All of ishaan's Comments + Replies

If you're interested in the question of why I figure that doing voluntary unpaid labor for most people involves negligible harm or opportunity cost of the type that ought to change our effectiveness estimate, my napkin calculation goes something like: suppose I personally were to replace half my compensated work hours with volunteering. That would be several tens of thousands of dollars of value to me and would half my income, which would be a hardship to me. But it should only take ~$285.92 to "offset" that harm to me personally, by doubling someone else'... (read more)

To clarify, when i said it "would have been negligible" what I meant more precisely is that "doing voluntary unpaid labor does negligible harm (and probably actually confers benefits) to the volunteer, so I didn't factor it into the cost estimate".  This is very different from the question of "how much would the cost change if the volunteers were to be paid" - which is a question that I do not know the answer to.

That's an interesting question and i don't know! I had myself implicitly been assuming it was from volunteer labor being unpaid for. But now that you put the question to me explicitly I realize that it could easily be due other factors (such as fewer expenses in some other category such as infrastructure, or salaries per staff, hypothetically). I don't think the answer to this question would change anything about our calculations, but if we happen to find out I'll let you know.

In an earlier draft I was considering counting the volunteer labor as a cost equ... (read more)

ie SoGive would thinks depression is worse than death. Maybe this isn't quite a "sanity check" but I doubt many people have that moral view.

I replied in the moral weights post w.r.t. "worse than death" thing. (I think that's a fundamentally fair, but fundamentally different point from what I meant re: sanity checks w.r.t not crossing hard lower bounds w.r.t. the empirical effects of cash on well being vs the empirical effect of mental health interventions on well being)

My response to this post overall is that I think some of what is going on here is that different people and different organizations mean very different things when we say "Depression". Since "depression" is not really a binary, the value of averting "1 case of severe depression" can change  a lot depending on how you define severity, in such a way that differences in reasonable definitions of "sufficiently bad depression" can plausibly differ by 1-3x when you break it down into "how many SD counts as curing depression" terms.

However, the in-progr... (read more)

To expand a little on "this seems implausible":  I feel like there is probably a mistake somewhere in the notion that anyone involves thinks that <doubling income as having 1.3 WELLBY and severe depression has having a 1.3 WELLBY effect.> 

 The mistake might be in your interpretation of HLI's document (it does look like the 1.3 figure is a small part of some more complicated calculation regarding the economic impacts of AMF and their effect on well being, rather than intended as a headline finding about the cash to well being conversion... (read more)

Good stuff. I haven't spent that much time looking at HLIs moral weights work but I think the answer is "Something is wrong with how you've constructed weights, HLI is in fact weighing mental health harder than SoGive". I think a complete answer to this question requires me checking up on your calculations carefully, but I haven't done so yet, so it's possible that this is right.

If if were true that HLI found anything on the order of roughly doubling someone's consumption  improved well being as much as averting 1 case of depression, that wo... (read more)

I'm a researcher at SoGive conducting an independent evaluation of StrongMinds which will be published soon. I think the factual contents of your post here are correct. However, I suspect that after completing the research, I would be willing to defend the inclusion of StrongMinds on the GGWC list, and that the SoGive write-up will probably have a more optimistic tone than your post. Most of our credence comes from the wider academic literature on psychotherapy, rather than direct evidence from StrongMinds (which we agree suffers from problems, as  yo... (read more)

Cool project! I suggest that the shrimp heart should be a different color, as most shrimp usually are not pink and only turn pink after cooking (although there are some exceptions to this so maybe this is too nitpicky and it's fine?). I am also not sure whether or not a living shrimp typically would have a curled up pose. Alternatively if you'd rather not do a full image redesign, or if there is a concern that people will not realize it is a shrimp if it looks too different from what they're used to seeing, it might help to instead have go vegan! text or something to clarify that it isn't that the sticker bearer likes eating shrimp.

What would it take to get the information that people like you, MichaelA, and many others have, compile it into a continually maintained resource, and get it into the hands of the people who need it?

I guess the "easy" answer is "do a poll with select interviews" but otherwise I'm not sure. I guess it would depends on which specific types of information you mean? To some degree organizations will state what they want and need in outreach. If you're referring to advice like what I said re: "indicate that you know what EA is in your application", a compilatio... (read more)

Heh, I was wondering if I'd get called out on that. You're totally right, everything that happens in the world constitutes evidence of something! 

What I should have said is that humans are prone to fundamental attribution error and it is bad to privilege the hypothesis that it's evidence of real skill/experience/resume signalling/degree etc, because then you risk working on the wrong things. Rejections are evidence, but they’re mostly evidence of a low baseline acceptance rate, and only slightly  evidence of other things.

I can imagine someon... (read more)

Another factor which may play a role in the seeming arbitrariness of it all, is that orgs are often looking for a very specific thing, or have specific values or ideas that they emphasize, or are sensitive to specific key-words, which aren't always obvious and legible from the outside - leading to communications gaps. To give the most extreme example I've encountered of this, sometimes people don't indicate that they know what EA is about in their initial application, perhaps not realizing that they're being considered alongside non-EA applicants or that i... (read more)

Also don't worry about repeated rejections. Even if you are rejected, your application had an expected value, it increased the probability that a strong hire was made and that more impact was achieved. The strength of the applicant pool matters. Rejection of strong applicants is a sign of a thriving and competitive movement. It means that the job that you thought was important enough to apply to is more likely to be done well by whoever does it.

Rejection should not be taken as evidence that your talent or current level of experience is insufficient. I thin... (read more)

Counter-point: If you are interested in an EA job or grant, please do apply to it, even if you haven't finished school. If you're reading the EA forum, you are likely in the demographic of people where (some) EA orgs and grant makers want your application.

I just imagined the world where none of my early-career colleagues had applied to EA things. I think that world is plausibly counterfactually worse. Possibly a world with fewer existing EA adjacent orgs, smaller EA adjacent orgs, or fewer high impact EA jobs. I think dynamic where we have a thriving commu... (read more)

Thanks for hosting this event! It was a pleasure to participate. 

Without making claims about the conclusions, I think this argument is of very poor quality and shouldn't update anyone in any direction.

"As taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent, the number of retractions of biomedical research articles increased more than 900 percent"

Taking all claims at face value, you should not be persuaded that more money causes retractions just because retractions increased roughly in proportion with the overall growth of the industry. I checked the cited work to see if there were any m... (read more)

I think that what is causing some confusion here is that "value drift" is (probably?) a loanword from AI-alignment which (I assume?) originally referred to very fundamental changes in goals that would unintentionally occur within iterative versions of self improving intelligences, which...isn't really something that humans do. The EA community borrowed this sort of scary alien term and is using it to describe a normal human thing that most people would ordinarily just call "changing priorities".

A common sense way to say this is th... (read more)

Cool write up!

Before I did research for this essay, I envisioned Bentham as a time traveller from today to the past: he shared all my present-day moral beliefs, but he just happened to live in a different time period. But that’s not strictly true. Bentham was wrong about a few things, like when he castigated the Declaration of Independence

Heh, I would not be so sure that Bentham was wrong about this! It seems like quite a morally complex issue to me and Bentham makes some good points.

what was their original their only original grievance? That t

Idk but in theory they shouldn't, as pitch is sensed by the hairs on the section of the cochlea that resonates at that the relevant frequency.

The tricky part of social enterprise from my perspective is that high impact activities are hard to find, and I figure they would be even harder to find when placed under the additional constraint that they must be self sustaining. Which is not to say that you might not find one (see here and here), just that, finding an idea that works is arguably the trickiest part.

for-profit social enterprises may be more sustainable because of a lack of reliance on grants that may not materialise;

This is true, but keep in mind, impact via social enterprise may be &quo... (read more)

I posted some things in this comment, and then realized the feature I wanted already existed and I just hadn't noticed it - which brings to mind another issue: how come one can retract, overwrite, but not delete a comment?

What evidence would you value to help resolve what weight an EA should place on dignity?

Many EAs tend to think that most interventions fail, so if you can't measure how well something works, chances are high that it doesn't work at all. To convince people who think that way, it helps to have a strong justification to incorporate a metric which is harder to measure over a well established and easier to measure metrics such as mortality and morbidity.

In the post on happiness you linked by Michael, you'll notice that he has a section on comp... (read more)

Why effective altruists should care

Opposing view: I don't think these are real concerns. The Future of Animal Consciousness Research citation boils down to "what if research in animal cognition is one day suppressed due to being labeled speciesist" - that's not a realistic worry. The vox thinkpeice emphasizes that we are in fact efficiently saving lives - I see no critiques there that we haven't also internally voiced to ourselves, as a community. I don't think it's realistic to expect coverage of us not to include these ... (read more)

a) Well, I think the "most work is low-quality aspect" is true, but also fully-general to almost everything (even EA). Engagement requires doing that filtering process.

b) I think seeking not to be "divisive" here isn't possible - issues of inequality on global scales and ethnic tension on local scales are in part caused by some groups of humans using violence to lock another group of humans out of access to resources. Even for me to point that out is inherently divisive. Those who feel aligned with the higher-power group will tend ... (read more)

I've seen a lot of discussion of criminal justice reform

Well, I do think discussion of it is good, but if you're referring to resources directed to the cause area...it's not that I want EAs to re-direct resources away from low-income countries to instead solving disparities in high income countries, and I don't necessarily consider this related to the self-criticism as a community issue. I haven't really looked into this issue, but: on prior intuition I'd be surprised if American criminal justice reform compares very favorabl... (read more)

What are some of the biases you're thinking of here? And are there any groups of people that you think are especially good at correcting for these biases?

The longer answer to this question: I am not sure how to give a productive answer to this question. In the classic "cognitive bias" literature, people tend to immediately accept that the biases exist once they learn about them (…as long as you don't point them out right at the moment they are engaged in them). That is not the case for these issues.

I had to think carefully abo... (read more)

What are some of the biases you're thinking of here?

This is a tough question to answer properly, both because it is complicated and because I think not everyone will like the answer. There is a short answer and a long answer.

Here is the short answer. I'll put the long answer in a different comment.

Refer to Sanjay's statement above

There are some who would argue that you can't tackle such a structural issue without looking at yourselves too, and understanding your own perspectives, biases and privileges...But I worried that tackling t

I broadly agree, but in my view the important part to emphasize is what you said on the final thoughts (about seeking to ask more questions about this to ourselves and as a community) and less on intervention recommendations.

Is EA really all about taking every question and twisting it back to malaria nets ...?... we want is to tackle systemic racism at a national level (e.g. in the US, or the UK).

I bite this bullet. I think you do ultimately need to circle back to the malaria nets (especially if you are talking more about directing money than about direc... (read more)

Super helpful, I'm about to cite this in the CE curriculum :)

I get much more than $0.43 of enjoyment out of a year's worth of eating animal products

I think we would likely not justify a moral offset for harming humans at (by the numbers you posted) $100/year or eating children at $20/pound (100*15 years / 75 pounds). This isn't due to sentimentality, deontology, taboo, or biting the bullet - I think a committed consequentialist, one grounded in practicality, would agree that no good consequences would likely come from allowing that sort of thing, and I think that this probably logically applies to meat.

I ... (read more)

Spend some time brainstorming and compare multiple alternative courses of action and potential hurdles to those actions before embarking on it, consider using a spreadsheet to augment your working memory when you evaluate actions by various criteria, get a sense of expected value per time on a given task so you can decide how long it's worth to spend on it, enforce this via time capping / time boxing and if you are working much longer on a given task much than you estimated then re-evaluate what you are doing, time track which task you spend your work... (read more)

Any discussion of how much it might cost to change a given economic policy / the limiting factor that has kept it from changing thus far?

(I think this is also the big question with health policy)

I went to the program, was quite impressed with what I saw there, and decided to work at charity entrepreneurship.

Before attending the program, as career paths, I was considering academia, earning to give, direct work in the global poverty space, and a few other more offbeat options. After the program, I'd estimate that I've significantly increased the expected value of my own career (perhaps by 3x-12x or more) in terms of impact by attending the program, thanks to

1) the direct impact of CE itself and associated organizations. I can say that in ... (read more)

I'm sure there's a better document somewhere addressing these, but I'll just quickly say that people tend to regret starting smoking tobacco and often want to stop, tobacco smoking reduces quality of life, and that smokers often support raising tobacco taxes if the money goes to addressing the (very expensive!) health problems caused by smoking (e.g. this sample, and I don't think this pattern is unique). So I think bringing tobacco taxes in line with recommendations is good under most moral systems, even those which strongly prioritiz... (read more)

For global health, don't forget Givewell's newsletter!

For meta, CharityEntrepreneurship has one as well (scroll to the middle of the page for the newsletter)

Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what you're told.

Not necessarily! You might just be less averse to disagreement. Or perhaps you (rightly or wrongly) feel less personally vulnerable to the potential consequences of stating unpopular opinions and criticism.

Or, mayb... (read more)

I agree that more people trying to do cost effectiveness analyses is good! I regret that the tone seemed otherwise and will consider it more in the future. I engaged with it primarily because I too often wonder about how one might improve impact outside of impact-focused environments, and I generally find it an interesting direction to explore. I also applaud that you made the core claim clearly and boldly and I would like to see more of that as well - all models suffer these flaws to some degree and it's a great virtue to make clear claims that are d... (read more)

I think the biggest improvement would be correcting the fact that this model (accidentally, I think) assumes that improving any arbitrary high budget charity by 5% is equally as impactful as improving a Givewell equivalent charity by 5%. Most charity's impact is an order of magnitude smaller.

You could solve this with a multiplier for the charity's impact at baseline.

If I understand correctly, you figure that if you become a trustee of a £419668/year budget charity, if only you can improve the cost effectiveness by 5%, then you can divide that by... (read more)

brainstorming / regurgitating some random additional ideas -

Goodhart's law - a charity may from the outset design itself or self-modify itself around Effective Altruist metrics, thereby pandering to the biases of the metrics and succeeding in them despite being less Good than a charity which scored well on the same metrics despite no prior knowledge of them. (Think of the difference between someone who has aced a standardized test due to intentional practice and "teaching to the test" vs. someone who aced it with no prior exposure to standa... (read more)

I think this description generally falls in line with what I've experienced and heard secondhand and is broadly true. However, there are some differences between my impression of it and yours. (But it sounds like you've collected more accounts, more systematically, and I've actually only gone up to the M.A. level in grad school, so I'm leaning towards trusting your aggregate)

Peer review is a disaster

I think we can get at better ways than peer review, but also, don't forget that people will sort of inevitably have Feelings about get... (read more)