I have a question about the structure of future oracular funding. For the last round, a project had to be funded by investors in order to qualify for impact certificates. Will that still be the case next year do you think?
I have an idea that I would feel bad taking investor/grant money for (because it's very unlikely to succeed), but I would probably do if, in its success case, I could plausibly sell the impact grant. (No one is harmed if it fails). Could I just do it myself (unfunded) and then sell the impact certificate?
I'll let Manifund have the final say, but I think from a technical perspective you could do this by creating the impact certificate and setting the "percent equity to sell to investors" to zero.
As a final oracular funder, I think I would be okay with this if you specified on the original cert/application that you wouldn't have done this unless you thought you could get it retro-funded later, and I trusted you. Otherwise I worry there's too much potential for everyone to want money for the things they're already doing. I don't know how other funders feel about this.
I realize this isn't a very helpful answer, but we're trying to invent this process as we go and don't have strong norms around it yet.
Sorry if I missed, but how much of the funding is reserved as retrofunding incentive for the impact market as opposed to prospective grant funding? Is there a minimum or a maximum? Thanks!
> If you want to invest in impact certificates, I’ll give you more information on the ACX Grants version later...
Or possibly there isn't a specific set of funding reserved as retrofunding, but rather they'll "pay for things they value," without a formal limit? Would be helpful to get clarification from Scott on this, though.
There is no funding for retrofunding this year. Next year, with however much funding I have (probably another $250K + whatever others give), I will treat retroactive and proactive projects equally.
>A group of lawyers who sue factory farms under animal cruelty laws.
Look, if you and everyone else with $250,000 to spare wants to buy cage-free eggs and humanely-sourced beef, go ahead, but don't make dinner more expensive for the rest of us due to your misplaced compassion.
If you have an argument that it's impossible for animals to suffer from cruelty, make it. Otherwise, I think animal cruelty continues to be bad and it is one of the central cases of legitimate government activity to ban it.
It's convenient when facts happen to line up with ethics.
But if a new and better study showed that actually, cruelly treated animals are _more_ nutritious than humanely treated animals, would you be in favour of animal cruelty?
If I were a psychopath, yes. Not very applicable to me as I don't eat mammal flesh, and mistreating fish would be expensive. No pull them out and let them die from lack of O2.
Very interesting point. I presume the animal rights people have heightened empathy.
Yes, animal cruelty is bad. And yes, if factory farming is cruel, indeed the laws should be enforced.
But the ultimate aim is to drive meat-eating out of existence completely, by making it way too expensive and inconvenient to comply with the laws and the nuisance law suits.
They may be motivated by good intentions, but when you're declaring that your plan is to lawfare meat-eating out of existence, where's the difference between that and 'go away' money?
Basically, serial objectors to planning permission write to the developers and say that if a certain amount is handed over for unspecified works, the objection will then magically go away.
>But the ultimate aim is to drive meat-eating out of existence completely, by making it way too expensive and inconvenient to comply with the laws and the nuisance law suits.
If the government writes laws that make it impossible to eat meat, you should complain to them. I don't know the specific "animal cruelty laws" but generally those are very mild and there is no risk of driving complying companies out of business.
"If the government writes laws that make it impossible to eat meat, you should complain to them. I don't know the specific "animal cruelty laws" but generally those are very mild and there is no risk of driving complying companies out of business."
We had this discussion when the original award was made. They're going after tiny legal loopholes to let people sue corporations.
Now, is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. If animal welfare laws are not being enforced, and lack of enforcement leads to abuse, then they should be enforced and breaches should be punished.
But there is a wider aim than just "encourage humane farming methods" and that is to get animal rearing for food stopped majorly or in whole.
To quote a comment on the previous post:
"However, even if that's wrong, if you think factory farming is basically immoral (I do), then making the industry act overly cautiously to avoid lawsuits seems great. If Tyson Chickens ends up giving all its chickens 1.2 hectares because it's worried it might slip under 1.0 and get sued, that seems like good news. If Tyson Chickens ends up going bankrupt, all the better.
...If the critique of this charity is that they might shut down factory farming for $72,000, that is probably the best thing Scott will ever do."
To quote the Legal Impact for Chickens website:
"Legal Impact for Chickens focuses on civil litigation as a way to improve animal welfare.
Why? Companies don’t follow laws that aren’t enforced. And prosecutors rarely enforce cruelty laws on factory farms, even when animal protection groups urge them to.
As a result, while several state cruelty laws technically cover farms, factory farms ignore them. Investigations in such states show rampant, unlawful neglect and abuse. Similarly, the animal movement’s effort to pass confinement bans may be wasted if those new bans aren’t enforced.
Strategic civil litigation offers a solution. Several little-known legal doctrines let plaintiffs sue in civil court for violation of a criminal law. At Legal Impact for Chickens, we focus on systematically developing, refining, and using those doctrines to fight factory-farm cruelty."
If existing laws are not being enforced, why the recourse to "strategic civil ligitation" instead of getting the relevant authorities to bring criminal charges?
Constant dripping wears away the stone - to have hundreds of small nuisance lawsuits constantly clogging up the courts may not drive a mega-producer out of business, but a smaller one is more vulnerable.
And they're relying on emotional blackmail to drive farmers out of supplying poultry processors:
"Legal Impact for Chickens submitted a public comment to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), asking the agency to make chicken-meat companies warn their potential new farmers about bird-welfare issues.
No one wants to see suffering. And LIC believes that farmers deserve to know what they’re getting into when they sign up to grow birds for a large company.
LIC submitted its comment on August 9, 2022, in response to USDA’s proposed regulation on Transparency in Poultry Grower Contracting and Tournaments. USDA proposed this new rule with the goal of helping chicken contract growers—by leveling the information playing field between these individual growers and the large poultry companies that hire them.
In our comment, LIC explained:
[M]any growers are currently forced to witness animal suffering which the growers didn’t expect upon entering into their contract. Health-and-welfare information will help a prospective grower decide whether he or she feels comfortable with the way the dealer will ultimately require him or her to treat chickens. Such information will also help a prospective grower decide whether he or she feels comfortable with the likely state of the animals he or she will ultimately be seeing, smelling, and caring for every day.
On November 8, 2023, USDA announced its final rule. Unfortunately, USDA rejected LIC’s comments."
Thanks for the long answer. Some part of the state passing laws another part of the state doesn't want to enforce is definitely a complicated situation.
I don't have a rigorous model of what's right here, but feel that Scott (a donor of an organization which uses a creative approach to get existing laws enforced) is not the right person to blame here if concerned about food prices (far too many levels removed).
If this was just about the direct impact Scott has on food prices, this wouldn't be worth our time at all.
The "law" situation reminds me of a situation in Germany: One party sold gold to exploit party funding laws. A satire party started selling money using the same exploit.
Everyone had a good laugh, the satire party got sued (and won), and the loophole was fixed.
This is what should happen to loopholes: You make people who can close them (or make them official) look at them.
Oh, I don't blame Scott for this, it's his money and if he wants to donate or grant it to people aiming to dress up as kobolds and paint their backsides blue and run around in the snow screaming, that's nobody's business but his own.
Even the Lawyers for Chickens lot are entitled to do what they're doing. I'd just like a little more transparency about what their real aims are, which as I said I don't think stop at the threshold of "get cruelty laws enforced and have those who break them penalised in a meaningful manner".
It’s not that the suffering of animals is impossible, it’s that the suffering of animals is irrelevant. Why does the internal subjective experience of chickens matter one bit? Chickens are not part of the social contract. Chickens are not going to rise up and overthrow their oppression. Chickens are not going to plot with the Russians or the Chinese to defeat US hegemony. The lives of humans in a society will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of farm animals is not regulated. That makes it bad policy.
That makes sense on a practical level but “you shouldn’t care about the wellbeing of those over whom you have overwhelming power” isn’t exactly what I’d call morally good.
I suppose psychopathology is morally bad, but why? My guru, psychiatrist Dr. Ben thought behaviour was consistent, i.e. if one treats animals well they treat people well. Lacking empathy is a symptom of psychopathology.
Because pain is bad* and pleasure is good, and other beings experience their pleasure and pain as mattering in the same way that you do? While that is not the only thing that could matter morally, those statements are usually treated as moral axioms**. Maybe someone else can have a good go at trying to prove them, but the whole point of axioms is “this is so obvious that it should need no justification.”
*In some forms and contexts, people like pain. This is interesting, but we can also define pain and pleasure here as “the kind of stuff that you don’t/do want” to avoid that without effecting the core point. Besides, I don’t think anybody’s arguing that chickens are just kinky like that.
**Divine Law morality does this in theory, as if God decided that pleasure was bad and pain was good that would simply be moral fact. In practice, religions tend to accept these axioms, at least implicitly. Earn an eternity in heaven or hell, find nothingness to be relieved of all suffering, etc.
This reminds be of old argument against religious morals. Religious people think the only thing that stops people from kill and rape is god's wrath. So, atheists must be immoral. Atheists, in turn, are puzzled, because their sense of morality is based on reason or intuition.
In your case, it looks like only fear of retribution stops you from old ways of colonization and slavery. I think most modern people would disagree. We try to be good because we think suffering of any living being is bad, not because chickens will retaliate.
The slavery example is interesting. Here is what I think is actually going on: Now that slavery has been near universally abolished, and technology has made slavery of relatively little economic value compared to where it was historically, it becomes positive value for pretty much everyone to agree to not enslave anyone else ever again. Unfortunately, you can't explain logical decision theory to first graders, so everyone just learns "slavery is bad" and gets punished if they ask questions.
This is a very niche moral position that most other people would call morally bad, verging on actively evil. None of the gods of the world's various religions would let you into heaven, and neither will the overbeings in whose simulation we exist as weak AGIs being evaluated for alignment and trustworthiness to be promoted to the "real" world and to greater power & responsibility.
You are demonstrating a willingness to harm anyone you have sufficient power over, but the lives of all sentient creatures will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of everyone capable of suffering is cared about. That makes it bad morality.
>but the lives of all sentient creatures will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of everyone capable of suffering is cared about. That makes it bad morality.
Actually, the lives of all sentient creatures capable of agreeing to deals and exchanging things for value will be *even better than your scenario* when the suffering only of all sentient creatures capable of agreeing to deals and exchanging things for value is cared about. It is a mistake to think that chickens belong at the bargaining table. They don't. This is a mistake common among people who don't understand decision theory (which is most people). People substitute "sentient creatures" or "conscious creatures" for "rational agents", which are the things that actually matter. See https://www.lesswrong.com/s/v55BhXbpJuaExkpcD/p/rP66bz34crvDudzcJ
Scott once said: "Contractualism scares me a little because it offers too easy an out from bottomless-pit type dilemmas. It seems really easy to say 'All of us people not in jail, we’ll agree to look out for one another, and as for those guys, screw them'. "
Dread it. Run from it. "All of us people not in jail, we’ll agree to look out for one another, and as for those guys, screw them'," is the dominant strategy all the same
Decision theory is not what tells us what we should care about. Decision theory is how we get what we care about.
In this case, most people care about the suffering of others whether or not they're at the bargaining table. The bargaining table is where sentient creatures capable of agreeing to deals exchange things for all sorts of value, including the value of "less suffering".
Your values are different, and I agree that your value of not caring about chickens is not objectively bad morality in the sense of "morality that just doesn't work". It's not, in fact, possible to talk you into caring about chickens by telling you that if only you cared about chickens, then everything you do care about is better off!
(That's, again, trying to change something on the wrong level. Actions you take to make everyone better off are part of your decision theory. It is not necessary to change your values to take different actions. If in a practical scenario, you could benefit from acting the way a person who cares about chickens acts, you could at least in theory just *pretend* to care about chickens, and get the same benefit.)
I actually do think that the people who claim to value the wellbeing of arbitrary creatures simply because they can experience suffering are incorrectly reasoning about their own value function. They feel bad when they see a dog whimpering on the side of the road (for example), and then they extend this impulse via subtly wrong logic into caring about the suffering of chickens who spend their whole lives inside a warehouse and are seen only by Tyson Foods employees.
I mean, yeah. That’s exactly what’s going to happen. I don’t think people realize that the only reason humans have empathy is as a heuristic to incentivize cooperation with other beings of approximately equal capacity. It’s not some built in fact of the universe. It is a very specific tool for a very specific purpose.
So from your logic, the only thing wrong about slavery is that it fosters slave revolts.
Suppose the Taliban said: "Women are not part of the social contract. Afghan women are not going to rise up and overthrow their oppression. Almost all Afghan women are not going to plot with the West to defeat the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The lives of men in a society will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of women is not regulated."
Would you find that argument as convincing as the one you are making?
>So from your logic, the only thing wrong about slavery is that it fosters slave revolts.
That's not quite the argument I'm making. I'm an ethical non-cognitivist. The proposition "slavery is wrong" has no truth value. I would say that the widespread belief that slavery is bad (for whatever "bad" means in your meta-ethical views) is a useful social technology for establishing coordination within and between societies to not enslave themselves or each other. To the extent that this social technology is useful, I will gladly go along with a reasonable amount of pro-social "boo slavery" talk. I don't think "animal suffering is bad" is a useful social technology in the same way that "slavery is bad" is.
>Suppose the Taliban said: "Women are not part of the social contract. Afghan women are not going to rise up and overthrow their oppression. Almost all Afghan women are not going to plot with the West to defeat the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The lives of men in a society will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of women is not regulated."
As a factual matter, women just *are* a part of the social contract. Maybe the Taliban or whoever can reduce their role, but they will never be anywhere near as irrelevant as factory farm animals. Men also care personally about the women in their lives in a way that they don't about anonymous farm animals.
> As a factual matter, women just *are* a part of the social contract.
Hm, let me check. Yes, in my version, which I signed on attaining majority, it clearly says "contract parties shall be all adult human beings irrespective of their gender" on page two. Not, because almost nobody signs such a document.
Most men -- even Taliban, I guess -- care about some of the women in their lives. Most pet owners care about their pets. Some men (me among them) care about general human welfare (which includes women), just like some humans (me among them) care about animal welfare. Neither of my preferences is strongly shaped by the fear of violent reprisals.
If -- as you alleged -- moral worth grows out of the barrel of a gun (because violent repercussions are what keeps you from defecting) then it follows logically that some people (the rich, or Jihadists getting upset about some caricatures) have vastly more moral value than others (the young, the weak, the poor, etc).
Also, future generations. Unless either aging is fixed (not particularly likely within my life time) or time travel (very unlikely) is fixed, future generations can't reciprocate, so your theory says one should defect.
That argument could be used for any group of people oppressing another group. The lives of men will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of women is not regulated. The lives of parents will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of children is not regulated. The lives of white people will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of minorities is not regulated. What will you do when those in power come for you? You have to draw a Schelling fence somewhere, and while, admittedly, "organisms that share a large amount of your DNA with you" is a strong Schelling fence, it's not nearly as strong as "any organism with a central nervous system."
If someone were to donate money to a group of lawyers who sue housing construction companies for violating zoning laws, many people here would think that to be evil, or at least misguided (and I would probably agree). Yes, the more elegant solution would be to change the law, but increased enforcement of bad laws is also bad.
People can think what they want, but I still wouldn't blame the donors or lawyers, but those who put bad zoning laws into place (If they are bad. I don't know all the zoning regulations.)
I actually also don't know what the "animal cruelty laws" are in the US.
Assuming laws are bad and then blaming people who try to get them enforces just seems misguided and like the wrong angle of attack.
I'm not assuming the laws are bad, I'm assuming the motives of the people involved are not the whole of what they're saying.
Look, this is all personal opinion on my part, and you can call me a stupid idiot jumping at shadows. But I think that people who consider chickens to be not just pets but family members have a certain view of food animals that is not completely congruent with "it's okay to raise animals for food, just don't violate the laws around doing so".
"LIC was founded by Alene Anello. Alene graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for a federal judge, and then started litigating for animals. She has worked at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and The Good Food Institute. She is licensed to practice law in New York, the District of Columbia, and California. Alene is committed to helping chickens to honor the memories of her two beloved avian family members, Conrad and Zeke."
"[Tyler] shares his life with his wife, his two sons, his dog Moco, and a small flock of rescue hens (Pearl, Ester, Sophia, Sophia II, Pepper, and Ginger)."
"Alicia teaches Animal Law at Brooklyn Law School, as an adjunct professor of law. Alicia also serves as vice chair of the board of The Humane League. Alicia graduated from Harvard Law School in 2015, where she served as the President of the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund and founded the university-wide Harvard Vegan Society."
"In her spare time, Stephanie enjoys traveling, backpacking, and trying new vegan restaurants."
Do I think vegans might be working to get meat-eating off the table (as it were)? What do you think I think?
"During law school, [Sarah] served as president of the Animal Law Society, and interned at Mercy for Animals."
"Mercy For Animals believes that a world without industrial animal agriculture is possible—if we work together to create it. Imagine a world in which we nourish ourselves with food that is kind to animals and sustainable for the planet and all who share it. We envision a world in which eating is an act of compassion, in which no one is exploited or forced to exploit another.
Our mission is to end industrial animal agriculture by constructing a just and sustainable food system.
We have three core approaches:
- Making alternatives to animal-based meat, eggs, and dairy as attractive and accessible as possible.
- Making animal products less competitive and less attractive to consumers, food producers, and policymakers.
The true costs of industrially produced animal products have been concealed from the public or externalized onto animals, the environment, and communities. We expose and shift these costs such that they are no longer borne by the most vulnerable.
- Reducing suffering for the animals in our current food system for as long as it exists."
You don't just *happen* to get jobs at PETA or the likes of the above. So yeah, I'm thinking that Legal Impact for Chickens is not simply about "let's make sure existing laws are enforced".
And that's fine! Just be honest about your aims and what you're trying to achieve, not "tum-di-dum all we're doing is helping concerned private citizens take cases about animal abuse in factory farming with some legal assistance on the finer points of law from our end".
>I'm assuming the motives of the people involved are not the whole of what they're saying.
They don't seem to be shy about their terminal goals, or am I missing something?
It's just a good strategy for LIC to form a large front of vegans, vegetarians & people who want ethically sourced meat for this issue. And as long as they are doing what they claim they are doing, I don't think anyone is deceived here.
Calling it deceit or deception would be very strong accusation on my part, and I wouldn't go that far. I think it's more the motte and bailey:
The motte: We're just taking cases where companies violate animal cruelty laws, is all!
Who could object to that? Who would stand up and say "Actually I *am* for animal suffering and I think factory farming is *not* cruel enough"?
The bailey: And we hope to work towards ending meat eating and raising animals as food either in large part or even completely
Yeah, this is where we BLOODMOUTH CARNISTS get off the train. And that's probably why this isn't being emphasised so much. It's a lot easier to gain support for "punish production facilities that break the law - oh and by the way did you know that *you*, private citizen, could take a civil case about this? just one of the tricks we can help you out with!" than "end meat eating forever by making growers go 'ugh, icky' about the conditions they have to keep animals in to make a profit, and making consumers wracked with guilt over torture and rape and fun stuff like that".
Like, in my childhood, I've seen hens kept free-range. I don't think chickens are these wonderfully complex creatures with interior lives and rich social organisations - there's a reason for the expressions "hen-pecked" and "pecking order", after all, and those came into being long before intensive factory farming. Chickens are omnivores, like us, and would happily eat your corpse if you dropped dead in the hen run. They're not smart, they can be vicious (this is why you don't have two roosters in the one hen yard) and basically they're animals.
If you want to keep them as pets and think of them as family members, sure you can. But that's sentimentality, to be brutal. I don't think that cruelty should be inflicted, but neither do I think chickens have experiences worth calling sentient consciousness.
But they’re not just “enforcing existing laws”—they’re advocating for frivolous interpretations with no chance of being adopted by the courts, in hopes of extorting companies into changing their practices because it would be cheaper than mounting a legal defense. Fortunately, the two companies they tried it on appear to have successfully defended themselves, but I’m still not sure what’s appealing about this cause.
I have not looked into the specific topic and don't know much about the US legal system, but shouldn't frivolous lawsuits just be thrown out by the judge, costing the defender nothing?
I favor people being able to sue, even if some / a majority considers the lawsuit "frivolous".
If it's possible to benefit from suing with no chance of success, there's a problem with your legal system, and that's where you should direct your ire.
With rare exceptions, in the American legal system judges don’t pre-screen cases for potential merit: the defendant has to explain why the complaint is meritless. Doing that requires an attorney to spend time researching and writing, and (with rare exceptions), the cost of the attorney’s time can’t be recovered from the plaintiff.
That does create the potential for exploitation, since it can create a situation where defending against a meritless lawsuit can be more expensive than paying what the plaintiff is asking for. Whether and how to address this problem is one of the biggest and most contentious questions in the American legal system. But it’s also pretty generally accepted that the people who abuse this facet of the system for personal gain are pretty contemptible. And doing it to advance a political agenda doesn’t seem much better—particularly, but by no means exclusively, if it’s a political agenda you disagree with.
I think there's a sizable gap between "case with a negligible chance of success" and "case so indefensibly bad that the judge will throw it out of court". You'll probably get into trouble if you go around repeatedly filing claims that people owe you taxes because you are Napoleon, but that still allows plenty of latitude to try some very unrealistic lawsuits.
I don't know how realistic Legal Impact for Chickens' cases are, but "several little-known legal doctrines let plaintiffs sue in civil court for violation of a criminal law" leads me to suspect they are closer to "no chance" than "slim chance".
I hope I haven't asked this before, but who owns the IP developed with one of these grants, or with a project with an impact certificate? If a grant funds software or website development, do you require the software or website to be made freely available, even ad-free, or even open-source? Most government research grants for software development have some requirement like that, with the result that the software developed with grants is seldom maintained after it's built.
There's no requirement, but if someone is producing software with the intent to sell it, I'll be appropriately skeptical of whether this is really a charity project vs. a company which should be funded by a VC (unless they overcome that skepticism by making some other case for why this is charitable).
Software must be maintained for as long as it is to be useful. So the software has to generate a revenue stream, or it can't be maintained. As I said, grants which forbid this result in software which doesn't generate revenue, and therefore isn't maintained, and is a waste of grant money because it becomes unusable or obsolete in a few years. It's also poorly documented, and usually is Unix software that must be compiled by hand for every different version of Unix, rather than being something you can install and run. This in turn means the software becomes unusable for a computer as soon as any component that must be linked to it becomes unusable on your particular variant of Unix.
I disagree. There are whole ecosystems of free and open source software which are maintained without generating a revenue stream through the sale of licences. Some of it is maintained by people who get paid for it by companies which have other revenue streams (e.g. hardware sales). Some is maintained by volunteers.
If the existence of the software is of such utility that EA will pay you to write it, chances are that they are also willing to pay you to maintain it. If they instead were to bet on you being able to turn selling licences into a viable business model, the possible loss (if it is not viable) would be theirs while the possible gains (if it is immensely profitable) would be yours. An unmaintained github repository from 2015 can at least be a starting point of future work while a buggy binary from a company which folded in 2015 generally is not.
Documentation quality (as well as code quality) is mostly dependent on the dev team, not the software license.
And of course the primary method to distribute software is by source code. You do not know what platforms your users might want to run the software on now, never mind what platforms might exist in the future, or what modifications a user might require.
If you dislike compiling "by hand", a recent trend in the open source world you might want to give a try are so called "distributions" of GNU/Linux and the like. Rather than compiling sources, you can install precompiled binaries for your architecture as long as your distribution maintains a version of that package. The usability of "apt install packagename" is vastly superior to downloading some installer.exe from what might be a genuine source, double clicking on it, reading an EULA, agreeing to it, entering your licence key, picking an install path and clicking install.
I'm long, intimately, and painfully familiar with open-source software, github, Unix distributions, and all that. That whole world is exactly what I'm talking about when I say "terrible documentation", "hard to compile", and "unmaintained". There are exceptions, like GIMP, Anaconda, Blender, Open-Office, Open-Shell, and Cygwin. All of those write extremely popular, mass-market software, and have enormous user bases. The most-specialized of them is Anaconda, and they say they have 30 million users. They also have a business model based on providing special consulting, and 300 full-time employees. Not a typical grantee.
Oh, and they all have pre-compiled installers for Windows.
There are also exceptions when someone has a day job, and maintains some open-source software in their spare time as a labor of love, like the AppleWin emulator.
I am not talking out my ass when I say the bioinformatics software landscape has been crippled by grants. There's very little professional-quality software available, and assembling a bioinformatics pipeline means spending months to piece together different bits of abandonware written on different operating systems, using different versions of the same linked libraries, precisely because there IS so much freely-available, but unmaintained, open-source software, and so few customers, that it's hard for anyone to make a profit by selling good software. It means rewriting your code every time the NIH releases a new version of BLAST, or HMMER releases a new version, or your favorite protein function database changes its format or loses its funding.
Just guessing here, but I can imagine things like this:
You buy a cheap building for organizing EA conferences. The idea is that in long term this will be cheaper than renting conference places at market rate (which also don't have to be available at the moment you need them), and you can use the building in the meanwhile, too. This is reported on as: "they pretend to collect money to cure Africans of malaria, but actually they are buying castles for themselves".
You organize a meetup for new effective altruists in some area. Many people come; some of them are not motivated by altruism, but by the opportunity to meet lots of naive people they could exploit. The predators end up hurting some participants or scamming them out of money. Furthermore, this is reported on as: "this is what effective altruism is really about".
(With projects like "make a website for X", the worst case is that the website won't get built, or no one will use it. That is, zero, not negative... except for the grant money wasted.)
Because it sounds too much like nepotism, of the sort that has troubled other charities and foundations, especially since EA is such an incestuous bubble.
SA, known associate of the EA movement, sets up a charitable grant-making scheme for which they solicit donations. By sheer coincidence, a large tranche of that goes to his friends, friends of friends, and the tulpa of the alters of a non-binary personage he met at a Bay Area house party in order to foster the building of EA communities. Hmmm - isn't that convenient?
If you saw this about any other organisation, you'd immediately suspect someone had their snout in the trough, their fingers in the till, and other body parts where they should not be. Caesar's wife, and all that jazz.
Just nipping in to say that I like that Ulysses S. Grant is the patron (saint) of the ACX Grants Scheme 😀
Also in philanthropy news: the funeral of "Chuck" Feeney who gave away most of his $8 billion fortune. Effective? That depends on whether you think the causes were worthwhile. But certainly altruistic, and he did a heck of a lot for Ireland:
"The quiet giant of Irish philanthropy made his fortune in duty-free shopping and, in 1982, set up Atlantic Philanthropies. He visited Ireland in the late 1980s and decided to finance education; at the time, Irish third level institutions were suffering from chronic under- funding. The University of Limerick became a particular success story. In the late ’80s, Feeney’s funding, along with other partners such as Shannon Development, transformed the National Institute for Higher Education in Limerick, with a student body of 735, into a university serving 11,000 students.
Atlantic has distributed $6.2 billion in capital investments in Vietnam, Cuba, the US, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland. Feeney’s philanthropy was anonymous until a court case in the ’90s threatened to disclose the disposal of his fortune and he decided to pre-empt it by going public."
The court case is interesting; I wondered about that, and Wikipedia tells me:
"The concept of "duty-free shopping"—offering high-end concessions to travelers, free of import taxes—was in its infancy when Feeney and his college classmate Robert Warren Miller started selling duty-free liquor to American servicemen in Asia in the 1950s. They later expanded to selling cars and tobacco, and founded the Duty Free Shoppers Group (DFS Group) in 1960.
...In 1996, Feeney and a partner sold their stakes in DFS to the French luxury conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. Miller opposed the sale, and before a presumptive lawsuit could reveal that Feeney's stake was owned not in fact by him but by the Atlantic Philanthropies, Feeney outed himself in a New York Times article. Atlantic made $1.63 billion from the sale."
On the one hand, it was a clever stroke; it's hard to go to court to portray your former business partner as trying to cheat you, motivated by money-grubbing avariciousness, when it's revealed that all the money is going to charity, on the other hand, Feeney doesn't seem to have publicised his philanthropy before that or used it to get social credit, so if the story was going to come out anyway, best to control how it happens by revealing it yourself.
And it also sounds as if he had something like impact certificates in mind! Feeney, through his foundation, invests in some charitable activity anonymously, then someone else may come along and donate as well so they can get the bragging rights to "John Johnson Johnston's Clean Water Pump Fund".
"In 1982, Feeney created the Atlantic Philanthropies, and in 1984, secretly transferred his entire 38.75% stake in DFS, then worth about $500 million, to the foundation. Not even his business partners knew that he no longer personally owned any part of DFS. Feeney expanded Atlantic's assets with investments in Facebook, Priceline, E-Trade, Alibaba, and Legent. For years, Atlantic gave away money in secret, requiring recipients to not reveal the source of their donations. Quoting the president of Atlantic, The New York Times writes, "Beyond Mr. Feeney's reticence about blowing his own horn, 'it was also a way to leverage more donations—some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights.'"
Hey Scott, my company matches 2:1 for donations and gives $50/hour (to that org) for volunteer service. Is this charity listed in benevity.org? I searched for ACX but see something unrelated.
@Scott this is _completely_ off topic, but are you aware that https://astralcodexten.com is not properly forwarding to www.astralcodexten.com? You just get a "Test website - Please ignore" page. Your DNS zones settings need some tweaking.
"If you’re an individual, you’ll have to pay taxes on it at your usual tax rate."
It is actually possible for a private foundation (which is a specific IRS category of grantmaking organization) to relieve individual grantees of the need to pay taxes on grants that are for specific projects/purposes. See
It seems likely that your microgrants would qualify there. And then the "procedure approved by the IRS" part is not onerous, though could be slow just because the IRS has been hollowed out and has hardly any staff left for its regulating-of-nonprofits functions. The question would be whether Manifund qualifies for that procedural approval, or (even better) perhaps has already obtained it.
What is the broad structure of these fundings? Lets say I put in a proposal for a relatively small sum (say $1000), and it's accepted/funded. What is the reporting/credit/input requirements tied to that? Obviously in any publications affected the funding would be disclosed, but would you/the funders have input in how the project proceeds?
Pretty minimal. Once every year or two I might ask you to fill in a form about how your project is progressing, just to help my learning process as a grantmaker. I don't maintain any input into projects and I wouldn't have the overhead to micromanage people even if I wanted to.
Since there's no confirmation email, could you confirm that you received my application? I'm a little worried it didn't go through. My email is toasterlightning@gmail.com
I'm just came across this and have a short proposal ready to go around progress and demographic change.
Specifically my aim is to "establish a network to research and promote new and emerging practices to create societies that thrive and progress amid rapid demographic aging and immigration, providing alternatives to dominant short-term narratives around demographic aging and fear-mongering around immigration. "
I work in futures / strategic foresight with UN and other organisations, and so have the the network to help see this through.
I understand the grant is closed, but are any of your colleagues interested? I'd be happy to share my submission ASAP.
I have a question about the structure of future oracular funding. For the last round, a project had to be funded by investors in order to qualify for impact certificates. Will that still be the case next year do you think?
I have an idea that I would feel bad taking investor/grant money for (because it's very unlikely to succeed), but I would probably do if, in its success case, I could plausibly sell the impact grant. (No one is harmed if it fails). Could I just do it myself (unfunded) and then sell the impact certificate?
I'll let Manifund have the final say, but I think from a technical perspective you could do this by creating the impact certificate and setting the "percent equity to sell to investors" to zero.
As a final oracular funder, I think I would be okay with this if you specified on the original cert/application that you wouldn't have done this unless you thought you could get it retro-funded later, and I trusted you. Otherwise I worry there's too much potential for everyone to want money for the things they're already doing. I don't know how other funders feel about this.
I realize this isn't a very helpful answer, but we're trying to invent this process as we go and don't have strong norms around it yet.
Sorry if I missed, but how much of the funding is reserved as retrofunding incentive for the impact market as opposed to prospective grant funding? Is there a minimum or a maximum? Thanks!
Possibly Scott intends to explain later? See:
> If you want to invest in impact certificates, I’ll give you more information on the ACX Grants version later...
Or possibly there isn't a specific set of funding reserved as retrofunding, but rather they'll "pay for things they value," without a formal limit? Would be helpful to get clarification from Scott on this, though.
Thanks!
There is no funding for retrofunding this year. Next year, with however much funding I have (probably another $250K + whatever others give), I will treat retroactive and proactive projects equally.
Thanks! 💡
Is the post about Neoreaction going to become available for non-subscribers as well?
>A group of lawyers who sue factory farms under animal cruelty laws.
Look, if you and everyone else with $250,000 to spare wants to buy cage-free eggs and humanely-sourced beef, go ahead, but don't make dinner more expensive for the rest of us due to your misplaced compassion.
If you have an argument that it's impossible for animals to suffer from cruelty, make it. Otherwise, I think animal cruelty continues to be bad and it is one of the central cases of legitimate government activity to ban it.
Animal cruelty is claimed to harm the consumers (the eaters). Cruelly treated animals create chemicals that make their flesh less nutritious.
It's convenient when facts happen to line up with ethics.
But if a new and better study showed that actually, cruelly treated animals are _more_ nutritious than humanely treated animals, would you be in favour of animal cruelty?
If I were a psychopath, yes. Not very applicable to me as I don't eat mammal flesh, and mistreating fish would be expensive. No pull them out and let them die from lack of O2.
Very interesting point. I presume the animal rights people have heightened empathy.
Yes, animal cruelty is bad. And yes, if factory farming is cruel, indeed the laws should be enforced.
But the ultimate aim is to drive meat-eating out of existence completely, by making it way too expensive and inconvenient to comply with the laws and the nuisance law suits.
They may be motivated by good intentions, but when you're declaring that your plan is to lawfare meat-eating out of existence, where's the difference between that and 'go away' money?
https://www.rte.ie/news/investigations-unit/2023/1208/1421020-an-bord-pleanala/
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/06/17/go-away-money-the-dispute-ending-deals-between-property-developers-and-objectors/
Basically, serial objectors to planning permission write to the developers and say that if a certain amount is handed over for unspecified works, the objection will then magically go away.
>But the ultimate aim is to drive meat-eating out of existence completely, by making it way too expensive and inconvenient to comply with the laws and the nuisance law suits.
If the government writes laws that make it impossible to eat meat, you should complain to them. I don't know the specific "animal cruelty laws" but generally those are very mild and there is no risk of driving complying companies out of business.
"If the government writes laws that make it impossible to eat meat, you should complain to them. I don't know the specific "animal cruelty laws" but generally those are very mild and there is no risk of driving complying companies out of business."
We had this discussion when the original award was made. They're going after tiny legal loopholes to let people sue corporations.
Now, is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. If animal welfare laws are not being enforced, and lack of enforcement leads to abuse, then they should be enforced and breaches should be punished.
But there is a wider aim than just "encourage humane farming methods" and that is to get animal rearing for food stopped majorly or in whole.
To quote a comment on the previous post:
"However, even if that's wrong, if you think factory farming is basically immoral (I do), then making the industry act overly cautiously to avoid lawsuits seems great. If Tyson Chickens ends up giving all its chickens 1.2 hectares because it's worried it might slip under 1.0 and get sued, that seems like good news. If Tyson Chickens ends up going bankrupt, all the better.
...If the critique of this charity is that they might shut down factory farming for $72,000, that is probably the best thing Scott will ever do."
To quote the Legal Impact for Chickens website:
"Legal Impact for Chickens focuses on civil litigation as a way to improve animal welfare.
Why? Companies don’t follow laws that aren’t enforced. And prosecutors rarely enforce cruelty laws on factory farms, even when animal protection groups urge them to.
As a result, while several state cruelty laws technically cover farms, factory farms ignore them. Investigations in such states show rampant, unlawful neglect and abuse. Similarly, the animal movement’s effort to pass confinement bans may be wasted if those new bans aren’t enforced.
Strategic civil litigation offers a solution. Several little-known legal doctrines let plaintiffs sue in civil court for violation of a criminal law. At Legal Impact for Chickens, we focus on systematically developing, refining, and using those doctrines to fight factory-farm cruelty."
If existing laws are not being enforced, why the recourse to "strategic civil ligitation" instead of getting the relevant authorities to bring criminal charges?
Constant dripping wears away the stone - to have hundreds of small nuisance lawsuits constantly clogging up the courts may not drive a mega-producer out of business, but a smaller one is more vulnerable.
And they're relying on emotional blackmail to drive farmers out of supplying poultry processors:
"Legal Impact for Chickens submitted a public comment to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), asking the agency to make chicken-meat companies warn their potential new farmers about bird-welfare issues.
No one wants to see suffering. And LIC believes that farmers deserve to know what they’re getting into when they sign up to grow birds for a large company.
LIC submitted its comment on August 9, 2022, in response to USDA’s proposed regulation on Transparency in Poultry Grower Contracting and Tournaments. USDA proposed this new rule with the goal of helping chicken contract growers—by leveling the information playing field between these individual growers and the large poultry companies that hire them.
In our comment, LIC explained:
[M]any growers are currently forced to witness animal suffering which the growers didn’t expect upon entering into their contract. Health-and-welfare information will help a prospective grower decide whether he or she feels comfortable with the way the dealer will ultimately require him or her to treat chickens. Such information will also help a prospective grower decide whether he or she feels comfortable with the likely state of the animals he or she will ultimately be seeing, smelling, and caring for every day.
On November 8, 2023, USDA announced its final rule. Unfortunately, USDA rejected LIC’s comments."
Thanks for the long answer. Some part of the state passing laws another part of the state doesn't want to enforce is definitely a complicated situation.
I don't have a rigorous model of what's right here, but feel that Scott (a donor of an organization which uses a creative approach to get existing laws enforced) is not the right person to blame here if concerned about food prices (far too many levels removed).
If this was just about the direct impact Scott has on food prices, this wouldn't be worth our time at all.
The "law" situation reminds me of a situation in Germany: One party sold gold to exploit party funding laws. A satire party started selling money using the same exploit.
Everyone had a good laugh, the satire party got sued (and won), and the loophole was fixed.
This is what should happen to loopholes: You make people who can close them (or make them official) look at them.
Oh, I don't blame Scott for this, it's his money and if he wants to donate or grant it to people aiming to dress up as kobolds and paint their backsides blue and run around in the snow screaming, that's nobody's business but his own.
Even the Lawyers for Chickens lot are entitled to do what they're doing. I'd just like a little more transparency about what their real aims are, which as I said I don't think stop at the threshold of "get cruelty laws enforced and have those who break them penalised in a meaningful manner".
It’s not that the suffering of animals is impossible, it’s that the suffering of animals is irrelevant. Why does the internal subjective experience of chickens matter one bit? Chickens are not part of the social contract. Chickens are not going to rise up and overthrow their oppression. Chickens are not going to plot with the Russians or the Chinese to defeat US hegemony. The lives of humans in a society will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of farm animals is not regulated. That makes it bad policy.
It matters to the chickens.
That makes sense on a practical level but “you shouldn’t care about the wellbeing of those over whom you have overwhelming power” isn’t exactly what I’d call morally good.
I suppose psychopathology is morally bad, but why? My guru, psychiatrist Dr. Ben thought behaviour was consistent, i.e. if one treats animals well they treat people well. Lacking empathy is a symptom of psychopathology.
Because pain is bad* and pleasure is good, and other beings experience their pleasure and pain as mattering in the same way that you do? While that is not the only thing that could matter morally, those statements are usually treated as moral axioms**. Maybe someone else can have a good go at trying to prove them, but the whole point of axioms is “this is so obvious that it should need no justification.”
*In some forms and contexts, people like pain. This is interesting, but we can also define pain and pleasure here as “the kind of stuff that you don’t/do want” to avoid that without effecting the core point. Besides, I don’t think anybody’s arguing that chickens are just kinky like that.
**Divine Law morality does this in theory, as if God decided that pleasure was bad and pain was good that would simply be moral fact. In practice, religions tend to accept these axioms, at least implicitly. Earn an eternity in heaven or hell, find nothingness to be relieved of all suffering, etc.
This reminds be of old argument against religious morals. Religious people think the only thing that stops people from kill and rape is god's wrath. So, atheists must be immoral. Atheists, in turn, are puzzled, because their sense of morality is based on reason or intuition.
In your case, it looks like only fear of retribution stops you from old ways of colonization and slavery. I think most modern people would disagree. We try to be good because we think suffering of any living being is bad, not because chickens will retaliate.
The slavery example is interesting. Here is what I think is actually going on: Now that slavery has been near universally abolished, and technology has made slavery of relatively little economic value compared to where it was historically, it becomes positive value for pretty much everyone to agree to not enslave anyone else ever again. Unfortunately, you can't explain logical decision theory to first graders, so everyone just learns "slavery is bad" and gets punished if they ask questions.
This is a very niche moral position that most other people would call morally bad, verging on actively evil. None of the gods of the world's various religions would let you into heaven, and neither will the overbeings in whose simulation we exist as weak AGIs being evaluated for alignment and trustworthiness to be promoted to the "real" world and to greater power & responsibility.
You are demonstrating a willingness to harm anyone you have sufficient power over, but the lives of all sentient creatures will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of everyone capable of suffering is cared about. That makes it bad morality.
>but the lives of all sentient creatures will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of everyone capable of suffering is cared about. That makes it bad morality.
Actually, the lives of all sentient creatures capable of agreeing to deals and exchanging things for value will be *even better than your scenario* when the suffering only of all sentient creatures capable of agreeing to deals and exchanging things for value is cared about. It is a mistake to think that chickens belong at the bargaining table. They don't. This is a mistake common among people who don't understand decision theory (which is most people). People substitute "sentient creatures" or "conscious creatures" for "rational agents", which are the things that actually matter. See https://www.lesswrong.com/s/v55BhXbpJuaExkpcD/p/rP66bz34crvDudzcJ
Scott once said: "Contractualism scares me a little because it offers too easy an out from bottomless-pit type dilemmas. It seems really easy to say 'All of us people not in jail, we’ll agree to look out for one another, and as for those guys, screw them'. "
Dread it. Run from it. "All of us people not in jail, we’ll agree to look out for one another, and as for those guys, screw them'," is the dominant strategy all the same
Decision theory is not what tells us what we should care about. Decision theory is how we get what we care about.
In this case, most people care about the suffering of others whether or not they're at the bargaining table. The bargaining table is where sentient creatures capable of agreeing to deals exchange things for all sorts of value, including the value of "less suffering".
Your values are different, and I agree that your value of not caring about chickens is not objectively bad morality in the sense of "morality that just doesn't work". It's not, in fact, possible to talk you into caring about chickens by telling you that if only you cared about chickens, then everything you do care about is better off!
(That's, again, trying to change something on the wrong level. Actions you take to make everyone better off are part of your decision theory. It is not necessary to change your values to take different actions. If in a practical scenario, you could benefit from acting the way a person who cares about chickens acts, you could at least in theory just *pretend* to care about chickens, and get the same benefit.)
I actually do think that the people who claim to value the wellbeing of arbitrary creatures simply because they can experience suffering are incorrectly reasoning about their own value function. They feel bad when they see a dog whimpering on the side of the road (for example), and then they extend this impulse via subtly wrong logic into caring about the suffering of chickens who spend their whole lives inside a warehouse and are seen only by Tyson Foods employees.
I think I understand better why some people are so worried about AI alignment now. Because if an ASI thinks anything like you we are royally fucked
I mean, yeah. That’s exactly what’s going to happen. I don’t think people realize that the only reason humans have empathy is as a heuristic to incentivize cooperation with other beings of approximately equal capacity. It’s not some built in fact of the universe. It is a very specific tool for a very specific purpose.
We realize it.
But we also understand what an is/ought fallacy is, and that it is a "reason" in the sense it is a empirical cause, and not a psychological reason.
So from your logic, the only thing wrong about slavery is that it fosters slave revolts.
Suppose the Taliban said: "Women are not part of the social contract. Afghan women are not going to rise up and overthrow their oppression. Almost all Afghan women are not going to plot with the West to defeat the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The lives of men in a society will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of women is not regulated."
Would you find that argument as convincing as the one you are making?
>So from your logic, the only thing wrong about slavery is that it fosters slave revolts.
That's not quite the argument I'm making. I'm an ethical non-cognitivist. The proposition "slavery is wrong" has no truth value. I would say that the widespread belief that slavery is bad (for whatever "bad" means in your meta-ethical views) is a useful social technology for establishing coordination within and between societies to not enslave themselves or each other. To the extent that this social technology is useful, I will gladly go along with a reasonable amount of pro-social "boo slavery" talk. I don't think "animal suffering is bad" is a useful social technology in the same way that "slavery is bad" is.
>Suppose the Taliban said: "Women are not part of the social contract. Afghan women are not going to rise up and overthrow their oppression. Almost all Afghan women are not going to plot with the West to defeat the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The lives of men in a society will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of women is not regulated."
As a factual matter, women just *are* a part of the social contract. Maybe the Taliban or whoever can reduce their role, but they will never be anywhere near as irrelevant as factory farm animals. Men also care personally about the women in their lives in a way that they don't about anonymous farm animals.
> As a factual matter, women just *are* a part of the social contract.
Hm, let me check. Yes, in my version, which I signed on attaining majority, it clearly says "contract parties shall be all adult human beings irrespective of their gender" on page two. Not, because almost nobody signs such a document.
Most men -- even Taliban, I guess -- care about some of the women in their lives. Most pet owners care about their pets. Some men (me among them) care about general human welfare (which includes women), just like some humans (me among them) care about animal welfare. Neither of my preferences is strongly shaped by the fear of violent reprisals.
If -- as you alleged -- moral worth grows out of the barrel of a gun (because violent repercussions are what keeps you from defecting) then it follows logically that some people (the rich, or Jihadists getting upset about some caricatures) have vastly more moral value than others (the young, the weak, the poor, etc).
Also, future generations. Unless either aging is fixed (not particularly likely within my life time) or time travel (very unlikely) is fixed, future generations can't reciprocate, so your theory says one should defect.
That argument could be used for any group of people oppressing another group. The lives of men will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of women is not regulated. The lives of parents will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of children is not regulated. The lives of white people will be predictably better in a world where the suffering of minorities is not regulated. What will you do when those in power come for you? You have to draw a Schelling fence somewhere, and while, admittedly, "organisms that share a large amount of your DNA with you" is a strong Schelling fence, it's not nearly as strong as "any organism with a central nervous system."
This is not about new laws, but enforcing existing laws. If you are against those laws, fight those, not the rule of law.
If someone were to donate money to a group of lawyers who sue housing construction companies for violating zoning laws, many people here would think that to be evil, or at least misguided (and I would probably agree). Yes, the more elegant solution would be to change the law, but increased enforcement of bad laws is also bad.
People can think what they want, but I still wouldn't blame the donors or lawyers, but those who put bad zoning laws into place (If they are bad. I don't know all the zoning regulations.)
I actually also don't know what the "animal cruelty laws" are in the US.
Assuming laws are bad and then blaming people who try to get them enforces just seems misguided and like the wrong angle of attack.
I'm not assuming the laws are bad, I'm assuming the motives of the people involved are not the whole of what they're saying.
Look, this is all personal opinion on my part, and you can call me a stupid idiot jumping at shadows. But I think that people who consider chickens to be not just pets but family members have a certain view of food animals that is not completely congruent with "it's okay to raise animals for food, just don't violate the laws around doing so".
https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/people
"LIC was founded by Alene Anello. Alene graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for a federal judge, and then started litigating for animals. She has worked at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and The Good Food Institute. She is licensed to practice law in New York, the District of Columbia, and California. Alene is committed to helping chickens to honor the memories of her two beloved avian family members, Conrad and Zeke."
"[Tyler] shares his life with his wife, his two sons, his dog Moco, and a small flock of rescue hens (Pearl, Ester, Sophia, Sophia II, Pepper, and Ginger)."
"Alicia teaches Animal Law at Brooklyn Law School, as an adjunct professor of law. Alicia also serves as vice chair of the board of The Humane League. Alicia graduated from Harvard Law School in 2015, where she served as the President of the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund and founded the university-wide Harvard Vegan Society."
"In her spare time, Stephanie enjoys traveling, backpacking, and trying new vegan restaurants."
Do I think vegans might be working to get meat-eating off the table (as it were)? What do you think I think?
"During law school, [Sarah] served as president of the Animal Law Society, and interned at Mercy for Animals."
What is Mercy for Animals?
https://mercyforanimals.org/strategicplan/
"Mercy For Animals believes that a world without industrial animal agriculture is possible—if we work together to create it. Imagine a world in which we nourish ourselves with food that is kind to animals and sustainable for the planet and all who share it. We envision a world in which eating is an act of compassion, in which no one is exploited or forced to exploit another.
Our mission is to end industrial animal agriculture by constructing a just and sustainable food system.
We have three core approaches:
- Making alternatives to animal-based meat, eggs, and dairy as attractive and accessible as possible.
- Making animal products less competitive and less attractive to consumers, food producers, and policymakers.
The true costs of industrially produced animal products have been concealed from the public or externalized onto animals, the environment, and communities. We expose and shift these costs such that they are no longer borne by the most vulnerable.
- Reducing suffering for the animals in our current food system for as long as it exists."
You don't just *happen* to get jobs at PETA or the likes of the above. So yeah, I'm thinking that Legal Impact for Chickens is not simply about "let's make sure existing laws are enforced".
And that's fine! Just be honest about your aims and what you're trying to achieve, not "tum-di-dum all we're doing is helping concerned private citizens take cases about animal abuse in factory farming with some legal assistance on the finer points of law from our end".
>I'm assuming the motives of the people involved are not the whole of what they're saying.
They don't seem to be shy about their terminal goals, or am I missing something?
It's just a good strategy for LIC to form a large front of vegans, vegetarians & people who want ethically sourced meat for this issue. And as long as they are doing what they claim they are doing, I don't think anyone is deceived here.
Calling it deceit or deception would be very strong accusation on my part, and I wouldn't go that far. I think it's more the motte and bailey:
The motte: We're just taking cases where companies violate animal cruelty laws, is all!
Who could object to that? Who would stand up and say "Actually I *am* for animal suffering and I think factory farming is *not* cruel enough"?
The bailey: And we hope to work towards ending meat eating and raising animals as food either in large part or even completely
Yeah, this is where we BLOODMOUTH CARNISTS get off the train. And that's probably why this isn't being emphasised so much. It's a lot easier to gain support for "punish production facilities that break the law - oh and by the way did you know that *you*, private citizen, could take a civil case about this? just one of the tricks we can help you out with!" than "end meat eating forever by making growers go 'ugh, icky' about the conditions they have to keep animals in to make a profit, and making consumers wracked with guilt over torture and rape and fun stuff like that".
Like, in my childhood, I've seen hens kept free-range. I don't think chickens are these wonderfully complex creatures with interior lives and rich social organisations - there's a reason for the expressions "hen-pecked" and "pecking order", after all, and those came into being long before intensive factory farming. Chickens are omnivores, like us, and would happily eat your corpse if you dropped dead in the hen run. They're not smart, they can be vicious (this is why you don't have two roosters in the one hen yard) and basically they're animals.
If you want to keep them as pets and think of them as family members, sure you can. But that's sentimentality, to be brutal. I don't think that cruelty should be inflicted, but neither do I think chickens have experiences worth calling sentient consciousness.
But they’re not just “enforcing existing laws”—they’re advocating for frivolous interpretations with no chance of being adopted by the courts, in hopes of extorting companies into changing their practices because it would be cheaper than mounting a legal defense. Fortunately, the two companies they tried it on appear to have successfully defended themselves, but I’m still not sure what’s appealing about this cause.
I have not looked into the specific topic and don't know much about the US legal system, but shouldn't frivolous lawsuits just be thrown out by the judge, costing the defender nothing?
I favor people being able to sue, even if some / a majority considers the lawsuit "frivolous".
If it's possible to benefit from suing with no chance of success, there's a problem with your legal system, and that's where you should direct your ire.
With rare exceptions, in the American legal system judges don’t pre-screen cases for potential merit: the defendant has to explain why the complaint is meritless. Doing that requires an attorney to spend time researching and writing, and (with rare exceptions), the cost of the attorney’s time can’t be recovered from the plaintiff.
That does create the potential for exploitation, since it can create a situation where defending against a meritless lawsuit can be more expensive than paying what the plaintiff is asking for. Whether and how to address this problem is one of the biggest and most contentious questions in the American legal system. But it’s also pretty generally accepted that the people who abuse this facet of the system for personal gain are pretty contemptible. And doing it to advance a political agenda doesn’t seem much better—particularly, but by no means exclusively, if it’s a political agenda you disagree with.
I think there's a sizable gap between "case with a negligible chance of success" and "case so indefensibly bad that the judge will throw it out of court". You'll probably get into trouble if you go around repeatedly filing claims that people owe you taxes because you are Napoleon, but that still allows plenty of latitude to try some very unrealistic lawsuits.
I don't know how realistic Legal Impact for Chickens' cases are, but "several little-known legal doctrines let plaintiffs sue in civil court for violation of a criminal law" leads me to suspect they are closer to "no chance" than "slim chance".
I hope I haven't asked this before, but who owns the IP developed with one of these grants, or with a project with an impact certificate? If a grant funds software or website development, do you require the software or website to be made freely available, even ad-free, or even open-source? Most government research grants for software development have some requirement like that, with the result that the software developed with grants is seldom maintained after it's built.
The creator continues to own the IP.
There's no requirement, but if someone is producing software with the intent to sell it, I'll be appropriately skeptical of whether this is really a charity project vs. a company which should be funded by a VC (unless they overcome that skepticism by making some other case for why this is charitable).
Software must be maintained for as long as it is to be useful. So the software has to generate a revenue stream, or it can't be maintained. As I said, grants which forbid this result in software which doesn't generate revenue, and therefore isn't maintained, and is a waste of grant money because it becomes unusable or obsolete in a few years. It's also poorly documented, and usually is Unix software that must be compiled by hand for every different version of Unix, rather than being something you can install and run. This in turn means the software becomes unusable for a computer as soon as any component that must be linked to it becomes unusable on your particular variant of Unix.
Yes, sorry, I misunderstood (okay, only read half of) your comment. I'll keep this in mind.
I disagree. There are whole ecosystems of free and open source software which are maintained without generating a revenue stream through the sale of licences. Some of it is maintained by people who get paid for it by companies which have other revenue streams (e.g. hardware sales). Some is maintained by volunteers.
If the existence of the software is of such utility that EA will pay you to write it, chances are that they are also willing to pay you to maintain it. If they instead were to bet on you being able to turn selling licences into a viable business model, the possible loss (if it is not viable) would be theirs while the possible gains (if it is immensely profitable) would be yours. An unmaintained github repository from 2015 can at least be a starting point of future work while a buggy binary from a company which folded in 2015 generally is not.
Documentation quality (as well as code quality) is mostly dependent on the dev team, not the software license.
And of course the primary method to distribute software is by source code. You do not know what platforms your users might want to run the software on now, never mind what platforms might exist in the future, or what modifications a user might require.
If you dislike compiling "by hand", a recent trend in the open source world you might want to give a try are so called "distributions" of GNU/Linux and the like. Rather than compiling sources, you can install precompiled binaries for your architecture as long as your distribution maintains a version of that package. The usability of "apt install packagename" is vastly superior to downloading some installer.exe from what might be a genuine source, double clicking on it, reading an EULA, agreeing to it, entering your licence key, picking an install path and clicking install.
I'm long, intimately, and painfully familiar with open-source software, github, Unix distributions, and all that. That whole world is exactly what I'm talking about when I say "terrible documentation", "hard to compile", and "unmaintained". There are exceptions, like GIMP, Anaconda, Blender, Open-Office, Open-Shell, and Cygwin. All of those write extremely popular, mass-market software, and have enormous user bases. The most-specialized of them is Anaconda, and they say they have 30 million users. They also have a business model based on providing special consulting, and 300 full-time employees. Not a typical grantee.
Oh, and they all have pre-compiled installers for Windows.
There are also exceptions when someone has a day job, and maintains some open-source software in their spare time as a labor of love, like the AppleWin emulator.
I am not talking out my ass when I say the bioinformatics software landscape has been crippled by grants. There's very little professional-quality software available, and assembling a bioinformatics pipeline means spending months to piece together different bits of abandonware written on different operating systems, using different versions of the same linked libraries, precisely because there IS so much freely-available, but unmaintained, open-source software, and so few customers, that it's hard for anyone to make a profit by selling good software. It means rewriting your code every time the NIH releases a new version of BLAST, or HMMER releases a new version, or your favorite protein function database changes its format or loses its funding.
Why is funding EA community building dangerous?
Just guessing here, but I can imagine things like this:
You buy a cheap building for organizing EA conferences. The idea is that in long term this will be cheaper than renting conference places at market rate (which also don't have to be available at the moment you need them), and you can use the building in the meanwhile, too. This is reported on as: "they pretend to collect money to cure Africans of malaria, but actually they are buying castles for themselves".
You organize a meetup for new effective altruists in some area. Many people come; some of them are not motivated by altruism, but by the opportunity to meet lots of naive people they could exploit. The predators end up hurting some participants or scamming them out of money. Furthermore, this is reported on as: "this is what effective altruism is really about".
(With projects like "make a website for X", the worst case is that the website won't get built, or no one will use it. That is, zero, not negative... except for the grant money wasted.)
Because it sounds too much like nepotism, of the sort that has troubled other charities and foundations, especially since EA is such an incestuous bubble.
SA, known associate of the EA movement, sets up a charitable grant-making scheme for which they solicit donations. By sheer coincidence, a large tranche of that goes to his friends, friends of friends, and the tulpa of the alters of a non-binary personage he met at a Bay Area house party in order to foster the building of EA communities. Hmmm - isn't that convenient?
If you saw this about any other organisation, you'd immediately suspect someone had their snout in the trough, their fingers in the till, and other body parts where they should not be. Caesar's wife, and all that jazz.
1. If done ham-fistedly, could turn people against EA.
2. Recruiting people changes the character of EA and some people are sensitive about that and want it to be done consensually.
Just nipping in to say that I like that Ulysses S. Grant is the patron (saint) of the ACX Grants Scheme 😀
Also in philanthropy news: the funeral of "Chuck" Feeney who gave away most of his $8 billion fortune. Effective? That depends on whether you think the causes were worthwhile. But certainly altruistic, and he did a heck of a lot for Ireland:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41286595.html
A feature on him from 2015:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-20372557.html
"The quiet giant of Irish philanthropy made his fortune in duty-free shopping and, in 1982, set up Atlantic Philanthropies. He visited Ireland in the late 1980s and decided to finance education; at the time, Irish third level institutions were suffering from chronic under- funding. The University of Limerick became a particular success story. In the late ’80s, Feeney’s funding, along with other partners such as Shannon Development, transformed the National Institute for Higher Education in Limerick, with a student body of 735, into a university serving 11,000 students.
Atlantic has distributed $6.2 billion in capital investments in Vietnam, Cuba, the US, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland. Feeney’s philanthropy was anonymous until a court case in the ’90s threatened to disclose the disposal of his fortune and he decided to pre-empt it by going public."
The court case is interesting; I wondered about that, and Wikipedia tells me:
"The concept of "duty-free shopping"—offering high-end concessions to travelers, free of import taxes—was in its infancy when Feeney and his college classmate Robert Warren Miller started selling duty-free liquor to American servicemen in Asia in the 1950s. They later expanded to selling cars and tobacco, and founded the Duty Free Shoppers Group (DFS Group) in 1960.
...In 1996, Feeney and a partner sold their stakes in DFS to the French luxury conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. Miller opposed the sale, and before a presumptive lawsuit could reveal that Feeney's stake was owned not in fact by him but by the Atlantic Philanthropies, Feeney outed himself in a New York Times article. Atlantic made $1.63 billion from the sale."
On the one hand, it was a clever stroke; it's hard to go to court to portray your former business partner as trying to cheat you, motivated by money-grubbing avariciousness, when it's revealed that all the money is going to charity, on the other hand, Feeney doesn't seem to have publicised his philanthropy before that or used it to get social credit, so if the story was going to come out anyway, best to control how it happens by revealing it yourself.
And it also sounds as if he had something like impact certificates in mind! Feeney, through his foundation, invests in some charitable activity anonymously, then someone else may come along and donate as well so they can get the bragging rights to "John Johnson Johnston's Clean Water Pump Fund".
"In 1982, Feeney created the Atlantic Philanthropies, and in 1984, secretly transferred his entire 38.75% stake in DFS, then worth about $500 million, to the foundation. Not even his business partners knew that he no longer personally owned any part of DFS. Feeney expanded Atlantic's assets with investments in Facebook, Priceline, E-Trade, Alibaba, and Legent. For years, Atlantic gave away money in secret, requiring recipients to not reveal the source of their donations. Quoting the president of Atlantic, The New York Times writes, "Beyond Mr. Feeney's reticence about blowing his own horn, 'it was also a way to leverage more donations—some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights.'"
Hey Scott, my company matches 2:1 for donations and gives $50/hour (to that org) for volunteer service. Is this charity listed in benevity.org? I searched for ACX but see something unrelated.
No, we're not.
@Scott this is _completely_ off topic, but are you aware that https://astralcodexten.com is not properly forwarding to www.astralcodexten.com? You just get a "Test website - Please ignore" page. Your DNS zones settings need some tweaking.
I am also seeing this, as of 2024JAN05.
"If you’re an individual, you’ll have to pay taxes on it at your usual tax rate."
It is actually possible for a private foundation (which is a specific IRS category of grantmaking organization) to relieve individual grantees of the need to pay taxes on grants that are for specific projects/purposes. See
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/grants-to-individuals
It seems likely that your microgrants would qualify there. And then the "procedure approved by the IRS" part is not onerous, though could be slow just because the IRS has been hollowed out and has hardly any staff left for its regulating-of-nonprofits functions. The question would be whether Manifund qualifies for that procedural approval, or (even better) perhaps has already obtained it.
If one has more than a single project that might be of interest to the ACX programme, can one submit multiple applications?
Yes.
Very good, thank you.
What is the broad structure of these fundings? Lets say I put in a proposal for a relatively small sum (say $1000), and it's accepted/funded. What is the reporting/credit/input requirements tied to that? Obviously in any publications affected the funding would be disclosed, but would you/the funders have input in how the project proceeds?
Pretty minimal. Once every year or two I might ask you to fill in a form about how your project is progressing, just to help my learning process as a grantmaker. I don't maintain any input into projects and I wouldn't have the overhead to micromanage people even if I wanted to.
Did other people get an email confirmation of their application? I submitted two, but I haven't received anything.
I don't think there's an email confirmation.
Is there any chance of shifting the deadline later? 29th is very tight to apply, especially in December.
I was hoping the form would only take 15 - 30 minutes; is there something that makes this hard I'm not thinking of?
"Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this
Include references if you have them, but don't worry if you don't."
references as in publications / prior work or colleagues?
I was thinking colleagues, but either one helps!
When is the exact deadline? Like 11:59pm Dec 29th which timezone?
Since there's no confirmation email, could you confirm that you received my application? I'm a little worried it didn't go through. My email is toasterlightning@gmail.com
I'm just came across this and have a short proposal ready to go around progress and demographic change.
Specifically my aim is to "establish a network to research and promote new and emerging practices to create societies that thrive and progress amid rapid demographic aging and immigration, providing alternatives to dominant short-term narratives around demographic aging and fear-mongering around immigration. "
I work in futures / strategic foresight with UN and other organisations, and so have the the network to help see this through.
I understand the grant is closed, but are any of your colleagues interested? I'd be happy to share my submission ASAP.
Any update on the results of the applications? Will we be notified whether our proposals are accepted or not?