Quick takes

2 weeks out from the new GiveWell/GiveDirectly analysis, I was wondering how GHD charities are evaluating the impact of these results. For Kaya Guides, this has got us thinking much more explicitly about what we’re comparing to. GiveWell and GiveDirectly have a lot more resources, so they can do things like go out to communities and measure second order and spillover effects. On the one hand, this has got us thinking about other impacts we can incorporate into our analyses. Like GiveDirectly, we probably also have community spillover effects, we probably also avert deaths, and we probably also increase our beneficiaries’ incomes by improving productivity. I suspect this is true for many GHD charities! On the other, it doesn’t seem fair to compare our analysis on individual subjective wellbeing to GiveDirectly’s analysis that incorporates many more things. Unless we believed that GiveDirectly is likely to be systematically better, it’s not the case that many GHD charities got 3–4× less cost-effective relative to cash transfers overnight, they may just count 3–4× less things! So I wonder if the standard cash transfers benchmark might have to include more nuance in the near-term. Kaya Guides already only makes claims about cost-effectiveness ‘at improving subjective wellbeing’ to try and cover for this. Are other GHD charities starting to think the same way? Do people have other angles on this?

During the animal welfare vs global health debate week, I was very reluctant to make a post or argument in favor of global health, the cause I work in and that animates me. Here are some reflections on why, that may or may not apply to other people: 1. Moral weights are tiresome to debate. If you (like me) do not have a good grasp of philosophy, it's an uphill struggle to grasp what RP's moral weights project means exactly, and where I would or would not buy into its assumptions. 2. I don't choose my donations/actions based on impartial cause prioritization. I think impartially within GHD (e.g. I don't prioritize interventions in India just because I'm from there, I treat health vs income moral weights much more analytically than species moral weights) but not for cross-cause comparison. I am okay with this. But it doesn't make for a persuasive case to other people. 3. It doesn't feel good to post something that you know will provoke a large volume of (friendly!) disagreement. I think of myself as a pretty disagreeable person, but I am still very averse to posting things that go against what almost everyone around me is saying, at least when I don't feel 100% confident in my thesis. I have found previous arguments about global health vs animal welfare to be especially exhausting and they did not lead to any convergence, so I don't see the upside that justifies the downside. 4. I don't fundamentally disagree with the narrow thesis that marginal money can do more good in animal welfare. I just feel disillusioned with the larger implications that global health is overfunded and not really worth the money we spend on it. I'm deliberately focusing on emotional/psychological inhibitions as opposed to analytical doubts I have about animal welfare. I do have some analytical doubts, but I think of them as secondary to the personal relationship I have with GHD.

Has anybody changed their behaviour after the animal welfare vs global health debate week? A month or so on, I'm curious if anybody is planning to donate differently, considering a career pivot, etc. If anybody doesn't want to share publicly but would share privately, please feel free to message me. Linking @Angelina Li's post asking how people would change their behaviour, and tagging @Toby Tremlett🔹 who might have thought about tracking this.

The value of re-directing non-EA funding to EA orgs might still be under-appreciated. While we obsess over (rightly so) where EA funding should be going, shifting money from one EA cause to another "better" ne might often only make an incremental difference, while moving money from a non-EA pool to fund cost-effective interventions might make an order of magnitude difference. There's nothing new to see here. High impact foundations are being cultivated to shift donor funding to effective causes, the “Center for effective aid policy”  was set up (then shut down) to shift governement money to more effective causes, and many great EAs work in public service jobs partly to redirect money. The Lead exposure action fund spearheaded by OpenPhil is hopefully re-directing millions to a fantastic cause as we speak. I would love to see an analysis (might have missed it) which estimates the “cost-effectiveness” of redirecting a dollar into a 10x or 100x more cost-effective intervention, How much money/time would it be worth spending to redirect money this way? Also I'd like to get my head around how much might the working "cost-effectiveness" of an org improve if its budget shifted from 10% non-EA funding to 90% non- EA funding. There are obviously costs to roping in non-EA funding. From my own experience it often takes huge time and energy. One thing I’ve appreciated about my 2 attempts applying for EA adjacent funding is just how straightforward It has been – probably an order of magnitude less work than other applications.  Here’s a few practical ideas to how we could further redirect funds 1. EA orgs could put more effort into helping each other access non-EA money. This is already happening through the AIM cluster, but I feel the scope could be widened to other orgs, and co-ordination could be improved a lot without too much effort. I’m sure pools of money are getting missed all the time. For example I sure hope we're doing whatever we can through our networks to hel

Epistemic status: preliminary take, likely not considering many factors. I'm starting to think that economic development and animal welfare go hand in hand. Since the end of the COVID pandemic, the plant-based meat industry has declined in large part because consumers' disposable incomes declined (at least in developed countries). It's good that GFI and others are trying to achieve price parity with conventional meat. However, finding ways to increase disposable incomes (or equivalently, reduce the cost of living) will likely accelerate the adoption of meat substitutes, even if price parity isn't reached.

I think people working on animal welfare have more incentives to post during debate week than people working on global health. The animal space feels (when you are in it) very funding constrained, especially compared to working in the global health and development space (and I expect gets a higher % of funding from EA / EA-adjacent sources). So along comes debate week and all the animal folk are very motivated to post and make their case and hopefully shift a few $. This could somewhat bias the balance of the debate. (Of course the fact that one side of the debate feels they needs funding so much more is in itself relevant to the debate.) 

Applying my global health knowledge to the animal welfare realm, I'm requesting 1,000,000 dollars to launch this deep net positive (Shr)Impactful charity. I'll admit the funding opportunity is pretty marginal...   Thanks @Toby Tremlett🔹 for bringing this to life. Even though she doesn't look so happy I can assure you this intervention nets a 30x welfare range improvement for this shrimp, so she's now basically a human.

Cross-posting Georgia Ray's / @eukaryote's "I got dysentery so you don't have to," a fascinating read on participating in a human challenge trial.