Diversifying Effective Altruism’s Long Shots in Animal AdvocacyAn Invitation to Prioritize Black Vegans, Higher Education, and Religious Communities

Abstract

Long Shots, this chapter acknowledges the value of certain aspects of Effective Altruism’s methods but considers two potential critical concerns. First, it isn’t always clear that EA succeeds in doing the most good, especially where long shots like foiling misaligned AI or producing meat without animals are concerned. Second, one might worry that investing large sums of money in long shots like these, even if they do succeed, has the opportunity cost of failing adequately to combat systemic injustice in the shorter term. This chapter explains each of these reservations and goes on to suggest some exciting new initiatives—institution-building in Black veganism, higher education, and religious communities—that could mitigate these reservations, energize and diversify the movement, and remain true to the EA method of supporting underexploited but potentially high-impact causes that produce nonfungible goods otherwise unlikely to be funded.