Software Developer at Giving What We Can, trying to make giving significantly and effectively a social norm.
I haven't read the whole post, but "519 g of fertility bait prevents one rodent birth" seemed implausibly high. I asked Gemini to review it, and it came out with this:
This 519g figure assumes wild rats will drink 10% of their body weight in bait every day as their exclusive hydration source. But real-world data shows intermittent grazing is enough to cause cumulative infertility.
For example, in the Washington D.C. ContraPest pilot trial (Nov 2019–Oct 2020):
- Site A had a starting colony of 391 rats.
- Over 12 months, the population crashed by 88% (the juvenile count specifically dropped from 121 to just 2).
- The entire colony consumed only 1.8L of bait all year.
If it truly took 519g to prevent one birth, 1,800g would have only prevented ~3.5 births for the whole colony.
Was it correct? I'm mostly curious about whether current LLMs can already help improving these estimates, or their reviews have too much noise
orgs like GiveWell are still getting a lot of funding
It's not just that these orgs are still getting a lot of funding:
there were more fellowship and grant and award opportunities than I could possibly apply to. It does not feel like that today.
I'm surprised by this, I think there's a ton today. I'm not following this space actively but, besides the >100 job openings and >3 AIM programs mentioned above, here's some off the top of my head:
You can also have a look at the most recent posts tagged "opportunities to take action" and the EA opportunities board, there's lots of non-AI stuff, enough to overwhelm newcomers as much as EA in 2021, and likely way more than EA in 2017.
Also in general if Coefficient Giving and others are making more grants to more things, it likely means that there are more opportunities.
funding for non-AI projects has dried up
What are you basing this on? I think the opposite is going on. Some datapoints that come to mind:
Thanks for sharing! I'd have guessed they would be using something at least as good as pangram, but maybe it has too many false negatives for them, or it was rejected for other reasons and the wrong rejection message was shown.
Literally just cranked out a 2 minute average quality comment and got accused of being a bot lol. Great introduction to the forum. To be fair they followed up well and promptly, but it was a bit annoying because it was days later and by that stage the thread had passed ant the comment was irrelevent.
As an ex forum moderator I can sympathize with them, not a fun job!
my first post on LessWrong was scrapped because they identified it as AI written
I'm surprised to read this, can you check your post on https://www.pangram.com/ ?
https://benefficienza.it/ (spelled with two Fs) has a lot of material on effective giving in Italian, in case it's useful, although nothing on catholicism as far as I'm aware.
Some EA articles were translated here: https://altruismoefficace.it/blog
And the EA handbook a few years ago was translated here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/ea-italy (I don't know if it changed much since then)
There was also this article in the major Italian Catholic newspaper after the FTX scandals, which was not entirely negative, but still mostly skeptical.
But I’m not sure how fruitful it is for all of us to have a vibes-based conversation about the possible merits of this campaign.
I think promoting good norms and making them more "common knowledge" is one of the few ways that EA Forum conversations can maybe be useful.
As in, I think it's good that "everyone knows that everyone knows" that we should have a strong bias to be collaborative towards other projects with similar goals, and these threads can help a bit with that.
(To be clear, my sense is that FarmKind is already well aware of this and this is collaborative campaign, especially after reading their comment. I mean for the EA Forum readers community as a whole)
Edit: new comment from FarmKind
Thank you! Here's a link from web.archive.org of the EA Forum citation https://web.archive.org/web/20230715000000*/https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0255/4986/5032/files/DC-CASE-STUDY_NEW-BRAND_WEB2.pdf?v=1653689936
But yeah if we can't trust that there was a real significant population reduction it doesn't mean much