All of MatthewDahlhausen's Comments + Replies

A common qualification added to the healthy patient case is that the killing and distribution could be done in a way with plausible deniability, or it is done in a remote setting where the doctor is the only one who would know what happened. The central challenge of the case is on means versus ends, so make whatever adjustments you need to avoid the evasive rejoinder that not killing is in fact the more utilitarian option.

But lets turn to the other case I gave: would you be ok with others engaging in human trafficking if they donated enough to reduce human... (read more)

I think the question is quite similar to the case of a doctor killing a healthy patient to use their organs to save five other sick patients.

Or as another comparison, using trafficked people for personal ends but donating enough to reduce human trafficking elsewhere.

People, and non-human animals, are not simply reducible to means to serve utilitarian ends.

Just get a room air filter for your condo. There are different models and they are usually quite quiet unless on the highest setting. I can't hear mine on the two lowest settings (up to 100 CFM). UVC doesn't remove small particulates, which is the most serious air pollutant of concern from a health perspective for most homes.

Commercial buildings have to comply with locally required codes and standards. Code authorities could adopt some or all of ASHRAE Standard 241 in their jurisdiction just like they do with ASHRAE Standard 62.1 (ventilation) and 90.1 (energy).

Far-UVC produces ozone. That's inherent to the technology. That can be managed with ventilation, so places with already high ventilation rates where you don't want the added static pressure in the air supply from greater filtration are a good fit for UVC. In other places, in-room air cleaners tend to be cheaper to operate and maintain. The "best" technology depends on space constraints, ventilation rates, first cost, maintenance, etc. If far-UVC gets cheaper, I expect it will become more widely used. But I don't think it will fully dominate the space.

My po... (read more)

I know the FIRE community floats 25x your annual spend in savings as a target for retirement. At your income and "frugal even compared to those under poverty line", it would take you less than year to hit that target. Taking what you say as true, it means you are prioritizing one less year of working far more than altruistically helping others. That is discordant with the median attitude in the community, who imagine themselves working effectively half a decade or more solely for the benefit of others. I don't want to focus too much on the money. Its the r... (read more)

"Personally, my partner and I donate on average ~$10k USD every year (plus employer matching for the most part), which is only ~1% of my income". I think this is where the disconnect comes from. At a ~$1 million/yr income, it seems you are prioritizing early retirement and a luxurious lifestyle over EA causes and giving. That's normal preference expression for the ultra-wealthy. It's just going to seem discordant for many in EA making $50-$150k/yr and giving 10%+ who place (relatively) higher priority on giving. There's a difference between what you value ... (read more)

If you are arguing for increasing agricultural land, there are many other ways to accomplish that. You could promote the use of biofuels. Suggest more people get horses as companion animals. Or many other methods. Hyper-focusing on eating cows is weird. At this point is seems like a way to self-rationalize that eating cows is not just ok but on net preferable.

P1: "This 90 year old is about to send a spam message to 100 million people. That will cause ~2000 years of annoyance and suffering. They have only ~4 years of expected mediocre life left, so it would be better to kill them so they can't send the message."

P2: "Why not just take away their phone?"

You've proposed a false dilemma.

Mild downvote here. The conclusions ("I recommend increasing the consumption of beef") do not not follow from the premises ("soil animals have negative lives"), even if true. And the premises are highly uncertain and speculative.

There are perhaps other ways to improve or mitigate soil animal lives, and certainly many other ways to increase agricultural land that do not involve killing and eating cows.

Because of that, it feels like the post is intentionally contrarian for the sake of aggravating others, rather than an earnest attempt to improve the lives of... (read more)

I understand you are trying to recast the Christian dominion interpretation, but it is worth mentioning that as an ideology it has long been overwhelming opposed or indifferent to animal welfare. Most popular dominion interpretations are in the mold of Rene Descartes, who thought animals automatons. The dominion framing is so severe that the most popular shocking vegan film is named after it.

Furthermore, the modern animal welfare movement is highly correlated with atheism, or at least skeptical approaches to understanding our relationship with non-human a... (read more)

It seems like a fundamental problem is the lack of a moral realist foundation, as "human intentions toward sentient beings" and "what is moral" are different things. Can someone recommend some reading on whether alignment is even a coherent ask, either from a moral realist or moral anti-realist perspective?

The salient question for me is how much does reducing extinction risk change the long run experience of moral patients? One argument is that meaningfully reducing risk would require substantial coordination, and that coordination is likely to result in better worlds. I think it is as or more likely that reducing extinction risk can result in some worlds where most moral patients are used as means without regard to their suffering.

I think an AI aligned to roughly to the output of all current human coordination would be net-negative. I would shift to thinkin... (read more)

The USDA secretary released a strategy yesterday on lowering egg prices. Explained originally as a WSJ opinion (paywall). Summarized here without the paywall.

Five points to the strategy:

• $500 million for a biosecurity program to limit transmission of avian flu
• $400 million to farmers to recover after an outbreak
• $100 million for vaccines
• Look to ease regulations, especially overriding California Proposition 12 that banned the sale of eggs from caged hens.
• Look to allow temporary imports of eggs

Key concerns:

• Enacting a key-goal of the EATS act to overri

I'm curious where the non-cage free eggs are going. From my naive position, it seems like the grocery stores and restaurant chains listed here should cover a majority of egg use, and are well above 40% cage-free in aggregate. Do non-chain restaurants explain the difference? Hotels? Food manufacturers? Schools and other public places with cafeterias?

"The important question is whether eating meat and donating is morally better than eating meat and not donating. The answer to that seems like a resounding 'yes'"

Offsetting bad moral actions depends on 1) the action being off-settable, 2) the two actions are inseparable, and 3) presuming a rather extreme form of utilitarianism is morally correct.

In the case you provide, I think it fails on all three parts. The action isn't off-settable. Most moral frameworks would look at the two actions separately. Donating to an animal welfare charity doesn't first requi... (read more)

Do you agree with Susan Wolf's claim in Moral Saints that we ought to consider non-moral values in deciding what we do, and those may be a valid reason to not given more to the worst off? I presume you've written about it before on your blog or in a paper.

A related question is: do you think the gap is greater between our actions and what we think we ought to do, or between what we think ought to do and what we ought to do in some realist meta-normative sense? Is the bigger issue that we lack moral knowledge, or that we don't live up to moral standards?

It's difficult to pinpoint a definition of conservatism. Modern politics tends to follow in the Burkean conservatism tradition. One of the animating forces is the belief that hierarchy is necessary for a just an prosperous society. It is to varying degrees a "might makes right" value system, summed up in this quote by Plato: " ...nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that ... (read more)

I think it is more likely than not that failure to pass this bill as is was net harmful.

• Ozone air cleaners are a significant source of indoor air pollution, producing indoor particulate levels just slightly less than second hand smoke. Particulates account for 85%+ of morbidity from indoor air pollution in residences. There is a serious harm in keeping these air cleaners on the market. All major health and air quality organizations oppose them. But there is no ban on their sale, so they remain available to uninformed customers. Killing this bill keeps a

You can buy whey made from precision fermentation (PerfectDay). That changes several elements of your post, particularly the claim that whey is necessarily not vegan.

"we are biologically programmed to not care when eating animal flesh" this isn't obvious or intuitive to me. It seems like our attitudes toward eating animals are largely culturally conditioned. Regardless, even if it is "innate", a personal insensitivity to animals is not a moral reason to treat them as interchangeable, expendable, or offsetable.

It seems your justifications for offsets are bit of fanatic consequentialism and a belief that animals do not deserve similar moral status as humans.

Two points in response. First, many vegans were similarly callou... (read more)

A useful test when moral theorizing about animals is to swap "animals" with "humans" and see if your answer changes substantially. In this example, if the answer changes, the relevant difference for you isn't about pure expected value consequentialism, it's about some salient difference between the rights or moral status of animals vs. humans. Vegans tend to give significant, even equivalent, moral status to some animals used for food. If you give near-equal moral status to animals, "offsetting meat eating by donating to animal welfare orgs" is similar to ... (read more)

Maximization is not as simple as choosing the single action the produces the most benefit; actions are not necessary exclusive. If I go to the grocery store, I don't only by beans because I think they have the highest nutritional value per dollar. I buy other things too, and need to be because beans alone are insufficient. One can donate to animal welfare charities and be vegan; those aren't exclusive.

Can you elaborate on why you think we will never eradicate factory farming? You point to near-term trends that suggest it will get worse over the coming decades. What about on a century long time scale or longer? Factory farming has only been around for a few generations, and food habits have changed tremendously over that time.

I think it's important to consider how some strategies may make future work difficult. For example, Martha Nussbaum highlights how much of the legal theory in the animal rights movement has relied on showing similarities between hum... (read more)

ASHRAE has long had standards and working groups on UVC, and recently published standard 241 on Control of Infectious Aerosols. The goal is to reduce transmission risk, not to support any one particular technology. Filtration is usually cheaper than Far-UVC and easier to maintain for the same level of infection control. Far-UVC/UVC is better in some niches, particularly in healthcare settings that require high air flow rates.

I suggest getting involved in ASHRAE and the research community that has been working on and developing standards for infection contr... (read more)

Academic freedom is not and has never been meant to protect professors on topics that have no relevance to their discipline: "Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment."

If, say, a philosophy professor wants to express opinions on infanticide, that... (read more)

A clear example of a post that would be banned under the rules: why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die.

Reducing chronic health risks from indoor air pollution (mostly PM 2.5) generally entails different strategies than reducing infection risk from aerosols. Filtration can address both, but the airflow rates and costs can be quite different. UVC won't do anything about PM 2.5, and may contribute to it with ozone formation.

I recommend reading the supporting literature and history behind ASHRAE Std 62.1 and Std 241, which cover ventilation and control for infectious diseases in buildings. There are also several recent studies by the National Academies on air p... (read more)

Meta level question:

How does Manifest have anything to do with Effective Altruism, and why is this on the EA forum?

Shouldn't this post be on some other other channel internal to Manifest and the forecasting community?

It get there are some people that went to Manifest that are also in the EA movement, but it seems like the communities are quite distinct and have different goals. From comments and conversations, it seems pretty clear to me that this Manifest community has a strong hostility towards even considering the reputational risks platforming racist s... (read more)

I think that longtermism relies on more popular, evidenced-based causes like global health and animal welfare to do its reputational laundering through the EA label. I don't see any benefit to global health and animal welfare causes from longtermism. And for that reason I think it would be better for the movement to split into "effective altruism" and "speculative altruism" so the more robust global health and animal welfare causes areas don't have to suffer the reputational risk and criticism that is almost entirely directed at the longtermism wing.

Given ... (read more)

A butterfly flaps its wings and causes a devastating hurricane to form in the tropics. Therefore, we must exterminate butterflies, because there is some small probability X that doing so will avert hurricane disaster.

But it is just as easily the case that the butterfly flaps prevent devastating hurricanes from forming. Therefore we must massively grown their population.

The point being, it can be practically impossible to understand the casual tree and get even the sign right around low probability events.

That's what I take issue with - it's not just the nu... (read more)

I do think there are things worth funding for which evidence doesn't exist. The initial RNA vaccine research relied on good judgement around a hypothetical, and had a hard time getting funding for lack of evidence. It ended up being critical to saving millions of lives.

I think there are more ways some sort of evidence can be included in grant making. But the core of the criticism is about judgement, and I think a $100k grant for 6 months of video game developers time, or $50k grants to university student group organizers represent poor judgement (EAIF and ... (read more)

The post-hoc rationalization is referring to the "Note that this grant was made at the very peak of the period of very abundant (partially FTX-driven) EA funding where finding good funding opportunities was extremely hard."

If it wasn't a good opportunity, why was it funded?

Why does "infrastructure" and longtermist funding rely so heavily on pascal-mugging with evidence-free hypotheticals?

I can easily craft a hypothetical in the other direction on the video game. Perhaps funding such a game reinforces the impression that EA is a self-serving cult (as Steven... (read more)

"I was a fan of Effective Altruism (almost taught a course on it at Harvard) together w other rational efforts (evidence-based medicine, data-driven policing, randomista econ). But it became cultish. Happy to donate to save the most lives in Africa, but not to pay techies to fret about AI turning us into paperclips. Still support the idea; hope they extricate themselves from this rut." - Steven Pinker

I think the pile-on of post-hoc rationalizations trying to defend or excuse this grant is evidence of the rot in EA in captured in Steven Pinker's comment. Pe... (read more)

"A cost-effectiveness of decreasing GHG emissions of 3.41 tCO2eq/$, with a plausible range of 0.182 to 31.4 tCO2eq/$."

This is not a credible number, and Founders Pledge as of several years ago said they no longer stand behind the cost-effectiveness calculation you link to in your post.

It is based on an assumption that CATF nuclear advocacy will result in cheap enough reactors to replace coal in thermal electric power production. That is not credible now, and it wasn't at the time when the BOTEC was made. Note the 0.5%/1%/2% assumptions that nuclear will d... (read more)

Pointing to white papers from think tanks that you fund isn't a good evidentiary basis to support the claim of R&D's cost effectiveness. As with most things, the details matter quite a bit. The R&D benefit for advanced nuclear since the 1970s has yielded a net increase in price for that technology. For renewables and efficiency, the gains were useful until about the early 00s. After that, all the technology gains came from scaling, not R&D. You can't take economy wide estimates for energy R&D funding and apply them to a specific federal bi... (read more)

(For those in the comments, you can track prior versions of these conversations in EA Anywhere's cause-climate-change channel).

1. Last time I checked, GG's still linked to FP's CATF BOTEC on nuclear advocacy. Yes, I understand FP no longer uses that estimate. In fact, FP no longer publishes any of its BOTECs publicly. However, that hasn't stopped you from continuing to assert that FP hits around $1/ton cost-effectiveness, heavily implying CATF is one such org, and its nuclear work being the likely example of it. The BOTEC remains in FP's control, and it ha

"This bravado carries over into the blunt advice that MacAskill gives throughout the book. For instance, are you concerned about the environment? Recycling or changing your diet should not be your priority, he says; you can be “radically more impactful.” By giving $3,000 to a lobbying group called Clean Air Task Force (CATF), MacAskill declares, you can reduce carbon emissions by a massive 3,000 metric tons per year. That sounds great.

Friends, here’s where those numbers come from. MacAskill cites one of Ord’s research assistants—a recent PhD with no obviou... (read more)

Given the differentiation between normative and factual beliefs, I'm having a hard time parsing the last sentence in the post: "It is hard to maintain tragic beliefs. On the face of it, it makes the world worse to believe them. But in order to actually do as much good as we can, we need to be open to them, while finding ways to keep a healthy relationship with tragedy."

Is the "worseness" a general worseness for the world, or specific to the believer? Does doing the most good (normative claim) necessarily require tragic beliefs (factual claim)? What is a "h... (read more)

There are two kinds of belief. Belief in factual statements, and belief in normative statements.

“Insect suffering matters” is a normative statement, “people dying of preventable diseases could be saved by my donations” is a factual one. A restatement of the preventable disease statement in normative terms would look like: "If I can prevent people dying of preventable diseases by my donations at not greater cost to myself, I ought to do it."

I think tragic beliefs derive their force from being normative. "Metastatic cancer is terminal" is not tragic because ... (read more)

I suggest being highly skeptical of the work coming from the Copenhagen Consensus Center. It's founder, Bjorn Lomborg, has on several occasions been found to have committed scientific dishonesty. I wouldn't use this report to make an determinations of what are the "best investments" without independently verifying the data and methodology.

Down-voted, because I think the argument's premises are flawed, and the conclusions don't necessarily follow from the premises. It relies heavily on a "fruit of the poison tree" idea that because EA gets resources from civilization, and civilization can create the tools of its destruction, EA is inherently flawed. That is nonsense. The argument could be used to dismiss any kind of action that uses resources as being morally corrupt and ineffectual. Surely at the margin there are actions that reduce existential risk more than promote it.

I watched the video and then downvoted this post. The video is a criticism of EA and philanthropy, but there isn't anything new, thoughtful, or useful. I would have upvoted if I thought the criticism was insightful. We've had much better left-wing criticism of EA before on the forum.

Adam and Amy make basic mistakes. For example at 15:30, Adam says that GiveWell recommends funding AI alignment work, and that caused him to become critical because they weren't also recommending climate change mitigation. Adam treats GiveWell, SBF, and the entire EA movement a... (read more)

GiveWell has dozens of researchers putting tens of thousands of hours of work into coming up with better models and variable estimates. Their most critical inputs are largely determined by RCTs, and they are constantly working to get better data. A lot of their uncertainty comes from differences in moral weights in saving vs. improving lives.

Founders Pledge makes models using monte carlo simulations on complex theory of change models where the variables ranges are made up because they are largely unknowable. It's mostly Johannes, with a few assistant resea... (read more)

Founders Pledge saying they can offset a ton of CO2 for $0.1-1 is like a malaria net charity saying they can save a life for $5.

Both are off by at least an order of magnitude. You should expect to spend at least $100/ton for robust, verifiable offsets. That brings your offset cost to $3,500 not $35.

Yes, I see your point. I used the video-of-torture instead of direct torture example to try to get around the common objections of demand-elasticity and psychological distance.

I think the space for refuge in the psychological difference is a lot smaller than may seem. Let's try another example.

Let's consider that you purchase a piglet that you keep in a dark, confined cage for 6 months and then slaughter. Would you have done something wrong in the psychological sense for being so personally responsible for it's life through slaughter? Is that still vastly... (read more)

"Of course, some mistakes are more egregious than others. Perhaps many reserve the term ‘wrong’ for those moral mistakes that are so bad that you ought to feel significant guilt over them. I don’t think eating meat is wrong in that sense. It’s not like torturing puppies..."

But it is a lot like torturing puppies. Or at least it is a lot like paying puppy torturers for access to a video of them torturing puppies because you get enjoyment out of watching the torture. The mechanized torture of young animals is a huge part of factory farming, which you support by buying meat.

Are you recommending people restrict their CATF donations, or give to CATF unrestricted?

How did CATF's net harmful work on 45Q influence your recommendation of CATF this year?

I've noticed this too, in two ways.

First, is that the EA community tends to prefer information from "EA-aligned" people on a topic, rather than from academic experts in that topic. I've noticed this in climate change mitigation, air quality, and aerosol-based disease transmission (topics I'm an expert in). I presume that same issue is in other cause areas as well.

Second, the EA shift from global health and animal causes towards longtermism-focused efforts has corresponded with less reliance on RCTs and provable statements towards unprovable claims from arg... (read more)

This post is a copy of your (Berkeley Institute for Young Americans) statement on Intergenerational Fairness Day. It'd be worth changing it to a linkpost, as it seems the EA forum is not the primary intended audience for the statement.

I'm presuming posting this on the EA forum is an invitation for consideration and engagement.

Here's my short summary:

• young people face serious risks, including societal/ecosystem collapse
• this is largely the fault of neoliberalism, which has created a destabilized and insecure future
• social safety nets haven't adapted to th

Besides two fully remote roles, all the job listings are in either the SF Bay or London/Oxford. Are EA organizations this heavily geographically concentrated? Or is this update newsletter simply not capturing job listings from EA organizations based in other places?