I enjoyed this post, thank you for writing it. You point to examples of fights that showed little/no progress for a long time before being won, as an argument against dismissing diet change / moral persuasion advocacy for animals.

But how do we make this argument falsifiable? What would you need to see to decide it’s not a fight worth having?

And what about base rates: if you consider not just the long fought fights that eventually won, but also those that failed, how sensible does it look to bet on a given fight?

[These aren’t supposed to be gotchas or rhetorical questions, they’re genuine questions I wonder about (and I feel the need to clarify that I, a human wrote this, despite using the word “genuine” in 2026)]

Ambitious Impact will also not be participating in or collaborating with Manifund projects for the foreseeable future.

I agree it’s super unintuitive. I was very skeptical myself. We had the confidence to enact this policy because (a) our salaries had been uniformly low since we began in 2018, and motivation, talent density and retention were strong, and (b) our staff salary preference survey and intell from potential hires we lost due to salary suggested that this policy would result in modest increases in costs but substantive improvements in staff retention, hiring and wellbeing. The policy is live and (c) so far so good! Maybe things will change, but so far, seemingly the decades of research and experience about motivation in general aren’t the best model of motivation amongst AIM’s current and target staff.

DM'd you on Substack :)

Hi Jeff, thanks for sharing. I agree that senior talent can well be worth paying more for, and that where someone's financial needs are higher now because of what they gave up earlier, that's a legitimate need like any other. I can't speak for the conversation you had as I'm new to AIM's leadership team, but It would happen differently under our new policies :)

Yes! Annually, staff have the option to (1) accept an inflation adjustment, (2) decline it if their current salary is working for them, (3) propose an adjustment to their salary based on a change in their circumstances

Good question! I think this change will be net positive for founder talent.

Firstly I think that in practice there is less competition for the same talent than one might expect:

(1) The talent pools are actually pretty different. Many of the people who are drawn to our incubation program specifically want to be founders, not staff. Conversely, often when a founder comes to work at AIM it’s because they don’t want to be founding at that time.

(2) AIM can’t actually absorb many founders. We’re increasingly specialized, meaning there are fewer and fewer roles a generalist founder could fill.

A relevant stat: Currently 4 out of 20+ staff are former CEIP founders (and 3 out of 4 are in the Programs Team -- where founding experience matters most)

(3) Hopefully the new salary policy will attract more talent to the AIM ecosystem, such that (a) AIM would have less need to hire people who would otherwise found, and (b) more new founders are unlocked than AIM is capable of absorbing.

I really like this framework! Thank you!

It's very fair to be concerned that your donations might be doing harm -- I can relate! A bittersweet consolation might be that this is a risk that applies to basically every charitable intervention, including highly evidence-based global health and development interventions. Something that increases a woman's income or autonomy can put her at greater risk of domestic violence for example. Changing someone's life can have impacts on the local and macro-economy, on those impacted by their diet and consumption patterns etc. -- the world is complicated and the risk of doing harm instead of good is always there.

This isn't to say we shouldn't work really hard to understand and prevent such harm! Just that "no chance of harm" is not a realistic bar to aim for

"If there had been 50 studies which compared mortality between two global health intervention and overall results was unequivocal, we would probably conclude that there was no major difference between the two, rather than say we didn't have a clear answer and needed more research." -- True, but the goal of cage-free isn't reducing mortality, it's reducing suffering. Mortality is one possible (but deeply confounded) indicator of suffering we can look at. If, when doing so, we conclude that there is no major difference between mortality in caged and cage-free systems, this has little to no bearing on whether cage-free reduces suffering.