This looks super cool Ren and KvPelt! Curious - do you plan to advocate for electrical stunning after the six months of investigation? I'm wondering if the theory of change would be similar to FWI and SWP, or if it's still to be determined based on this initial investigation work?
Thanks Martin, looking forward to it! Just checking - should I eat dinner beforehand? (Is it mostly snacks?) Also, I’m allergic to nuts (except for almonds), but no problem if you’ve already bought food :)
Hi! I'm visiting from Australia and would love to meet some new people in EA Berlin. Is it ok for me to attend? :)
I very much agree with what Kyle said.
Please consider focusing on improving your mental health as priority, because your wellbeing matters, and you deserve to live a flourishing and joyful life.
I also agree that IQ is not particularly important in certain jobs, and there is something impactful for everyone if you enjoy it and your heart is in the right place.
Good luck :)
Hi team, thanks for your amazing work. Just out of curiosity, is there any particular reason climate charities are no longer recommended?
Wow fascinating, thanks for this post Vasco!
I'd be inclined to take a Bayesian approach to this kind of cost-effectiveness modelling, where the "prior evidence" is the estimated impact on lives saved. This is something we have strong reason to believe is good under many world views. Then the "additional evidence" would be the reduction in insect welfare caused by deforestation. I'm just so very uncertain about whether the second one is really a negative effect that I think it would be swamped by the impact on lives saved. This is because we have several st...
Hi Bob, thanks for this post, really interesting stuff.
I'm a researcher at the Shrimp Welfare Project. Do you have a sense of whether any of the broad conclusions are likely to apply to shrimps as well, or do you think it would require an entirely new research project?
Thanks,
Lucas
I'd like to see someone in the EA community do some work related to preventing bullying, which seems likely to be one the most intense forms of suffering for children.
Thanks so much for your awesome work!! :)
What is StrongMinds' room for more funding, and do you expect the cost-effectiveness of the marginal dollar (ie. additional funds) to be any worse than the average cost-effectiveness of StrongMinds?
Fantastic work - thank you!
Re Jalil et. al (2022), it's interesting to see there was a decrease in poultry/fish consumption as a result of climate change messaging (in addition to red meat). My prior concern would've been that people might simply switch from red meat to poultry/fish. For those interested in the general topic, note also this meta-review on interventions that influence animal-product consumption.
Ah yes, my apologies, I meant natural experiments (or in the case of Croke 2019, a natural experiment caused by an actual experiment).
I suppose it is possible deworming would have a much smaller effect when children also receive these other interventions. However, I would've thought many children currently being treated for worms are also receiving such interventions, therefore making it decision-relevant for GiveWell-funded deworming programs?
Thanks for this post, the critique of GiveDirectly seems particularly compelling and important.
On the issue of effects on males vs females, were you able to look into whether they may have converged towards more homogenous effects over time? It seems most of the eradication campaigns studied in the papers listed happened in the 1950s - I would suspect labour market opportunities are significantly stronger for women today, though I haven't looked at the data or whether this is true for the low-income countries where GiveWell's malaria charities do the...
Note that if observational (i.e. non-experimental) studies are being included, one would probably also want to consider Croke 2019, which shows null effects on literacy and numeracy.
There is also Makamu et al. 2018, but I don't think the natural experiment is very plausible (they use variation in which regions had deworming campaigns, but this is likely to be correlated with other policies/economic factors).
Hi MHR, thank you very much for your questions, these are important considerations!
1. We certainly aim to consider the long-term effects on the total number of shrimps farmed when designing our interventions. Though we have not yet had an opportunity to precisely model the net effect, we expect a full analysis would need to account for:
Thanks for this thoughtful post Carolina! I would second Karthik's note here - I think there have also been a few other GE studies which show contradictory results, so it's not clear that the spillover effects would be positive once inflation and exchange rates effects are taken into account. Others have also raised concerns about possible negative pyschological spillovers, though from memory I think GiveDirectly typically provides cash to everyone in a village, which may mitigate this issue.
Thanks for writing this up Joseph, these are really valuable questions to raise. I'd be particularly excited to see someone do a systematic review of spillovers on the control group after developmental interventions.
Hi everyone,
In this recent critique of EA, Erik Hoel claims that EA is sympathetic towards letting AGI develop because of the potential for billions of happy AIs (~35 mins) . He claims that this influences EA funding to go more towards alignment rather than trying to prevent/delay AGI (such as through regulation).
Is this true, or is it a misrepresentation of why EA funding goes towards alignment? For example, perhaps it is because EAs think AGI is inevitable or it is too difficult to delay/prevent?
Thanks very much!
Lucas
Thanks for this really well-written post, I particularly like how you clarified the different connotations of longtermism and also the summary table of cost-effectiveness.
I think one thing to note is that an X-risk event would not only wipe out humans, but also the billions of factory farmed animals. Taking into account animal suffering would dramatically worsen the cost-effectiveness of X-risk from a neartermist point of view. I think this implies longtermism is necessary to justify working on X-risk (at least until factory farming is phased out).
While I don't necessarily agree with Matty's view that total utilitarianism is wrong, I think this comment highlights a key distinction between a) improving the lives of future people and b) bringing lives into existance.
The examples in this post are really useful to show that future people matter, but they don't show that we should bring people into existance. For example, if future people were going to live unhappy lives, it would still be good to do things that prevent their lives from being worse (e.g. improve education, prevent climate change, p...
Sorry I'm a bit late to the party on this, but thanks for the well-researched and well thought-out post.
My two cents, as this line caught my eye:
Notably, working on these issues can often improve the lives of people living today (e.g. working towards safe advanced AI includes addressing already present issues, like racial or gender bias in today’s systems).
I think the line of reasoning concerns me. If working on racial/gender bias from AI is one of the most cost-effective ways to make people happier or save lives, then I would advocate&nb...
Thanks for the response Samuel, would be interesting to hear GiveWell's rationale on using the log of average(earnings+consumption).
Hi Joel, thanks for your response on this!
I think my concern is that we can only "illustrate what would happen if GiveWell added decay to their model" if we have the right starting value. In the decay model's current form, I believe the model is not only adding decay, but also inadvertently changes the total earnings effect over the first 11 years of adulthood (yet we already have evidence on the total earnings effect for these years).
However, as you noted, the main point certainly still holds either way.
As a separate note, I'm not sure if it was intentional, but it appears HLI has calculated log effects slightly differently to GiveWell.
Full disclosure: I'm the primary author of a yet to be published SoGive report on deworming, however I'm commenting here in a personal capacity.
Thanks for this thought provoking and well-written analysis!
I have a query about whether the exponential decay model appropriately reflects the evidence:
Thank you for writing this Mitra, it's always valuable to hear critiques of current approaches in the EA community. As Peter noted above, your experiences and views would be greatly valued by the community.
I will attempt to respond to some of these questions, but note that my responses may not reflect the views of everyone in the community, and I may miss some crucial points.
Thanks for writing this Caroline, really interesting post! I think it's probably true that having talented people doing important things work really hard is higher impact than having people donate a little bit more money.
However, I am concerned about the idea that one should prioritize their impact over relationships with family, friends, romantic partners, or children, for two reasons:
Thanks for writing this up Rumtin and Krystal!
Does the scope of the project allow for engagment with academics as well as policy-makers/public servants? While there obvious risks with expanding the scope too broadly, I wonder whether collaboration with academia could be valuable for research efforts. There is also the possibility that some academic work (e.g. gain-of function research) could undermine policy efforts, so perhaps coordination between EA-aligned policy-makers/public servants and academics could reduce this risk?
Thanks for writing this up!
This post does resonate with me, as when I was first introduced to EA, I was sceptical about the idea of "discussing the best ways to do good". This was because I wanted to volunteer rather than just talk about doing good (this was before I realised how much more impact I could have with my career/donations) and I think I would’ve been even more deterred if I’d heard that donated funds were being spent on my dinners.
However, it sounds like my attitude might have been quite different to others, reading the comments here. Also, I suspect I would’ve ended up becoming involved in EA either way as long as I heard about the core ideas.
Thanks Nathan, that would make a lot of sense, and motivates the conversation about whether CEA can realisticly attract as many people through advertising as Goldman etc.
I guess the question is then whether:
a) Goldman's activities are actually effective at attracting students; and
b) This is a relevant baseline prior for the types of activities that local EA groups undertake with CEA's funding (e.g. dinners for EA scholars students)
Hi Jessica,
Thanks for outlining your reasoning here, and I'm really excited about the progress EA groups are making around the world.
I could easily be missing something here, but why are we comparing the value of CEA's community building grants to the value of Mckinsey etc?
Isn't the relevant comparison CEA's community building grants vs other EA spending, for example GiveWell's marginally funded programs (around 5x the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers)?
If CEA is getting funding from non-EA sources, however, this query would be i...
I'm obviously not speaking for Jessica here, but I think the reason the comparison is relevant is that the high spend by Goldman ect suggests that spending a lot on recruitment at unis is effective.
If this is the case, which I think is also supported by the success of well funded groups with full or part time organisers, and that EA is in an adversarial relationship to with these large firms, which I think is large true, then it makes sense for EA to spend similar amounts of money trying to attract students.
The relvent comparison is then comparing the value of the marginal student recurited with malaria nets ect.
Really interesting and well-written post about the Australian political context! Do you think EA grant makers should consider funding political campaigns by minor parties, or would you prefer to see EA-aligned volunteers/staff leverage other sources of funds?
Thanks, Lucas
Thank you for raising some interesting concerns JP.
I just wanted to note that the value of a market for bednets may be small relative to the value of philanthropic funding for several reasons:
Thank you, that makes sense! Keen to hear what comes from it.