suggestion, but it does feel a bit icky/full of hubris.

Also, in making this list, I realized that I favored large orgs whose work I'm familiar with, and most skipped over small orgs who I know little about (including ones that made posts for marginal funding week that I just haven't read). This was a funny feeling because (as mentioned) I run a small org that I expect many people don't know about and will skip over. 

One way people can counteract this would be, in making your selection, choose 1-2 orgs you've never heard of at random, do a deep dive on them, and place them somewhere in your rankings (even at the bottom if you aren't excited about them). With enough people doing this, there should be enough coverage of small orgs for the results of the election to be a bit more informative, at least in terms of how smaller orgs compare to each other.

Organizations like the Shrimp Welfare Project or the Fish Welfare Initiative have high utilitarian returns, but are difficult to sell to people outside of EA, so it makes sense for dollars coming directly from the core of the community to go to these niche but highly effective cause areas. 

I'm voting for charities that have the biggest room for funding considering the impact the want to make. I am also prioritising meta charities, because they are less likely to receive votes due to most people supporting direct work, while meta charities are important for us to grow as a community. 

The donation election post (meet the candidates) and the actual voting platform need to be cross-checked. I saw that Animetrics was included in the vote but not in the post, while Giving Green was included in the post and not in the vote. There may be other errors which I missed.

I think work on animals is comparatively neglected, due to the high numbers of individuals of bad conditions. More specifically, the smaller the animals, the more numerous and neglected they tend to be, which leads to underfunding.

Please consider using star (or approval) voting next year instead of RCV

I ranked the more neglected charities higher as they will benefit from funding more than others

I voted for The Humane League UK (meat/broiler chicken welfare), Fish Welfare Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation for cost-effective programs for animal welfare with low risk of backfire. I'm specifically concerned with backfire due to wild animal effects (also here), or increasing keel bone fractures for cage-free hens, so I avoid reducing animal product consumption/production and cage-free work.

I voted for mainly animal welfare/rights charities first, particularly ones which focused on highly neglected, large-scale populations like insects, shrimps, and fishes. I also voted highly for PauseAI because I believe in creating greater public pressure to slow AI progress and shifting the Overton Window, even if I am agnostic about pausing AI progress itself. After these, I voted for some of the meta/mixed organizations which I thought were especially promising, including Rethink Priorities and the Unjournal. Then I voted for mental health/resilience interventions. Then I voted for GCR initiatives. I did not vote for any human welfare interventions which I expected to cause net harm to animals. I did not vote for any other AI organizations because I did not trust that they were sufficiently decelerationist.

Like @Toby Tremlett🔹 I did a quick initial vote and will come back and edit my vote once I've read more marginal funding posts + see who's in the lead. 

(Another plug here for the Spotify playlist we created with the marginal funding posts in case you (like me) prefer listening to posts)

I noticed my view of these charities splits roughly into three categories: a) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a good chance (>30%) of being more effective than givedirectly, b) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a low chance of being more effective than givedirectly (<10%), and charities, and c) I wish I knew more about this charity.

I added those in category a) to the top of my list, in no particular order for now.

I'm kind of confused why I don't think anything is range 10-30%, but it seems I don't...

I don't have a lot of confidence in this vote, and it's quite possible my ranking will change in important ways. Because only the top three organizations place in the money, we will all have the ability to narrow down which placements are likely to be outcome-relevant as the running counts start displaying. I'm quite sure I have not given all 36 organizations a fair shake in the 5-10 minutes I devoted to actually voted.

I've put together a quick initial vote, but I'll vote again at least once before the deadline. I'll go more in depth and closely read the marginal funding posts of the top 5 or so candidates when there are clear front-runners. 

Hey @Toby Tremlett🔹 , when people leave their rationales with their votes and they end up as comments here, they often don't say what they voted for, and it doesn't show in this thread. So, I don't know what orgs they're talking about. Is that intended?

Animals are suffering and they deserve as much or more help than we give to other humans. They demonostrate no malice, hatred, jealousy, they only wish to survive. How we care for them reflects how we care for other humans. 

My previous experience assessing the projects of the listed organizations (I did not vote for those I'm unfamiliar with), how neglected the work they're doing is, and the marginal impact I expect from funding them.

I believe these are the most effective organisations and will use the money wisely

Like Toby, this is my initial vote, but I may revise it as more information becomes available over time.