Finding your niche of engagement
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Small and big opportunities to explore and get involved

  • Advocacy
  • Raising awareness
  • Education
  • Publicity

Events
and meetups

Participating in or organising meetups helps to exchange ideas and deepen understanding of and concern for the topics discussed.

For meetups and events, prepare talks or workshops to raise awareness of the philosophy and moral importance of reducing suffering for all sentient beings.

Talks can be as simple as a summary of already existing content.

To increase outreach, record more advanced meetups and events and share them via YouTube.

Accountability/ co-working groups, to motivate joint work on high impact interventions or respective career planning. 

Giving Games — structured group exercises in which participants collectively contribute with (small) donations and allocate the budget, fostering practical engagement with cause prioritisation and effective giving; potentially including Giving What We Can pledge ceremonies as well. 

Groups and meetups to join: e.g. political and advocacy groups, effective altruism, animal rights and veganism, (trans-)humanism, anti-natalism etc..

Tabling / information stalls at public events, markets and university campuses

Online
activism

Encourage more vegan options through (google) ratings and commenting on restaurants, catered events, workplaces and hospitals (never harshly), and praise them if they already have them.

Resource
sharing

Promoting content
that raises awareness /
educates etc.

'Liking' respective material throughout social media increases traction and motivates the authors. Cross-post resources where there might be a relevant audience, such as other activist groups or organisations (e.g. political parties, NGOs and educational and youth groups).
Remember to avoid being spammy and always maintain an attitude of service, not demand or judgement.

Contribute to Wikipedia — writing, expanding, or improving articles on relevant concepts, organisations, and research. Wikipedia is a primary training source for AI systems and a default reference for the general public, making accurate and comprehensive coverage of welfare-relevant topics for all sentient beings has disproportionately high-reach

Starting or participating in newsletters with updates on projects in the community and with related news and opportunities.

Translate relevant resources / literature / articles

Art and media
to influence
culture change

E.g. illustrations, memes, fictional and personal stories, blogs, video clips, (short) films, music, podcasts 

Example: Helping people become open minded about abolishing carnism: Make / share compilations of (wild) carnivores befriended with their prey. Share them with us and incorporate those in your presentations / campaigns.

Online magazine

Starting or contributing to (online) magazines via articles, news, opinion pieces and content from the community.

Development and promotion of high quality pedagogical / educational art and media fostering the development of compassion, self-reflexion, communication, critical and rational thinking.

Examples: The School of Life, School of Thought and Center for Applied Rationality

Research
To increase wellbeing for all sentient beings and minimise risks of future suffering, research is needed across a broad range of domains to develop a broad range of new interventions and welfare oriented technologies. 

To find more high impact research opportunities join the Effective Thesis Fellowship program. 

And to increase the impact of your research e.g. by involving decision-makers check out the research guide by Charity Entrepreneurship.

Animal Welfare science
for wild animals and farmed animals.
Assessing the quality of life of various species in various environmental settings to find and assess welfare interventions. See Animal Ethics & Wild Animal Initiative

Fertility control (See also: Influencing Policy)
Compassionate population control to replace lethal or other aggressive population control strategies.

'Pests'

Rodents

Rodent Fertility Control: What It Is and Why It’s Important

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Laboratory Evaluation of the Effectiveness of the Fertility Control Bait ContraPest® on Wild-captured Black Rats

Stray pets

Parsemus Foundation

Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs (ACC&D)

Wildlife

Meta Orgs: 

  • Wild Animal Initiative
  • Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control

Overpopulating species
e.g. deer, wild boar, rabbits,
pigeons, neobiota / invasive species...

Nicarbazin: an avian reproductive inhibitor for pigeons and geese

Immunocontraception for feral pigs

Grey squirrel fertility control

Wildlife contraception and welfare by Simon Eckerström Liedholm and the Wild Animal Initiative

Wildlife Contraception — Issues, Methods, and Applications

'Dangerous species'
e.g. parasites, carnivores,
disease transmitting species

Sterile Insect Technique

Tsetse fly eradicated on the Island of Zanzibar

Screwworm Free Future

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Predator Free 2050

AI for Animals
AI tools may significantly expand animal welfare monitoring and care through automated processing of video, audio, and movement-tracking data, in both farmed and wild animals.
AI tools are being developed to quantify animal welfare states and inform effective welfare interventions. 

Welfare Footprint Institute

Sentient Futures

AI Alignment & Safety



CaML: shaping how advanced AI treats sentient beings.

Center on Long-Term Risk: addressing worst-case risks from advanced AI, with current focus on conflict scenarios and the technical and philosophical foundations of cooperation.

Sentient Futures: capacity building & fellowship programs

Evolutionary anthropology & prosocial system design
Research on how to develop and establish robustly prosocial cultures and social systems that reduce and prevent suffering for all sentient beings.

Compassionate Genomics & Genomic Welfare
Gene therapy already has many healthcare applications. Heritable genome interventions could offer much larger welfare gains but also carry significantly higher risks, and decades of further research across multiple biomedical fields remain necessary before such interventions can be responsibly considered.

Cellular Agriculture 
Replacing animal-derived products with biosynthetic and cell-cultivated alternatives, eliminating the production chains that depend on animal exploitation.

The Good Food Institute

Ageing and Health-Span Expansion Research
Ageing involves progressive biological deterioration, of body and mind, with significant welfare costs, alongside the loss of accumulated wisdom, knowledge, and experience. Preventing or slowing its progression would have major welfare and economic benefits.

Healthspan Action Coalition (HSAC)

XPRIZE Healthspan

Sentience Research
Foundational questions about the levels and nature of sentience and consciousness remain to be solved.

Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness

Qualia Research Institute

Eleos AI

Further reading:

  • The Case for Quantifying Sentience in Animal Welfare by Damin Curtis
  • Consciousness in AI: Insights from the Science of Consciousness by Patrick Butlin et.a.

Physics

Environmental design and atmospheric engineering
Atmospheric and environmental engineering research could decouple human welfare from the suffering-laden dynamics of wild ecosystems, with the goal to allow biospheres to be managed with welfare concerns over utility priorities. 

Understanding the long-term future of the universe, incl. prevalence and expiration of inhabited planets, and respective s-risk and welfare concerns. 

Starting A Compassionate Impact Oriented Academic Journal
The journal should focus on cross-causal welfare of all sentient beings and would 

  • help evaluate biotechnological and other research for its potential contribution to suffering prevention, 
  • disseminate findings and application opportunities across disciplines, 
  • and promote the research itself. 

Research assessment criteria should include whether the research approach meets relevant ethical and quality standards, and could include whether work specifically targets scalable, long-term suffering prevention with a likely net-positive impact.

Capacity Building

Participate in / organise
Suffering Focussed (Compassionate) Impact meetups & events.

Other communities to tap into:

  • Political Parties
  • Effective Altruism
  • Sentient Futures

Prepare talks / workshops on

Moral Psychology

Cause Areas

Existing Body of Work

Impact Optimisation Tools & Strategies

Neglected Opportunities of Impact

Moral Philosophy

Profession-specific networking and conferences

Self-education /
study groups

Reading group

Prioritisation workshops

Go to / watch relevant talks in pairs / groups (e.g. from international animal rights conference/ Effective Animal Advocacy) and then discuss relevance for your own approach.

Earning-to-Give / Effective Giving

Fundraising

On an individual level e.g. by using fundraising via FB during holidays, birthdays, match makers.

On an organisational level: Funds, prizes and contests for research contributing to abolishing suffering.

See Founding to Give

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See AIM Grantmaking

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Opportunity Board (jobs and volunteering)

See e.g. CRS’s Career Advice 

Other Examples:

  • EA Work Club
  • 80,000 Hours
  • Animal Advocacy Careers

Newsletter with

High Impact Jobs & Volunteering opportunities in most relevant cause areas

Updates from most relevant organisations

Upcoming Events

Influencing Policymaking

Systemic foundations
Before specific welfare policies can take hold, the underlying political and institutional environment needs to support them sustainably.

Improving institutional decision-making and strengthening democracies — drawing on insights from evolutionary anthropology to understand how human cooperative and political behaviour evolved, and applying these insights to the design of more effective, resilient and compassionate political systems and institutions. 

CFI’s Evolutionary Anthropology & Prosocial System Design

Power for Democracies

CRS’s Improving our political system

OPIS’s Guide to Compassionate Governance

EA Forum Improving institutional decision-making

Maintaining the rule of law — requiring that all individuals and government entities are accountable to clear, transparent, and fairly applied laws, with equal and non-beneficiary access to legal representation. This includes preventing elected officials from escaping legal accountability and protecting democratic institutions from dismantlement.

Improving education — Pedagogical interventions and educational strategies for children and young adults shape behaviour of the next generation and are thereby high-impact. High-quality education can significantly benefit physical and mental health, decision-making, career performance, and social impact. We therefore need moral pedagogy, mindfulness, reflection skills, analytical and methodical thinking as well as life skills in educational curricula

Cause-specific policy ambitions

Fertility control

The greatest potential for a compassionate, non-invasive, easily scalable, persistent and reversible approach to population control is fertility control. It should therefore be promoted as opposition to poisoning and predation against ‘pest’ or population control of wild animals. It not just reduces their burden on the environment, but also heavily reduces their struggle for resources.

Prominent example: Immunocontraception

'Pests'

Rodents

Rodent Fertility Control: What It Is and Why It’s Important

a

Laboratory Evaluation of the Effectiveness of the Fertility Control
Bait ContraPest® on Wild-captured Black Rats

Insects

Tsetse fly eradicated on the Island of Zanzibar

a

Sterile Insect Technique

Stray pets

Wildlife

Overpopulating species
e.g. deer, wild boar, rabbits,
pigeons, neobiota / invasive species...

Nicarbazin: an avian reproductive inhibitor
for pigeons and geese

Intervention Report: Wildlife Contraception

Wildlife Contraception —
Issues, Methods, and Applications

'Dangerous species'
e.g. parasites, carnivores,
disease transmitting species

Predator Free 2050

Removing dependency on
animal (derived) products

Implementing / promoting usage of animal free alternative products
(Foot-in-the-door approach: promoting acknowledgement of animal sentience and the problem of animal suffering.)

Making cellular research independent from bovine calf serum: not only for in-vitro meat development, but also to make in-vitro research vegan.

Lobbying for vegan dietary in kindergarten / schools / public institutions and events.

Lobbying for
animal rights

Fighting speciesist approach on rights: not humanness, nor intelligence matters, but ability to suffer

Acknowledgement of sentient entities as entities requiring rights protected by law

Long term plan:
Promotion of a sentience welfare system

Right to have interests represented by independent qualified allies

Genetic welfare for sentient beings

Lobbying for pre-implantation diagnostics and embryonic stem cell research is important to enable research for a future genetic welfare program. We need to promote laws that regulate applications of genetic enhancement of sentient beings and ensure access to genetic welfare. In laws and regulations on genetic welfare applications, benefits and risks to the society, communities and the individual (irrespective of the species) need to be considered.

Community Genetics in Israel

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Compassionate Genomics & Genomic Welfare

Public funding, prizes and research incentives to help accelerate research that may contribute to preventing suffering and improving welfare long-term

Promoting (development of) animal free
biotechnological / medical
research and testing.

Making cellular research independent of bovine calf serum: not only for in-vitro meat development, but also to make in-vitro research vegan/vegetarian.

Reduce, Refine, Replace

Particularly promising interventions are tentatively listed at the top and highlighted.

Note, that personal fit assessment is crucial for motivation and endurance, and thus should not be sacrificed in pursuit of cause neutrality.

It's recommended to try out many different engagement opportunities before committing too much to one. This way you can develop a broad rage of skills, learn about your strengths and weaknesses and about work environments that can accelerate and maintain motivation and well-being, rather than burn you out.

Enterprises / institutions

Existing enterprises / institutions

Education

Center for Applied Rationality

School of Thought

Fertility control

SenseTech: offering rodent fertility control

Ovocontrol: offering pigeon fertility control

a

Oxitec: offering insect fertility control

Think tanks / research

Invincible Wellbeing

Animal Ethics

Sentience Institute

Sentience Politics

Center on Long-Term Risk

Center for Reducing Suffering

Qualia Research Institute

Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering

Algosphere Alliance

Wild Animal Initiative

Cellular agriculture

For-profit organisations

Contract Manufacturing Database

Alternative protein company database

Non-profit organisations

New Harvest

a

Good Food Institute

Cellular Agriculture Society

Transhumanism

Humanity+

Foresight Institute

Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Betterhumans

Transhumanist UK

Needed enterprises / institutions

Air cleaning technology:
producing oxygen, reducing CO2 and pollution -> making human quality of life independent from nature.
We need advocacy, marketing, fundraising, and research.

For information on the importance see the map of life expectancy reduction due to pollution or a video on lead poisoning.

For solution approaches see MechanicalTrees and examples no. 1, and no. 2.

Fertility control:
as opposition to poisoning and predation against ‘pest’ or population control of wild animals, and to reduce struggle for resources.

Production and sale of non-invasive fertility control products 'against' 'pests' and stray animals.

A genetic health organisation for all sentient beings

Offering conferences

Organising public image campaigns

Offering networking to politics, research and industry

Suffering abolition funds or prizes

Academic journal

Evaluation of (biotechnological) research papers in regard of their (potential) contribution to suffering abolition.

To be checked:
1. whether papers are specifically aiming for suffering abolition / promoting the concept of suffering abolition,
2. whether the research approach is ethical,
3. whether research/technological enhancement is (potentially) valuable for the suffering abolition,
4. has low risk for creating suffering (through abuse, lack of control etc.).

Suffering Research Institute

Robert Daoust's proposal

Before exploring the various options of engagement, I highly recommend exploring the meaning of suffering and the causes of suffering illustrated in the linked mind map.

Charity Entrepreneurship