All of benleo's Comments + Replies

I think this is a great idea. I agree that it is much easier to shift giving within a cause area than between cause areas. 

I do wonder if there are ways to build in cross-causal giving using this platform. For example, I am curious whether the giving multiplier mechanism would be an effective way to achieve both 1) increased effectiveness within climate change donations and 2) substitute some donations to other cause areas. However, I would be hesitant to include this straight away, but if the EEA EF gets momentum it is something to consider. 

Als... (read more)

1
Michael Noetel
7mo
Thanks for the support Ben. I love what giving multiplier are doing and we entertained the idea down here but we have more restrictive charity regranting laws down here. My understand is that giving multiplier can basically just forward re-grants to the donor's target, but our read of the Aussie legislation is that we'd need to formally partner with every charity that a donor would want to choose. Our strategy for marketing to non-EAs is to partner with Giving Green to support a Manager of Climate Giving for Giving Green Australia. Basically, we work closely with Jack who's job is to both evaluate Australian options but also to market and fundraise around effective climate giving in Australia. We're also planning to hire a fundraiser and marketer for EAA.

Thanks for posting this, I have a few questions. 

Do you have any other metrics besides visiting the website? Is there a link such as "learn more about veganism" that you can track? 

Besides anecdotes, do you have evidence/data that the "dog meat" intervention works better than other interventions?

I do worry that while shock value may work for some people, it could push other people further away from veganism (especially if they felt deceived). But, I am unsure how serious (or important) this concern is. 

1
Benny Smith
9mo
Great questions! Allied Scholars doesn't run the dog meat website, that's Molly Elwood. I'm not sure what kinds of metrics she has for that. We haven't collected rigorous data on engagement, but I'm very enthusiastic about people doing that kind of thing. There have been a few studies over the years suggesting that leafletting doesn't really work (see ACE and Faunalytics), but I suspect there are lots of potential outreach tactics that work much better than leafletting. For example, Faunalytics found that showing people factory farming footage has a meaningful impact on behavior and attitudes around pork. I'd love to see Faunalytics or other orgs study a broader variety of outreach tactics – I think there's a risk that people see a study saying "leafletting doesn't work" and conclude that vegan outreach in general is a lost cause. This is something I plan to write more about later this summer. Anecdotally, when I've done standard vegan leafletting (with a sign that says "Why Aren't You Vegan Yet?") less than 1% of passerby engaged at all. With the dog meat stand, it felt more like 10%, though the number could easily be higher or lower and I'd have to actually keep track to know for sure. There's always a risk of pushing people away, but IMO this can mostly be mitigated if the organizers are nice to people in conversation.

I'm also impressed by this post. HLI's work has definitely shifted my priors on wellbeing interventions. 

We strive to be maximally philosophically and empirically rigorous. For instance, our meta-analysis of cash transfers has since been published in a top academic journal. We’ve shown how important philosophy is for comparing life-improving against life-extending interventions. We’ve won prizes: our report re-analysing deworming led GiveWell to start their “Change Our Mind” competition. Open Philanthropy awarded us money in their Cause

... (read more)

The reference classes I look at generate a prior for AGI control over current human resources anywhere between 5% and 60% (mean of ~16-26%).

 

Thanks for this Zach. I found it quite thought provoking, especially the quoted sentence. 

 

Based on your model,  AGI controlling human resources is much more likely to occur than extinction. Given that, what events do you think we should be worried about with losing autonomy over resources (and potentially institutions) and are you more concerned about that after this work? 

I take 5%-60% as an estimate of how much of human civilization's future value will depend on what AI systems do, but it does not necessarily exclude human autonomy. If humans determine what AI systems do with the resources they acquire and the actions they take, then AI could be extremely important, and humans would still retain autonomy.

I don't think this really left me more or less concerned about losing autonomy over resources. It does feel like this exercise made it starker that there's a large chance of AI reshaping the world beyond human extinction. ... (read more)

Here is a paper by Steve Levitt that argues that for people who are having difficulty making a decision (quitting your job, ending a relationship etc), those that do make a change are happier 6 months later. 

 

Here is an open access earlier version of the working paper. 

Participants donated their own money. They received a bonus of £1 and could choose how much of it they wanted to keep or donate. 

This is a fantastic idea. Congratulations to all involved. 

Out of curiosity, does GD have any data on whether other religions donate a portion of their tithe/tzdaka/etc to GD? 

3
Jason
1y
From the perspective of a Christian who (more or less) tithes to secular global health charities, it would be challenging to figure this out unless you asked donors outright whether they were acting in accordance with a religious teaching about tithing / believed in tithing and were counting the donation toward their tithe.

This is fantastic news!

As an experimental economist, I hope this has spillovers to our field (as well as others).  

At the feedback level (referee reports, presentations etc), I believe there is significantly more value to be gained when discussing the experimental design itself before any data is collected. 

Congrats to Hauke, Chris, and all others involved.

Thanks Catherine. We just used the platform Prolific for subject recruitment.

Thanks David, that would be great! I'll check to see if there is a way to run it on STATA, but if not I can just run it on R. 

In experiment 1, condition on them donating they actually donated significantly less in the Moral Demandingness condition (but this didn't replicate in E2). 

Can you DM me about the model, I am happy to run that analysis. We ran mean equivalence tests to provide evidence of the bounds of the null result, but I believe what you are suggesting is quite different.  

In experiment 1, condition on them donating they actually donated significantly less in the Moral Demandingness condition (but this didn't replicate in E2). 

Can you DM me about the model, I am happy to run that analysis. We ran mean equivalence tests to provide evidence of the bounds of the null result, but I believe what you are suggesting is quite different.  

3
david_reinstein
1y
'Conditional on positive' results are less reliable because of the potential for differential selection, but that is still a bit interesting. (But it could be e.g., 'bigger push to get people to donate means you attract less interested people on average, so they respond with smaller amounts.) The equivalence testing is close to what I meant (do you want to expand on/link those), but no, not quite the same. Quickly, what I had in mind is a 'Bayesian regression'. You input a model, priors over all parameters (perhaps 'weakly informative' priors centered at a 0 effect) and you can then compute the posterior belief for these parameters. R's BRMS package is good for this. Then you can report 'what share of the posterior falls into each of the categories I mentioned below'. I'll try to follow up on this more specifically, and perhaps share some code.

Thanks Scott, that's a really good point. 

One of the variables we thought about manipulating was "who is the demand coming from"? The use of language here "I", "We" and other expressions could easily make a difference (social norms are usually presented in terms of "X% of people believe").

 Unfortunately, we didn't have the budget to test whether how much of a difference (if any) this made. It would definitely be worth following up on if we were able to get the funding. 

2
Jack Lewars
1y
This is my intuition as well - the phrasing of the 'strong demandingness' seemed quite jarring compared to the usual language of donation page copy.

Thanks Ariel. That's a great question. 

We checked a number of different correlations cross both studies, including altruistic type, how utilitarian they are, guilt, how manipulated they felt, agreeableness, and a number of demographic characteristics including religion. 

We didn't find anything in our regression analysis that stood out. However, we reported everything in the appendix, which can be accessed in the paper. Alternatively, I can send it to you. 

I guess another question is who is the obligation coming from? In our experiments it wa... (read more)

In that case, a better title would probably be something like "Tell people why they should donate, not that they  morally obligated to."* 

I had a strong prior that telling people they were morally obligated to donate would not have a positive effect and if anything backfire. So I have actually updated a bit in the other direction regarding the backfire effect. 

However, given we have evidence that moral demandingness  didn't produce any positive outcomes, I would currently tell people not to use them and instead stick to moral arguments ... (read more)

2
david_reinstein
1y
But you don’t want to imply that the morally demanding argument backfired either. Donations were higher in the morally demanding case, no? So we should update our beliefs in that direction I think, even if you don’t have statistical power to “rule out” that this difference was due to chance. Can you tell us: in a simple bayesian updating model what is the ~ posterior probability that the strong moral demandingness condition performed * equal or worse than the regular moral argument * no more than 10% better * more than 10% better (1- the last thing) * more than 20% better ?
3
Nathan Young
1y
You can change the title, though I actually think I was being a bit snotty to pull you up on it.

That's very fair! I'm not familiar with the norms for EA Forum title posts. What do you think a better title would be? 

5
Nathan Young
1y
I guess something that summarises your research results. But also I genuinely want your expert view on this. Should we? I guess not, right?

Now I really want to call it EaE(con)^2

8
Brian Jabarian
2y
haha, EAEconomicsAssociation: EA^2

Thanks for sharing your proposal Michael. The institute looks great. Finding ways to incentivise replication is something I consider to be really important. 

A couple of questions. I am curious what probability you would place on the Institute significantly increasing acceptances of replications in top journals? More abstractly, I wonder if a dedicated instituted could help  change social norms in academia around replication. Do you have any thoughts about this? 

Lastly, did you receive any feedback from FTX? 

2
Michael_Wiebe
2y
I'm not sure if top journals would publish replications. They seem to get prestige from publishing original research, but maybe if replication was higher status, they would do it. I mainly see the benefit of systematic replication in inducing researchers to improve the quality of their research, so we'd actually see fewer negative replications. (Another issue is that only negative replications are 'interesting'.) I think changing norms is possible. A lot of journals now have a data editor who ensures 'push-button' reproducibility: the data and code are available, and you can run a script that produces all of the results in the paper. This is a big improvement over 10-15 years ago when code wasn't available, or didn't reproduce results. I didn't get any feedback from FTX.

Interesting. I wonder if the mechanism is similar to making a donation when there is matching. As in, people think they are giving more money to the cause because their donation is 'doubled'.  By providing matching funds they might believe they are going to bring more money in. Alternatively, if they see GM as a public good itself (and like this idea), they have some preference to fund it for that sake. 

Would love to know more about this! 

Congratulations Lucius, these are pretty amazing results. I am quite surprised that on the extensive margin 38% of people contributed to the matching system. What were your priors about contributions and did this also surprise you? 

5
Lucius Caviola
2y
Yes, it was initially quite surprising that so many donors are willing to support the matching system. We found similar results when we tested it with MTurk participants (who were given a small bonus which they could give or keep; see Study 7). One possibility is that it's a kind of intergenerational reciprocity tendency, where people who benefited from the generosity of previous donors want to pay it forward to the next ones.

I had the same intuition as RhysSouthan that most people who acquire the second vote in a Demeny voting structure would use the two votes for the same party/candidate/policy . I think an important facet here is that the salience of the vote being for the 'future generation' may nudge people on the margin to use both votes for the policy/party that best benefits the future generation, whereas without receiving the second vote they may not have voted this way. The Kochi University of Technology Research Institute of Future Design have some papers t... (read more)

5
MichaelA
4y
One concern with that system that came to my mind is the possibility that explicitly assigning one vote for a person's own use and one for a person's use on behalf of future generations could make the idea of voting in a more self-interested/short-termist way more salient, as well as making it seem more acceptable, or even like it's the norm that they're being encouraged to follow. It seems like it might therefore make people more likely to use "their own" vote in a more self-interested/short-termist way (which could just cancel out the increased longtermism of people's "second votes", rather than making things worse overall). But that's entirely speculative, and seems to me somewhat less likely than Demeny Voting causing people to (a) just vote twice for what they would've voted for anyway, (b) use "their own" vote like they would've anyway but their "second" vote in more longtermist way, or (c) use both votes in a more longtermist way. But it still seems like that's a concern worth investigating. (It's possible it's been investigated already - I haven't read any of the linked papers.)