In my last piece I named the question I’ve been avoiding for two years: should I keep earning and fund people doing direct animal welfare work, or should I become one of them? I also explained why I’m doing this in public. If I’m not willing to apply my own decision-making methodology to the highest-stakes decision I’m facing, the methodology is decoration.
This piece introduces the two mental models I’m using to guide the exploration.
Model 1: Scale, neglectedness, and tractability
Before asking how to contribute to a cause, it’s worth asking whether individual effort can actually move the needle on it at all. The framework I’m using has three dimensions.
Scale: how many beings are affected, and how seriously? The numbers in animal welfare are almost impossible to hold in my head, which is part of why the problem stays neglected.
Neglectedness: how much attention and funding does the problem get relative to its scale? A neglected problem means my marginal contribution has more counterfactual impact. I’m not duplicating what others are already doing.
Tractability: can individual effort actually change outcomes? A problem can be enormous and ignored and still be one where nothing I do makes a difference.
If you want a rigorous breakdown of how animal welfare scores on all three dimensions, the Effective Altruism cause profile does that better than I will here.
Model 2: Direct work vs. earning to give
Once I’ve identified a cause worth working on, the second question is: what form should my contribution take?
Earning to give means staying in a well-paid role and donating meaningfully. The logic is that a Sydney tech salary can fund one or two full-time advocates in Southeast Asia, where the cost of a skilled campaigner is a fraction of what it is here.
Direct work means becoming one of those people, taking a role inside the movement or the technology trying to change it. Some causes aren’t funding-constrained, they’re talent-constrained, and cash doesn’t help if there’s no one to spend it well.
The right answer depends on the cause area, my specific skills, and, given what I know about my own temperament, which kind of work actually sustains me over a decade.
The next steps
I’m running two parallel experiments to generate real data on that last point. Earning to give is already running (via my regular donation of 10% of my salary to Sinergia Animal), so the open question is whether direct work beats it. Both experiments are focused on testing that.
The first tests whether I’m energised working inside animal advocacy organisations, specifically helping non-technical, mission-driven people use data better.
The second tests whether the operational and data skills I’ve built in tech are actually useful inside an alt-protein company trying to scale.
I’ve also started building a direct connection to the frontlines. Earlier in June, I had my first call with one of the advocates in Sinergia that my donation funds. We talked about what’s satisfying and what’s hard in her role. That relationship is part of why earning to give works for me right now. It keeps the cause concrete rather than abstract while the longer investigation runs.
In the next few months, expect more details and field reports from both experiments: what I tried, what I measured, and what the evidence actually says, not what I hoped it would.