All of Seth Ariel Green's Comments + Replies

Animal welfare is an area where climate concerns and a canonical EA cause converge because factory farming is a major contributor to both problems. By that light, EAs are actually doing quite a lot to mitigate climate change, just under a different banner. 

Glad you liked it! I also got a lot out of Jia Tolentino's "We Come From Old Virginia" in her book Trick Mirror

there have been a few "EA" responses to this issue but TBF they can be a bit hard to find

https://www.cold-takes.com/minimal-trust-investigations/

As an aside, I'm pretty underwhelmed by concerns about using LLINs as fishing nets. These concerns are very media-worthy, but I'm more worried about things like "People just never bother to hang up their LLIN," which I'd guess is a more common issue. The LLIN usage data we use would (if accurate) account for both.

https://blog.givewell.org/2015/02/05/putting-the-problem-of-bed-nets-used-for-fishing-in-perspective/

B

Yeah, I was curious about this too, and we try to get at something theoretically similar by putting out all the "zeitgeist" studies in an attempt to define the dominant approaches of a given era. Like, in the mid-2010s, everyone was thinking about bystander stuff. But if memory serves, once I saw the above graph, I basically just dropped this whole line of inquiry because we were basically seeing no relationship between effect size and publication date. Having said that, behavioral outcomes get more common over time (see graph in original post), and that i... (read more)

Hi Akhil, 

Thanks for engaging.

1. I do not think we have missed a significant portion of primary prevention papers in our time period. Looking at that page, I am seeing some things that had midpoint evaluations in 2018. Looking at this group's final report (https://www.whatworks.co.za/documents/publications/390-what-works-to-prevent-vawg-final-performance-evaluation-report-mar-2020/file), I do not see anything that qualifies as a primary prevention of sexual violence. We did a painstaking systematic search and I'm reasonably confident we got just about ev

👋 our search extends to 1985, but the first paper was from 1986.  We started our search by replicating and extending a previous review, which says "The start date of 1985 was chosen to capture the 25-year period prior to the initial intended end date of 2010. The review was later extended through May 2012 to capture the most recent evaluation studies at that time." I'm not too worried about missing stuff from before that, though, because the first legit evaluation we could find was from 1986. There's actually a side story to tell here about how the p... (read more)

Some research evaluations last over time! But Munger's 'temporal validity' argument really stuck with me: the social world changes over time, so things that work in one place and time could fail in another for reasons that have nothing to do with rigor, but changing context.

In general, null results should be our default expectation in behavioral research: https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2023/12/STEVENSON.pdf

However, per https://eiko-fried.com/antidotes-to-cynicism-creep/#6_Antidotes_to_cynicism_creep

More broadly, for me personally, the way forward i

This happens to be trending on Hacker News right now: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/startup-school-east-boston/

they also have a cofounder matching program https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching

Probably nothing like this exists for EA-specific matching though IDK

As I argue in the SMC piece, not just any RCT will suffice, and today we know a lot more about what good research looks like. IMO, we should (collectively) be revisiting things we think we know with modern research methods. So yes, I think we can know things. But we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Our evidentiary standards should be high.

Related: Keving Munger on temporal validity https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20531680231187271

I can see why this piece's examples and tone will rankle folks here. But speaking for myself, I think its core contention is directionally correct: EA's leading orgs' and thinkers' predictions and numeric estimates have an "all fur coat and no knickers" problem -- putative precision but weak foundations. My entry to GiveWell's Change Our Mind contest made basically the same point (albeit more politely).

Another way to frame this critique is to say it's an instance of the Shirky principle: institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the s... (read more)

Glad to hear it! 

I've been working on a meta-analysis of "what works best for reducing consumption of meat and animal products (MAP)" -- first draft here, in-progress version here.  I've been coming to the conclusion that in terms of consumer-side interventions, we have a much better handle on how to reduce red and processed meat consumption (RPMC) that MAP consumption overall, and that much of the change in RPMC is probably being driven by inter-MAP substitution. This might be good for health and the environment but terrible for animal welfare ,... (read more)

My pleasure and thank you! (I was able to mostly cut and paste my response from something else I was working on, FWIW)

Great questions!

Our summary doesn't cover this much, but the paper discusses measurement error a lot, because it's a serious problem. Essentially everything in this dataset is self-reported. 

The few exceptions are typically either involvement outcomes or actually somewhat bizarre, for instance, male subjects watch a video on sexual harassment and then teach a female confederate how to golf, while a researcher watches through a one-way mirror and codes how often the subject touches the confederate and how sexually harassing those touches were.

Perp... (read more)

Thank you, that section was a weak link in the article and I replaced the paragraph with a brief summary of an article about vegan diets for a sample of beagles.

If I were a determined skeptic, I wouldn't accept any of these results, but I'm not, because my prior is that dogs, like us, are omnivorous generalists who can thrive on a huge variety of diets. 

I do think that on average, supplementing with bivalves will be good for their health, as it would be good for many vegans as well.

Our pleasure! 

I edited a sentence about the UCT experiment to note where it took place.

Here is the country distribution for papers we meta-analyzed

  country  		n  	percentage
  USA			262	0.888
 Canada 		13	0.044
     
 Germany  		4 	0.014
       
 Kenya 			3	0.010
      
 Mexico 		3	0.010
 
 Netherlands		2	0.007
    
 Spain 			2	0.007
       
 Ghana  		1	0.003
       
 Haiti  		1	0.003
      
 Israel 		1	0.003
    
 Scotland  		1	0.003
   
 St. Lucia		1	0.003
      
 Uganda  		1	0.003

👋 which meta-analyses did you look at? I have looked into this a subject a bit and would be curious to read more. Thanks!

Hi Abbey,

I think you are going to have a very hard time convincing EAs that this should be a core, or even peripheral, EA cause area. 

In your previous piece, you cite Matt Desmond's estimate that 5.4 million Americans live in extreme poverty. I think this is probably an overestimate, but taking it at face value, that's less than 1% of all the people who live in extreme poverty globally. Accordingly, if global poverty is your top priority, the impartial altruism principle implies that the extreme poor in America  should receive less than 1% of the... (read more)

Very nice report, and thank you for sharing it here.

I am currently working on a meta-analysis of interventions intended to reduce MAP consumption -- first draft published on the forum here. My main question about this paper is: did you all collect (or consider collecting) MAP consumption outcomes? I like the behavioral outcomes you collect, and I think that giving money is not at all a cheap signal. I'd also be interested in whether a week later people are still thinking about it in a way that affects their purchases. (I am guessing that the mTurk-based de... (read more)

Very nice! Apropos of:

Which settings are most conducive to running rigorous experiments on dietary change interventions, and how can these settings be accessed/used? (For example, college cafeterias allow data on purchases to be used, so that researchers don’t have to rely on self-reports.)

I'd suggest retirement communities. We have a fair bit of data on changing the eating habits of college students (I review the most rigorous studies in that literature in this meta-analysis), but much less on adults, and essentially nothing on older people. Like college ... (read more)

Pro-immigration orgs probably meet the bill, e.g. https://malengo.org/ or https://freemigrationproject.org/ (see here for discussion: https://vipulnaik.com/blog/my-q1-2022-donation-to-free-migration-project/)

I don't know much about these org's efficacy, but we generally have good reason to think that more immigration will lead to more growth: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Fjep.25.3.83

Thank you, I had not seen this Vox piece, Lewis Bollard's thread, or pieces you link to.

My attention is now mostly on expanding a different piece but if time permits, I'll return to this one and incorporate the above evidence. A few quick thoughts

1. To convince me that a vegan diet is safe for cats would require nigh overwhelming evidence, and at first glance, none of these studies is a slam dunk.
2. I also think that Lewis's estimate is smaller than mine, but a few notes about that
   1. the question of what would happen to the 'meal' that goes into pet food is hard to

Wow that’s a very large number! I shall take a look at the paper, thank you. My first thought is that I don’t think 1/5 premature deaths is attributable to MAP — overeating, maybe, but that could be true of plant-based diets too.

Thank you for engaging Alex!

(The following is a lightly edited version of an email I sent to Alex earlier this weekend)

I just fixed that typo, TY [I actually fixed it in draft on Saturday and forgot to implement]

1. Comparing online to IRL studies -- I will think about how to integrate, e.g. a study that finds similar results wr.t. the effects of intergroup contact on prejudice, but I'm not sure how much this generalizes across the behavioral sciences.

2. You're right about motivations; for the EA forum and a preprint I think we can take for granted that peo... (read more)

You are 100% right about this, my mistake. First, I read your first comment too fast (I placed 'binary' on the wrong side of the equation, as you noticed), and second, I think that the original paragraph confuses percentage change with percentile change. I removed the section.

I still want the final draft to present some intuitive, drawing-on-stats-that-we-learned-in-HS way to put standardized mean effect sizes into impact estimate terms, but I think we need to think more about this.

Thanks for engaging! FWIW  I ran through your code and everything makes sense to me

Hi Maya,

Thank you very much for your kind words. Your two 2021 papers were big inspirations and guidance for this post.

1. I still believe that self-reported outcomes are at serious risk of social desirability bias, even though our test doesn't detect it. The second experiment in your 3-RCT paper is, as far as I am concerned, dispositive. I also agree that the thing we need now is an assessment of the correlation between, on the one hand, attitudes, intentions, and self-reported outcomes, and objectively measured outcomes on the other. 
   1. Apropos of this, if

Thanks Wes! I updated this post to link to two posts by GWWC folks on this subject.

I think this post is on the right track, the request for reasoning transparency especially so. 

I personally worry about how weird effective altruism will seem to the outside world if we focus exclusively on topics that most people don't think are very important. A sister comment argues that the average person's revealed preference about the value of a hen's life relative to a human's is infinitesimal. Likewise, however much people say they worry about AI (as a proxy for longtermism, which isn't really on people's radar in general), in practice, it ten... (read more)

Yep, I recall this case from Bryan Caplan as well: https://betonit.substack.com/p/a-correction-on-housing-regulation

I happen to think Johannes is unusually careful about this stuff; per the original UCT evaluation:

Second, we also follow common practice by making public the data and code that produce the results we report in this paper. However, it has recently been shown that data and code used in economics papers frequently contains errors, making it difficult for readers to confirm the findings (Chang and Li 2015). We therefore hired two graduate student

Thank you, I've amended the text to reflect that.

Oysters meet my threshold for sufficiently unlikely to suffer that I think it's ok to eat them, but I completely understand if they don't meet that threshold for other people.

Thanks! I actually had but had forgotten that Ben was its author.

I edited my top-level comment to reflect this, and to better hone the question I was really getting at.

Did you sense something was amiss at Alameda?

EDIT -- Ben addresses this at length in a previous post. 

However, I think the question is germane, because if you go for the money, it has practical consequences, like daily association with people who operate under very different ethical frameworks than our own. The risk is that you'll get socialized into their worldview, as (seemingly) happened to folks at Alameda. I am wondering how Ben thinks (or thought) about that risk.

Thanks! 

I'm afraid I don't know, but this could be a good follow-up post. (I project it to be a  20-40 hour task, so I'd probably look for funding first).

I remember reading a Times article about cultivated meat that mentioned that someone's pet cat took well to it, which they took as a positive sign, but I can't find the quote now. Here's a 2021 article about the state of the field from Smithsonian: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/we-wont-be-only-ones-eating-lab-grown-meat-our-pets-will-too-180977559/

Also, in my humble opinion, ostroveg... (read more)

It's fun to see job market candidates posting summaries here! (@basil.halperin I just saw your paper on MR.) It's a great venue for a high-level summary. Good luck to you both!

Can we hear about why you want to take another look at Egger et al. (2021)? This is a really important paper and it's important to get this stuff right; OTOH, its data and programs are publicly accessible (download link here), the journal has a pretty robust replication policy...I guess I'm thinking that if something is wrong in this paper it's going to be off in the text and not in the code, i.e. that any mistakes are going to be conceptual. WDYT?

Good stuff, thanks!

FWIW I am a co-author on a meta-analysis of interventions to reduce sexual violence, where we found a disappointing lack of correlation between changes in stated attitudes and change in behavior.

I look forward to seeing this come together!

P.S. another two studies on this subject: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00104140221139385 (found significant effects on attitudes towards early and forced marriage) and https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/726964?journalCode=jop (found "sporadic" effects on attitudes) 

👋 just the same one I brought up previously, which is that being for-profit probably provides a massive fitness benefit in the Darwinian world of business. I have some theories about what that fitness advantage is -- I favor the advantages brought by the opportunity to raise startup capital by offering early investors potential outsized rewards -- but the truth is I don't know, because I've never run a business, and I've never been part of a massively growing business. Have you? 

Elsewhere, you say "The only thing keeping such firms from thriving and ... (read more)

Really excited to see this coming along!

I'm particularly keen on the mass media to prevent violence against women intervention. In fact in August, I sent a version of your webpage covering the same topic to the co-authors of the "one experimental study [that] measured effects on behavior" (my advisor and two grad school classmates, FWIW), and they are all positive about this project as well.

I'd like to know more about the thinking behind the claim that a mass media IPV campaign would be 50x as effective as cash transfers at improving welfare (which roughly... (read more)

Hi there, really enjoying this piece (just discovered it). My grad school advisor often asks: "what evidence would convince a determined skeptic?" and I think that's broadly in the same vein.

Incidentally, my entry to GiveWell's Change Our Mind contest does for SMC what you did LLINs, though I came away much less convinced. I think the core difference between us is that I am, by default, skeptical of pre-replication-crisis research.  I think that if you find papers from 20 years ago where the authors themselves say that their designs were underpowered ... (read more)

Very cool, I will definitely apply on behalf of my company. 

Incidentally, I asked in a previous post: "Has there been meta-evaluator work to establish which of the evaluators/advisors qualifies as an effective charity?" So I'm happy to see this initiative   

Thank you! Self-reported is better than nothing but worse than, eg, collecting grocery bills or monitoring consumption in a common space like a dorm-specific cafeteria. Ideal implementation partner for this kind of study is meal kit or grocery delivery company. Will take a closer look shortly

I'm all for experimenting with strategies for vegan outreach! Do you know of any RCTs that actually test the behavioral effects (i.e. eating meat or not) of interventions like this? I was thinking of doing a little lit review to show just how little we know about what moves the needle here

Thanks for asking this, the comments surfaced some criticisms of ACE that I wasn't aware of.

I split my 2022 animal welfare contributions between ACE and Direct Action Everywhere, with more going to ACE; I agree with a commenter below that they're the best we have. Still good to be aware of some common criticisms and concerns.

If you’re comfortable with a level of abstraction away from direct aid, JPAL does a lot of work in India implementing and evaluating the interventions that become opportunities for effective giving:

https://www.povertyactionlab.org/

One of the pleasures of liaising with EAs on Glo's behalf is how quickly the conversations advance to the "frontier" of issues that we are currently debating or have debated extensively. This is a good example.

Section 3 of the previously linked-to Glo EA post outlines the intended stages of Glo's growth, starting with stablecoin use cases and then moving to savings accounts. I wrote that section and I meant it as a chronological roadmap, meaning the DeFi use case would come first in a sequence. As you observed, that nuance has been lost on the Glo homepage... (read more)