Please note that this event has been rescheduled from its original date by one week (to Monday Oct 27th).

For this month's animal welfare meetup, we will be discussing the essay by Anthony DiGiovanni, "What to do about near-term cluelessness in animal welfare."

In this essay, DiGiovanni considers how even short-term animal welfare interventions can have uncertain or counterintuitive effects—sometimes helping one group of animals while unintentionally harming others. He explores how advocates and donors can make decisions despite this "cluelessness," proposing principles for identifying interventions that are robust to such uncertainty.

The post invites readers to think more carefully about backfire effects, unknown unknowns, and the limits of our predictions. These topics are highly relevant for anyone trying to do the most good for animals and should make for an interesting discussion.

The essay should only take 15–20 minutes to read. Please try and read it in full before our meeting, but feel free to attend even if you don't get the time (or prompt an LLM with the link and ask for a summary!).