All of rootpi's Comments + Replies

If farmed chickens plausibly have overall net positive lives (per the discussion above), and if you're something like a total utilitarian, then you should want more of them to exist; hence eat more in order to at least weakly increase demand / production.

Alternately, if you think it's very difficult to know for sure whether chickens have net positive lives or not, and you enjoy the taste of chicken, then that's another case for eating more of them.

2
Vasco Grilo
5mo
Thanks for the question, mlovic, and welcome to the EA forum! Thanks for clarifying, Julian. This might be true, but not necessarily so. I strongly endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarianism (classical utilitarianism), but would not be confident about increasing the consumption of factory-farmed animals even if they had good lives (although my best guess is that chickens do not): * Conditional on factory-farmed animals having good lives, one should arguably guess wild animals also have good lives. Consequently, since the scale of the welfare of wild animals is much larger than that of factory-farmed animals, one should do what increases the welfare of wild animals. So, because animal foods require much more land than plant-based foods, one would still want to decrease the consumption of factory-farmed animals. * Even if one thinks wild animals have bad lives, or is mostly agnostic about it, the increase in the welfare of factory-farmed animals may be outweighted by other negative effects. For example, I think enslaving people with good lives would be bad today[1] under classical utilitarianism, as it would erode impartiality by implicitly attributing a lower welfare range than justified to the enslaved. Likewise for factory-farmed animals, although less so. If one is not confident about factory-farmed and wild animals having good/bad lives (I am not), and thinks this is a crucial consideration due to not giving major weight to the 2nd bullet above, one should focus on learning more about that question (e.g. Welfare Footprint Project's research), or improving their lives (e.g. corporate campaigns for chicken welfare). 1. ^ And also in the past, but less bad, holding the quality of life of the enslaved constant.

I attended an interesting (not just researchers!) Wellbeing Forum in London on Monday. Focus topics highlighted two unusual (for this topic) themes that might both be of interest to people here: 'Human wellbeing in the age of AI' and 'religion and spirituality' (using recent large global polling data from Gallup). Feel free to DM me if you want more info or have any questions.

Hi - thanks again for taking more time with this, but I don't think you do understand my model. It has nothing to do with capital assets, hiring/firing workers, or switching suppliers. All that it requires is that some decisions are made in bulk, i.e. at a level of granularity larger than the impact of any one individual consumer. I agree this is less likely for retail stores (possibly some of them order in units of 1? wouldn't it be nice if someone actually cared enough to look into this rather than us all arguing hypothetically...), but it will clearly h... (read more)

8
MichaelStJules
10mo
(I've edited this comment, but the main argument about grocery stores hasn't changed, only some small additions/corrections to it, and changes to the rest of my response.) Thanks for clarifying again. You're right that I misunderstood. The point as I now understand is that they expect the purchases (or whatever they'd ideally order, if they could order by individual units) to fall disproportionately in one order size and away from each threshold for lower and higher order sizes, i.e. much more towards the middle, and they've arranged for their order sizes to ensure this. I’ll abandon the specific procedure I suggested for the store, and make my argument more general. For large grocery stores, I think my argument at the end of my last comment is still basically right, though, and so you should expect sensitivity, as I will elaborate further here. In particular, this would rule out your model applying to large grocery stores, even if they have to order in large multiples, assuming a fixed order frequency. Let’s consider a grocery store. Suppose they make purchase predictions p (point estimates or probability distributions), and they have to order in multiples of K, but I’ll relax this assumption later. We can represent this with a function f from predictions to order sizes so that f(p)=K∗g(p), where g is an integer-valued function. f can be the solution to an optimization problem, like yours. I’m ignoring any remaining stock they could carry forward for simplicity, but they could just subtract it from p and put that stock out first. I’m also assuming a fixed order frequency, but M&H mention the possibility of "a threshold at which a delivery of meat comes a day later". I think your model is a special case of this, ignoring what I'm ignoring and with the appropriate relaxations below. I claim the following: 1. Assuming the store is not horrible at optimizing, f should be nondecreasing and scale roughly linearly with p. What I mean by “roughly linearly with p” is

I still haven't read Budolfson, so I'm not claiming that M&H misinterpret him. As I said, I did read their entire paper, and in the section specifically about him they describe two interpretations of "buffer", neither of which matches my model. So if his model is similar to mine, they got it wrong. If his model is different than mine, then they don't seem to have ever considered a model like mine. Either way a bad sign.

Everything you write about how you think they might respond to me (i.e. your three bullet points and the subsequent paragraph) is 100% ... (read more)

9
MichaelStJules
10mo
EDIT: I did misunderstand at this point, as you pointed out in your reply.   Ok, I think I get your model, but I don't really see why a grocery store in particular would follow it, and it seems like a generally worse way to make order decisions for one. I think it's more plausible for earlier parts of the supply chain, where businesses may prefer to produce consistent volumes, because there are relevant thresholds (in revenue) for shutting down, downsizing, expanding and entering the market, and it's costly to make such a decision (selling/buying capital, hiring/firing staff) only to regret it later or even flip-flop.[1] It takes work to hire someone, so hiring and firing (in either order) is costly. Capital assets lose value once you purchase or use them, so buying and selling (in either order) is costly. If changes in a business' production levels often require such a decision, that business has reason to try to keep production more consistent or stick with their plans to avoid accumulating such costs. But not all changes to production levels require such decisions. (I don't mean to imply you don't understand all of the above; this is just me thinking through it, checking my understanding and showing others interested.) I don't think a grocery store has to adjust its capital or staff to order more or less, or at least not for the vast majority of marginal changes in order size. Same for distributors/wholesalers. I'm not sure about broiler farms. They'd sometimes just have to wait longer for a contract (or never get one again), or maybe they'd get a smaller contract and raise fewer broilers (the market is contract-based in the US, and the farms don't own the broilers[2]), so it often just wouldn't be their decision. But on something like your model, if a farm was planning to enter the market or expand, and contracts or revenues (or market reports) come only slightly worse than expected (still above the threshold in your model, and which is far more likely than

Yes all fair, and I'd say it goes beyond counterfactuals. I'm not sure people fully realize how sensitive many conclusions are to all sorts of assumptions, which are often implicit in standard models. I am on record disagreeing strongly with John Halstead about the likely cost-effectiveness of advocating for economic growth, and I feel similarly about much of the longtermist agenda, so this isn't specific to animals. My personal sense is that if you can save an existing human life for a few thousand dollars (for which the evidence is very clear, although p... (read more)

Interesting - thanks for the extra info re Budolfson. I did in fact read all of M&H, and they give two interpretations of the buffer model, neither of which is related to my model, so that's what I was referring to. [That's also what I was referring to in my final paragraph: none of the sources you cited on that side of the causal efficacy argument seems to have considered anything like my model, which remains true given my current knowledge.]  In fact if Budolfson was saying something more like my model, which does seem to be the case, then that'... (read more)

8
MichaelStJules
10mo
I'm not sure what you mean by M&H not understanding Budolfson. They give a brief overview of the model, but the section from M&H I referred to ("Efficient Responsive Supply Chains and Causal Efficacy") describes the market as they understand it, in a way that's not consistent with Budolfson. The implicit reply is that Budolfson's model does not match their observations of how the market actually works. I think how they'd respond to your model is: 1. stores do use explicit demand predictions to decide procurement, 2. they are constantly making new predictions,  3. these predictions are in fact very sensitive to recent individual purchase decisions, and actually directly so. Suppose the store makes stocking decisions weekly. If demand is lower one week than it would have otherwise been, their predictions for the next week will be lower than they would have otherwise been. Of course, there's still a question of how sensitive: maybe they give little weight to their actual recent recorded purchases[1] relative to other things, like others' market forecasts or sales the same time in past years.[2] But M&H would contend that actually they are very sensitive to recent purchases, and I would guess that's the case, too, because it probably is one of the most predictive pieces of information they can use, and plausibly the most predictive. They don't provide direct estimates of the sensitivity based on empirical data and maybe they don't back these claims with strong enough evidence at all (i.e. maybe stores don't actually usually work this way), and it's fair to point out these kinds of holes in their arguments if someone wants to use their paper to make a strong case. ---------------------------------------- Here are relevant quotes: I would correct the one sentence to "When a person decides to stop purchasing chickens, the result is that their local grocery store automatically starts ordering chickens more slowly than they otherwise would have, to reflect the lower

I wasn't gesturing toward the relative competitiveness because it's important per se (you're right that it isn't) but rather as a way to gauge absolute competitiveness for those who don't already know that a net profit margin of 5.7% isn't bad at all. My intuition is that people realize that both defense and healthcare firms make decent profits (as they do) and hence that this fact would help convey that farmers (whether large or small; and if your point is that they can differentiate themselves and do some monopolistic competition then you're already on m... (read more)

9
MichaelStJules
10mo
The edge of survival is not the only relevant threshold here. Chicken farmers don't own the birds they raise and only raise them when given a contract, so it's not entirely their choice whether or not and when they raise any chickens. From M&H: And even if their net profit margins were 5.7% on average, many farms could still be on the edge of survival. Also from M&H: From MacDonald, 2008: Furthermore, the 20th percentile of household income[1] across broiler farmers was $18,782 in 2011, according to the USDA, and so close to the poverty line at the time. However, the household income for chicken farmers is relatively high recently, in 2020 (USDA).   Also, about differentiation, I don't see what the existence of some small high-cost farms selling to small niche submarkets tells you about the behaviour or competitiveness of the conventional large farms, which account for almost all of the combined market. I don't think it's a case of monopolistic competition; these are just a few separate submarkets, like free range and organic. Maybe those selling locally are acting nearly monopolistically, with the "local" label or by selling to farmers markets, but it also doesn't really matter, because they're selling to a tiny submarket and their supply is very limited. If a kid sets up a lemonade stand in their neighbourhood and sells lemonade above grocery store prices, you wouldn't conclude from this that an individual lemonade company can set higher prices for grocery stores (or distributors?), where almost all of the lemonade is bought, without being pushed out of the market. 1. ^ The USDA's definition:

I had seen some of this, but not the specific paper (ungated) by McMullen & Halteman - thanks!

First of all note that the two sources you cite directly contradict one another: the first-hand anecdotal account says there is essentially no meat waste even in very small groceries, while M&H (p.12) say there is a modest constant unavoidable waste that is in fact higher in smaller / local stores than for big outfits. Indeed M&H are internally inconsistent: they say that the market is highly competitive (although they only give a very incomplete refer... (read more)

8
MichaelStJules
10mo
This seems fair and seems like the strongest argument here. Even M&H only say they "briefly sketch the contours of a positive argument for consumer efficacy".   While I think this doesn't undermine your point that people could come to reasonable differing conclusions about this case, it's worth pointing out the same is true about counterfactuals for basically all charity and altruistic work based on similar arguments, so this case doesn't seem categorically special. Some level of guesswork is basically always involved, although to different degrees, and levels of "robustness" can differ: 1. GiveWell has estimates for the value of counterfactual spending by other actors, but it mostly only reflects government actors, plus the Global Fund. What about Open Phil and smaller donors? (Maybe they can be ignored based on Open Phil's own statements, and assuming smaller donors don't pay attention to these funding levels, and so don't respond.) Some of the numbers they do use are also just guesses. They go further than basically anyone else, but is it far enough? How much less cost-effective could they be? 2. For individuals doing altruistic work, if they didn't do it (e.g. they didn't take the job), what would others have done differently, and with what value? ("Replaceability".) 3. There are other effects on things we don't or can't measure. Does the charity undermine governance and do harm in the long run as a result? What about the effects on nonhuman animals, farmed and wild? What about the potential impacts much further into the future, through economic growth, climate change or space colonization? This gets into cluelessness and the McNamara fallacy.
8
MichaelStJules
10mo
Fair. I think the anecdotal account is a limiting case of M&H where the waste is very close to 0, though, so the arguments in M&H would apply to the anecdote. M&H's argument doesn't depend on there being modest constant unavoidable waste rather than essentially none.   This doesn't show they're internally inconsistent. They probably meant the market is highly competitive in absolute terms, not among the very most competitive markets in the US. The argument they make isn't meant to depend on the relative competitiveness of the industry among industries, and it wouldn't be valid if it did. Small farms can survive by product differentiation and competing in different submarkets. They can sell niche, specially labelled/described products, like organic, free range or locally raised, and they can charge premiums this way. They can sell in different places, like farmers markets, to small local grocers or to restaurants trying to appear more responsible/ethical, and charge more this way. Broiler farms producing fewer than 100,000 broilers/year only made up around 5% of the market in 2001 (Fig 2), so it's pretty plausible and I'd guess it's the case that small broiler farms with much higher production costs sell differentiated products.
8
MichaelStJules
10mo
Sorry, I could have been more explicit in my comment. I wasn't referring to the rest of the Reducing Suffering article, and I didn't mean that any of that article referred to your model. M&H refer to a model similar to yours (Budolfson's buffer model), but not in the section that I referred to (and from which you quote). What I meant is that both propose more plausible models of markets (more plausible based on observations of how grocery stores behave), and I was pointing to those alternative proposals. M&H summarizes the main takeaway from Budolfson's buffer model: This is an illustration of Budolfson's buffer model, directly from Budolfson, 2018: Presumably there could also be a conceivable decrease in sales that would cause Richard to produce fewer T-shirts, too. Richard has a historical monthly demand range that serves essentially the same purpose as your predicted demand, with thresholds for setting alternative future procurement/production decisions far enough away from the centre of the historical range, or in your case, predicted demand. EDIT: so your last paragraph seems wrong:

I'm a professor of economics, but thanks for the link explaining elasticity :) 

The answer is no, we can't just do that, since those approaches assume nontrivial changes (and/or they assume everything is continuous, which the real world isn't). One plausible simple model of supermarket (or restaurant) purchasing behavior is that when observed demand goes above/below a certain threshold relative to predicted demand, they buy more/less of the input next cycle. From an individual point of view, the expected aggregate demand of other agents in any time per... (read more)

7
MichaelStJules
10mo
This sounds like Budolfson's buffer model. Have you seen the response by McMullen and Halteman? They describe supply chains and management practices in the section "Efficient Responsive Supply Chains and Causal Efficacy". Also, this short first-hand account for grocery stores in an older article from the EA community on the issue, quoted from a comment on a post in an EA Facebook group on the issue. I agree that it's probably true most people don't know the right reasons to believe that their individual purchase decisions make much difference on average, because most people know basically nothing about supply chain management.

Thanks for the input Michael - your estimates seem reasonable / defensible to me. On the other hand, it also seems reasonable / defensible to argue that time spent just sitting around is fairly highly pleasurable for chickens (relative to their maximum): many humans prefer doing nothing to active foraging (NB I'm being serious), and chickens (like all prey) are evolved to be wary of predators and at risk of dying at any moment. My sense is that the default welfare state for all living beings is nontrivially positive (we see this in human survey data, and i... (read more)

9
MichaelStJules
10mo
I appreciate you pointing out these possibilities. You might indeed be right, and I think it's a position new evidence could end up supporting. However, I don't think you or really anyone would be warranted in believing the average broiler welfare overall to be positive in expectation if they were well-informed about their conditions and the current state of evidence. Maybe we should just withhold judgement. However, using Welfare Footprint Project's analysis, and being, like them, careful in the attribution of welfare states and more careful the more intense, there would be more expected pain than expected pleasure. I do think it's plausible the default (e.g. most common) welfare state for wild red jungle fowls, i.e. the chicken's wild progenitor and counterpart, is positive, or at least that positive is more common than negative. I might even lean somewhat towards that, but it depends on how common the threat of predators is and how long-lasting the negative effects of predator exposure are. But this and comparisons to humans (which ones?) are quite weak priors from which to conclude broilers frequently experience pleasure of intensity similar to hurtful pain just from sitting/resting, and there are multiple reasons to be skeptical or even expect negative welfare instead. Conventionally farmed chickens are in very unnatural, monotonous and limiting environments, often have painful and limiting health conditions and face multiple chronic stressors their wild counterparts don't face. Their environments are especially not conducive to high baseline moods or much good to attend to when they're not active, and they also contain substantial bad.[1] On comparisons to wild animals, as foragers, I don't imagine red jungle fowls would often be at risk of starvation in the wild, and in fact a decent share of broilers (or hours of broiler life) suffer from hunger and thirst, according to WFP: broiler breeders in particular are chronically hungry and food-deprived, and other

Thanks again - all very constructive / helpful. I've updated some of my beliefs (partly toward the scale of this issue, as you intended, but also toward current factory farming not being as bad as I would have guessed... although I admit most people probably know less about conditions than I did), and I hope you have as well.

The only place I wanted to specifically respond is to your comment that you "sympathise with animal-welfare advocates pushing for veganism because the most common objections to it are pretty weak" - this doesn't make sense to me. We sh... (read more)

2
Vasco Grilo
10mo
I agree. Sorry for not being clear in my previous reply. By "I sympathise with animal-welfare advocates pushing for veganism", I meant that I can see from where they are coming, not that I rationally endorse veganism.
4
MichaelStJules
10mo
Can't we make informed estimates, even if they have wide ranges? We multiply the demand shift by ϵSϵS−ϵD (based on equilibrium displacement models, or this), with long-run elasticity estimates from the literature. (FWIW, I'm also sympathetic to diet change being net negative in the near term, mostly because of the impacts on wild invertebrates and maybe fish. So I mostly focus on welfare.)

Thanks for the quick and constructive reply! 

(and yes apologies for the typo: I meant "disabling" not "debilitating")

I admit I'm still unconvinced by several of the assumptions and still believe that they require a bit more discussion / support / defense; e.g. in addition to the ones above, the claim that welfare is symmetric around the neutral point or (as discussed elsewhere in the comments) that their welfare range is 0.33 that of humans. I'm also sympathetic to the comment that was somewhat skeptical regarding the expected marginal impact of best-... (read more)

3
mlovic
5mo
What is the case for eating more chickens?
3
Vasco Grilo
10mo
Thanks for the constructive reply too! I assumed the welfare range is symmetric around the neutral point, but this does not impact the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns in human-years per dollar. To illustrate, if I had supposed the welfare range goes from excruciating pain to something as good as hurtful pain is bad, the welfare range would become about 0.5 times as wide (in reality, a little over 0.5 times as wide). Consequently: * The improvement in chicken welfare (when broilers go from a conventional to a reformed scenario) as a fraction of the median welfare range of chickens would become 2 (= 1/0.5) times as large. * The intensity of the mean human experience as a fraction of the median welfare range of humans would become 2 times as large. The cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns in human-years per dollar is directly proportional to the ratio between the above, so it would not change. I agree: I still think this is not a major issue, but I can see there is some margin for reasonable disagreement. I might do a Monte Carlo simulation modelling everything as distributions one of these days. FWIW, in a previous analysis, I estimated corporate campaigns can be anything between 4.36 % to 34.1 k times as effective as GW's top charities (5th to 95th percentiles). The reason for my 95th percentile being roughly 1 M times my 5th percentile is me having used a moral weight distribution with 95th percentile about 1 M times as large as the 5th percentile. In contrast, RP's 95th percentile is only 434 (= 0.869/0.002) times RP's 5th percentile, and my uncertainty about the intensity of the various types of pains is similar, which means the 5th and 95th percentile of the cost-effectiveness ratio can be guesstimated from 0.602 % and 2.61 times the median ratio. So, if I were to do a Monte Carlo simulation, I guess I would conclude corporate campaigns are something between 10 to 4 k times as effective as GW's top charities (around 2.5 OOMs of uncertainty,

Hi Vasco - 

It's great that you're so passionate about this, but I find it extremely surprising that you're willing to draw such strong conclusions based on such weak evidence and ad hoc assumptions. For instance if I change your assumption that debilitating pain is 100x as bad as hurtful pain, and instead assume that it is only 10x as bad (and don't change anything else), your calculations imply that even under the conventional scenario broiler chickens have net positive lives (and hence presumably that we should be eating as many of them as possible ... (read more)

I don't think this assumption Vasco made is reasonable, and it substantially overestimates the pleasure conventional broilers are likely to experience:

Broilers being awake is as good as hurtful pain is bad. This means being awake with hurtful pain is neutral, thus accounting for positive experiences.

There are a few issues with this:

  1. While in disabling pain, they shouldn't be experiencing any pleasure, by WFP's definition, so you should subtract the time spent in disabling pain.
  2. While suffering from behavioural deprivation, they probably shouldn't experience
... (read more)
3
Vasco Grilo
10mo
Great points, Julian! I assumed disabling (not debilitating) pain is 100 times as bad as hurtful pain, but my 90 % confidence interval would be something like 10 to 1 k. As a result, I would not be too surprised if broilers in conventional scenarions had positive lives. Because of this, I am decently open to the possibility that we should be eating more/less factory-farmed animals (including chickens).  Supposing hurtful, disabling and excruciating pain are each as bad as annoying pain (instead of 10, 1 k and 1 M times as bad, as I guessed), the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for broiler welfare would still be 40.5 times that of the lowest cost to save a human life. In other words, for corporate campaigns for broiler welfare to be as effective as GW's top charities, one would have to assume, for example: * Hurtful pain 1 order of magnitude (OOM) less bad. * Disabling pain 3 OOMs less bad. * Excruciating pain 6 OOMs less bad. * A median welfare range of chickens 2.5 % (= 1/40.5) as high as RP's best guess. Combinations like this seem sufficiently unlikely for one to say "corporate campaigns for chicken welfare increase nearterm [emphasis mine] wellbeing robustly more cost-effectively than GW’s top charities". If we include indirect longterm effects, I still guess corporate campaigns to be more effective, but not robustly so.

Hi - thanks for writing this - agree this is a somewhat neglected topic in general. You might want to look at a couple of my papers: a conceptual one (with my father and some perinatologists), and a follow-up empirical one that does actually ask people to try to put numbers on some of these important tradeoffs. 

Hi Richard - this all makes a lot of sense. Gustav Alexandrie and I have a model of 'perspective-weighted utilitarianism' which also puts intermediate weight on potential people and has some of the same motivations / implications. I presented it at the June GPI workshop and would be happy to discuss.

-Julian

3
Richard Y Chappell
1y
Sounds great!  If/when you have a public draft available, please do share the link!

Thanks for this! A small point: as one of the coauthors of the Blattman et al Liberia CBT study, we didn't use trained counselors either (they basically don't exist in Liberia) so I think this helps somewhat with your legitimate concern about scaling. I wasn't sure what you meant by job training in that context?

We are just finishing a ten-year follow-up of the same population, with encouraging results, which should be public soon.

4
Lauren Gilbert
2y
Oh, that's a valid point about scaling; noted. Re. job training: I was referring to Blattman and Annan 2016, where the intervention contained both counseling and job training. Very excited to see the ten year results when they're out!  
Answer by rootpiOct 29, 20211
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Great question and great answers so far. I always liked Alexander Fleming (discoverer of penicillin, which has certainly saved millions of lives) but I suspect someone else would have found it relatively quickly if he hadn't - although I've never looked into the details.

What about George Washington? He obviously wasn't the intellectual leader of the early USA and its form of government (and should only get a fraction of the credit / blame for everything that followed), but my sense (?) is that he played a key political (leadership) and military role in the... (read more)

Another point of agreement: the economics profession currently focuses too much on empirical work. Meanwhile my own personal view is that people like Esther and Chris B are slightly 'too far' in the pro-RCT camp, and that people like Lant (and you) are 'too far' in the anti-RCT camp. But I don't see anyone in this discussion as being extreme (except possibly Lant...); healthy disagreement is to be expected and encouraged. Note that Esther and Abhijit's most recent book tackles macro issues like migration, trade, climate change, and yes growth - using RCTs ... (read more)

I'm going to try to step back first and speculate where we actually disagree, in hopes of getting at what you actually think should be happening differently, if anything. You seem to be arguing to some extent against things that do not exist, and in particular that neither I nor others are saying. I think we agree that (i) 1-5% of work in economics should be RCTs; (ii) RCTs are not the right approach for many, indeed most, questions in social science; (iii) there exists lots of policy-relevant and actionable information from non-RCT sources; (iv) intuition... (read more)

9[anonymous]3y
Yes, that seems like the main thing we disagree about. It also seems like we disagree about the likely impact of deworming.  1. I would also like to do that but I don't have time to do that properly unfortunately - my time is now focused on longterm relevant stuff.  2. I think the point here is that the growth decelerations don't seem like they would be big enough to make the back of the envelope calcs on the world bank, IMF and all economists in mine and Hauke's post lower than RCT stuff.  3. Thanks for clarifying. First, (this is not a criticism of you) this is different to the view taken by Open Phil which does try to compare its rich world policy to AMF and is what prompted the main post. So, at least Open Phil can't think it is an apples to orange comparison. Second, I don't really get how it is an apples to oranges comparison. You seem to be saying that the judgement of the probability is too high. but that is different to the metric used to compare the options being incomparable. I don't understand why you think the probability estimate is too high. The back of the envelope on the world bank and IMF seems like a pretty good guide. You really have to believe some implausible things to think that the probability of success is low enough. On the 'all economists' one for example, the estimate is extremely conservative because it only counts the economic gains in China and assumes that is the only thing that all economists achieved.  4. The reason I cited the Cochrane review was that GiveWell also cited it in their review of deworming. My main aim is to dispute GiveWell's reasoning as that is what is driving a lot of EA money, which I think could do much more good elsewhere. On external validity, I'm going off the Vivalt paper. 5. It's a natural way to interpret GiveWell's views because the only charities they recommend, or (I think) have ever recommended, have been tested by RCTs. All of the charities on their standout list have all been tested by RCTs. Thi
  1. Fair enough that not all of that time (much less all of Lant's career) was spent trying to come up with a good example here. I still think that if after a nontrivial amount of cognitive resource spent on this by very smart people (e.g. Lant is in an excellent position to have run across something and at least mentioned it), no one has even come up with a single plausible example that's worthy of further study, that's discouraging in a bayesian sense. I fully agree it's worth more research; I simply doubt that anything fantastic will appear after four years
... (read more)
3[anonymous]3y
1. You seem here to be eliding the claim that we didn't find any leads with the claim that we didn't recommend anything. We found many  leads. FP found 7 different organisations that we thought it might be worth investigating if we had control of money. In Hauke's appendices to our post,  he lists several organisations and interventions that would be worth investigating. So, there are many plausible examples of things that are worthy of further study. If I put 3 months into a climate change report, I wouldn't argue that the failure to recommend a climate charity proves that aren't any good climate charities. 2. It is true that economists have caused some bad things, but on balance, as Hauke and I discuss in section 3.2, the net gains of growth episodes have been extremely large since 1950. If economists affected the growth accelerations and decelerations in equal measure, then the effect would be strongly positive. For what you say to be true, the economists would have to have massively disproportionately affected the growth decelerations, which I don't think happened. Further to your criticism of intuition, your argument seems to be either that (i) all subjective probability assessments must be rejected because they are based on intuition or (ii) our subjective probability assessments are too high. Firstly, these two arguments are inconsistent. You cannot both say that you reject our argument because it is based on intuition and then say that according to your intuition the true probability is a lot lower. Secondly, argument (i) applies to all policy work, including the policy work that GiveWell are now going to investigate and that Open Phil already funds; I don't see why economic policy would be more subjective than air quality work. Thirdly, the case for deworming is also based on subjective probability judgements. For example, the various staff replicability adjustments that GiveWell staff members used to provide varied by a factor of 10. If you read the docu

And thanks for your reply!  I hope that you are now satisfied, since the issue is being discussed :)  More seriously I really am glad you brought it to the fore again, because it deserves it, and I'm being [sincerely] critical only because I take it seriously and respect it.

Re the FP report: so did it find anything promising or not? My reading (could be wrong, obviously, so let me know) was that they/you didn't in fact find anything to point to; that they/you believe such a thing does exist; but that it would take a lot of time and effort to find... (read more)

[anonymous]3y12
0
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Hello,

  1. My view is that I  think it is very likely (>95% chance) that one would find something better than  GiveWell's top charities if one were to put in 4 person-years of time into the project, which was the claim in my original post. My team put in about 6 months of person time on the project. Hauke and I put in a few months writing up our post, which wasn't about trying to find donation opportunities but just to make the case that there is reason to think we would find something if we tried. I don't know how much time Lant has put in to actu
... (read more)

I've been meaning to respond to the original post but never got around to it, so thank you for bringing it back up and encouraging more discussion. I'm not a 'randomista' per se, but I have published RCTs as well as non-RCTs, and I have worked in the US as well as many developing countries. FWIW, like Lant I have a PhD in econ from MIT (where I was one year ahead of Esther and TA'd for Abhijit), have taught at Harvard (and elsewhere), and used to work at the World Bank. We're also fairly evenly matched at tennis, judging from an interesting doubles game ma... (read more)

8[anonymous]3y
Hello, thanks for this and thanks for assisting with our report on that! To clarify, it's not the case that the FP report didn't have any recommendations because we didn't find anything good. We stopped because we couldn't guarantee that we could move enough money to the area to make it worth our own time and that of the organisations we evaluated. We didn't discover anything that made me think we wouldn't find something better than deworming if we were to put a couple of person-years into it.  On your tldr - the point of my post is that I don't see how it could be true that the returns are not higher than direct RCT-tested projects. Either  US policy doesn't actually get close to the GiveWell bar, or poor world policy beats it.  1. Yes, what I meant there was RCT-evaluated things rather than run RCTs. Though I think the randomistas would indeed have wanted the Rwandan government to run RCTs? 2. I have to say I disagree on deworming. If I had philanthropic resources to spend, I think it would have been a clear grave error to go to East Asia after 1950 and try to deworm people rather than getting them to do whatever it is that caused them to grow. This is basically for the reasons outlined by Lant's sniff test. It is true that "the fact that almost no rich or quickly growing  countries didn't do mass school deworming does not logically guarantee that mass deworming is not the most cost-effective economic intervention in the world". The point is that it makes it very unlikely. It is especially unlikely given that the case for deworming only rests on 1 RCT in the early 2000s, which I think has a lot of problems. eg they didn't find any improvements in health that might explain the economic benefits deworming is meant to have produced; the external validity of RCTs in general has been shown to be poor but, while some external validity factors are considered by GiveWell, this broader evidence (as far as I can tell) is not considered.  3. I agree that some things in

I liked the post (I have worked a lot on RCTs, and a little on NPIs, but not together alas!). Here's another paper that I didn't see mentioned (although maybe I missed it) which I think roughly falls into the category you're considering?https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27496/revisions/w27496.rev0.pdf

I feel like there are also some behavioral econ papers looking at e.g. social distancing in queues, but off the top of my head I'm not certain if there are actual randomized field experiments in that space...

-julian

1
James Smith
3y
For future searching, where/how did you come across that paper? 
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James Smith
3y
Good find - thanks for sharing that paper which I hadn't included.  If I update the post I'll add that. 

Thanks for this great post. I'm closer to left-libertarian or classical liberal myself, but I have many friends and family (mostly in the US) who are more traditional progressives and much more sympathetic to typical social justice concerns than to EA. I agree with many of the issues identified here (including in the comments); my own experience has been that it is largely that they want to be able to "walk and chew gum at the same time". As an economist, I'm imbued with notions like opportunity cost and only being able to optimize one goal at a time (pote... (read more)

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MaxRa
3y
I agree with the last point, and I think EA is doing fairly well on the being sympathetic to Matt Yglesias front: * he donated his stimulus check to GiveWell https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1371137697746681858?s=20 * he appeared on Julia Galef‘s Rationally Speaking podcast and iirc voiced pretty strong support of rationalist ideals http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/episode-251-the-case-for-one-billion-americans-more-matt-ygl.html
Answer by rootpiMar 18, 20219
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I agree with several of the previous responses, but just to add something I haven't seen mentioned: it is a new / different experience 'outside the convex hull' of anything else. I selfishly enjoy that, because I like to experience new things (travel, changing research focus, ultra-running, etc), but I also believe that all of this gives me a more flexible and broader view of the world and how it can work and what it can contain, in a way that improves my perspective and my thinking. Imagination only goes so far, even for the most creative amongst us.

I consider myself 'EA-adjacent' for the past few years - very sympathetic and somewhat knowledgeable, although not fully invested for various reasons. However I think I was already broadly aware of all the IBCs you listed. So perhaps I am more invested than I thought!  But my preferred interpretation is that most people who are sufficiently interested in EA and also sufficiently open to considering various causes will have already found most of these or will do so relatively quickly on their own. Obviously I could be wrong, and if you do a survey we will find out at least the first half.

[Note that I fully agree with you that it is very beneficial for people to be aware of these!]

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Jack Malde
3y
This is definitely a possibility and I certainly don't have enough evidence to claim that this isn't the case. A survey to determine existing knowledge could be interesting, and I may get in touch with Rethink Priorities to see if they think such a survey might be useful. Having said that, I have thought about all this a bit more since originally posting and I generally agree that doing more to spread EA to those who don't know about it is more important, on the current margin, than doing more to spread important ideas within the existing EA community. I expect this balance to flip at some point, but that may not be for a while.
Answer by rootpiJan 06, 20215
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Hi - I'm an American (although dual citizen with Canada) who worked in US government for six years (at the Fed and the CFPB) and am now an academic in the UK so happy to give my thoughts briefly; feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss further. 

I agree with the general premise, both because the US is so large and because (for better or worse, and despite everything) the US is still seen as a leader in many ways: whether or not they copy it (often not, often with good reason), almost everyone will at least consider doing anything the US does. T... (read more)

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Jack Malde
3y
Thanks, this is very useful.  Would you say then that general EA movement building is likely to be more important in US? To make this more concrete: at the current margin do you think one additional person doing EA movement building in US is likely to do more good than one additional person doing EA movement building in UK? This will of course depend both on how influential the US relative to the UK, but also on how well-known EA currently is in UK versus US. My impression is that the proportion of Americans who are EAs is far less than the proportion of British who are EAs, so the US is likely to win on both metrics.

This is great - thanks. My belief certainly wouldn't be that simply because of the age structure IFR is going to be lower in developing countries. I do think that will be protective, but I also think that poor health systems will (obviously) go the other way. Some risk factors (generally more stressed immune systems) may work against them; other risk factors (lower rates of hypertension & diabetes) may work in favor. Hopefully treatment regimens will improve over time in useful ways even for resource-poor settings, but it's hard to predict. S... (read more)

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RayTaylor
4y
so glad to see this discussion who are you RootPi and can you reach me at ALLFED.info?

Sorry for the slow reply! I had been working on some rough estimates for total (i.e. including medium- and long-run downstream impacts) costs and benefits of e.g. lockdown vs targeted social distancing, but even in high-income countries this is hard! This paper from Layard et al (using well-being adjusted life years) is perhaps the closest I've seen:

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/occasional/op049.pdf

See also this effort for LMICs from CGD:

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/scoping-indirect-health-effects-covid-19-open-call-resources

Happy to consid... (read more)

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Linch
4y
I think ~1.1% (with fairly wide uncertainty) is a fairly realistic guess for a global IFR (including all age ranges). I basically don't buy that the balance of factors would necessarily favor poorer and younger countries over richer/healthier/older ones, though it certainly is possible. Here's a preliminary document listing why I believe this. Usual caveats of being a non-professional apply, and also the tone is a bit sharper than I'd use on the EA Forum (basically the intended audience was other amateur forecasters so there are certain stylistic differences, especially around caveats). ~0.1%, or even slightly lower, seems believable for <60s in some rich countries but I don't think you want to extrapolate age-structure arguments too strongly to novel situations (in essence I think age is a biased estimator whereas something like crude death rate may not be), and if you want to look at specific countries you'd want to look at a bunch of known comorbidities*; eg per capita, Nigerians die of heart disease at ~1/10 the rate of Indians. One thing that I didn't mention in my document above is that even if .1%-.2% is a realistic IFR for young people in developing countries, and developing countries are skewed young, the full IFR in developing countries will likely still be much higher. For example, Guayas province in Ecuador has had ~11,561 excess deaths from the beginning of March to mid-April (base rate is ~3000 in that time period). My understanding is that close to all of it is directly due to covid-19 (I talked to people from Ecuador and if there was mass starvations or a different epidemic that accounted for even 2x all-cause mortality I'd have heard by now). The population of Guayas is ~3 million, so this is already a lower bound of ~0.39% of the entire population(!), and I really don't buy that anywhere near 100% of Guayas were infected as of mid-April (or more accurately late March to account for lag between infection and death). Ecuador has a median age of

Thanks! and good question. I wasn't being very precise, and partly that's because I suppose I see it on a continuum. The extent to which lockdowns make sense will depend on the context and will be correlated (I believe) with GDP/capita, % formal economy, etc. I actually think a decent case could be made against lockdowns even in high-income countries, although I'm not sure the numbers would come out that way (and I realize that's far more controversial). It's true that they are "practical" in middle- and high-income count... (read more)

3
Linch
4y
I know the Washington post opinion column isn't the right place to post numbers, but do you have ballpark estimates for how costly (economically and/or in terms of human toll) lockdowns will be in low income and middle income countries? I do think that some people (not saying you are one!) often underestimate the human harm of getting covid-19 in developing countries (eg, they'll quote widely discredited numbers for IFR like .1%, which obviously is ~impossible). So it'd be helpful to do ballpark Fermi estimates for the cost of different interventions (or not doing those interventions) vs the benefits, either for the world as a whole or a specific country in mind. I can possibly help provide the modeling on the covid side, but I don't have a good grasp of the "cost" side of lockdowns at the moment.