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

In talking with OWA groups in Africa and Asia, I’m learning about a culture of dictatorship at OWA. 1. OWA holds 15 to 20+ meetings annually with grantees, excluding campaign meetings, mentorship, and trainings, in addition to 2 narrative reports each year. It has to be unacceptable even if you’re brandishing it as collaboration. 2. OWA grantees in these regions are recently required to submit “regular written updates regarding engagement with the companies” 3. Over 30 groups from Asia and Africa are in the alliance, serving 78% of the world population and over 60% of farmed chicken. OWA has only three staff to support groups in the regions. The job titles of some of the staff are “regional leads”. I think that is insufficient if they’re building a movement in these regions, but sufficient if they’re passing over requests from the West. 4. OWA seeks to control the specific companies that groups campaign against. In a recent webinar to OWA members on “Focus Local, Impact Global,” they pitched to groups to leave Western companies operating in their countries and target local competitors.  I discovered these facts while researching OWA and attending their recent global summit. I haven't shared this feedback with the OWA team before this post, as they don’t have a public anonymous feedback form.  

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. 

I added some quick polls to this post. I'd love to get some feedback to get a sense of whether we're on the right track and foster discussion. I think the polls also highlight some of the key issues and implications. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Eh8MbqLwFBsD7GK2/how-much-do-plant-based-products-substitute-for-animal State a probability for the underlying policy question: Rate your agreement over the plausibility of existing methods: Comparing this to another prominent approach (rate your agreement)

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

Recently I got curious about the situation of animal farming in China. So I asked the popular AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) to do some research on this topic. I have put the result into a NotebookLM note here: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/071bb8ac-1745-4965-904a-d0afb9437682 If you have resources that you think I should include, please let me know.