Fantastic response love it. Makes me more comfortable all this already.

I think these interventions may make sense, but it makes me sad that this could be another line of thinking which could make all of EA more unpopular again, especially when there's a bit of a public comeback afoot?

This doesn't mean we shouldn't do this research,  I just think its an important point to consider. Not just for PR reasons, but also to make sure scientists working on this dont' get maligned and that this line of science doesn't get shut down for ideological reasons.

I do wonder whether it might be important to do this kind of research explicitly alongside governments and mainstream climate scientists, as much as possible. If it turns out the best option is to manually mess with our atmosphere and ice-sheets, I suspect the bottleneck might be public opinion and politics more than the science.

On the other hand maybe its best to start with a little quiet-ish research in the background... But "low hundreds of millions" wouldn't be quiet lol.

How many warning shots will governments need before they start to regulate AI? Maybe having to shut down their own websites will get them one step closer?

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/ckgel5xp2xv9t
 

Amazing explanation - and this is the kind of thing that might be useful to know at the start of a campaign like this, although I can see how that might be difficult relationally or politically.

Just wanted to note it might be helpful to clearly state the assumption at the start of the piece that Wild animals have a negative welfare, which you kind of state a bit later. A minority of people such as myself believe that wild animals have welfare not around zero or negative, but actually have positive welfare, so I think its worth at least recognising that uncertainty.


"Those wild animals my have a welfare around zero (according to the abovementioned survey), but they may also have a negative welfare (according to many experts)."

Also I believe this statement is straightforwardly flawed... "Most wild animals die prematurely, which can indicate that they have a negative welfare overall." How early you die can have little to do with if your life is positive or negative. A shorter life could be positive, negative or neutral. Even from a utilitarian perspective we don't save kids because their short lives are net-negative, we save them to extend a positive life.
 

Thanks for this great response

My only real quibble is with this statement "It seemed unlikely to us that improving monitoring truly has no effect, even if the real mortality reduction is much smaller than observed." I agree with this statement. But how unlikely? You have made the call here that no effect is not just unlikely, but that there is a well under 5% chance that monitoring has no effect. This is where I disagree. Given other null results when RCTs were done on monitoring (in different contexts), and an inconsistent history of before and after study results, I think it would have been better to include null in your confidence interval. I didn't do the research so I have little clue but I would maybe have guestimated the probability of no effect in the 10%-30% range given these priors.

I might have discounted further on the point estimate, but this is perhaps a "how short is a piece of string" situation where you just have to make subjective calls so fair enough here - and you did discount a lot already.

"the RP report does not claim this is the most cost-effective global health intervention." Point estimates matter a lot as this is your best estimate as to the effect. This an interesting philosophical question, but with your eye-popping point estimate and a confidence interval that doesn't include zero effect, I think there is a decent argument that your math at least does seem to claim this is one of most cost-effective global health interventions on earth, even if that isn't your intent. 

Yep completely agree with this from a comms perspective generally, although on the EA forum here I think it was fair enough to lead like they did.

Wow these guys are taking some punches graciously from the rest of us and @MichaelPlant weighs in with a curveball ha.

My main comment here is to reiterate that this is a completely standard thing which most GHD people do, largely because the biggest player GiveWell uses it as their standard. 

My take here is that there are different degrees of "removal" as it were, all with different levels of understanding. We can't who's subjectivity it's just how much we are willing to live with. 

You could classify these differently but I'm my mind there's at least 3 degrees of this

1. Even within DALY measurement there is enormous subjectiity. How does hearing loss compare with itching compare with the death of a child?
2. Comparing across human realms like your example here of income vs health.
3. Comparing across cause areas line animal welfare vs human welfare, where we can't even talk with animals to get their subjective opinion. 

Personally I can liver with the end of the first 2 but currently 50/50 on whether it's worth trying to quantify number 3.

There are also these people who would rather look at this thing called wellbeing which solves  this comparison-between-human issue at least, but I'm not sure if they are really serious.