All of ClimateDoc's Comments + Replies

Thanks, it's good to know it's had input from multiple knowledgable people. I agree that this looks like a good thing even if it's implemented imperfectly!

Thanks for putting together the doc.

For the suggested responses, are they informed by expertise or based on a personal view? This would be useful to know where I'm not sure about them. E.g. for the question on including images, I wondered if they could be misleading if they show animals (as disease and other health problems aren't very visible, perhaps leading people to erroneously think "those animals look OK to me" or similar).

I also wonder if there's a risk from this that products get labelled as "high" welfare when the animals still suffer overall, red... (read more)

the second most upvoted comment (27 karma right now) takes me to task for saying that "most experts are deeply skeptical of Ord’s claim"  (1/30 existential biorisk in the next 100 years).

I take that to be uncontroversial. Would you be willing to say so?

I asked because I'm interested - what makes you think most experts don't think biorisk is such a big threat, beyond a couple of papers?

I guess it depends on what the "correct direction" is thought to be. From the reasoning quoted in my first post, it could be the case that as the study result becomes larger the posterior expectation should actually reduce. It's not inconceivable that as we saw the estimate go to infinity, we should start reasoning that the study is so ridiculous as to be uninformative and so not the posterior update becomes smaller. But I don't know. What you say seems to suggest that Bayesian reasoning could only do that for rather specific choices of likelihood functions, which is interesting.

It's a potential solution, but I think it requires the prior to decrease quickly enough with increasing cost effectiveness, and this isn't guaranteed. So I'm wondering is there any analysis to show that the methods being used are actually robust to this problem e.g. exploring sensitivity to how answers would look if the deworming RCT results had been higher or lower and that they change sensibly? 

A document that looks to give more info on the method used for deworming looks to be here, so perhaps that can be built on - but from a quick look it doesn't... (read more)

Hmm it's not very clear to me that it would be effective at addressing the problem - it seems a bit abstract as described. And addressing Pascal's mugging issues seems like it potentially requires modifying how cost effectiveness estimates are done ie modifying one component of the "cluster" rather than it just being a cluster vs sequence thinking matter. It would be good to hear more about how this kind of thinking is influencing decisions about giving grants in actual cases like deworming if it is being used.

Something I've wondered is whether GiveWell has looked at whether its methods are robust against "Pascal's mugging" type situations, where a very high estimate of expected value of an intervention leads to it being chosen even when it seems very implausible a priori. The deworming case seems to fit this mould to me somewhat - an RCT finding a high expected impact despite no clear large near term health benefits and no reason to think there's another mechanism to getting income improvements (as I understand it) does seem a bit like the hypothetical mugger p... (read more)

What good solutions are there for EAs leaving money to charity in wills, in terms of getting them legally correct but not incurring large costs?

I've found this 2014 forum post that looks to have good info but many of the links no longer work - for example, it has a broken link to a form for getting a free will - does a resource like that still exist somewhere?

There's also the GWWC bequests page. When I tried their "tool", it directed me to an organisation called FareWill - has anyone used them and found it to give a good result?

I get the impression that th... (read more)

We saw in Parts 9-11 of this series that most experts are deeply skeptical of Ord’s claim

How is it being decided that "most experts" think this? I took a look and part 10 referenced two different papers with a total of 7 authors and a panel of four experts brought together by one of those authors - it doesn't seem clear to me from this that this view is representative of the majority of experts in the space.

Harvard Health says that avoiding infection is part of strengthening one's immune system

I was intrigued so looked at the link. It has heading "Healthy ways to strengthen your immune system" and says in one bullet point under this "Take steps to avoid infection, such as washing your hands frequently and cooking meats thoroughly", but doesn't say anything about why this would help strengthen the immune system (it just links to a page with steps for reducing infection risk). A possible alternative interpretation is that this is meant as advice for not getting... (read more)

A minor thing on the CO2 emissions reductions is it should probably be considered whether the trees would be cut down anyway if they weren't used for wood. I think you'd want to know the net deforestation due to collecting firewood, presuming that forest expansion would be cut back anyway for other reasons.

Just thought I'd note that I checked again and the CAF DAF's minimum balance has gone up to £25k and has a minimum fee of £600/ann.: https://www.cafonline.org/individual-trust-supporting-documents 

The most common pushback (and the first two comments, as of now) are from people who think this is an attempt at regulatory capture by the AI labs

This is also the case in the comments on this FT article (paywalled I think), which I guess indicates how less techy people may be tending to see it.

"According to CE’s weighted animal welfare index" - the link seems broken - I think the bit after the final "/" needs to be removed

Regarding the question of what philosophical view should be used, I wonder if it would also matter if someone were something like prioritarian rather than a total utilitarian. StrongMinds looks to focus on people who suffer more than typical members of these countries' populations, whilst the lives saved by AMF would presumably cover more of the whole distribution of wellbeing. So a prioritarian may favour StrongMinds more, assuming the people helped are not substantially better off economically or in other ways. (Though, it could perhaps also be argued that the people who would die without AMF's intervention are extremely badly off pre-intervention.) 

Though if you wanted to reduce wild animal populations, you could pay to destroy habitats without also causing farm animal suffering, or maybe even do something productive e.g. keep growing crops but burn them for fuel rather than use them as animal feed. Not that I'd particularly advocate this, but I think it argues against a view that it could be optimal to not reduce farm animal populations on these grounds.

 Fair questions to ask. I'd hope the quality of information obtained through uni courses is much better than random selection of reading material, as profs who have spent many years studying a subject should know which are the key texts to read, the most important facts to understand and the key arguments on each side of controversial issues. I think a random selection approach would generally yield information low in importance. (Perhaps articles from certain blogs wouldn't do too badly, but how would you know which blogs to choose and avoid getting ... (read more)

I agree that any sense of shame about dropping out should be removed and that university may not be the best route for everyone. However, the post seems to mainly make the argument for dropping out for people who have a firm idea of what they want to do, and I don't think most early-stage university students would have much idea (or even if they believe they do, that their ideas would be a good).

Similar to Guy Raveh, I think university may be most valuable for getting exposure to a broader set of ideas (though specialised courses like those that are common... (read more)

Thanks very much for answering Sjir. I'm not sure why having tax relief on future income would change the answer to what to do with this year's income a lot, unless one were not going to donate future years' income - else, the tax relief on future income is used up by donating that income. Of course, it may be possible to use relief on future income that would not counterfactually get donated (that needed for living expenses, saving etc.), so in that case you're right that the return from tax relief for donating now vs later is less than I said for that po... (read more)

That's very useful to know about that DAF, thanks.

ISAs are a nice tax break, but only save the capital gains tax, so not as beneficial as Gift Aid.

Thanks Robert. No I hadn't seen that, thanks for sharing it (the total amount of stuff on FTX exceeded my bandwidth and there is much I missed!). 

Given that, the thought behind my earlier comment that remains is that it would seem more appropriately complete to acknowledge in Ben's reflections that 80k made a mistake in information it put out, not just in "affiliating" with SBF. And also that if a body as prominent as 80k had not heard concerns about SBF that were circulating, it seems to suggest there are important things to improve about communication of information within EA and I'd have thought they'd warrant a mention in there. Though I appreciate that individuals may not want to be super tuned in to everything.

People downvoting - it would be useful to know why.

I think I made a mistake to publicly affiliate 80,000 Hours with SBF as much as we did

But 80k didn't just "affiliate" with SBF - they promoted him with untrue information. And I don't see this addressed in the above or anywhere else. Particularly, his podcast interview made a thing of him driving a Corolla and sleeping on a beanbag as part of promoting the frugal Messiah image, when it seems likely that at least some people high up in EA knew that this characterisation was false. Plus no mentioning of the stories of how he treated his Alameda co-founders. ... (read more)

Thanks Adria. Are there good resources on investing in learning in the different cause areas, and how it compares to donating to do direct work?

Just to make a point on this comment related to how the forum works, it looks like people don't like it on net, but there may be a substantial minority interested in animal welfare considerations who find it helpful (I count myself here), and therefore it would be valuable for these people. But currently it's automatically hidden as if it's spam-like and not worth reading for anyone. This seems suboptimal, and perhaps a more strict bar for hiding comments should be set. Comments with low scores are sent to the bottom of the page anyway, so it's unlikely to... (read more)

Just thought I'd say I'm actually interested by Vasco's comment. I don't see why it's not related - the post is meant to be assessing overall cost-effectiveness (according to the title), so effects on animals are potentially relevant (edit: OK the title refers to HLI's analysis and the comment is about GiveWell's, but it applies to both, so I'd accept it). If the point were only written about elsewhere, then it could easily be missed by readers interested in this topic. That said, a fuller write up of how the meat eater problem may affect views on which charities are most cost-effective would also be helpful I think.

Having used veganhealth.org quite a bit, I'd be interested to know what you were unhappy with there.

The tests you're using sound quite involved. In the UK at least, there are simple and cheap blood tests you can order for vit D and iron e.g. here and here respectively, which I thought might be useful for people to know. I don't know how reliable they are, though. There look to be home vit B12 tests that are more expensive and I've not used one myself.

"we estimate StrongMinds at roughly 6x GD" - this seems to be about 2/3 what HLI estimate the relative impact to be (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zCD98wpPt3km8aRGo/happiness-for-the-whole-household-accounting-for-household) - it's not obvious to me how and why your estimates differ - are you able to say what is the reason for the difference? (Edited to update to a more recent analysis by HLI)

Thanks for posting that. I think a complete answer also requires addressing HStencil's comment on your post asking whether there is any risk to donations due to potential clawbacks.

As a subsidiary question, can anyone say how the property has been used so far eg the rough sum over meetings of number of attendees times length of meeting in days? Or some other measure of utilisation/cost saving?

Thanks for replying. Can you confirm for people that money donated to or through CEA is safe as far as CEA officials know (at least, as safe as it seemed before there was widespread knowledge of problems at FTX)?

It seems like there are quite a lot of people/orgs who made plans based on promised money that now seems unlikely to arrive. Is there a lesson that can be learned about how to reduce risk in grant awarding e.g. by waiting until funds are securely in the foundation's hands? Or is there no way to avoid this risk given potential clawbacks, even in cases of bankruptcy that don't involve any fraud?

I think, if grant money has been spent in good faith, then it makes ethical sense to treat it as gone and not needing to be repaid. I don't think anyone should make themselves financially worse off for having received a grant.

I feel pretty sure that you are not ethically obliged to pay anything out of your savings. And you haven't done anything wrong so I don't think you have anything to feel guilty about.

Peer review is very variable so it's hard to say what "the depth of peer review" is. I checked the bits I was asked to check in a similar way as I would a journal article. No I didn't myself really review the methodology. The process was also quite different from normal review in involving quite a few back-and-forth discussions - I felt more like I was helping make the work better rather than simply commenting on its quality. It also differed in that the decision about "publishing" was taken by John rather than a separate editor (as far as I know). 

I'm a researcher in weather and climate science and this post is very interesting to me - weather forecasts, and forecasts of events that depend on those like for flooding, can be quite skilful and it's possible that more could be done to tailor that information to people's needs and get it out to them. Colleagues of mine would know more. If you happened to want to discuss that further, feel free to PM me.

"I don't want to put words in their mouths, but Peter overall seemed very positive"

As Peter, just in case this should come back to bite me if misinterpreted, I just thought I'd say I could give an informed review of certain physical climate science aspects and the report seems to capture those well. I am positive about the rest as being an interesting and in depth piece of scholarship into interesting questions, but I can't vouch for it as an expert :-)

"it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist"

As a climate scientist reading this, I just thought I'd pick up on that and say I have not got that impression from reading the reports or conversations with my colleagues who are IPCC authors. I've not seen any strong evidence presented that the IPCC systematically understates risks - there are a couple of examples where risks were perhaps not discussed (not clearly underestimated as far as I'... (read more)

When thinking about whether to donate to Helen Keller International's Vitamin A supplementation program, I wondered whether this is problematic for animal welfare, since Vit A is usually derived from animal sources as I understand it. So I asked HKI and they said their Vit A is chemically synthesised without animal origin, though their capsules do contain gelatin sourced from cattle. My perception is that the use of gelatin wouldn't be expected to contribute a lot to animal welfare problems (though it might matter for people who never want to fund purchasing of animal products). I just thought I'd share this in case anyone else wondered.

I only just saw your reply. Here's a (fairly old) report that discusses organic farming in the UK, including management of disease, that may be useful - though note it was sponsored by a organic-promoting organisation, but it does include criticism and doesn't just seem to be a piece of marketing: http://charliepyesmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2003/01/Batteries-not-included.pdf . I don't know of any other thorough reports - it would be useful if there were more. 

Yeah OK, the US seems a lot worse for this. UK organic (Soil Association) standards seem to be the best or nearly the best in the world as far as I know (but only a small fraction of meat is produced that way).

'in "humane" farms the animals are more often sick (since they do not take antibiotics, ...)'

It sounds like the book is referring to organic farms, which are not necessarily as humane as could be possible, for reasons like this. I've read about UK organic farms and it seems that disease rates can be relatively low even without antibiotics due to using lower stocking densities. For sheep it's a problem, though, because they can't help encountering germs in their environment. There's nothing to stop a truly humane farm from using antibiotics, though.

"life on any factory farm still stinks" - the term "humane farm" means to me not a factory farm, but one with actual net positive animal welfare (at least). Though I don't know if that's how it's used in the book. From my reading about UK high-end organic farming, it seems to me that beef cows and pigs could have positive welfare overall, and so could chickens if their density were reduced even further than in organic systems. I'm not sure about sheep - it sounds like their lives may just be hard.

It's an interesting analysis. Just a thought - since the value of 1 unit is up to the responder if I've understood correctly, it might be more meaningful to calculate ratios of the responses for each person and average these rather than average the responses to each part - for the latter, if any responder picked small "unit" sizes and correspondingly gave large numerical values, they would make an outsized contribution. Calculating ratios first cancels out whatever "unit" people have decided on. Though it should only matter much if people's "units" differ considerably in size.

Thanks for your thoughts and the links. I agree that more consideration of long-term effects and population ethics seems important (also, I would have thought, for the impact of accelerating animal welfare improvements). I don't know anything to go on for quantitative estimates of long-term effects myself, though.

Regarding the possibility of cage-free campaigns as being net negative, I agree this sounds like a risk, so perhaps I was loose in saying donating a certain amount to THL could be "robustly better". I'm not sure it's going to be possible to be 100... (read more)

Thanks Michael for the post. I happened to be thinking in similar terms recently regarding how to divide donations between saving human lives and increasing welfare of farmed animals (though nothing like as thoroughly and generally). I thought perhaps this could be an interesting real-world example to analyse:

• This review estimated that saving a life in a very poor country would result in a reduction in births of 0.33-0.5, hence giving 0.5-0.67 extra lives. Though, the uncertainty in the various studies included indicates to me it could plausibly give 1 ext

Thanks for this analysis, it's very interesting. You might find it simpler and more accurate to go straight from emissions to warming using the transient climate response to cumulative carbon emissions (TCRE) rather than climate sensitivity, though (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_climate_response_to_cumulative_carbon_emissions ). A problem with using ECS is that it gives you the warming that occurs after Earth has reached equilibrium with a given CO2 concentration. However, in reality, the CO2 concentration won't stay constant once w... (read more)

Peter here - so actually I'd say this isn't clear now - here's some recent work for example suggesting that estimates of future warming won't change much compared to those from the previous set of models once recent observed warming is used as a constraint i.e. those newer models with higher sensitivity seem to warm too fast compared to observations e.g. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/12/eaaz9549 . Well, the models are only one piece of evidence going into the overall estimate anyway. I don't follow the literature on this closely enough to be confident about what the IPCC will actually conclude.