I quite liked this! I thought the part where the environmental advocate was like "well actually I do think animal suffering is important" was kind of hilarious + wholesome, and also I admire them for being willing to agree here despite their other reservations about EA. <3

Nice job @Andres Jimenez Zorrilla 🔸 and all! Proud to be a part of the "we look at numbers + care about shrimp" club :)

Just noting that I've seen and haven't forgotten about this, thank you! The CEA team is currently at a retreat, so I'll be slower to respond. Let me know if there are a few particular points you'd be most interested in talking through (I might be able to prioritize that faster).

Okay, re-reading 'How it works', seems like somewhere between A and C? I think I still don't understand whether there are funky perverse incentive problems going on here, but hopefully someone with more direct market design knowledge can weigh in :)

I’m (as you know) a big fan of SWP <3, but I’m not really understanding the idea here. I’m walking through a few potential setups to try and get a handle for this below. I assume I'm just misunderstanding the key idea!

A: Is the idea to get the supermarkets to pay you to set up more stunners elsewhere?

• I.e. you get Big Supermarket to commit to doing stunning, and to fulfill that promise it agrees to buy 10 stunning credits per year from SWP, but otherwise doesn’t change their existing supply chain.
  • Let’s say 1 credit = ‘Operating 1 stunner at normal capacity for 1 year’
  • And you sell credits to cover the prorated set-up & operating costs of a stunner for 1 year
• You take that money and then go find a bunch of producers (who have existing customers), and get them to take up the stunner.
• If this is the idea, I’m wondering why money isn’t a blocker here when you elsewhere suggest that these big corporations probably aren’t willing to pay for the stunners. I’m also not sure how much scaling to new producers is a problem here, since you’d still have to play middleman by getting enough farms to adopt stunners.

B: Or maybe it’s the above, but instead of Big Supermarket paying, SWP donors foot the bill for the credits? If so, I’m confused how this improves welfare. Feels a bit like telling the supermarkets, “Hey! Want to purchase some paper from us that means you get to call your welfare standards good while you do nothing?”

C: Or as an alternative to A, maybe you set up a genuine marketplace where supermarkets can buy credits from producers, i.e. more similar to carbon credits.

• If so, feels like there are obvious perverse incentive problems. E.g. dumb hypothetical:
  • Tesco wants to buy a bunch of stunning credits
  • Bunch of people set up shrimp farms even though there’s not the demand for it, stun the shrimp, bank the money, then discard the shrimp / sell it at super low prices. ⇒ In which case, this seems worse than the counterfactual!
• I feel like a key difference between carbon credits & shrimp stunning is that reducing carbon is actually “good”, but stunning shrimp is “bad” (it’s only good relative to the counterfactual). Because of this I generally feel nervous about perverse incentive problems here!

Helpful chart! That's what the authors concluded as well:

The first answer may be geographic: duck farming is concentrated in places that most Western animal advocacy organizations traditionally don’t pay attention to or don’t know as much about. The vast majority of the world’s duck production is concentrated in China and across Asia. Moreover, duck meat is relatively niche in the U.S., Canada, and much of Europe, aside from certain culinary subcultures or specific products like foie gras.

There's this ACX post (that I only skimmed and don't have strong opinions about) which mostly seems to do this, minus the "pushing" part.

Fab, congratulations on receiving the grant from GiveWell!!

Hey @AnonymousEAForumAccount, I’m sorry for not responding to this earlier, and thank you as always for your thoughtful engagement with our strategy. I genuinely appreciate your deep engagement here. As context, I work closely with Jessica on coordinating the growth pillar within CEA.

Going through your comments line by line:

Prioritizing high-value community assets.

As Toby and Sarah have mentioned, I’m really excited that we’re prioritizing work to improve the quality of these programs and expand their reach! I won’t say more since I think my colleagues have covered it.

Creation of good, public growth dashboards.

Thanks for your bids here — responding by category:

• Re: the existing CEA dashboard:
  • I’m glad it has been a valuable product, and apologize that it has not been always consistently kept up to date. We’ve been unusually short staffed on the technical capacity needed to maintain this data in the last few months (in part because I've moved into a more generalist role), but are working on finding it a consistent owner internally.
  • I’m also excited about the value of this dashboard for helping the community track growth in CEA’s products!
• Re: a public dashboard for EA growth as a whole:
  • I agree that if there were a well maintained and easily interpretable dashboard of EA relevant growth metrics, this would be a major win. I wouldn’t rule out prioritizing a project like this, but right now we are prioritizing doing the foundational investigation work ourselves.
  • From past experience with running similar projects, I expect this project would be a major time investment, both to keep the data fresh, and to coordinate many external stakeholder concerns. If we report core growth metrics for many orgs (especially if this includes metrics that weren’t previously made public which is IMO where the main value add would be), I think we want to do so responsibly and accurately — which takes time!
  • This is all to say I’d want to think hard about the capacity tradeoffs on our side, and am not immediately convinced it is worth prioritizing, but I’d be excited to revisit this down the line.

Thoughtful reflection on growth measurement.

To take a step back, I think we'd broadly agree that much less effort historically has been put into investigating the question of “How much is EA growing and in what ways?” than we both would like. This is still a very shallow research area relative to where I’d like the EA community to be, and while I think we have made important progress in the last few years, I’d be interested in more work here.

In terms of the specific analysis you point to, we’ve stopped relying on this exact methodology internally so haven’t prioritized following up on it, although if someone wanted to try grading our line-by-line predictions based on e.g. our dashboard + public information (some linked from the post), I’d be pretty excited about that.

I have some quibbles around how “obviously off” the analysis is in retrospect (my confidence intervals around the top line numbers were pretty wide, and the analysis was importantly not just tracking growth in principles-first EA community building projects which I think changes its interpretation), but I won’t dive deep into these for sake of time.

Transparency about growth strategy and targets

Thanks for prompting us for this! For transparency, our top priority right now remains making sure we endorse and are able to reach our growth targets, and I expect this will take up the majority of our growth-specific attention in Q2-Q3. I think that’s appropriate for solidifying our work internally, and am excited for us to share more in due course.

I was extremely surprised to see the claim in the OP that “Growth has long been at the core of our mission.”

I wonder if we are talking past each other here (I’m surprised at your surprise!), although perhaps this wording could also have been clearer. As a community building org, a major way I think CEA has become more successful over time is in building up our programs. For instance I think of the growth in our EAG and EAGx portfolio from pre- to post-pandemic times, and the scaling in our Ongoing Support Program for university group organisers as two emblematic examples of programs finding their product-market-impact fit and then scaling up to achieve more impact over time.

I think what's new here is that after a period of being focused on building foundations internally (in part to prepare for growth), we are now back towards a more unified growth-focused strategy across CEA.

Nice! I've been enjoying your quick takes / analyses, and find your writing style clear/easy to follow. Thanks Mo! (I think this could have been a great top level post FWIW, but to each their own :) )

Wow, your highlighted grants seem like really great giving opportunities. Thank you for writing this up!