Quick takes

Potential opportunity to influence the World Bank away from financing factory farms: The UK Parliament is currently holding an open consultation on the future of UK aid and development assistance, closing on November 14, 2025. It includes the question, "Where is reform needed in multilateral agencies and development banks the UK is a member of, and funds?". This would include the World Bank, which finances factory farms,[1][2] so could this consultation be a way to push it away from doing that, via the UK government?  Are any organisations planning on submitting responses? If so, should there be an effort to co-ordinate more responses on this? 1. ^  "Why the World Bank Must Stop Funding Factory Farms", 30 Apr 2024 https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/why-the-world-bank-must-stop-funding-factory-farms/  2. ^ "The World Bank has a factory-farm climate problem", 20 Nov 2024 https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/world-bank-development-banks-factory-farm-climate-industrial-agriculture/ 

MrBeast just released a video about “saving 1,000 animals”—a well-intentioned but inefficient intervention (e.g. shooting vaccines at giraffes from a helicopter, relocating wild rhinos before they fight each other to the death, covering bills for people to adopt rescue dogs from shelters, transporting lions via plane, and more). It’s great to see a creator of his scale engaging with animal welfare, but there’s a massive opportunity here to spotlight interventions that are orders of magnitude more impactful. Given that he’s been in touch with people from GiveDirectly for past videos, does anyone know if there’s a line of contact to him or his team? A single video/mention highlighting effective animal charities—like those recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators (e.g. The Humane League, Faunalytics, Good Food Institute)—could reach tens of millions and (potentially) meaningfully shift public perception toward impact-focused giving for animals. If anyone’s connected or has thoughts on how to coordinate outreach, this seems like a high-leverage opportunity I really have no idea how this sorta stuff works, but it seemed worth a quick take — feel free to lmk if I’m totally off base here). 

I sometimes think of this idea and haven't found anyone mentioning it with a quick AI search: a tax on suffering. EDIT: there's a paper on this but specific to animal welfare that was shared on the forum earlier this year. A suffering tax would function as a Pigouvian tax on negative externalities—specifically, the suffering imposed on sentient beings. The core logic: activities that cause suffering create costs not borne by the actor, so taxation internalizes these costs and incentivizes reduction. This differs from existing approaches (animal welfare regulations, meat taxes) by: * Making suffering itself the tax base rather than proxies like carbon emissions or product type * Creating a unified framework across different contexts (factory farming, research, entertainment, etc.) * Explicitly quantifying and pricing suffering The main problems are measurement & administration. I would imagine an institute would be tasked with guidelines/a calculation model, which could become pretty complex. Actually administrating it would also be very hard, and there should be a threshold beneath which no tax is required because it wouldn't be worth the overhead. I would imagine that an initial version wouldn't right away be "full EA" taking into account invertebrates. It should start with a narrow scope, but with the infrastructure for moral circle expansion. It's obviously more a theoretical exercise than practical near-term, but here's a couple of considerations:  * it's hard to oppose: it's easier to say that carbon isn't important or animals don't suffer. It's harder to oppose direct taxation of suffering * it's relatively robust in the long-term: it can incorporate new scientific and philosophical insights on wild animal welfare, non-vertebrate sentience, digital sentience, etc. * it's scale sensitive * it focuses the discussion on what matters: who suffers how much? * It incentivizes the private sector to find out ways to reduce suffering

"Dwarkesh's fundraiser to fight factory farming has now raised over $1M!" - https://x.com/Lewis_Bollard/status/1954962845994819719

Well done to the Shrimp Welfare Project for contributing to Waitrose's pledge to stun 100% of their warm water shrimps by the end of 2026, and for getting media coverage in a prominent newspaper (this article is currently on the front page of the website): Waitrose to stop selling suffocated farmed prawns, as campaigners say they feel pain

I think the term "welfare footprint" (analogous to the term "carbon footprint") is extremely useful, and we should make stronger attempts to popularise it among the public as a quick way to encapsulate the idea that different animal products have vastly different welfare harms, e.g. milk vs eggs. 

During the animal welfare vs global health debate week, I was very reluctant to make a post or argument in favor of global health, the cause I work in and that animates me. Here are some reflections on why, that may or may not apply to other people: 1. Moral weights are tiresome to debate. If you (like me) do not have a good grasp of philosophy, it's an uphill struggle to grasp what RP's moral weights project means exactly, and where I would or would not buy into its assumptions. 2. I don't choose my donations/actions based on impartial cause prioritization. I think impartially within GHD (e.g. I don't prioritize interventions in India just because I'm from there, I treat health vs income moral weights much more analytically than species moral weights) but not for cross-cause comparison. I am okay with this. But it doesn't make for a persuasive case to other people. 3. It doesn't feel good to post something that you know will provoke a large volume of (friendly!) disagreement. I think of myself as a pretty disagreeable person, but I am still very averse to posting things that go against what almost everyone around me is saying, at least when I don't feel 100% confident in my thesis. I have found previous arguments about global health vs animal welfare to be especially exhausting and they did not lead to any convergence, so I don't see the upside that justifies the downside. 4. I don't fundamentally disagree with the narrow thesis that marginal money can do more good in animal welfare. I just feel disillusioned with the larger implications that global health is overfunded and not really worth the money we spend on it. I'm deliberately focusing on emotional/psychological inhibitions as opposed to analytical doubts I have about animal welfare. I do have some analytical doubts, but I think of them as secondary to the personal relationship I have with GHD.

Animal Justice Appreciation Note Animal Justice et al. v A.G of Ontario 2024 was recently decided and struck down large portions of Ontario's ag-gag law. A blog post is here. The suit was partially funded by ACE, which presumably means that many of the people reading this deserve partial credit for donating to support it. Thanks to Animal Justice (Andrea Gonsalves, Fredrick Schumann, Kaitlyn Mitchell, Scott Tinney), co-applicants Jessica Scott-Reid and Louise Jorgensen, and everyone who supported this work!