I've been toying around with the following:

• There are two motivations for donating money – egotistic (e.g. it feels good to do) & altruistic (e.g. other people are better off)
• The egotistic motivation is highly scope insensitive – giving away $500 feels roughly as good as giving away $50,000
• Probably also scope insensitive qualitatively – giving $5,000 to a low-impact charity feels about as good as giving $5,000 to an effective charity (especially if you don't reflect very much about impact)
• This scope insensitivity is baked in – knowing about it doesn't make it go away
• EA orgs sometimes say that giving effectively will make you happier (e.g. 80k, e.g. GWWC)
• These arguments ignore the scope insensitivity of the egotistic motivation – donating some money to charity will probably make you happier than not donating any at all. It's less clear that donating more money to charity will make you happier than donating some (and especially unclear that the donation <> happiness link scales anything close to linearly)
• Ergo, EA should stop recommending effective giving on egotistic grounds, and probably even encourage people to not do effective giving if they're considering it because they want to be happier (related)
• If the above is true, effective giving won't make you much happier than low-impact giving, and donating large amounts won't make you much happier than donating small amounts
• e.g. $100 to GiveDirectly feels about as good as $1,000 to GiveDirectly; e.g. saving one (statistical) life via AMF feels about as good as saving two (statistical) lives via AMF
• Advocating for effective giving on egotistic grounds (e.g. "it will make you happier") is sorta a false promise

Why don't we have a kind of "Effective Thesis Prize"?

I know there have been prizes on particular subjects, such as the philosophy quarterly essay prize in 2016 (who won it?). But has anyone tried an open general prize, accepting applicants from any area, anywhere? Would it be too expensive? (I don't think so: the $$ could be little, since phd candidates don't need additional incentives to improve their thesis)

Would it it hard to organize? (Maybe a little bit, but there would be time...)

Pros: it'd be a simple way to propagate EA ideas and the Effective thesis tool. It'd be useful to elicit information, and maybe to find significative new contributions...

Actually, I think there are many more pros, and I'm considering to try something like that in Brazil (where EA movement is just beginning). So I'd really appreciate some tips about possible CONS.

Why don't we have an entry on EA (and on X-Risk) on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (or IEP, by the way)?

The best we have is a mention en passant of Singer's "Most good you can do..." inside the "Altruism" entry. Really, it's just: "If friendships and other loving relationships have a proper place in our lives even if they do not maximize the good, then sentiment is an appropriate basis for altruism. (For an opposing view, see Singer 2015.)" <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism/>

I mean, there's even a whole new article on the Philosophy of Chemistry! It might not seem important, but SEP is one of the major preliminary sources for researches in Philosophy. It'd be an effective way "spreading the word" among philosophers outside Oxford & Berkeley communities.

(Funny thought: many EA philosophers are cited as major sources in SEP articles about Ethics, decision theory, AI... - but NOT EA)

I see that SEP's editorial board has the responsibility of defining what's being published and who's gonna do it - but there must be something to do about (maybe coordinated mass requests of an EA article? or someone sending a complete article, according to item 3 in the Editorial Policies: " ualified potential contributors may send to the Principal Editor or an appropriate member of the Editorial Board a preliminary proposal to write on an Encyclopedia topic, along with a curriculum vitae." <https://plato.stanford.edu/info.html>

I guess all I've said so far applies to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosphy, too.

(P.S.: If I'm getting boring with my frequent posts, please let me know)

I came across a quote from biostatistician Andrew Vickers that I really like:

A mistake in the operating room can threaten the life of one patient; a mistake in statistical analysis or interpretation can lead to hundreds of early deaths. So it is perhaps odd that, while we allow a doctor to conduct surgery only after years of training, we give [the SPSS statistical software] to almost anyone.

I can think of a number of caveats. For example, if you're an amateur trying to conduct a statistical analysis of some phenomenon where no statistical analysis currently exists, maybe you should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good by suppressing your analysis altogether, if it means people will continue thinking about the phenomenon in an intuitive and non-data-driven way.

But I do think it'd be valuable for the EA community to connect with or create more EAs with a deep understanding of statistics. Improving my own statistical skills has been a big project of mine recently, and the knowledge I've gained feels very generally useful.

Does vegan advocacy really work in reducing global meat consumption? Has anyone tested it?

My point: despite the increasing number of vegans & reducitarians, global meat production & consumption has increased (important exceptions: US & EU). That's a problem, since effective altruists defend vegetarianism etc. in order to reduce animal slaughter. Economic development aside (and the corresponding new demand for animal protein), I wonder if, in the long-term, markets adjust prices: thus, for each individual reducing meat consumption, there are many others who increase their consumption (because of falling prices due to decreasing demand), so leading the market to a new equilibrium.

So, my question: is there a way to test it? I imagine it could be done by a RCT: we could ask parts of a populations to stop eating meat for some time and measure if there is an observable effect.

John: For future open threads, I'd recommend removing this line:

"This is also a great place to post if you don't have enough karma to post on the main forum."

The new Forum doesn't have a karma restriction for creating your first post.

Has anyone reframed priorities choices (such as x-risk vs. poverty) as losses to check if they’re really biased?

I’ve read a little bit about the possibility that preferences for poverty reduction/global health/animal welfare causes over x-risk reduction may be due to some kind of ambiguity-aversion bias. Between donating U$3,000 for (A) saving a life (high certainty, presently) or (B) potentially saving 10^20 future lives (I know this may be a conservative guess, but it's the reasoning that is important here, not the numbers), by making something like a marginal 10^-5 contribution to reducing in 10^-5 some extinction risk, people would prefer the first "safe" option A, despite the large pay-off of the second one. However, such bias is sensitive to framing effects: people usually prefer sure gains (like A) and uncertain losses (like B'). So, I was trying to find out, without success, if anyone had reframed this decision as matter of losses, to see if one prefers, e.g., (A’) reducing deaths by malaria from 478,001 to 478,000 or (B’) reducing the odds of extinction (minus 10^20 lives) in 10^-10.

Perhaps there’s a better way to reframe this choice, but I’m not interested in discussing one particular example (however, I’m concerned with the possibility that there’s no bias-free way of framing it). My point is that, if one chooses something like A-B’, then we have a strong case for the existence of a bias.

(I’m well aware of other objections against x-risk causes, such as Pascal’s mugging and discount rates arguments – but I think they’ve received due attention, and should be discussed separately. Also, I’m mostly thinking about donation choices, not about policy or career decisions, which is a completely different matter; however, IF this experiment confirmed the existence of such a bias, it could influence the latter, too.

I’m new here. Since I suspect someone has probably already made a similar question somewhere else - but I couldn’t find it, so sorry bothering you - I’m mostly trying to satisfy my curiosity; however, there’s a small probability that it touches an important unsolved dilemma about global priorities - the x-risk vs. safe causes. I'm not looking for karma - though you can't have too much of it, right?)

Does anyone here have opinions on the higher quality labels for farm animal products, such as "Certified Humane"? (see here for a comparison of labels by ASPCA: https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/meat-eggs-and-dairy-label-guide) I am particularly interested in egg labels.