Bio

Participation
4

I am open to work. I see myself as a generalist quantitative researcher.

How others can help me

You can give me feedback here (anonymous or not).

You are welcome to answer any of the following:

  • Do you have any thoughts on the value (or lack thereof) of my posts?
  • Do you have any ideas for posts you think I would like to write?
  • Are there any opportunities you think would be a good fit for me which are either not listed on 80,000 Hours' job board, or are listed there, but you guess I might be underrating them?

How I can help others

Feel free to check my posts, and see if we can collaborate to contribute to a better world. I am open to part-time volunteering and paid work. In this case, I typically ask for 20 $/h, which is roughly equal to 2 times the global real GDP per capita.

Comments
1809

Topic contributions
26

Thanks for the post, Lintz. I would be happy to bet 10 k$ against short AI timelines.

Thanks for sharing! I would not be surprised if the effects of global warming on wild animals were larger than the suffering of farmed animals. However, it is super unclear whether wild animals have positive or negative lives, including r-selected ones. So I think it makes sense to prioritise learning more about the effects on wild animals, such as by donating to the Wild Animal Initiative (WAI), instead of betting a cooler world results in less animals with negative lives. More broadly, if climate change is super bad due to a specific problem (wild animal welfare, water scarcity, conflict, soil erosion, or other), I believe it is better to target that problem more directly/explicitly and without constraints instead of via decreasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which narrows the number of available interventions a lot.

@SummaryBot , have you considered summarising this post, which was just shared as a classic Forum post on the last EA Forum Digest?

Thanks for pointing that out, David! Excluding a few senior roles, I guess the typical counterfactual is hiring another candidate who is less qualified. So I think the respondents are overestimating the value of expanding the talent pool relative to increasing funding.

  • Evaluating more fine-grained causes, respondents estimated that 26.8% should go to work focused on AI, 15.7% to Global health, 14.7% to Farm animal welfare, 10.2% to building EA and related communities, and 8.2% to Biosecurity (in addition to smaller percentages to many other causes).

So the respondents would like to see 1.82 (= 0.268/0.147) and 1.07 (= 0.157/0.147) times as much resources going into AI and global health as into farm animal welfare. These numbers imply it is good to move donations from global health to farm animal welfare (which I agree with), and from this to AI (which I disagree with). Of the amount granted by Open Philanthropy in 2024, I estimate:

  • 16.0 % went to farm animal welfare:
    • 2.59 % to "Alternatives to Animal Products".
    • 2.70 % to "Broiler Chicken Welfare".
    • 0.203 % to "Cage-Free Reforms".
    • 10.5 % to "Farm Animal Welfare".
    • 0.0136 % to "Fish Welfare".
  • 46.6 % went to global health, 2.91 (= 0.466/0.160) times as much as to farm animal welfare (significantly more than 1.07 times as much):
    • 10.3 % to "GiveWell-Recommended Charities".
    • 1.83 % to "Global Aid Policy".
    • 0.172 % to "Global Health & Development".
    • 0.672 % to "Global Health & Wellbeing".
    • 12.2% to "Global Health R&D".
    • 11.1 % to "Global Public Health Policy".
    • 5.25 % to "Human Health and Wellbeing".
    • 4.93 % to "Scientific Research".
    • 0.0926 % to "South Asian Air Quality".
  • 17.8 % went to "Potential Risks from Advanced AI", 1.11 (= 0.178/0.160) times as much as to farm animal welfare (significantly less than 1.82 times as much). There are other focus areas which cover AI, but that is the major one, so the takeaway will remain the same.

Great work, David and Willem!

  • The average value to an organization of their most preferred over their second most preferred candidate, in a typical hiring round, was estimated to be $50,737 (junior hire) and $455,278 (senior hire).

People considering earning to give can always ask this question to the recruiters instead of relying on the values above, as there is significant variation across roles and organisations.

  • The average value to the community of a person with equivalent expected lifetime value to an organization’s typical hire joining the community was estimated to be $2,037,500 (junior) and $7,308,333 (senior). This suggests that the value of recruiting ‘hire-level’ EAs to the community is estimated to be extremely high.

This bullet plus the other I quoted above suggest typical junior and senior hires have lifetimes of 40.2 (= 2.04*10^6/(50.7*10^3)) and 16.1 roles (= 7.31*10^6/(455*10^3)), which are unreasonably long. For 3 working-years per junior hire, and 10 working-years per senior hire, they would correspond to working at junior level for 121 years (= 40.2*3), and at senior level for 161 years (= 16.1*10).

  • 8. Basically all the rest of the value that comes from the Forum (more on this in the appendix) is downstream of having a strong community of people contributing/writing on the Forum.
    • a. For example, I think the Forum creates a significant amount of good in the world by helping people find impactful work (ex. job postings) and improve their donations (ex. by reading about work from organizations). However, I believe that is not typically why people come to the Forum, and so this value is downstream of having a strong core community of individuals writing posts and comments.

I think it would be better to focus more explicitly on how the EA Forum results in improved donations and career choices, as these are better proxies for impact than lead indicators like the number of posts, comments, or user-hours. I would also be deliberate about which areas are more cost-effective. I believe increasing donations to the best animal welfare interventions is way more valuable than to the best in human welfare[1] (including not only global health and development, but also global catastrophic risk).

  1. ^

    I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, which are thought to be among the best human welfare interventions, and that the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been 64.3 k times as cost-effective as such charities.

All 12 ratios are much higher than the 2.4 estimated for GiveDirectly's cash transfers to poor households in Kenya.

2.4 refers to the integral of the increase in local real GDP over the 29 months after the transfer as a fraction of the transfer. The integral of an investment in global stocks over 29 months as a fraction of the initial investment is 2.56 (= ((1 + 0.05)^(29/12) - 1)/LN(1 + 0.05)) for the annual real growth rate from 1900 to 2022 of 5 %. So, over 29 months, I think investing in global stocks increases the integral of global real GDP 1.07 (= 2.56/2.4) times as much as GiveDirectly's cash transfers to poor households in Kenya increase the integral of local real GDP.

Thanks for the post! I think the best interventions in animal welfare are much more cost-effective than the best decreasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. I estimated Founders Pledge’s (FP's) Climate Change Fund (CCF), which I consider to be the best donation option to decrease GHG emissions, has a cost-effectiveness of 0.0326 DALY/$. I calculate this is only 0.710 % (= 0.0326/4.59) as cost-effective as cage-free campaigns helping hens, and 0.00510 % (= 0.0326/639) as cost-effective as the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been.

Thanks for the great context, Aaron! Strongly upvoted.

I think the impact from FWI you are alluding to falls under their 3rd and 4th best arguments to donate to FWI, "Tackling some of the animal movement’s hardest questions", and "Movement building in Asia" (see details below). FWI rates these as less significant than their "future potential for impact" and "current impact", which I assessed in my post, so my conclusions would hold if FWI is right about which arguments for donating to them are more significant. I assume the 3rd and 4th best current arguments used to be more important earlier on when there were fewer organisations working on aquatic animals, and fewer organisations working in Asia.

On the one hand, FWI's historical influence on SWP seems like a good argument for their cost-effectiveness not to differ astronomically. On the other, I tend to agree with FWI's ranking of their best arguments for donating to FWI. I believe donating to SWP is more cost-effective than donating to FWI with the goal of increasing the cost-effectiveness of SWP. SWP's funds can always be used to leverage FWI's position in a targeted way that would be most informative to SWP, whereas FWI's funds would also necessarily go towards activities which are not optimally informative to SWP.

What are the best arguments for donating to FWI?

The following are some arguments in favor of donating to FWI, roughly in descending order of our view of their significance:

  1. FWI’s future potential for impact: About 67% of our current budget (specifically our R&D, exploratory programs, and China budget items) goes towards developing more cost-effective interventions in the future rather than having a direct impact. We conduct this intervention research in what we believe is an unusually rigorous and ground-proofed way. For examples, see our recent studies focused on developing interventions on satellite imagery and feed fortification.
  2. FWI’s current impact: We currently estimate that we’ve improved the lives of over 2 million fishes. This makes FWI one of the most promising avenues in the world to reduce farmed fish suffering, and likely the most promising avenue in the world to reduce the suffering of farmed Indian major carp, one of the largest and most neglected species groups of farmed fishes.
  3. Tackling some of the animal movement’s hardest questions: If we are ever going to bring about a world that is truly humane, we will need to focus on the more neglected groups in animal farming, particularly including farmed fishes and animals farmed in informal economies. We believe that FWI’s work is demonstrating some avenues of helping these groups, and will thus enable other organizations to work more effectively on them. For instance, some of the lessons we learned in implementing our own farmer-centric work later inspired the model that Shrimp Welfare Project is pursuing in their Sustainable Shrimp Farmers of India.
  4. Movement building in Asia: Almost 90% of farmed fishes, as well as the majority of farmed terrestrial animals, are in Asia. We thus believe it is critical to launch movements in Asian countries to address the suffering these animals face, and to expand the animal movement by bringing in new people. We are proud to have hired a local team of about 20 full-time equivalent staff in India as well as contractors in China and the Philippines. We are also proud that most of these people did not work in animal protection previously, and are now more likely to have careers helping animals even after they leave FWI.
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