The comments are the best part.
And by best, I mean worst.
Thank you for trying!
We also made sure to enjoy our trip and tried some Turkish coffee and petted some of the stray cats." (Awwww),
Well, cats like fish too so this is relevant.
One thing I reflected on after learning about your experiences is the challenge of getting in touch with other, non-EA established organizations
Who knew that acting in a weird, insular manner would hinder the very thing that was attempting to be accomplished?
The continuation of the stray cats thing:
One of these cats gave me fleas so I will no longer engage in petting stray cats
lol
Jordan Peterson is shaking his head in dismay.
i can’t believe I read this whole article. They somewhat buried the lede with the paragraphs about emailing farmers twice and that was it. Apparently shoe leather and knocking on doors was not an option. They did also go to a conference and have coffee and pet cats though!
5/10, failed to sexually harass their staff
Dang those donors overpaid. I’d happily run an unremarkable & ineffective email campaign for $20k
On the one hand, kudos to them for realizing “existing organizations are already performing excellent work” which many non-profit founders never learn.
On the other hand, their approach to developing networks was to email farmers twice? With a “farmer-friendly” website made by vegans? For serious?
They saw it but didn’t internalize the message, they were just waiting until they could stand up their own organization to try to stop me, the acausal robot god.
I can’t believe there’s so much money for a bunch of fauxtivists who don’t know how to do basic community-building and networking. Why don’t they go invade McKinsey with their top-down mishegas, maybe they can at least give McKinsey half an ethic.
“We assumed that being able to approach farmers with a message that was not focused around animal welfare could give us an advantage compared to already established animal welfare groups.”
Ooh, did they invent the brand new notion of “outreach to all stakeholders aimed at finding common ground”? The fundamental strategy of every successful nonprofit and NGO?
Such genius, much amaze, wow.
Im just amazed they went to fish farmers with ‘farmer friendly’ outreach, yeah people are really waiting for more outreach on that. Wonder how many people who didn’t initially delete/ignore the emails looked at the site : https://www.piscivita.org/ and went ‘nah’ in greek and closed the site. (try switching to a different language and click around on the site).
“Speaking to farmers during the conference proved difficult due to the language barrier and difficulty finding interpreters” no shit.
It bothers me a bit as after all these years you would expect EA to be reasonably good at setting up these kinds of EA franchises, but I guess they don’t do ‘how to’ guides and only have after action reports and that is it.
TL;DR:
Overall, despite the fact that the project “failed”, we see the overall experience as a positive one. Most new charities fail - that is part of the game. The important thing is to figure out as quickly as possible whether your idea is a good one, and we believe that we succeeded in doing so.
“We had a bad idea bad spent only 30k on it.”
Great job kids, here’s your "You Tried " ribbon.
the whole thing reads like a nonspecific job application to the EA-industrial-complex, actual “charity” irrelevant here
Honestly, if they had taken just one evening to chill and put themselves in the shoes of the tired, overly spammed, unmotivated farmers; they would have instantly recognised that sending them a non solicited email with a nondescript, probably overly verbose request, would be the absolute worst way to go about reaching them. Save maybe for carving their message on a brick and throwing it at their main window.
It looks to me as a typical case of “not my money, so let’s take things easy”. I would gladly make a study on how many failed charities would have been successful, would the funding depend on some basic metric. I would even do that as a charity. For, say, 30k. 🙃
Considering they only bothered to translate the landing page of their site, they prob would have emailed these farmers in english, and got promptly ignored due to that alone. I mean if you cannot even be bothered to translate into the companies (prob) primary language.
Nah, at least according to their post, they translated. But if they put as much effort in translating the text as they seemingly did in everything else, it might have sounded quite awkward… 😅
50 bucks that they just plopped it into ChatGPT and called it a day.
Right, missed that. Thanks for correcting me! I had only looked at the site and saw the translation buttons only worked on the main page.
It’s quite alright. Happens to anyone. I also miss stuff on a regular basis. I have, however, to salute the lemming camaraderie, it is a very nice change of tone from other platforms. 🙂
Didn’t hire a single local. Didn’t pair up with a single existing organization.
I doubt that would even pass an Eagle Scout project proposal review.
Only Eagle Scout I know of is Ross Ulbrich, was his “do crimes, don’t get caught”?
Lil’ old me (with volunteer help, ofc) installed railroad tie steps on a trail at an ecological reserve.
well I mean at least they spent a reasonable amount of money. It is very easy to see hundreds to millions of K sinked to projects with similar complexity and get not much in return.
the reasonable amount of money on such a non-project is closer to $0
@dgerard Exactly. Fish deserve whatever suffering comes their way.
@grumpybozo @dgerard it’s ok to eat fish, they don’t have any feelings
fish know what they did
How delightfully ineffective
(Seriously, what has Effective Altruism ever accomplished beyond buying castles?)
sexual harrassment
money laundering and embezzlement
The “malaria nets” side of it has done legitimate good, because they didn’t try to reinvent the wheel from scratch, stuck to actual science and existing, well performing charitable organisations.
global poverty still gets a good portion of the EA funding, but is slowly falling out of the movement because it’s boring to discuss and you can’t make any dubiously effective startups out of it.
Greece has no groups focused on improving fish welfare however, Charity Entrepreneurship is possibly starting a charity focused on advocating for fish welfare improvements Greece.
EAs advocating for fish welfare is about the only thing left to see in this country, awesome.
If you want to influence Greece just use some of the fabled EA obsquatumatillions to buy out the left part of our two party system, they’re currently in such shambles they’d barely notice, and it’s not like they could do much worse with shrimp rights as a flagship issue.
