david_reinstein
Bio
Participation2
I'm the Founder and Co-director of The Unjournal; We organize and fund public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects. We will focus on work that is highly relevant to global priorities (especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation). We will encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.
Previously I was a Senior Economist at Rethink Priorities, and before that n Economics lecturer/professor for 15 years.
I'm working to impact EA fundraising and marketing; see https://bit.ly/eamtt
And projects bridging EA, academia, and open science.. see bit.ly/eaprojects
My previous and ongoing research focuses on determinants and motivators of charitable giving (propensity, amounts, and 'to which cause?'), and drivers of/barriers to effective giving, as well as the impact of pro-social behavior and social preferences on market contexts.
Podcasts: "Found in the Struce" https://anchor.fm/david-reinstein
and the EA Forum podcast: https://anchor.fm/ea-forum-podcast (co-founder, regular reader)
Twitter: @givingtools
Posts 82
Comments998
Topic contributions9
This connects to two of our Unjournal Pivotal Questions workstreams. One is on CM cost and viability (related to our post on this here) where we just ran a workshop on cost trajectories (summary here, more reporting to come). The other is on PBA substitution, where the cannibalization question you raise is close to the central one. (Note, we are also planning a workshop for the substitution question: see the resource page here_
On substitution, my main worry is that it's very hard to measure even for products that already exist. From the earlier post, our forest plot of cross-price elasticities is all over the map: credible studies find PBAs to be substitutes for a given meat in some cases and complements in others, with no obvious study-level feature explaining the divergence. Moving outside of PBA/meat, Bray, Sanders and Stamatopoulos (2024) sharpen the concern. In a grocery pricing experiment they find an own-price elasticity around -0.34, versus roughly -2.0 from observational scanner data on comparable stores, and the usual IV and difference-in-differences "fixes" don't close the gap. So I might hold the existing PBA substitution evidence fairly lightly in either direction, which makes me cautious about leaning too hard on it to assess CM.
Going further, see this AI-driven report aiming to synthesize the evidence on 'what can we measure' here.
For cultivated meat itself the evidence is a thin reed at best. You already flag that survey-based WTP is unreliable; I'd push that further. For a product that basically doesn't exist at retail scale (and in a category seemingly rather sensitive to price, brand, framing) and context, I doubt we'll learn much about who actually buys it until it's on shelves and menus. Attitudes can move a lot: in the mid-1990s (from my experience) many/most Americans treated raw fish as absurd and repulsive. Today a large majority have tried sushi, with only about third of Americans never having tried it per one restaurant-chain survey (and about a third having eaten sushi with raw fish in the past year in a 2016 -- paywall linked, I'm relying on chatGPT there).
On cannibalization itself I'm a little less worried than you, mostly because plant-based seems to have a fairly low market-share ceiling so far, so if it gets a decent market share, cannibalization won't matter much.
Fwiw, here's a similarly AI-guided report (with human feedback) on the consumption of plant-based-alternatives. Its market share is still rather low (1-3% at best), but the evidence points it being purchased and consumed mainly by omnivores rather than veg*ns. That makes me a tiny bit more optimistic that if CM is made appealing it will also be consumed by omnivores.
Update. I've put in some more work into this and I think it's getting better. Please have a look and let me know your thoughts. If it seems valuable, we could go for some more systematic RLHF etc.
NB -- this is almost entirely AI generated, with some back and forth prompts and corrections
I'm sharing a steelman against a live assumption in Bay/EA/AIS circles: that large AI-lab-adjacent philanthropy is likely to arrive soon enough, and in a sufficiently usable form, that organizations should plan around it.
https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/
The stronger skeptical case is that IPOs, valuations, pledges, DAFs, and foundation stakes are several gates away from fast, flexible, AIS/EA-directed grants.
The interactive model lets readers vary assumptions about Anthropic valuation, founder ownership, pledge follow-through, employee giving, OpenAI Foundation allocation, lockups, deployment rates, and grantmaker capacity.
Original motivating thread/comment: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dtF6wBjH7yBD4kqLz/noah-birnbaum-s-quick-takes?commentId=sGRyGF5wjaaoMFmfK
As a first pass, I asked GPT Pro to consider and model this, and Codex to host it, with interactive BOTEC tools etc.
https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/
I'm just looking through it now (I'll respond/adapt to hypothes.is comments). Let me know if this sort of thing is useful or annoying.
Project Idea: 'Cost to save a life' interactive calculator promotion
What about making and promoting a ‘how much does it cost to save a life’ quiz and calculator.
This could be adjustable/customizable (in my country, around the world, of an infant/child/adult, counting ‘value added life years’ etc.) … and trying to make it go viral (or at least bacterial) as in the ‘how rich am I’ calculator?
The case
While GiveWell has a page with a lot of tech details, but it’s not compelling or interactive in the way I suggest above, and I doubt they market it heavily.
GWWC probably doesn't have the design/engineering time for this (not to mention refining this for accuracy and communication). But if someone else (UX design, research support, IT) could do the legwork I think they might be very happy to host it.
It could also mesh well with academic-linked research so I may have some ‘Meta academic support ads’ funds that could work with this.
Tags/backlinks (~testing out this new feature)
@GiveWell @Giving What We Can
Projects I'd like to see
EA Projects I'd Like to See
Idea: Curated database of quick-win tangible, attributable projects