“Nuance in Proxies” by Kevin Xia 🔸

This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to my usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked.  Commenting and feedback guidelines: This draft lacks the polish of a full post, but the content is almost there. The kind of constructive feedback you would normally put on a Forum post is very welcome. Draft Amnesty Context: In the last year or two, I have noticed several ways in which the proxies that we use to communicate in effective animal advocacy can lose important nuance, leading to misunderstandings. I have even noticed a couple of times where these misunderstandings have found their way into important evaluative work, but not yet in a crucial/decision-relevant way. I intended to turn these observations into a stringent line of thought with a broader point, using real-world examples as citations and hard data to back up how they can be misleading. Now [...] ---Outline:(01:23) Nuances in Scale:(08:20) Nuance in Contribution(12:13) So what now?The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 2nd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DgpRaCdvupy6cMbdk/nuance-in-proxies --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.