It's not about the current spending it's about the overall system of allocation. Currently our political economy has implemented a system where some people accumulate billions of dollars in private wealth. I've seen people in the EA-sphere and beyond defend this system on the basis of effective philanthropy. So I made a post evaluating this claim and found it lacking. My hope is that people will now either stop, or find a new defense for why this is the best we can do (well, I say 'hope', but that might be gone by now).

ITN framework? This is post is not a proposal for a cause area, it's an analysis of whether Billionaire Philanthropists are effective. If someone says 'but the government is bigger' then that doesn't really change the evaluation.
Same for two, we can't assume that billionaire philanthropy is effective if we haven't even compared it to the other options. So I'm making an inductive claim that, given the demonstrated problems with billionaire philanthropy and given that there are many other options out there, it seems reasonable to assume that something else is actually 'the most good we can do'.

Hi Ben, thanks for reading

I included these common counterarguments to show that they don't really address the issue.
Argument 1 isn't relevant. It does get used all the time, but it's a whataboutism at best.
Argument 2 is a false dilemma. It might be true that billionaire philanthropy is better than government programs (although while I've often seen it being asserted, I've never actually seen it demonstrated), but even if we grant that it doesn't matter because those two aren't our only options, it's a false dilemma.

$2.5k for general families (more than one person), $737 for the mean individual American, so even lower for the median. I think that holds.

I also think that if poorer people indeed give a higher proportion to church, this is probably because you're expected to give a certain amount to your local church that does not scale linearly with your wealth (e.g. a billionaire that goes to church is also expected to place a couple bills in the jar, and not e.g. give them some gold bars). If that's the case that would mean that the wealthy give a lower proportion by ... (read more)

But the tag has changed

The tag has not changed, they have explicitly closed it (see their site) and I don't think those three links count as examples since it's not targeted at reform (nor general immigration), but even if they did, it's still much lower than it used to be. They never told us why they closed it (which is annoying in itself) but the writing was already on the wall a year earlier with them saying:

We have never had a clear theory of how to change the political economy to be supportive of substantially larger immigration flows, which is what w

Thanks for the comment, that seems like a strange null hypothesis to me but alright. My earlier aversion to commenting on the EA forum has borne out again, so I'm going to stop commenting now.

if you want to have true beliefs about how to improve the world, economics can provide a bunch more useful insights than other parts of the social sciences

Source?

EDIT: I'm getting downvoted for asking for a source on a controversial claim? Why? Why does the heterodox EA have to cite dozens of academic sources and still get more downvotes than someone just asserting an academically controversial (but orthodox within EA) claim without a citation or justification? Why does asking for one generate downvotes?

If it was literally 2 we couldn't do statistics, but say it was the same ratio but one we could do statistics on, e.g. 1000.000 vs 2000, I would say this research is valid. If it was just about citations it would be a problem, but what's being polled there is opinions on interdisciplinary research, so it's about attitude towards working with other disciplines in general.

If a higher percentage of (a quantitatively smaller number of) political scientists think working with other disciplines is better, whereas a lower percentage of (a quantitatively higher nu... (read more)

I've already responded to Larks on this

The first (by Fourcade et al) is about percentage not absolute numbers, so this is direct evidence of economists preferring to stay insular. Same for the one about citations in flagship journals. We can see that both the number of papers and the number of citations in economics is indeed higher, however it's so minor (still within the same order of magnitude), while the differences are so large (more than an order of magnitude) that the trend still remains. Similar for the Angris et al one (also, I don't know where you got these numbers from... the bureau ... (read more)

I'm not knocking economics as a field otherwise I wouldn't study/write about economics, I'm knocking overrelying on simple economic models to the detriment of a complete picture. That's why I cite evidence of simple economic models failing (which are obviously published in economic journals) and talk about the value that other disciplines can bring. If you think my citing is bad, perhaps you'd like to present some better sources?

Hi David,

I don't like commenting on the EA Forum given the karma-system's distortionary effect, so your chances of getting a response are much higher if you use substack/reddit/DM/email/any-other-medium. However, since you addressed me directly I'm not going to be so impolite as to ignore you, so I'll give it a go.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I have one that meets all these requirements. I linked Jason Hickel's "The Divide", which is probably the closest, but it's been half a decade since I read it. Given that  1: I have trouble remembering what I even... (read more)

My complaint was the incentive structure:

Not necessarily because you want to, but just because that's how the system is set up.

I used a personal example, but the complaint was about people being incentivized to  downvote (past and future) stuff by the outgroup while upvoting the ingroup, whether or not it's "mass" voting:

it incentivizes detractors to go back and downvote your other stuff as well. [...]

So if you want the forum to remain dominated by your ingroup, better upvote your ingroup's posts/comments

which I then expanded on with examples like:

If

I don't believe that is true for admins

They literally say so:

Voting activity is generally private (even admins don't know who voted on what), but if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting (e.g. by mass-downvoting many of a different user's comments and posts), we reserve the right to check what account is doing this.

That's why I said:

Voting is anonymous, so unless you "mass" vote it will remain undetected.

The examples I gave --downvoting based on opinion not content, downvoting based on ideology, upvoting your ingroup, upvo... (read more)

Are all the voting theorists on the 'disagree' side or is there a voting theorist on the 'agree' side I don't know about?

Do you post on the EA subreddit?  Everyone's vote power is equal there:

Yes, I do post there. It's...fine. I don't exactly love it, but it at least doesn't give me an active feeling of disgust every time I use it (which the forum does).

Retributive downvoting appears to be a bannable offense, according to the forum guide:

This is unenforceable. In fact that whole section is unenforceable:

Additionally, please avoid: 

• Asking your friends or coworkers to vote on a post, especially if you might be biased (e.g. because the post is criticizing your work, o

Not only that, it incentivizes detractors to go back and downvote your other stuff as well. When I was coming out against HBD, older things I had written also got downvoted (and I lost voting power).
This doesn't make sense on other forums but here it's perfectly reasonable since with karma you're not just deciding "how good is this post/comment?" but also "who gets voting power?". So if you want the forum to remain dominated by your ingroup, better upvote your ingroup's posts/comments while downvoting everything by the outgroup. Not necessarily because you... (read more)

Are you an EU citizen? If so, please sign this citizen’s initiative to phase out factory farms (this is an approved EU citizen’s initiative, so if it gets enough signatures the EU has to respond):
stopcrueltystopslaughter.com

It also calls for reducing the number of animal farms over time, and introducing more incentives for the production of plant proteins.

(If initiatives like these interest you, I occasionally share more of them on my blog)

EDIT: If it doesn't work, try again in a couple hours/days. The collection has just started and the site may be overlo... (read more)

Hi Arturo,

You might be interested in this graph, from me and Jobst's paper: "Should we vote in non-deterministic elections?"

It visualizes the effective power groups of voters have in proportion to their percentage of the votes. So for most winner-takes-all systems (conventional voting systems) it is a step function; if you have 51% of the vote you have 100% of the power (blue line).
Some voting systems try to ameliorate this by requiring a supermajority; e.g. to change the constitution you need 2/3rds of the votes. This slows down legislation and also doesn... (read more)

and they seem to be down on socialism, except maybe some non-mainstream market variants.

I did try to find a survey for sociology, political science, and economics, not only today but also when I was writing my post on market socialism (I too wondered whether economists are more in favor of market socialism), but I couldn't really find one. My guess is that the first two would be more pro-socialism and the last more anti, although it probably also differs from country to country depending on their history of academia (e.g. whether they had a red scare in ac... (read more)

Let me try to steelman this:

We want people to learn new things, so we have conferences where people can present their research. But who to invite? There are so many people, many of whom have never done any studies.
Luckily for us, we have a body of people that spend their lives researching and checking each other's research: Academia. Still, there are many academics, and there's only so many time slots you can assign before you're filled up; ideally, we'd be representative.
So now the question becomes: why was the choice made to spend so many of the limited ... (read more)

For one thing, I'm not sure if I want to concede the point that it is the "maximally truth-seeking" thing to risk that a community evaporatively cools itself along the lines we're discussing.

Another way to frame it is through the concept of collective intelligence. What is good for developing individual intelligence may not be good for developing collective intelligence.

Think, for example, of schools that pit students against each other and place a heavy emphasis on high-stakes testing to measure individual student performance. This certainly motivates peo... (read more)

eventually SJP-EA morphs into bog-standard Ford Foundation philanthropy

This seems unlikely to me for several reasons, foremost amongst them that they would lose interest in animal welfare. Do you think that progressives are not truly invested in it, and that it's primarily championed by their skeptics? Because the data seems to indicate the opposite.

I appreciate what Rutger Bregman is trying to do, and his work has certainly had a big positive impact on the world, almost certainly larger than mine at least. But honestly, I think he could be more rigorous. I haven't looked into his 'school for moral ambition' project, but I have read (the first half) of his book "humankind", and despite vehemently agreeing with the conclusion, I would never recommend it to anyone, especially not anyone who has done any research before.

There seems to be some sort of trade-off between wide reach and rigor. I noticed a si... (read more)

A bit strong, but about right. The strategy the rationalists describe seems to stem from a desire to ensure their own intellectual development, which is, after all, the rationalist project. By disregarding social norms you can start conversing with lots of people about lots of stuff you otherwise wouldn't have been able to. Tempting, however, my own (intellectual) freedom is not my primary concern; my primary concern is the overall happiness (or feelings, if you will) of others, and certain social norms are there to protect that.

Here's one data point; I was consistently in the top 25 on metaculus for a couple years. I would never attend a conference where a "scientific racist" gave a talk.
 

I quit. I'm going to stop calling myself an EA, and I'm going to stop organizing EA Ghent, which, since I'm the only organizer, means that in practice it will stop existing.

It's not just because of Manifest; that was merely the straw that broke the camel's back. In hindsight, I should have stopped after the Bostrom or FTX scandal. And it's not just because they're scandals; It's because they highlight a much broader issue within the EA community regarding whom it chooses to support with money and attention, and whom it excludes.

I'm not going to go to any E... (read more)

Hi Melvin, wonderful work!

Similar to you, I also want to bring about systemic change for animals (see e.g. animal welfare is now enshrined in the Belgian constitution). One problem people like us face is that the EA framework doesn't really gel with it. My group couldn't get any funding from EA, even though we have a decades long track record with things like:

• Legal prohibition of the sale of dogs and cats in public marketplaces.

• The closure of several markets where animals suffered routine and abject abuse (due to hidden camera investigations)

• The prohibit

For those voting in the EU election and general elections in Belgium, here's an overview of the party positions when it comes to animal welfare:

(For more details, click this link)

✅ means more in favor    ❌ means more against

Federal election (Flanders):

Federal election (Walloon):

*A million pounds if we round down, not to mention it could've been much more if it was invested.
The venue is not the biggest cost of those EAG events, since you also need to pay for things like travel grants, catering, equipment... This also doesn't establish that buying it is better than renting. Not that it matters, the only thing listed on the Wytham Abbey website is a grand total of eleven workshops.
Even if you don't want to give the money to animals or the developing world, and even if you don't want to invest the money to have more to give later, an... (read more)

Inside Wytham Abbey, the £15 Million Castle Effective Altruism Must Sell [Bloomberg]

From the article:

Effective Ventures has since come to a settlement with the FTX estate and paid back the $26.8 million given to it by FTX Foundation. [...] It’s amid such turmoil that Wytham Abbey is being listed on the open market for £15 million [...]

Adjusted for inflation, the purchase price of the house two years ago now equals £16.2 million. [...] The listing comes as homes on the UK’s once-hot country market are taking longer to sell, forcing some owners to offer disc

But how is public ownership of firms compatible with ownership of firms being exchanged on markets?

Because governments can trade. E.g., if the governments of the Netherlands and Germany are looking to sell some firms they own, and the governments of Belgium and Luxembourg are giving competing offers to buy those firms, we have a market without the firms being privately owned.

Good post.

Economics is completely bankrupt as a science

His thesis still irritates me. Lukeprog claims philosophers are doing shoddy work, and he can e.g. solve meta-ethics all by himself. He starts writing his meta-ethics sequence and it has just the basic intro stuff, but nonetheless since he claimed he could solve it, it gets promoted to one of the few curated sequences on Less Wrong. And then he just...stops, he never gets even close to solving meta-ethics and it remains in the Less Wrong curated sequences. It's been 6 years since the last post Lukeprog... (read more)

How do you have capital markets without private capital?

If the capital is not privately owned (private property) but rather socially owned, for example public property (owned by a state entity), collective property (owned by a collective),  cooperative property (owned by a co-op), etc...

Hi Vasco,

Thanks for notifying me, it's probably because the EA forum switched editors (and maybe also compression algorithm) a while back. I remember struggling with adding images to the forum in the beginning, and now it's easy.

I looked at some old posts and it seems like those that used .png and .jpg still displayed them, so people don't need to check up on their old posts. I looked at older comments and both .jpg and .png still work from three years back. I also found an .png in a comment from five years back. Hopefully this helps the devs with debuggin... (read more)

removing important parts of one's body

I mean it's not an important body part, you can live perfectly well with only one kidney, which is why I'm giving it away. If by some cruel twist of fate I do end up needing another kidney, I'll be on the top of the recipient list thanks to my donation.

I think you might be influenced a lot by your feelings

Of course I am, empathy is a feeling after all. I don't see why this is a reason to not do it.

wait a few years after you have graduated and you have a comfortable, stable income

I will not do the procedure during the s... (read more)

• I don't think we can just equate 15 QALY's to 15 DALY's, these are different metrics. I tried to find a converter online but it looks like there is no consensus on how to do that.
• Additional benefits of making someone an EA include: doing part-time/volunteer work (e.g. currently everyone at effectief geven is a volunteer), and them making other people EAs (spreading the generated expected QALY's further).
• Same things could be said for veganism, which is less likely with a one time donation since people don't make that part of their identity. But the cost-eff

I already give everything, except what's required for the bare living necessities, away. The analysis is warranted seeing as the cost-effectiveness is so high (see other comment) and analyzing which intervention is higher impact is just a general ethical/EA practice, even when we aren't talking about ~15 QALYs

EDIT: This is not as impressive as it seems at first glance. I'm a student so I only buy cheap things anyways (which means I get a modest-proposal-esque thought every time e.g. This 30 dollar jacket costs as much as curing one person of blindness). We... (read more)

Hi Vasco,

I already do work for an animal welfare organization. I looked at the study and it's not about Belgian hospitals, so it doesn't really apply to me. Some of the listed costs aren't present (I don't have a wage so no wage loss), those that are present are mostly paid for by the state (travel, accommodation, medical...) and those that aren't are paid for by my parents (housework). The only one that applies is "Small cash payments for grocery items (eg, tissue paper)" which is negligible, so the expected DALY per dollar is extremely high.

In Belgium yo... (read more)

You raise some minor objections but I think the biggest problem with charter cities (apart from the lack of empirical evidence of their effectiveness^[1]) is the free-rider problem. Society uses taxes to invest in common goods such as education, healthcare, research... If rich people use these common goods to generate their wealth, but then once it's time to start paying their taxes, opt to create a tax haven charter city instead, we will have an underinvestment in these public goods and we'll get a race to the bottom. For an eventual endpoint of this race ... (read more)

I found this topic first from a short snippet in The Week, then from the news article https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/maintaining-a-vegetarian-diet-might-be-in-your-genes-180983021.

Remove the dot at the end, otherwise it's a dead link.

It is important to note that behavior is always in relation to an environment, so we can't say that some behavior is 70% caused by genetics, the most we can say is that something is 70% caused by genetics in this specific environment. This is easy to check with a thought experiment, lets take these people whose "wil... (read more)

Incredible work!

Your previous research/intervention in Kenya showed that UBI can have a positive impact, not only on the recipient villages, but also on nearby villages.

In this study the welfare of those in nearby villages seems to not be the focus. Although you did look at nearby markets which had a somewhat disappointing conclusion:

We do not reject the null that consumer prices in nearby markets were unchanged, both for agricultural and non-agricultural products, though to be fair these estimates are not precise enough to rule out meaningful appreciation

The Belgian senate votes to add animal welfare to the constitution.

It's been a journey. I work for GAIA, a Belgian animal advocacy group that for years has tried to get animal welfare added to the constitution. Today we were present as a supermajority of the senate came out in favor of our proposed constitutional amendment. The relevant section reads:

In exercising their respective powers, the Federal State, the Communities and the Regions strive to protect and care for animals as sentient beings.

It's a very good day for Belgian animals but I do want to not... (read more)

Thank you!

Yes, I agree distributions are better than single numbers. I think part of the problem for podcasts/conversations is that it's easier to quickly say a number than a probability distribution, though that excuse works slightly less well for the written medium.

I didn't base it off an existing method. While @Jobst tells me I have good "math instincts" that has yet to translate itself into actually being good at math, so this mostly comes from me reading the philosophical literature and trying to come up with solutions to some of the proposed problems... (read more)

It seems I didn't get brigaded [tap on wood], but I still feel uneasy answering this. You got some downvotes on this comment initially which means the karma system pushes you to not reply, in the same way it pushed me to not reply to the HBD-proponents I was debating. This voting-power-by-popularity system doesn't incentivize having conversations, so feel free to answer in the comment section on your substack instead. I will edit in a link to it at the end of this comment if you do so. This comment is going to be shorter anyway.

Firstly, I wanted to say tha... (read more)

For example, Francis and Kirkegaard (2022) employ the use of instrumental variables

I can view an astonishing amount of publications for free through my university, but they haven't opted to include this one, weird... So should I pay money to see this "Mankind Quarterly" publication?

When I googled it I found that Mankind Quarterly includes among its founders Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in... (read more)

Say you had to choose between two options:

Option 1: A 99% chance that everyone on earth gets tortured for all of time (-100 utils per person) and a 1% chance that a septillion happy people get created (+90 utils pp) for all of time

Option 2: A 100% chance that everyone on earth becomes maximally happy for all of time (+100 utils pp)

Let's assume the population in both these scenario's remain stable over time (or grow similarly), Expected Value Theory (and classic utilitarianism by extension) says we should choose option 1, even though this has a 99% chance o... (read more)

Gunman: [points a sniper rifle at a faraway kid] Give me $10 or I'll kill this kid.

Utilitarian: I’m sorry, why should I believe that you will let the kid live if I give you $10? Also, I can’t give you the money because that would set a bad precedent. If people know I always give money to gunmen that would encourage people to start taking hostages and demanding money from me.

Gunman: I promise I will let her live and to keep it a secret. See, I have this bomb-collar that will explode if I try to remove it. Here's a detonator that starts working in 1 hour, no... (read more)

If you want to contribute to the fight against TB, John Green published another video today in which he explains an unrealized way a company could bring the cost of TB detection way down. He then points to a way we can pressure said company to make this change:

Since his last attempt to bully a company into doing the right thing was mostly successful, I think this attempt has a good chance of succes too.

I agree about the bad engineering. Apart from boundary norms we might also want to consider making our organizations more democratic. This kind of power abuse is a lot harder when power is more equally distributed among the workers. Bosses making money while paying employees nothing or very little occurs everywhere, but co-ops tend to have a lot less inequality within firms. They also create higher job satisfaction, life satisfaction and social trust. Furthermore, research has shown that employees getting more ownership of the company is associated with hi... (read more)