All of utilitarian01's Comments + Replies
>In the case of C. elegans, despite being a widely studied animal, evidence of their being conscious is weak and their behavioral reactions are simple and highly stereotyped.
What do you mean by simple? Having nociceptors is a good indicator of pain, right? Surely more than a 1% chance, that just seems like crazy overconfidence.
That's true, but barring some huge change in the exact way capitalism works, I doubt it will ever happen.
>Leverage: It seems empirically evident to me that meta EA activity is influencing both the amount and the direction of funding at a ratio of at least £10 influenced £1 inputted.
How? Skimming through the page I see no evidence of that, it's literally just a random hypothetical that they throw out.
Giving What We Can's impact reports (when I last read them) suggested they had raised for effective charities £6 per £ spent using pessimistic assumptions or £60 per £ best guess.
The Life You Can Save raised $11 per $ spent for effective charities
Raising for Effective giving has raised $24 per $ spent, for effective charities.
EA London (which does not do much fundraising) roughly raised £2.5 per £.
Rethink Forward moves £7 per £.
This are all post hoc analyses of money moved to date, not estimates of future impact. The quality of the evidence for these i
... (read more)I know I'm like 1 year late, but do you have the raw data still?
I would expect the number of ea-but-dont-know-about-ea people to be pretty high actually. Givewell received $42 million last year from people who gave $1 million or less, if each person gave $5000 (which I think is a generous amount), that's 8400 donors compared to the 3,500 that took the EA survey last year. Of course that could just be cause most people don't like taking surveys, but I would expect that to be countered by a lower average donation amount. In contrast, taking the median estimate of $750 in the last survey, it looks like we have ... (read more)
Thanks! Note that for the computation to work, you probably should take the mean and not the median. In the survey that's $9761 - so the total (claimed) donations from people that took the survey amounts to about $35 million.
Also, I see that from that same survey that they have (partial) data on contribution to each charity. Note that Givewell is not that big relatively in total donations
Great news for the animals suffering :)
Even at worst that's still 4 years of suffering averted per $, insane cost-effectiveness.
Hm, my intuition goes the other way. I would assume being in a relationship increases your chances of convincing your gf/wife to donate at least a little, perhaps 10%, to your choice charity. I've never been in a relationship though so who knows.
Interestingly the EA wikipedia page gets an average of 9000 pageviews a month. Curious where most of these people first hear about it before googling, maybe Doing Good Better?
Where would starvation fall under in the juvenile mortality pie chart? Or is that something r-selected species don't typically go through.
Fantastic post, I'll be looking forward to the next one about insects as a cause area. I suggest researching the effects of buying beef to reduce springtail and nematode populations on grazing lands. See this post and this one as well. I could also pm you my spreadsheet that tried to compare it to other causes to give you a starting point.
Watching cricket makes you a better altruist
Off-topic but what do broiler chicken campaigns look like typically? I know for hens it's cage-free, is it just more space per chicken for broilers?
More space per chicken is just one of the requirements. Probably the most important requirement is to use higher welfare breeds, which generally grow more slowly. But there are more requirements regarding lighting, enrichments, etc. You can see the full ask in the European Chicken Commitment. Asks for other regions are similar and can be seen here.
If you make the definition of EA "anyone who donates to an EA charity" then the movement is much bigger, there's more than 20K people in the world donating to effective charities. The Humane League alone has 1.1M followers on facebook, assuming only 200K of those donate, that's still the same as the double every year number. I'd say anyone that donates would be considered an EA in my book, even if they don't self-identify as one.
I think it's cause of the cheese line. Most of us here are vegans and we don't like hearing that kind of thing.
I could still see a sizable impact coming from the consumer skipping a meal of chicken that they otherwise would have ate and substituting it with beyond meat. It doesn't have to be an exact substitute.
Donating is much more effective than the increase in demand though, especially when you consider the elasticity factor. So in that case you should just buy whatever food is cheaper and donate the excess, tofu is about 3x cheaper ($2 per pound) vs grass-fed beef ($6 per pound). I guess if you truly hate tofu you could have an excuse but there's always soy sauce to make it tastier.
I think that your general model is wrong. Briefly, here’s a couple of reasons why:
First, producers strongest economic incentive is net-profit maximization.
Net-profit= #fish sold * (average revenue per fish sold - average cost to farmer per fish sold)
Farming fish at quite high stocking densities without counteracting aeration causes low dissolved oxygen levels. These high stocking densities cause a greater number of fish to be sold. As long as the increase in net-profit caused by the increase in the # fish sold is greater than the decrease in net-profit ... (read more)
Fair point. Also this model gives a very similar number too, if you take the median of the -6, 13 estimate (3.5).
ACE charities are also super cost-effective (15 chickens spared per dollar or so) so if you can hold yourself to a deal like "I'm gonna eat steak tonight but promise to donate $1 to The Humane League after", you just did a lot more good than bad, at least in expected value.
Deliberately offsetting a harm through a "similar" opposite benefit means deliberately restricting that donation to a charity from a restricted subset of possible charities, and it may be less effective than the ones you've ruled out.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Yix7BzSQLJ9TYaodG/ethical-offsetting-is-antithetical-to-ea
Offsetting could also justify murder, because there are life-saving charities.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/04/ethics-offsets/
Also related: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eeBwfLfB3iQkpDhz6/at-what-... (read more)
The first impression though is that animal charities should be accepted as more effective until proven otherwise by some large positive AMF flow-through effect that outweighs saving a life (maybe reducing insect populations?) Until then it seems much more straightforward to donate to ACE charities, specifically the cage-free ones.
Utilitarianism is probably the biggest one
Good catch, I also don't think the welfare improvement would be anywhere near a cage-free campaign, especially after reading that economic incentives part of your post. Unless you think the slaughter is really really bad, this probably isn't a worthy cause area.
These fish are not slaughtered, they are released into natural waters. But I wouldn't jump to conclusions that quickly :)
> How cost-effective could they be compared to other animal welfare interventions?
This is a hard one, but I'll take a (crude) stab at it. Currently the best charity working on fish welfare is Albert Schweitzer (ace top charity). This 2016 guesstimate model of Albert Schweitzer shows a figure of 57 animals spared per dollar, but ~75% of these are chicks being spared from debeaking, which I think is too easy of a policy to implement compared to the oxygen/food problems that arise with fish welfare. The other 25% are cage-free hens which is probably ... (read more)
The dissolved oxygen comes from the nitrogen spike when overfeeding the fish, correct?
True, I still believe that making a toy model with made-up numbers is still better than not doing it at all.
Sure I'd be happy to discuss it more
I don't think its enough to say they're net negative because of r-selection though. Insect larvae probably have like 2 orders of magnitude less neurons and they might not even be conscious in the first place. Also I saw those welfare reports but really didn't like them because they left out the duration of suffering which is a huge factor in how bad something is. A broiler chicken experiencing a moderate amount of stress for it's entire life could be much much worse than it being boiled alive for a few seconds.
This is my welfare spread... (read more)
Has there been any explicit calculation actually done on whether wild animal lives are net positive or negative? Because I've done some myself and it seems to be positive, at least for microorganisms and insects which are the most populous by a large margin.
Also do you know where I can find the ACE models?
The charities I chose wasn't a very principled decision, I just used the Givewell #1 (Malaria Consortium) and compared it to a couple other charities I thought could be more effective. The model is really just a basic attempt at comparing animal charities to human charities which is surprisingly something I haven't seen anyone try yet. There's also the utility number and duration of suffering I use to try to get a good grasp of how bad the life is for a chicken/fish
Might be irrelevant, but have you considered moving to the US for the increased salary?