(For those in the comments, you can track prior versions of these conversations in EA Anywhere's cause-climate-change channel).
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...
I agree with you that the 2018 report should not have been used as primary evidence for CATF cost-effectiveness for WWOTF (and, IIRC, I advised against it and recommended an argument more based on landdscaping considerations with leverage from advocacy and induced technological change). But this comment is quite misleading with regards to FP's work as we have discussed before:
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
"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...
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:
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?
Thanks for re-emphasizing these norms.
For those who disagree with these norms, these sources help explain why they are important:
The sub-population that disagrees with these norms has substantial overlap with the sub-population that would most benefit from them.
I suspect that there is significant geographic concentration in the bay area as well, because of a culmination of factors including housing prices pushing people to group homes, gender ratios, tech/startup...
6Sept2023 Update: An opinion piece in Utility Dive "DOE’s error-ridden analysis on coal CCS project threatens climate and engagement goals" and journal article by Emily Grubert shows the likely increase in emissions from 45Q.
There are real coal plants that are adding CCS and extending their life, which is only possible with 45Q. They would have otherwise retired and been replaced with renewable energy.
I suggest you consult with a licensed professional mechanical engineer who specializes in air quality testing. I can't make any recommendations without knowing the specifics of the system and the building occupancy, which a consultant can analyze.
Thanks for this list! Thanks for this! Great list.
Here's some additional lessons I've learned in my group:
Have a plan for disruptive people. You will encounter zoom bombers, aggressive contrarians, and people that dominate conversations. Have a plan for handling them so you don't freeze in the moment and have it ruin an event.
Space matters. Some people are not comfortable attending events at a person's house or apartment complex. Some people are physically limited and can't meet outside. Is the event space accessible to those who drive and those who take t...
Happy to message or chat 1:1; I don't want to dispute specific LTFF grants in the comment section.
I think EAIF vastly overstates the effectiveness difference between paid vs. unpaid organizers, and dismisses the reputational risks of having paid organizers. Many college groups thrive without paid organizers, and EAIF-level of funding paid organizers only start being necessary once groups sizes reach 100. I don't think there are any EA college groups that large, and they can fund-raise for it. I think the reputational harm - that EA is for self-serving grifters - causes far more damage than the marginal benefit from paid recruitment. It completely undercuts the message of using resources effectively.
The EAIF isn't supporting university groups anymore (though I don't think it's implausible that we will start doing this again in the future).
I think we have a pretty good sense of which uni groups and activities tend to produce people that go on to do high-impact work. I don't think that is the only metric on which we should assess uni groups, but it's an important one. I do think that groups wth paid organisers tend to have more measurable impact than groups without (though ofc there are selection effects). The groups also generally seem larger and more ...
EA Funds would like to do more retroactive investigation into the effectiveness of past grants, if you have ideas on which metrics would convince you that paid organizers are effective vs ineffective use of marginal resources, that'd be really appreciated! But of course there's no expectation that you'd do our work for us either!
I don't think I fully understand the reputational argument. The most naive interpretation of "It completely undercuts the message of using resources effectively" is that you're simply assuming the conclusion. If the EV of hav...
Thanks for linking to that! I appreciate the transparency in the write-up, and thanks for responding well to criticism. I don't have the knowledge to evaluate the quality of the AI-related LTFF grants on AI. But I do have some experience in pandemic / aerosol disease transmission, and I've been pretty stunned by the lack of EA expertise in the space despite the attention. Others experts have told me they share the concern. It seems there is a strong bias in EA to source knowledge from "value-aligned" people that brand themselves as EAs, even if they aren'...
Thanks for the feedback! But this all sounds very generic and I don't know how to interpret it. Can you give specific examples of pandemic/aerosol grantees we've funded but you think shouldn't be funded, or (with their permission ofc) grants that we rejected that you think should be funded?
I think most grants to university, city, or national groups fund work that would have been done just as effectively by volunteers. Some of the university grants are particularly egregious, given how nearly all other college clubs exist just fine without paid organizers. "We are a student group interested in the most effective causes, and oh by the way funding us to organize this group for a semester is of similar levels of effectiveness as preventing 3 kids dying from malaria in poor countries." I can think of few things more effective at turning people away from EA than college students learning the EA organizer is paid lots of money for it.
(I don't work for the EAIF, and have limited visibility into their past decisionmaking)
Hmm, I think it's fairly likely that the added value of having people devote significant time to university organizing (over what you could realistically get with volunteers) has higher EV via getting more future donations or via future hires than direct donations.
Do you disagree with this characterization of the expected consequences, or is the disagreement non-consequentialist in nature?
Separately, I also expect college club organizers to mostly be too young and relatively unknown entities for grantmakers that the "dole out to their friends" concern should be pretty minimal.
I may be unfairly lumping the LTFF in with EAIF (I'm skeptical of longtermism and wish it was less prominent in EA)
LTFF recently released a long payout report, which you might or might not find helpful to dive into. FWIW I think relatively few of our grants are contingent on philosophical longtermism, though many of them are probably only cost-effective if you think there's non-trivial probability of large-scale AI and/or biorisk catastrophes in the next 20-100 years, in addition to other more specific worldviews that fund managers may have.
I'm curious to compare the growth in funding to the growth in EA group size (uni, local, & regional/national groups). I suspect there was a lot of money put into community development with relatively muted response in growth.
It seems a lot of the community growth dollars went to students to organize on campuses or fly them to EA conferences. The students would have otherwise organized voluntarily and raised necessary funds through fundraisers, like most other university student groups. Many university groups have and continue to thrive without central ...
The alternatives also include people packing their own lunch, or having people pay for the lunches they buy on site (a small cafe for example). If the worksite is in a downtown area, there are excellent options within a few minutes walk, and people can pick exactly what food they want. If people are worried about the loss of a few minutes walking, or they are are far away from food, they can order food delivery. Free work lunches are not a necessary perk, and people can easily pay for it if they think it's worthwhile. The exception I'd make is someplace like a K-12 school where they are already giving kids (free) lunch, and marginal costs are minimal to extend the benefit to adults. Or if the work is in the food industry.
Thanks for writing this out and distinguishing between workplace perks and personal spending.
This movement is always going to have a cultural clash between the social pressures of class status and the demandingness of charity as explained by philosophers like Parfit, Singer, and Unger. Lifestyle creep is pernicious, and EAs are excellent at rationalizing luxury spending. SBF's billionaire lifestyle is an extreme example.
It seems that many EA orgs are modeling themselves after bay area tech companies which are peculiar elite workplaces with massive compensa...
Maybe occasional lunches and a coffee machine
Flagging that I think lunches every single day may be a great productivity investment for an org to make – the alternative is likely people leaving the office to find lunch, taking a significantly longer lunch break. The cost is only several dollars a day per employee, versus a benefit of perhaps several times that. Ditto for having good coffee and snacks available at all times.
It's hard to think of an industry that has a larger gap between best practice and what is typical than HVAC. Thanks for highlighting this.
Liz Specht at the Good Food Institute wrote this response in the NewScientist:
*"Scientists developing cultivated meat agree that R&D-scale methods won’t work for large-scale production. The non-peer-reviewed environmental impact study you reported on assumed commercial production of cultivated meat would rely on pharmaceutical-grade media to feed the cells – which food manufacturers won’t need to use (13 May, p 11).
Its findings deviate from other published research and don’t reflect current or anticipated practices. Recent peer-reviewed data demonstrat...
This article hasn't been peer-reviewed, so don't read into the results too much. The CO2e/kg estimates are 10-100x higher than previous studies. And while the author doesn't claim a conflict of interest, all the authors are at UC Davis in the same college as the Clear Center, a beef-industry funded advocacy organization. I don't think academic work should be dismissed outright for an apparent unstated conflict of interest, but it does warrant extra scrutiny. I'd be much less skeptical if this came out of another university.
Here's a related comment from last year: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nopFhTtoiyGX8Bs7G/uvc-air-purifier-design-and-testing-strategy?commentId=ZywtAzPB2Ci5PLfPC
UV systems have been around for ~100 years. They work great in some specific applications. Newer UV-C technology is a marginal improvement, but doesn't significantly address the cost, design expertise, and maintenance challenges that have kept UV systems from widespread use. Air filters are generally better for most applications. I do expect we will see more UV-C systems in particular a...
I agree with a succinct, workable change based on your recommendations:
(1) EVF board seat should be elected by GWWC members in good standing.
I'd be interested in a chart similar to "Proportion of GWWC Pledgers who record any donations by Pledge year (per cohort)", but with 4 versions (median / average donation in $) x (inclusive / exclusive of those that didn't record data, assuming no record is $0). From the data it seems that both things are true: "most people give less over time and stop giving" and "on average, pledge donations increase over time", driven entirely by ~5-10% of extremely wealthy donors that increase their pledge.
Do you think the EA community comparative "smartness" is real, or is it an example of the Lake Wobegon Effect compared to other youthful social-do-gooder movements?
It's comedy, but it's also pretty spot on. My only nitpick is it should be 200 years, not 400 years. Not doing harm would be a big step forward in addressing poverty in developing countries.
Many developing countries are under crippling debt that forces them to forgo basic services for their citizens. Around half of this debt is taken out by dictators and never used to help the citizens of the countries responsible for the debts. . There are many instances where IMF and World Bank insist on collecting debts in full knowledge that the funds weren't used
When the UK outlawed slavery they compensated the slaveowners. It was a distasteful compromise, but [edit: contributed to] slavery being outlawed much sooner than in other countries (ex: in the US it took another 32y and a war). To fund these payments the UK government borrowed money, and paid it back slowly over time. Describing paying back the loans as "paying money to former slave owning families as compensation for their financial loss when slavery was banned" is very misleading.
I think that disengaging from developing countries would be a negative, at least if we include trade, services, tourism and immigration/remittances (not sure if that should count under 'not doing harm')
But OK:
ODA is about $180 billion per year; about $50 billion to Africa link
Plus about 8 billion in private philanthropy per year
Africa's debt service payments are about $70 billion per year
If that debt was all forgiven it might do as much good as the ODA. So if 'not doing harm' means 'forgiving debt' you might be right. (But that is not what G
If sections 1 and 2 were their own post, I wouldn't have strongly downvoted, but I probably wouldn't have upvoted either. Investing advice isn't new or interesting to me.
There is some interest in investing; our local group even ran a 6-week course on socially responsible investing in the fall that was well received. Importantly, the person giving it didn't use it as an advertising opportunity. They were just genuinely interested it the topic and sharing what they learned.
Is it ever ok for EAs to share one of their for-profit solutions? Yes, but general...
"Group differences in IQ is right around the corner, and if you’re going to maintain any kind of commitment to rationalism you’re going to have to either stop yourself before getting on that train or take it to its logical destination."
Yikes.
Eugenics or "human biodiversity" isn't a new idea and is incredibly toxic to most people. It has no place in the EA movement. If you let it anywhere near the movement, the only people that will remain are contrarian right-wingers that care more about being edgy and provocative than helping people or other animals. And ...
"Eugenics or 'human biodiversity' isn't a new idea and is incredibly toxic to most people."
>right, calling an idea "toxic" is literally the same thing as calling it "taboo." Hanania argues rationalism is the belief that "fewer topics...should be considered taboo...and not subject to cost-benefit anaysis."
It sounds like your argument isn't explicitly saying that you consider this topic off limits personally, but rather too many others view it as taboo so as a practical matter you will lose more people than you'll gain (or lose the right peopl...
While I appreciate the investment thoughts in this post, I strongly downvoted it because I don't think the EA forum is an appropriate place to advertise specific financial products.
I don't think anyone is denying that longtermist and existential risk concerns were part of the movement from the beginning. Or think that longtermist concerns don't belong in a movement about doing the most good. I think the concern is around the shift from longtermist concerns existing relatively equally with other cause areas to becoming much more dominant. Longtermism is much more prominent both in terms of funding and attention given to longtermism in community growth and introductory materials.
See my comment about clean cookstoves here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cz85mufYwiiukpowD/clean-cookstoves-may-be-competitive-with-givewell?commentId=C9j4TXromRcFbJJT7
If you are interested in clean cookstoves in particular, review the content from: https://cleancooking.org/
This post and headline conflate several issues:
It seems many of the comments express agreement with 1) and 2), while ignoring 3).
I would hope that a majority of the EA community would agree that there aren't good reasons for someone to claim ownership to billions of dollars. Perhaps there are those that ...
I would hope that a majority of the EA community would agree that there aren't good reasons for someone to claim ownership to billions of dollars. Perhaps there are those that disagree.
I would certainly disagree vehemently with this claim, and would hope the majority of EAs also disagree. I might clarify that this isn't about arbitrarily claiming ownership of billions of dollars - it's a question of whether you can earn billions of dollars through mutual exchange consistent with legal rules.
We might believe, as EAs, that it is either a duty or a supe...
Thanks for the clarification!
I took the pledge in 2016 which coincided with when the research department disbanded per Jeff's comment. I think that explains why I perceived GWWC to not be in the business of doing evaluations. Glad to see "evaluate the evaluators" is working its way back in.
"One of the roles of Giving What We Can (GWWC) is to help its members and other interested people figure out where to give." Is this a recent addition to the GWWC mission statement? I've been a member for a while and wasn't under the impression that GWWC was in the business of doing charity evaluations or meta-charity/fund evaluations. I assumed GWWC always emphasized the pledge, why to give, how much to give, but not saying much about where to give beyond pointing to GiveWell or whatever. If a big component of GWWC has always been about where to give, I must have missed that. Has GWWC emphasized the where to give piece more in recent years?
The key actors involved in FTX were extremely close to the EA community. SBF became involved after a 1:1? conversation with Will MacAskill, worked at CEA for a short while, held prime speaking slots at EAG, and set up and funded a key organization (FTX fund). Caroline held an officer position in her university EA group. It's fair to say the people at the center of the fraud were embedded and more tightly aligned with the EA movement than most people connected with EA. It's a classic example of high-trust / bad actors - it only takes a few of them to ca...
To re-frame this:
High-trust assumes both good motivations and competence. High trust is nice because it makes things go smoother. But if there are any badly motivated or incompetent actors, insisting on high trust creates conditions for repeated devastating impacts. To further insist on high trust after significant shocks means people who no longer trust good motivations and competence leave.
FTX was a high-trust/bad act...
To add further, given construction prices in Oxford and London, CEA could have built a brand-new office/hotel/retreat center of the same size for less than half the price.
The difficulty in building, aside from the fact that CEA is not a construction firm, is all in the planning permission, not the cost of materials and labour. I would be very surprised if CEA happened to have a comparative advantage at overcoming one of the main impediments to UK economic growth over the last 70 years.
That comment isn't really an answer. It's just saying "CEA got a grant to purchase a venue dedicated to fancy retreats". The post is asking for an explanation as to why CEA thought this was necessary, useful, and why did they pick such an expensive venue in particular. The comment doesn't answer that.
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)
I cite a range of papers from the academia, government, and think tanks in the appendix. You don't cite anything either those are just like... your opinions no?
Are you saying the more we invest in R&D the higher the costs? I agree that nuclear is getting more expensive on net but that can stil... (read more)