All of Neil_Dullaghan's Comments + Replies

Thanks!
So, directionally if not literally, are you suggesting that in policy BOTECs, rather than assuming a policy will happen eventually and have indefinite impacts, so we only need add in how many extra years of impact occurred by the intervention succeeding now rather than later - we should be including a metric “how many years will this have impact for” and assigning ~100 years. And then take your data suggesting 80% of policies that barely passed were still in place 100 years later, but 40% of those that barely failed are. So should we be doing something like: That 100 year value (Probability of passing * 80%) - That 100 year value (probability of failing * 40%)

7
zdgroff
5mo
Yes, basically (if I understand correctly). If you think a policy has impact X for each year it's in place, and you don't discount, then the impact of causing it to pass rather than fail is something on the order of 100 * X. The impact of funding a campaign to pass it is bigger, though, because you presumably don't want to count the possibility that you fund it later as part of the counterfactual (see my note above about Appendix Figure D20).  Some things to keep in mind: 1. Impacts might change over time (e.g., a policy stops mattering in 50 years even if it's in place). If you think, e.g., transformative AI will upend everything, that might be what you need to think about here in terms of how long this policy change matters. 2. I'm looking at whether this policy or a version of it will be in place. It's possible policies will be substituted for in some way in ways that make things wash out somewhat. (For instance, we don't pass one animal welfare policy, but we pass some policy to shrink the farming sector.) I think this effect is small given the lack of differences by policy topic—this should be much more of an issue for some topics than others—but see the next point. 3. There are some hints of less persistence for policies where there's more room for negotiation/more ways to dial it up and down. See my reply to Erich Grunewald lower down—for taxes and Congressional legislation, it seems like the effect on whether some possibly weaker version of the policy eventually passes might wash out.

Based on the choice of words from the EU Commission President in her "state of the union" speech today, it seems as though the EU is indeed shelving the planned transition to cage-free hens supposed to be proposed this month, as part of a general change in strategic direction from it's top-down "Farm-to-Fork" strategy to some more bottom-up "strategic dialogue" approach.

If true, pretty big defeat for the EU animal movement. 

Probably a lot to do with current food inflation, prices, Ukraine war etc and pressure from industry and farmers

There's still som... (read more)

Good sign.
Still has to go through a lot of negotiations and industry will obviously seek to water it down by claiming it's not economically feasible to do at all, or at least anytime soon. Also see the secondary Metaculus question- conditional on the European Union agreeing to ban cages, when will the phase out for cages end?

 

I think this is a really positive indication that builds on the many other positive indications we've had from the Commission that they will try push for an ambitious animal welfare reform, but I wouldn't want to overplay the EFSA opinion. It's harder to imagine a path to a cage-free transition in a world where EFSA came out against cage-free or was more muted in its support, but the fact that many EFSA opinions are ignored and watered down show that it is low down on the list of necessary but not sufficient factors.

The two Metaculus questions I set up on ... (read more)

4
Ben_West
1y
Thanks! This is helpful (though a bit sad).

You can read what Jason Crawford had to say on the topic here when 
Peter Wildeford  asked:
https://twitter.com/peterwildeford/status/1520911804288966656

Peter:  What do progress studies people think about nonhuman animals?
Jason : It's not discussed much. There are probably a range of views. Personally, my current position is that we shouldn't be inhumane or needlessly cruel, but that animals aren't on the same moral level as humans

Peter: Do you think modern factory farming is inhumane?
Jason: I've only read a little bit about it, and what I rea... (read more)

OurWorldinData also wrote something like this and had a visualization too
Growth needed to reach denmark
https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-minimum-growth-needed

They also write

"If we want to know how much the distribution of Ethiopia would need to change to reduce the share in poverty to Denmark’s level we can read it off the two parameters that describe the distribution – the average level of income and the inequality of those incomes.

Ethiopia has a much lower average income: an increase of average incomes is called economic growth and to increase the average from $3.30 per day to $55 w... (read more)

Hi Stijn,
Interesting post!
I have a few questions about your meat-to-animal conversions.

1. In the "Deathprint of meat" section you clearly cite the sources for the meat-to-emissions conversions, but not the meat-to-animal conversions. From reading further down the piece it seems they probably come from Saja, K. (2013). Is that correct?

2. Saja (2013) seems to calculate 2 kg of chicken meat for "Average animal products per one animal life", which would be 0.5 chickens per 1kg though in your table you have 0.667 for animals killed per kg meat for chicken meat.... (read more)

1
Stijn
1y
Hi Neil, my meat-to-animal conversions were not based on Saja, but simply on the weight of edible meat produced by an animal. For chickens, I used the slightly more conservative value of 1.5 kg edible meat per broiler chicken, instead of Saja's 2 kg. That means 1/1.5=0.66 animals/kg. Perhaps broiler chickens in the US grow heavier and are closer to Saja's 2 kg per chicken? Haven't thought about using those other sources like Faunalitics. Thanks for mentioning it.

Thanks for this,
Just wanted to note a misframing of the slaughterhouse ban post.  You have written
 "found ~40% supported banning slaughterhouses or said ‘don’t know / no opinion’ to questions, highlighting a large discrepancy"-which I think is taken directly from the latest "EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary"  rather than the slaughterhouse ban post.
This makes it seem like 60% opposed and then 40% combined EITHER supported or had no opinion, when in fact the 2017 Sentience Institute result was 43% supported, 11% chose don't know,  46% o... (read more)

1
Zoe Williams
1y
Ah cheers, that makes sense - I'll update in the forum summary post too.
4
James Özden
1y
Apologies - I've fixed it so I use the 39-43% figure from SI as well as referencing survey 2 rather than survey 1 (agreed it's much more useful as it's larger and nationally representative). No worries re the confusion, yeah I didn't quite understand how it was framed in your post and thought Zoe might have the right interpretation but seems not! Thanks for amending your post and explaining though - it's much clearer now.

We should also note that Norwood (one of the authors who replicated SI’s original 2017 study) this year ran a new slaughterhouse ban survey experiment  ([Britton & Norwood 2022](https://doi.org/10.1017/aae.2022.17)) and found lower support. (I only just received the data from them so I couldn’t include it in the post).

Here is my summary from just skimming the article and quickly aggregating the data.

They test a hypothesis that the question ordering in the 2017 SI study cued respondents' ideal self (like whether voting is a moral virtue) ... (read more)

Thanks for reading and engaging with our work!

  • In 2019 we conducted some exploratory small-N, low-confidence studies on this topic that informed these high-quality, larger N studies. We feel comfortable presenting these recent results as we want to promote the norm of advocates choosing strategies and messages based on the best quality evidence, so would rather the community update based on the results of high-quality studies rather than low-confidence small-N studies where the wrong inferences may be drawn.
  • [Update 2022-Nov-18: I added a methods section to
... (read more)

Thanks for engaging with the report. I'll offer a response since Tapinder's summer fellowship has ended and I was her manager during the project. I've made a general comment in response to Tristan that applies here too.

On your comment specifically, the "malthusian trap" is empirically not always supported. A population can approach or be at its carrying capacity and still have adequate resources, for instance if they simply do not reproduce as much due to less resource surplus.

Thanks for engaging with the report. I'll offer a response since Tapinder's summer fellowship has ended and I was her manager during the project.

Firstly, as a response to both you and Max.

Those are very fair concerns. I tend to think that in the very nascent WAW field tractability is such a big issue that focusing only on the most painful deaths of wild animals leaves us with few (if any?) tractable things to do. Until we gain greater knowledge of what to do, there is value in some WAW resources going towards trying out things that look more tractable. In ... (read more)

1
Tristan Katz
8mo
Hi, sorry I somehow missed this until just now - far too late! Still I feel I need to say that I think you've missed the point. With windmills it is not necessarily the case that the average bird will live a shorter life. If some birds are killed by windmills, then others will have more to eat or will have more habitat (whatever factor it is that otherwise limits this bird population) and will then succumb to that death later. Or perhaps with windmills their main predator will just scavenge on the dead birds, rather than predating them. The point is, there is no reason to assume that the average life will be shorter - either way, some factors are limiting the population, and without directly comparing them we just cannot make this claim. Establishing a norm of caring about wild animals is good, but it seems to me that you are only encouraging people to care about human-caused harms, rather than the welfare of wild animals generally. There is a risk that people only care about the dirtiness of their own hands, rather than the animals themselves. I hope that makes sense.

For something similar, see David Manheim's 2021 list

Net worth & Charity Pledges

Elon Musk: $205 billion - Giving Pledge (GP), 50% 
Jeff Bezos:  $200 billion - No pledge (None) 
Bernard Arnault:$159 billion -  None 
Bill Gates: $151 billion - GP, ~100% 
Mark Zuckerberg: $136 billion - Non-specific, 99% 
Larry Page: $126 billion - None 
Sergey Brin: $121 billion - None 
Steve Ballmer: $107 billion - None 
Larry Ellison: $101 billion - GP, 95% 
Warren Buffett: $101 billion- GP, 99%

4
Stephen Clare
1y
Interesting, this makes me realize how little one hears about the Google guys' philanthropy.

Thanks Jamie! We struggled a lot with this issue when writing the post.

I'm not really sure I see a problem or a difference with the "which megaproject ideas can we think of?"/ "how rapidly will we get diminishing returns on further investment in various plausibly cost-effective project ideas?" distinction. I think if the answer to the second question is "quickly and with only a few million $" then you cut the idea from the list. It's part of the way to arrive at answers to "which megaproject ideas can we think of?". Other ideas floated seeme... (read more)

Thanks for your thoughts on the different approaches Zane, do you have an estimate of when your proposed approach would bear fruit in terms of a scalable intervention?

As Sebastian noted, in-ovo is already being done in two countries with chick culling prohibition legislation, and the Metaculus forecasting community median estimates most eggs produced in the EU will be sexed before hatching by October 2025, and most eggs produced in the USA will be sexed before hatching by 2033 (but a major U.S. supermarket chain will sell “no-kill eggs” in at least 25 sta... (read more)

How do you think this approach (make male chickens lay eggs if I understand correctly) compares to other solutions being proposed/rolled out:

... (read more)
8
Zane Oberholzer
2y
1. The various in-ovo sexing technologies to find the male eggs and destroy them before they hatch- Respeggt eggs are already available for sale in Germany, France, and The Netherlands and Open Phil has funded the Egg-Tech prize The company  respeggt GmbH has two projects: 1. Seleggt’s in-ovo sexing technology is similar to a gender test. Allantoic fluid from eggs is extracted and the hormone content is analysed for sex-specific differences. The drawback is that the technology requires expensive machinery and currently the technology cannot meet industrial demands. This technology is also not very suitable for small scale hatcheries. Another consideration is that males can only be sexed after 9 days of incubation. Indeed, this is an improvement over culling day-old male chicks but male chicks are still being produced so it only saves part of the time investment and there will still be costs involved in disposing of the males. 2. Respeggt GmbH’s second project pledges to hatch the male chicks that are part  of the Seleggt project. These chicks are reared alongside the female chicks. This “dual-purpose” approach is unfortunately not financially viable for every hatchery to adopt.   2. Change the sex of the embryo in the egg  https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/food/2021/jan/31/good-vibrations-sound-waves-eggs-ethical-slaughter-male-chicks This looks like a very interesting technology! I wish there was more information available on how it works. Their technology (SOOS) uses a combination of environmental factors including sound waves to induce male-to-female sex reversal in the egg. A couple of questions I have about their technology though is whether the sex reversal persists into adulthood and whether the male chickens need to remain in the same environment to keep their “femaleness”. The principle of their technology, however, is the same as the approach I’m proposing: by selectively suppressing the expression of the gene DMRT1 in gonadal tissue,

Makes sense. Made a few edits along those lines.
Genuinely appreciate suggestions on how to make our summaries more useful to readers, so thanks again. 

2
Stefan_Schubert
2y
Thank you!

(Note that I've replaced that exact sentence with a new paragraph about plant-based and conventional meat production volumes in response to a comment from Stefan.)

Thanks!

The production volumes were not chosen as a comparison to plant-based meat. It was more that we started with an upper target we thought would be meaningful (arriving at the >50M metric tons in 2051) and then wanted to add an intermediate time prediction. >1M metric tons we thought could indicate cultured meat was "on track" since it would have exceeded mere startup volume, and then t... (read more)

Thanks for the suggestion. I've added a few production numbers of plant-based and conventional meat after the first table in the results section to provide this context.

One reason we didn't ask questions about "what % of meat production will be cultured meat in 20XX" was that it would require forecasters to also produce models of total meat production (including plant-based and funghi-based meat). This seemed overly taxing and could introduce a lot of unclear underlying assumptions. We did ask  "What will total global conventional meat and seafood pro... (read more)

One reason we didn't ask questions about "what % of meat production will be cultured meat in 20XX" was that it would require forecasters to also produce models of total meat production (including plant-based and funghi-based meat).

Yeah, I'm not saying there was any problem with the questions you gave to the forecasters. My comment concerned how to present the findings to the readers of this article.

I've added a few production numbers of plant-based and conventional meat after the first table in the results section to provide this context.

Fwiw I would also ... (read more)

Another example for "V. Factory farming might spread to space - Some proponents of space colonization include factory farming in their plans"

"North Carolina State University is now taking applicants for its Nuggets on Mars program [ . . .] The multi–step, year–long program will involve teachers learning STEM principles behind poultry production and the unique challenges of raising chickens on Mars [. . .] At the end of the program, the participants will be tasked with putting together a unit for their class focused on developing ideas on way... (read more)

  1. DG Connect proposed the AI Act. Rauh's (2019) study of 2,200 proposals for regulations and directives that the Commission tabled between 1994 and 2016 suggests DG Connect proposals have a 40-55% chance that the adopted law equals what the Commission has originally proposed.
    Does your team have any internal estimates of how likely the final law will equal the original proposal? Or perhaps more importantly, how likely the sections of the original proposal that you like will remain intact?
  2. Given the importance of the Council and qualified majority voting do you
... (read more)
1[anonymous]2y
Hello Neil, thank you for these questions - I have sent you a DM with some additional answers. 
2
Risto Uuk
2y
Thank you, a lot of great questions. In response to question (3), some of our work focuses on EU member states as well. Because we are a small team, our ability to cover many member states is limited, but hopefully, with the new hire we can do a lot more on this front as well. If you know anybody suitable, please let us know. For example, we have engaged with Sweden, Estonia, Belgium, Netherlands, France, and a few other countries. Right now, the Presidency of the Council of the EU is held by France, next up are Czechia and Sweden, so work at the member state level in these countries is definitely important. 

Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, Stella Kyriakides said "this has reached today a record of over 40,000 contributions. I think you will all agree with me, dear members, that this clearly shows how much animal welfare matters to our citizens."
H/T Jan Sorgenfrei again

Just listing here the things I've found helpful and seconding some of them that have already been mentioned in other comments

More than 10,000 EU citizens have completed the EU animal welfare survey in the last week alone. Good work!
H/T Jan Sorgenfrei for informing me about the response number update. 

6
Neil_Dullaghan
2y
Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, Stella Kyriakides said "this has reached today a record of over 40,000 contributions. I think you will all agree with me, dear members, that this clearly shows how much animal welfare matters to our citizens." H/T Jan Sorgenfrei again

Thanks for adding that Anima link Peter. Following the video guide on that page is what I would suggest anyone filling in this survey do for the most impact, unless they have strong reasons to answer the questions differently. 

I'd also add that in the last section "14. Is there any other comment you would like to add?", which the video doesn't cover, one may want to use that space to address other issues such as requesting bans on octopus farming and fur farming (though I personally am a little sceptical the EU can/will outright ban an entire sector)

7
PeterSlattery
2y
Great, thanks. I have added your comment to the post.

Just want to flag that animal advocacy organizations in the Open Wing Alliance (OWA) and Eurogroup for Animals (EfA) networks have been trying to coordinate the responses to this survey to ensure a consistent ask is made.

I'd encourage anyone interested in filling out this survey to make contact with the OWA or EfA groups (or other effective animal advocacy organizations not in these associations) in your country for advice (the links above show who the member organizations in your country are). 

Thanks Neil, that's very helpful. I didn't know about those initiatives. I have since looked for more information about the best way to complete the survey. Someone shared this post from Anima International with me and it seems to be the best guide available. Please let me know if you don't think that it is a good source. 

For now, I will add that link and your recommendations for other orgs to contact to the post. 

Please let me know if you have any links from those organisations you mention that is immediately usable (e.g., a blog post or video).

Eurogroup for Animals (a European Union lobby group representing other animal advocacy organizations) has encouraged EU citizens to submit feedback in the EU's animal welfare legislative review  - though it is better to make a submission on behalf of an organization rather than as an individual citizen.

In addition to answering the multiple choice/tick-box format questionnaire prepared by the European Commission (which addresses cage-free hens and fish welfare among other issues), one can add in a request to ban/restrict such cephalopod farming under t... (read more)

Thanks for this breakdown. I'd be curious if other parents here have radically different experiences, especially for kids of different ages.
Also, just to flag that stay at home dads do extremely important work too!

3
Max_Daniel
2y
Yeah, I enjoyed the post and am grateful for the data point, but when I read that sentence I was definitely like "huh? ...".

Thanks Misha. Can you share who the author of that document is? Looks like it might be Paul Christiano but I want to be sure.

3
Misha_Yagudin
2y
I think he is the author.

My assumption is that where effective animal advocacy has theories, they aren't explicitly modelling it around Transformative AI (TAI).

The theories of victory/change I have seen articulated online, IMO, fall into these buckets (I don't have a sense of how popular or far along each of these are):
 

Farm & Food level

Turn factory farms into humane farms (no requirements about total meat consumption, but implicitly less occurs since we can’t humanely farm at scale) so that total suffering in factory farms is below X. Tactics could include:

  • Undercover inv
... (read more)

I would break this down into a) the methods for getting research in front of government orgs and b) the types of research that gets put in front of them.

In general I think we (me for sure) haven’t been optimising for this enough to even know the barriers (unknown unknowns). I think historically we’ve been mostly focused on foundations and direct work groups, and less on government and academia. This is changing so I expect us to learn a lot more going forward.

As for known unknowns in the methods, I still don’t know who to actually send my research to in va... (read more)

1
Madhav Malhotra
2y
Thank you for the well-researched response :-) Excited to maybe ask again in a year and see any changes in your practical lessons!
3
Richenda
2y
@Neil_Dullaghan we should chat.

It has been said before elsewhere by Peter, but worth stating again:read and practice Reasoning Transparency . Michael Aird compiled some great resources recently here.

I'd also refer people to Michael and Saulius' replies to arushigupta's similar subquestion in last year's RP AMA.

8
MichaelA
2y
One thing I'd add is that I think several people at RP and elsewhere would be very excited if someone could: 1. Find existing resources that work as good training for improving one's reasoning transparency, and/or 2. Create such a resource As far as I'm aware, currently the state of the art is "Suggest people read the post Reasoning Transparency, maybe point them to a couple somewhat related other things (e.g., the compilation I made that Neil links to, or this other compilation I made), hope they absorb it, give them a bunch of feedback when they don't really (since it's hard!), hope they absorb that, repeat." I.e., the state of the art is kinda crappy. (I think Luke's post is excellent, but just reading it is not generally sufficient for going from not doing the skill well to doing the skill well.)  I don't know exactly what sort of resources would be best, but I imagine we could do better than what we have now. 

+1 to reporting numbers of animals instead of tonnage or biomass. The OWID meat and dairy production page does have a "numbers of animals slaughtered" section, so it would be great for that to be expanded both to other large numbers of animals (like various fish species, crustaceans, invertebrates) and beyond slaughter (such as alive at any one time).

Here are some articles with sources of such data. I haven't really looked into how hard they would be to maintain and update. It is biased towards data collected by Rethink Priorities staff because it was the ... (read more)

I write letters to the future when I give. Sometimes I write what the expected value of the giving was, and future me can reflect on how that panned out. Sometimes I ask my future self how did the world turn out (no replies yet). Present me enjoys getting surprise emails from past me and hearing how excited they were by giving and I get some delight in seeing the through line in my values.

I also get together every few months with a select group of friends and we each give a five minute presentation about an idea we want to share (ranging from serious to si... (read more)

Fwiw, we tasked a couple of people in Singapore to try get the GOOD Meat cultured chicken nuggets from the 1880 member's club restaurant and they were unable to do so. The restaurant does not serve them directly anymore. It's only possible to order takeout, and they claim to only have 10 portions/week on Thursday lunches. Our volunteer was unsuccessful on two attempts to order them for delivery. We also heard claims that a specific Marriott Hotel serves the nuggets in person but we were unable to find information online and our other volunteer was unable to get it in person.

For those interested, here are the paragraphs that added new information on the CE Delft TEA that I hadn't considered or seen in other TEAs or reviews.

Cell growth

"For bacteria, one may generally subculture in the range of 1:10 to 1:100, depending on the bacterium. For stem cells, which are more fastidious, the highest subculture ratio (i.e. the amount of an old culture one uses to seed or start a new culture) is typically 1:5. This is significantly less than the 1:200 cell ratio that is proposed in the TEA. Experience dictates that if stem cells are sub-cu... (read more)

9
nil
2y
Thanks for linking to GFI’s posts (and for your and Linch’s article in the first place!). GFI’s concerns w/ some of the points made in the TEAs and the Counter article seem sound to me (FWIW, as I have only some basic knowledge of the field at best). I couldn’t find any responses to GFI, unfortunately. For those who might be interested in checking GFI’s posts, below are some excerpts. From the overview of “Preliminary review of technical assumptions within the Humbird analysis”: From “Statement addressing TEA analyses”:                   The article concludes:

Thanks for sharing your perspective.

The prediction "it is only a matter of time" has an effect on how to allocate EA resources depending on how long that matter of time is, even with additional resources going towards it, so I'd be curious what time period you'd assign for this and how you came to think that.

Even without having to construct brains, eyes, ears, tails, feathers, Humbird thinks it will still be very expensive at the moment since creating the immune system is so hard to create- so you need pharma grade standards with are expensive (one can dis... (read more)

1
Stijn
2y
Concerning "it is a matter of time": the only worry that I see, is that it would take so long to develop cultivated meat that in the meantime we would have already abolished animal farming (or decreased it to such a degree that cultivated meat has little additional value) because of e.g. plant-based and fermentation-based protein. But I consider that unlikely (lower than 10% likelihood). Oh, and even if humans would be all plant-based vegans by then, then we still have the many carnivorous animals (pets,...) who may benefit from cultivated meat. Hence, I think speeding up cultivated meat R&D remains very effective (high risk high impact), especially for animal welfare. It may be less effective for e.g. climate change, because reductions of greenhouse gas emissions need to occur soon (within 30 years). But cultivated meat offers a cheap carbon capture and storage method (reforestation of agricultural land that was used for livestock). And I think carbon capture is still worthwhile even over 50 years. I would say 30-50 years for whole tissue cultivated meat to reach price parity with animal-based meat. But I have no clue whether I'm good at forecasting.   About the 50% consumption of resources: that was just an assumption, somewhere between 0 and 100%, close to what I think is the proportion of edible tissue mass to whole body mass.

I don't think it's reasonably likely this particular prediction was delayed by COVID-19, given they made this prediction in early 2019 about a product being on offer *in 2019*. I don't think there is much to suggest any impediments to a  product roll-out in 2019  from the pandemic since it only started having major impacts/reactions in 2020. 

For other predictions in this dataset made by companies, research institutes, and reported in the media it seems likely the pandemic threw up an unexpected obstacle and delay. However, that would presuma... (read more)

2
MichaelStJules
3y
Woops, ya, I got my dates mixed up for COVID and JUST. I'm not sure what you mean by this. My point is that COVID might have made some of these predictions false, when they would have otherwise ended up true without COVID, so these groups just got very unlucky, and we shouldn't count these particular inaccurate predictions against them. It also looks like about half or more of the predictions had dates ending in 2020 or later based on the two graphs in the post, so this could affect many of them.

My colleague Linch asked me “to include a random sample of 9 predictions that resolved negatively.” I numbered the incorrect market/supermarket predictions and then randomised the list of numbers, and used an online random number generator to select nine numbers.
 

  • March 2019 "JUST, the San Francisco-based company racing to be the first to bring cell-based meat to market, announced in a CBS San Francisco interview last month that they would debut their first product — a cultured chicken nugget — in Asia sometime this year"
  • February 2018 "Tetrick claims h
... (read more)
1
MichaelStJules
3y
EDIT: Woops, got my COVID dates mixed up; I was thinking March 2020. I think it's reasonably likely this was delayed by COVID-19, given they made this prediction when it wasn't clear how bad things would be, they debuted in a restaurant in Singapore at the end of 2020, and restaurants where they were looking to debut might have been closed (or they preferred an in-person debut, rather than take-out). I wouldn't be surprised if COVID caused some other delays, not just for JUST, but basically all of these companies, as long as their deadlines were in 2020 or later. Some lab and manufacturing work might not have been allowed or was impeded for extended periods due to lockdowns. I'm not sure how much delay we should allow for these lockdowns, though.

I don't think Anders Sandberg uses the EA Forum, so I'll just repost what Anders wrote in reaction to this on Twitter:

"I suspect we have a "publication bias" of tech predictions where the pessimists don't make predictions (think the tech impossible or irrelevant, hence don't respond to queries, or find their long timescales so uncertain they are loath to state them).

In this case it is fairly clear that progress is being made but it is slower than hoped for: predictions as a whole made a rate mistake, but perhaps not an eventual outcome mistake (we will see... (read more)

7
Ozzie Gooen
3y
I think it should be pretty clear that there are a ton of biases going on. In Expert Political Judgement, there was a much earlier study on expert/pundit forecasting ability, and the results were very poor. I don't see reasons why we should have expected different here. One thing that might help would be "meta-forecasting". We could later have some expert forecasters predict the accuracy of average statements made by different groups in different domains. I'd predict that they would have given pretty poor scores to most of these groups, especially "companies making public claims about their own technologies", and "magazines and public media" (which also seem just as biased).

As some examples, Open Wing Alliance, Compassion in World Farming, Humane Society International/Europe (HSI), and Animal Protection Denmark (Dyrenes Beskyttelse) have already submitted comments to this feedback period.

For the subsequent public consultation process I would again highlight that Alice DiConcetto, of Animal Law Europe recently published a short manual on how to submit feedback to an EU Public Consultation that I think will be valuable for advocates. IMO, feedback will be more impactful if it sends a consistent message but avoids sending dupl... (read more)

I'm no expert, and appreciate the honest epistemic status, but I quickly asked an IBS R.D. who said:

"like irritable bowel disease, which is much worse"
->It’s inflammatory bowel disease not irritable. There’s irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease. There’s is no irritable bowel disease.

"there’s not that much you can do to diagnose it"
->IBS is diagnosed based off the Rome IV diagnostic criteria
 

3
alexlintz
3y
Oh thanks! I'll update that

Did you consider advocacy, as mentioned in a recent Future Perfect piece (talking about vaccine supply generally, not specific to India): https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22440986/covax-challenges-covid-19-vaccines-global-inequity

" Arguably, donors could have a bigger impact by donating to an advocacy group than by donating to Go Give One, though this field is so new that it’s hard to know for sure.

For donors who prefer to invest in advocacy, Dodson and Glassman both recommended three groups: Global Citizen, the ONE Campaign, and the Pandemic Action Netw... (read more)

3
Tejas Subramaniam
3y
Thanks for the link! I will look into this soon.  My immediate reaction is that that depends on the specific objectives of the advocacy organizations, as well as who they’re aiming to influence.  For example, the article mentions the patent waiver a lot. While this is (I think) a point of difference between Manya and me, I’m currently unsure (50-50 split, in fact) about the sign of the effect of the patent waiver, and pretty convinced the magnitude is small (and that it obscures the deeper problems with vaccine supply). 

Just noticed that the Animal Pain and Suffering section on the Wikipedia page on Denialism that you mention was deleted 29 November 2019 after discussion about what constitutes denialism.

Hi, I wrote the cause area EA Survey 2019 post for Rethink Priorities so thought I should just weigh in here on this minor point.

Fwiw, I think it's more accurate to say 22% of respondents thought Global Poverty should be at least one of the top priorities, if not the only top priority, but when forced to only pick only one of five traditional cause areas to be the top priority, 32% chose Global Poverty.

The data shows 476 of the 2164 respondents (22%) who gave any top priority cause rating in that question selected Global Poverty and "this should be the to... (read more)

Thanks for this!
I see you referenced Matthews et al. (2018), which I haven't read, and wondered if you had also seen the Authoritarian Ruling Elites Database, compiled by  Matthews (2019): “a collection of biographical and professional information on the individuals who constitute the top elite of authoritarian regimes.” Each of the project’s 18 datasets focuses on a particular regime, such as the military dictatorship that ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. The biographical data-points include gender, occupation, dates of birth and death, tenure among th

... (read more)

+1 that the footnotes issue is quite an inconvenience. 

8
Habryka
4y
Yeah, I agree with this. Adding footnotes to the new editor is quite a high priority.
Load more