All of DirectedEvolution's Comments + Replies

For me, palatability is about texture at least as much as taste. What I've found, unfortunately, is that even the best imitation meats, like beyond burgers, certain vegan sausages, and chick'n, are in the uncanny valley of meatlike textures. I agree with you that chicken is rather bland on its own, and if an imitation chicken could nail the texture, I would probably be fine crossing over.  Red meat supplies much of its own flavor, and beyond burger and its similars have yet to really approach either the texture or flavor.

I think vegan sausage might be... (read more)

I'm sure that it would be difficult to eliminate all unethical meat consumption, and I applaud you for trying before you went entirely veg*an. I don't have a very absolutist take on it. "Morally safe" is a relative term to me, and I don't feel like a moral disaster has occurred if I eat factory farmed meat once in a while. It's a bit like how I approached COVID safety: I will accept greater levels of harm/risk in order to enjoy a socially meaningful experience than I will in circumstances that are less meaningful. Similarly, I'll eat ethical meat at home a... (read more)

Based on your intro, I take it that you are one of the authors of the pain scale. It's been a while since I thought about this post, but I appreciate your info-dense comment, and given your apparent background I will take some time to read and think about it over the next week. It might be a bit before I can offer a substantive reply, but thank you for chiming in!

Overall I have been pleasantly surprised at how constructive this conversation has been, thanks to OP for creating space for it. Generally I find ethical discussion with EAs to be pleasant, but I had anticipated there might be an exception where veg*ism is concerned.

I would add one extra point, which is that while I do think that all of life's activities come into the scope of ethics, I think it's important to preserve space to make meaningful decisions without subjecting each one to conscious ethical deliberation. By analogy, sometimes we scrutinize all t... (read more)

Thanks for the information!

I'm curious, do you consider veganism more than "morally safe" if the meat-eater takes scrupulous care to source pasture raised and what we might call "artisanally slaughtered" meat and other animal products?

It kind of makes sense to me that veganism and being anti-abortion would go together - the points of view harmonize well. I personally have the opposite view, and think that both abortion and eating ethically raised meat are basically fine, even though many factory farming practices are apalling and there are probably some ca... (read more)

Yes, my partner keeps chickens in the backyard, so that's the only eggs I typically eat, and we are considering buying a meat freezer and ordering shares of pasture-raised livestock instead of buying at the supermarket. I tend to think that eating meat is more or less perfectly fine as long as the animal didn't suffer excessively during its life. I think that's less of a morally safe position than not eating meat at all. I'd personally like to see more consideration (not necessarily endorsement, just consideration) within the EA movement of pasture-raised/... (read more)

Good information and worth sharing.

I'm going to share some information about my meat-heavy diet, not because I'm trying to troll or distract from this post, but because I think there is value in trying to triangulate between the experiences of successful vegans and continued meat-eaters. The theme here is "refuting anti-vegan myths," and, on reflection, my resistance to becoming vegan comes from a different source, which I'll share in case anybody else has information that might be relevant.

I eat meat, and am currently dieting for the first time after ball... (read more)

Thanks for your thoughts!

I agree that more refined metrics would allow a better comparison between deaths from malaria in Africa and deaths from kidney disease in America.

A typical story for the latter is “a Black man close to retirement suddenly develops the symptoms of end-stage kidney disease and is put on dialysis. If he receives a kidney, he lives until his late 70s-early 80s in health comparable to if he hadn’t experienced kidney failure. If not, he declines and dies a few years later.” Kidney transplants typically give about 15 years of extra life b... (read more)

This is excellent, thank you very much for writing this all out. I really appreciate it. I'll reply with questions if they come up.

We can imagine many ways of specifying a pledge that is substantial and targeted at effective charities.

One example might be a pledge for which the fraction of income to be donated is itself a function of income (perhaps a 0% donation is called for if you make < $10,000/year, and a max of 50% is called for if you make > $100 million/year, with the % of income scaling in between these bounds). But that of course is much more than "10% of income."

How do you think on a meta-level about the tension between the need for simplicity and the risk of oversimplification in GWWC's messaging?

Part of GWWC's mission is to create a culture of giving, but as you note in comments, a huge proportion of your donations come from the wealthy. How helpful do you think it would be if we thought about creating cultures of giving, with a focus on the intersectional - considering the ways that income, race and ethnicity, religion, nationality, and so on intersect with habits of charitable giving?

How much does GWWC prioritize getting people to commit to the GWWC pledge specifically, as opposed to spreading earnest commitment to the twin ideas of:

1. Higher than normal levels of charitable giving?

2. Selecting recipients of charitable giving based on (secular) impact?

For example, if the result of GWWC's advocacy was convincing a profoundly religious person to donate more to their church's missionary activities, believing that this is the most effective way to save souls, would GWWC consider that a success?

What role(s) do you see GWWC playing in onboarding new people into EA? Are people finding GWWC's website as their first point of contact with EA, perhaps discovered via Google? Are they reading books like What We Owe The Future and finding it that way? Are they discovering GWWC after onboarding into EA some other way?

It seems to me like there are two somewhat common critical interpretations of the 10% GWWC pledge.

1. The idea that the standard is 10%, so anything less than that is a failure or not good enough.
2. The idea that although we only ask for a pledge of 10% of one's income, we are asking that 100% of pledger's charitable donations go specifically to effective charities - no room for donations to the arts, one's alma mater, etc.

Do you think that the 10% GWWC pledge is, in fact, often interpreted that way? If so, do you think there is any value in modifying the pledge ... (read more)

Thanks for finding that!

I am not clear on if that number is meant to be interpreted in terms of years or just as a unitless "moral weight" for comparison purposes. I am hesitant to compare it with QALYs or other metrics without knowing the units.

I don’t think there’s a substantive difference. It’s just counterfactual reasoning. If I give you penicillin that saves your life so you live to age 70 instead of dying at 25, did I just save or create 45 years of extra life for you? I think that is just a matter of word choice.

Interesting. That is not apparently taken into account in the $4500/life figure they publish which is based exclusively on deaths averted.

Hm interesting. It's plausible this is a way to avoid utility monsterization?

Like hypothetically, let's say an average high-income life is twice as enjoyable than a low-income life. If that were the case, then using cost-per-QALY might give an advantage to saving high-income lives - they were all set to have a fun life as a rich person until they happened to die from some disease. Whereas the low-income lives were going to have a miserable time anyway, so it "doesn't matter as much if they die." I am not endorsing this interpretation - just articulating what using QALYs might imply if we were to use them for comparison purposes.

I liked Lucretia's initial response quite a bit. For a small bit of context about my personal identity and background, I'm a hetero cis man who has witnessed severe problems with sexual abuse in the rat/EA and also in other subcultures over the last 10 years, and has had many conversations with women on these issues.

The following are just my thoughts. Their length, the number of conjunctions, and the fact that I'm a hetero cis man makes me a little bit anxious about posting them, even though I think they are a carefully thought-out and constructive contrib... (read more)

In fact, ignoring concerns about message complexity and not trying to be too fancy, I might suggest we eliminate any hard percentage standard in favor of a recommended % donation that scales with income. So somebody earning < $10,000-$20,000/year might be advised not to donate. Someone earning $80,000 might be asked to donate 10%. Someone earning $10,000,000/year might be asked to donate 90%. These are just rough numbers. But I think this might be better treated in book form or in tailored appeals to individual people. In the EA community I think it wou... (read more)

Hi Jason, thank you for your response.

To the extent "you should only donate to effective charities" is being conveyed in practice, it's not clear to me why deploying a 2/8 message is the most effective way to correct that mismessaging.

It's certainly not the most effective way in all circumstances. I think that, on a substantial the margin, a 2/8 message would be more effective in many circumstances. I think a sophistated EA take would be that the real goal is to find a substantial yet isustainable level of giving to effective causes, one that is tailored t... (read more)

Your link didn't get pasted properly. Here it is: Lawful Uncertainty.

For example, can I do better than just deferring to the “largest and smartest” expert group on “Might AI lead to extinction?” (which seems to be EA). Can I instead look at the arguments and epistemics of EAs versus, say, opposing academics and reach a better conclusion? (Better in the sense of “more likely to be correct”.) If so, how much and how should I do that in the details?

Deference is a major topic in EA. I am currently working on a research project simulating various models of deference.

So far, my findings indicate that deference is ... (read more)

Hi mhendric,

Thanks for your feedback! Researching and writing up my posts takes enough time that adding in individual zoom calls on top would be tough - I work full time. Maybe at some point?

I see two strains of EA criticism. The one you point out comes from EA’s ideological opponents. That doesn’t mean they are bad, wrong, or that their lives revolve around some sort of other political activism. It means that they have decided on a different organizing ideology for their worldview that generates conclusions incompatible with EA’s way of looking at a varie... (read more)

Update: based on analytics and timing, I now believe that there are one or two specific individuals (whose identities I don’t know) who are just strong-downvoting my posts without reading them.

While they may be doing this because they disagree with what they can glean of my conclusions from the intro, I do not consider this to be different from suppression of thought. I am not certain this is happening but it is the best explanation for the data I have at this time.

I continue to find the speed at which these posts accrue initial at least one initial early strong-downvote surprising and frustrating. Once again, I invite downvoters to articulate their disagreement in a comment. Based on analytics, I know it is one of the first 6 readers, and that they spent less than 5 minutes on this 11 minute article. I precommit to responding with a "thanks for your feedback" or something more positive and thoughtful than that.

I hope you will join me for further discussion and debate in my next post, where I dig in deeper to some of the objections you raised here!

As one additional note, first, thank you for linking to the survey about people's familiarity with EA. Although I think it is probably useful evidence, and am extremely supportive of attempts to gather such evidence in general, one of my immediate concerns is that the data was gathered in April 2022.

This means the results predate both Will MacAskill's high-profile publicity tour for What We Owe The Future as well as the downfall of FTX. My guess is that the number of people who have heard of Effective Altruism has increased substantially since then. The Ne... (read more)

Yes, I have tentative plans to conduct some interviews and MTurk surveys as a cheap and easy way to gather more empirical information. I don't think these will resolve the question, but hopefully they will continue to elevate the discussion with critique that is less focused on convenience sampling and ad hoc interpretation by a potentially motivated debater (which is how I would criticize the quality of the evidence I present here).

That makes sense, and thank you for providing that context for your vote. Part of the challenge here is that our differences seem to be the result of more than one belief, which makes it challenging to parse the meaning of upvotes and agreevotes.

Thank you Isaac. Based on this post's more positive reception, I'm more inclined to update in favor of your view.

Hi mhendric. First, thank you for your continued engagement and criticism - it sharpens my own thinking and encourages me to continue. I will respond in greater depth to some of the critiques you've made here in my next post.

Briefly:

• My wording obviously has been muddy. My proposal is not a mandatory 2%-to-fuzzies-causes pledge, but a 10% pledge of which 80% is allocated to effective causes and 20% is explicitly to whatever cause the donor is passionate about. This discretionary 20%-of-the-10% (i.e. 2% of annual income) could also go to effective causes, bu

Thank you for your response.

I completely agree that earning to give and the GWWC pledge are conceptually distinct. Ideally, anyone dealing with these ideas would treat them as such.

Where I disagree with you is that my post is conceptually 'conflating' these two ideas. Instead, my post is identifying that a bundle of associated ideas, including the GWWC pledge and earning to give, are prominent parts of EA's reputation.

Here is an analogy to the point I am making:

• When people think of engineering, they think of math, chemicals and robots.
• When people think of

To readers of this post, I would like to note that a small number of people on the forum appear to be strong-downvoting my posts on this subject shortly after they are published. I don't know specifically why, but it is frustrating.

For those of you who agree or disagree with my post, I hope you will choose to engage and comment on it to help foster a productive discussion. If you are a person who has chosen to strong-downvote any of the posts in this series, I especially invite you to articulate why - I precommit that my response will be somewhere between "thank you for your feedback" and something more positive and engaged than that.

See my new post for a partial response to this portion of your argument:

Firstly, I don't see any benefit from the proposal.  I don't think the 10% norm forms a major part of EA's public perception, so I don't believe tweaking it would make any difference.  If anything 2%/8% makes it more weird (not least because it no longer matches the tithing norm).  You haven't made any compelling argument for the reputational advantage to be gained either here or in your previous post, yet alone that this is the most effective way of gaining reputation.

See my new post for a partial response to this portion of your argument:

I'm not really seeing a dire need for this proposal. 10% effective donations has brand recognition and is a nice round number, as you point out. It is used by other groups, such as religious groups, making it easy to re-funnel donations to e.g. religious communities to effective charities. This leaves 90% of your income at your disposal, part of which you may spend on fuzzy causes. It does not seem required to me to change the 10% to allow for fuzzy donations, nor do I think there's a

Although you are right that modesty (or deference) often outperforms one's own personal judgment, this isn't always the case. Results below are based on Monte Carlo simulations I haven't published yet.

Take the case of a crowd estimating a cow's weight. The members of the crowd announce their guesses sequentially. They adopt a uniform rule of D% deference, so that each person's guess is a weighted average of a sample from a Normal distribution centered on the cow's true weight, and of the current crowd average guess:

Guess_i = D*(Crowd average) + (1-D)*(Dire... (read more)

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. Based on your comment and others, I am going to focus my next post in this series on how I think about movement reputation in general, including some specific replies to your points here. Just flagging that lack of a substantive reply here is because I'm going to write a full-scale post on the subject, hopefully over the next few days.

That makes sense. I don't think there are any official prerequisites to being an EA, but there are community norms. I think the GWWC pledge (or a direct-work equivalent) is a common-enough practical or aspirational norm that I'm comfortable with eliding EA and GWWC-adjacent-EA for the purposes of this post, but I acknowledge you'd prefer to split these apart for a sensible reason.

I'd guess donating for warm fuzzies is generally an ineffective way to gain influence/status.

As a simple and costless way to start operationalizing this disagreement, I claim that if I ask my mom (not an EA, pretty opposed to the vibe) if she'd like EA better with a 2%/8% standard, she'd prefer it and say that she'd think warmly of a movement that encouraged this style of donating. I'm only sort of being facetious here - I think having accurate models about how to build reputation for the movement are important and that EAs need a way to gather evidence and update.

My post is related to the Giving What We Can pledge and the broad idea of focusing on "utilons, not fuzzies." From the wording of your comment I'm unclear on whether you're unfamiliar with these ideas or whether you are just taking this as an opportunity to say that you disagree with them. If you don't think that standards like the GWWC pledge are good for EA, then what do you think about the 2%/8% norm I propose here as a better alternative, even if far suboptimal to no pledge at all?

Roughly, I think the community isn't able (isn't strong enough?) to both think much about how it's perceived and think well or in-a-high-integrity-manner about how to do good, and I'd favor thinking well and in a high-integrity manner.

Just want to flag that I completely disagree with this, and that moreover I find it bewildering that in EA and rationalism this seemingly passes almost as a truism.

I think we can absolutely think both about perceptions and charitable effectiveness - their tradeoffs, how to get the most of one without sacrificing too much of t... (read more)

I would not be surprised if this small cohort of volunteers accelerated the pace of getting to this result by a year or more. I'm not going to take a chance on plugging in numbers, but that's a lot of lives saved per volunteer. While most of the badass points/moral credit goes to the people who received the jab, we should also feel proud of the people who were lined up behind them ready to endure the same.

Yes it does, thank you for the added context!

That makes sense! Thank you.

I have a second question. You compared before/after intervention malaria rates for the treated vs. control districts, and found that the multiplier was 52.5% lower in the treated areas. Do we have information on how this compares to historical data? Also, were the districts randomly selected for the treatment vs. control group, or was it chosen on a convenience basis?

I am thinking about the possibility that the treated and control districts may have significantly different base rates of malarial increase at the seasonal time points chosen for the before an... (read more)

This looks like excellent work, a very logical intervention and where you’ve put a lot of effort into putting together the data to attract serious funding for a scale-up.

One thing I would like to know: in urban areas, I presume access to medical care is higher, and so I am wondering whether the death rate, as well as incidence, may be lower. I see that you achieved a 52% reduction in cases, and I am wondering if you have data, or will be gathering data, on the effect on deaths due to malaria?

I have also encountered deletionism. When I was improving the aptamer article for a good article nomination, the reviewer recommended splitting a section on peptide aptamers into a separate article. After some thinking, I did so. Then some random editor who I’d never interacted with before deleted the whole peptide aptamer article and accused me of plagiarism/copying it from someplace else on the internet, and never responded to my messages trying to figure out what he was doing or why.

It’s odd to me because the Foreign Dredge Act is a political issue, whi... (read more)

That hasn’t been entirely my experience. In fact, when I made the page for the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly others jumped in to improve on my basic efforts - it was clearly a case of just needing the page to exist at all before it started getting the attention it deserved.

By contrast, I’ve found that trying to do things like good article nominations, where you’re trying to satisfy the demands of self-selected nonexpert referees, can be frustrating. The same is true for trying to improve pages already getting a lot o... (read more)