All of Bella's Comments + Replies

Hey Sam — thanks for this really helpful comment. I think I will do this & do so at any future places I live with wool carpets.

This summary was helpful — I've tried a couple times to engage with the original paper but found it hard, whereas this was very readable & I now think I understand the main points at a basic level :)

(& let's not forget the fetal calves who are still gestating when their mothers go to slaughter. They're killed slowly, if they ever get purposefully slaughtered at all rather than just left to asphyxiate. Obviously, it's unclear whether they're conscious, but I've read accounts of them moving, opening eyes, trying to breathe, etc.).

Just adding: the discussion of dairy cows, here and elsewhere, tends to focus on the experience of the adult cattle & the suffering for them of being milked, deprived of their babies, etc.

But it's not implausible to me that the majority of the disvalue from dairy is in the lives of the calves born to dairy cows. In typical milk-producing operations, adult cows have 1 calf every 18 months or so; 50% of them are male, and so are killed within a few hours to a few months after birth.

(& these lives more likely to be net negative because they have less ... (read more)

The idea behind why eating babies is more likely to be net negative is that there's a shorter lifespan of positive experiences to balance out the terror and pain of death.

From my experience watching lots of slaughterhouse footage and reading accounts from workers, even the best humane conditions still involve, routinely, a (shorter or longer) period in which the animal goes through the process of dying. This is probably pretty bad. If they only lived for a few weeks before that, it's harder to imagine it's a good deal overall.

all aspects effective autism

Can't tell if joke or typo, but I enjoyed it either way

Hey Aidan!

I'm not sure — I didn't do this in this post/didn't have any plans to, mostly because I'm unsure how much our experiences would generalise to different contexts.

Performance of our ads within the same channel can vary by up to a couple orders of magnitude, so I'm just not sure how helpful it'd be for others.

That said, if you're considering a specific project, I'd probably be happy for me or one of my team to chat to you about it based on our experience?

As far as we can tell (e.g. by looking at metrics in the Google ads platform directly) this percentage viewed incorporates all ads served on YouTube (which is most, but not all of them).

Average percentage viewed was indeed a lot worse on other ad platforms :)

Hey Sasha!

Yes, we ran a bunch of ads to show the videos to new audiences.

I agree with you that organic growth would lead to more engagement in the form of likes and comments, and that it'd increase the credibility of the video in the eyes of viewers.

However, on balance I don't think it'd have been better overall to not promote these videos. (Of course, I could be wrong!)

There's two main reasons:

1. I think the videos would have been seen by many fewer people (& I think the videos have important ideas in them, so I'm excited for more people to watch them

This was cool to read — a number I didn't know! :D

cruxy essential, difficult consideration

'Crux' has a quasi-formal definition when used by EA/rat types. I think your definition might be good enough for navigating discussions where the word is used, but I think crux (as formally defined) is a cool/useful concept :)

Wow, thanks for drawing my attention to this (hadn't really considered it at all before).

My gut pessimistic instinct is that this'd be intractable to implement — at least in the US — because administering anaesthesia could perhaps be seen as an implicit admission of moral personhood. I also doubt anaesthesia would get much support from pro-life advocates, since they oppose abortions altogether.

I hope that I could be proven wrong about that, though. Maybe a good next step could be for someone to talk to some doctors who administer abortions & get a few reactions?

Two generically positive compliments (e.g. 'You're cool!' (not a real example))

A couple of items where someone I work with felt the form was the best medium by which to give some work-related feedback — they did actually de-anonymise, but it gave them a place to put their feedback which was a) accessible to nobody else and b) unobtrusive & didn't immediately prompt a conversation.

One person said words to the effect 'I thought you did a good job at [x public event where they saw me]'

One person commented on my social presence, in a slightly off-beat way that I think would have been hard/unlikely to say in person.

One person commented on someone I follow on Twitter.

This was a really great & informative report; thanks for your work here.

You're almost certainly already aware, but just in case you're not (since AFAICT you didn't mention it directly) there's a CE report on this topic!

(Edit: mentioning just because my first thought on reading this report was 'huh, I wonder if CE have considered recommending this idea to cofounders? If not, they probably should!')

Thanks — this was helpfully accessible to my not-very-mathsy brain!

I have a vague fear that this doesn't do well on the 'try not to have the main net effect be AI hypebuilding' heuristic.

At least for me, this is broken now :(

I think that's generally the picture I had, but I put some decent chance on people overcoming those kinds of barriers.

See e.g. https://scitechdaily.com/breakthrough-could-reduce-cultivated-meat-production-costs-by-up-to-90/ which seems in the category 'huge if true/generalisable'

Hey, thanks so much for replying in such detail — really appreciated! :)

(haha, yes, I had heard of some of the extra things you mentioned, but I think for someone just starting out they're really valuable to learn!!)

Hey, thanks for sharing! Are you up for sharing any more detail on the ads, for example:

• What targeting settings did you use on the ads?
• What creative (images/videos) did you use?
• What copy (text that goes in the ad) did you use?
• Did any of those do especially well?

Just on the face of it I find an increase of nearly 80% in a single year to be implausible, especially given that I'd imagine a ~doubling of demand for vegan products in the UK would come alongside increased investment, buzz, and new vegan retail lines.

(And even without that implausibly large jump, I'm skeptical of surveys for determining diet. For example, the Wikipedia article on vegetarianism by country lists Brazil and Mexico as the 2nd and 3rd highest % vegetarian in the world, when anecdotes from those populations — people I know + Google — suggest that's very far off.)

Hey! A little feedback on your feedback form (hehe):

I think it should include a space for open-ended comment (Anything else you want to mention?) and/or qualitative comments, as well as just ratings, for the things you're asking about.

Putting my qualitative comments here instead:

• I think the name is not very good — it sounds to me like a translation from another language, e.g. Japanese, and not like a phrase I would say as a native English speaker (I almost never say 'harmony'). It's also kind of long, and doesn't relate to what the product does.
• The curr

I signed up because of this post :) (I thought the time out from work was higher/GA was the only option)

That makes sense — I appreciate you doing that work & making calls about what to include; I bet there's a lot I'm missing!!

Ah, I wrote & meant 'a necessary condition for' — I hadn't misunderstood the argument in the way you're worried about in your second paragraph (but perhaps a useful clarification for anyone reading!)

My problem is I don't buy that 'any animal that is sentient would be motivated to play' — and ultimately I think the additional explanation you've provided here, about shared ancestry and neurophysiology, is interesting & releva... (read more)

Thanks for your summary!

I'll admit I didn't really follow the section 'sensation, sentition, and the ipsundrum' but the rest of it seems very weak, if any, evidence for the theory.

To pick one example: Why should I think sensory play is a necessary condition for sentience?

You could imagine a species which had all the neural architecture mammals & birds have, but had no limbs. I think we wouldn't observe it 'playing,' but I think Humphrey's theory still implies it's sentient.

What a nice idea! I'd buy this for a friend where I'd feel less comfortable making a donation in their name.

Question: What will you do with the un-redeemed vouchers?

In commerce, the company just keeps the money at a tidy profit. Would Effektiv Spenden just keep it?

Commenting to help out any other people confused by the mathematical notation, because I couldn't find this out with Google (but ChatGPT got it for me):

Expectation: In probability and statistics, 'E' is often used to denote the expected value of a random variable. For example, E(X) would represent the expected value of the random variable X.

(Of course, given that I didn't know that, I have no hope of following the entire post, but at least I now understand roughly what the claim is)

Hi! Thanks for this post and for your inspiring work :)

I think there might be a formatting issue with your 'impact per $' spreadsheet, where some of the columns and rows are misaligned, making it a little hard to read.

Also, a couple more questions about the model:

1. What is 'welfare module' (column H)?
2. How did you estimate that 50% of farmers would need to change their practices to comply?
3. How did you estimate that 50% of farms would comply with the standard?
4. Have you considered discounting for the fact that these certification schemes might have decided to

Thanks for replying & editing the OP — appreciate it! :D

I wonder if your third point about advertising might be a differentiating factor

Yeah — to my knowledge, we have the biggest team focused on outreach of any (single) EA organisation (3 FTE). I think this is probably a big part of it. 
 

...we’re not seeing a “normal level of growth”. While growth had generally been the norm pre-FTX, we’re now either seeing zero growth (EA forum metrics) or outright contraction (EA Funds donations/donors, EA.org intro page, EA newsletter).

I think that's fair... (read more)

Hey! I work at 80k doing outreach.

Thanks for your work here!

I think the data from 80k overall tells a bit of a different story.

Here’s a copy of our programmes’ lead metrics, and our main funnel metrics (more detailed). 

As you can see, some metrics take a dip in Q1 and Q2 2023: site visitors & engagement time, new newsletter subscribers, podcast listening time, and applications to advising. 

I’d like to say four things about that data: 

1. It seems pretty plausible to me that lower interest in EA due to the FTX crash is one (important) factor

Awesome, I got the UK ebook! I'm so excited to see this launched and I hope people love the book!

My favourite feature isn't on here at all, which is making yourself automatically unavailable during sessions/talks you've said you're going to!

This is so cool to see! Thanks for putting it together and for posting :)

Just an FYI, Week 11 refers to the 80,000 Hours career guide, but actually links to our key ideas series, which we've now stopped updating.

Thanks for sharing this — it feels like you really didn't "have to" in some sense, but I appreciated some of the insight into how the process is going and reading your learnings!

Thanks for your thoughtful comment, & thanks for providing some more explicit/concrete examples of the kind of thing you'd like to see more of — that was really helpful!

(And I hadn't read that article you linked before, or thought about the "missing middle" as a frame — thanks!)

I think I'm now more confident that I disagree with the argument you've laid out here.

The main reason is that I disagree with your claim that we'd be able to do more good by reviewing our methodology & de-emphasising neglectedness.

I basically just think neglectedness is real... (read more)

Hi! I enjoyed reading this; thanks for writing and posting it!

I'd make a tentative guess that many (most?) longtermists would totally agree with a ton of the substantive claims in this post — or at least I do — such as: 

• Substantive equality, as defined in this post, is the right way to think about equality
  • (Though I'll register that I personally find discussions about equality to often be pretty confusing/unhelpfully framed, when we don't agree on a) what quantities should be equal, b) how they're currently distributed, and c) and what it would look li

Are we worried beak trimming ban is net neg? Because of increased pecking/deaths from cannibalism & infected wounds.

Wow.

Banning CO2 slaughter and mutilations seems... way ahead of anything I would have guessed might happen soon. I would've guessed that at least a ban on dehorning is way outside the range of plausible things that would be done for animal welfare.

Nice, that helped clear this up for me!

I think there is a typo here:

(1-0.8)% of vaccinated and as yet uninfected people would be.

Should say:

(1-0.8)*x% of vaccinated and as yet uninfected people would be.

Right?

(else I'm still confused, heh.)

I'm confused — would someone mind explaining to me how the quoted numbers show 71-80% efficacy?

(Sorry I'm probably being mathematically illiterate here, but if it's a problem I have, maybe others will too!)

Hey Yonatan —I think the more relevant part of my post is the following, which hopefully answers your question? Let me know if it doesn't. 

There are some details I can't give because (as I said in the post) I don't have permission from the relevant people to talk about it publicly.

We can’t be sure how many additional people will change to a high-impact career as a result, in large part because we have found that “career plan changes” of this kind take, on average, about 2 years from first hearing about 80k. 

Still, our current best guess is t

This makes sense to me, but I don't think I provided anything in this post which you could easily use to compare to your project here.

How would you go about guessing whether the cost of what you were doing was higher or lower than that of 80k's outreach?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'using this as a baseline to compare other EA outreach efforts'? Is there some specific outcome metric you'd want to use as a baseline?

In general, I think what works best in outreach can be pretty context-specific, and I wouldn't recommend everything I've done to people with different goals & constraints.

Being more reluctant to do your own outreach after learning about this makes sense if you think there’s some optimal growth rate in EA which we are at or nearly at. If you learn that I’m doing lots of outreach, then it decreases the value of additional outreach (unless we are not yet at or near the optimal rate of growth).

Hey — thanks, yeah, I did try that at the time but IIRC it didn't fix the issue. However the issue fixed itself in the following couple days, so, not sure what happened but I'm not getting the error!

Tysm for looking into it!

Hey Cillian — thanks so much for a really thoughtful/detailed question! 

I'll take this one since I was the only staff member on marketing last year :)

The short answer is: 

• Marketing ramped up considerably over the second half of 2022. Web engagement time grew a lot more in the second half of 2022 as well — if we just compare Q3 &Q4 2020 and 2022, engagement time grew 50% (rather than 10%).
• But that still doesn't look like web engagement time rising precisely in step with marketing investment, as you point out!
  • We don't know all the reasons why,

Slaughter, probably.

(plus: no access to the outdoors; much larger-than-optimal social groups; separation from young/inability to raise young; handling & transportation to slaughter; problems arising from selective breeding for weight gain e.g. perpetual hunger, higher incidence of injuries like breast bone fractures)