I am looking for work, and welcome suggestions for posts.
I am looking for work. I welcome suggestions for posts. You can give me feedback here (anonymous or not). Feel free to share your thoughts on the value (or lack thereof) of my posts.
I can help with career advice, prioritisation, and quantitative analyses.
Thanks for the relevant comment, Toby! I only covered the options I consider most reasonable, but the ones you mentioned crossed my mind, and I think they are worth discussing. As far as I can tell, they can be summarised into 2 objections:
On the 1st objection, ACE's cost-effectiveness analyses rely on Ambitious Impact's (AIM's) suffering-adjusted days (SADs). In this system, silkworms have a welfare range of 0.46 (you can ask Vicky Cox for the private sheet with the estimates), 230 (= 0.46/0.002) times Rethink Priorities's (RP's) mainline welfare range of silkworms of 0.002. As a result, small invertebrates have a much greater welfare range in ACE's cost-effectiveness analyses than under RP's mainline welfare ranges. My estimates for the welfare of soil nematodes, mites, and springtails rely on RP's mainline welfare ranges, so I believe these animals would have a welfare much further away from 0 under AIM's, and therefore ACE's, assumptions about welfare ranges.
On the 2nd objection, I think it would be a surprising and suspicious convergence if considering unmodelled effects much larger than the ones currently being modelled practically did not change anything in terms of ACE's recommendations. My analysis of effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails significantly changed my cause prioritisation. At the very least, I would say ACE could explain why they think effects on wild animals are not worth considering.
I am wary of causing large harm to soil nematodes, mites, and spirngtails in the hope that other unmodelled undescribed effect will neutralise it. I estimated School Plates in 2023 increased 1.20 billion wild-animal-years (mostly nematode-years) per $, and nematodes seem to have pretty painful experiences. From FƩlix and Braendle (2010), "Frequently co-occurring predators [of nematodes] include fungi, which, depending on the species, invade the nematode through spores attaching to the cuticle or the intestine, or use trapping devices that immobilize the animal and perforate it". From FrƩzal and FƩlix (2015), "parasites infect their host via the two most exposed parts of the nematode, the cuticle and the intestine. Some non-invasive bacteria form a biofilm along the nematode's cuticle or directly stick to it (Hodgkin et al., 2013). Other bacteria proliferate in the nematode gut, which may induce constipation and likely impairs nutrient uptake (FƩlix and Duveau, 2012). The most intrusive parasites enter and proliferate inside the nematode body. Some pierce the cuticle (e.g., Drechmeria coniospora [Couillault et al., 2004], Figure 2J), while others enter intestinal cells via the apical membrane (e.g., microsporidia and Orsay virus [Troemel et al., 2008; FƩlix et al., 2011])".
I would not be surprised if effects on bacteria of changing cropland were much larger than those on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails. From Table S1 of Bar-on et al. (2018), there are 10^30 terrestrial deep subsurface bacteria, 10^9 (= 10^(30 - 21)) times as many as nematodes, and I guess the welfare range of bacteria can seasily be much larger than 10^-9 that of nematodes. However, the number of bacteria per unit area is correlated with the number of soil nematodes, mites, and springtails per unit area, as both are driven by net primary production (NPP), and I would guess bacteria to have negative/positive lives conditional on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails having negative/positive lives. So I believe my conclusion that the cost-effectiveness of interventions targeting vertebrates is driven by changes in cropland would hold accounting for bacteria.
Thanks for sharing, Emre!
I liked your conceptual analysis. On the other hand, I would say the empirical evidence points towards single-issue organisations being more cost-effective. I think the organisations supported by impact-focussed evaluators and funders like Animal Charity Evaluators, EA Funds, GiveWell, and Open Philanthropy are overwhelmingly single-issue.
I worry multi-issue advocacy by animal welfare organisations may easily backfire:
Thanks for sharing, Alina! Do you plan to consider the effects on wild animals of interventions targeting farmed animals?
I think the effects on wild animals of interventions targeting vertebrates which change feed consumption are much larger than those on farmed animals. I estimate:
For my best guess that wild animals have negative lives, considering effects on wild animals makes welfare reforms increasing the feed requirement per food-kg much more beneficial, but also renders increasing the consumption of animal-based foods very harmful. I worry your recommendations are not internally consistent. If I had the best guess that:
@eleanor mcaree, @Elisabeth Ormandy, @Vince Mak šø, and @Zuzana Sperlovašø, you may be interested in this comment, and my response to Toby's reply.
Thanks for the clarification, David. There are so many concepts of existential risk, and they are often so vague that I think estimates of existential risk can vary by many orders of magnitude even holding constant the definition in words of a given author. So I would prefer discussions to focus on outcomes like human extinction which are well defined, even if their chance remains very hard to estimate.
I also think human extinction without recovery to a similarly promising state is much less likely than human extinction. For a time from human extinction to that kind of recovery described by anĀ exponential distribution with a mean of 66 M years, which was the time from the last mass extinction until humans evolving, and 1 billion years during which the Earth willĀ remain habitable, and therefore recovery is possible, the probability of recovery conditional on human extinction would be 2.63*10^-7 (= e^(-10^9/(66*10^6))).
Thanks for the feedback, Aidan! Strongly upvoted.
I would actually expect our marginal multiplier to be much closer to our average multiplier than the CEARCH method implies.
What is your best guess for the marginal multiplier of donating to GWWC now? I think it would be great if you estimated GWWC's marginal multiplier in your next impact evaluation. Do you plan to publish this in 2026, looking into your impact in 2025? I guess data until the end of 2025 would be enough for you to have a better idea about your marginal multiplier.
I don't think I agree that the information on the website is misleading seeing as it just states the number of people who have taken the pledge.
Assuming the median person who checks your website, and reads the sentence I quoted above[1]Ā believes something like 90 % of pledgers are fulfilling their pledges, but that in reality only 1/3 are actually fulfilling it based on recorded and non-recorded donations, would you agree it would be better to update the website such that people do not think the size of the active community is much larger than it actually is? If you do agree, which fraction of pledgers are fulfilling their pledge based on past recorded and non-recorded donations? I understand there is uncertainty, but your estimate that only 59.4 % of 10 % Pledgers record a donation in the 1st year of their pledge makes me think the fraction of people fulfilling their pledges could me much lower than what people checking your website think. I think you should at least update the sentence I quoted above from your website to something like the following. "9,840 people have pledged to donate at least 10% of their net income". I suspect many will infer from the words "community" and "pledging", which GWWC is currently using, that the vast majority of pledgers are fulfilling their pledge.
The regression you suggest is something we have considered, but donāt think it is an obvious improvement over our approach of taking the mean over the most recent pledge years. While there might be an effect of the year the pledge started on average first-year pledge donations, we do not think this trend is linear.
I still think assuming a (potentially small) linear effect of the year the pledge started on donations is better than supposing no effect at all. The effect may be non-linear, but I see this as a reason for running a non-linear regression (e.g. D(s, y) = a(s) + b(s)*y + c(s)*y^2), not for supposing an effect of 0.
For instance, the 2021 cohort had the second highest average first-year donations across all cohorts and the five cohorts with the lowest average first-year donations were 2010, 2017, 2018, 2016 and 2012.
Note the year the pledge started can affect donations in years of the pledge besides the 1st.
We currently arenāt considering retiring the š¹Trial Pledge. While in terms of direct donation value the š¹Trial Pledge contributes a relatively small fraction of our pledge impact, we believe the main value add of the š¹Trial Pledge comes from š¹TrialĀ pledgers āupgradingā to šø10% Pledges.
Have you estimated the fraction of the impact you attributed to The 10 % Pledge which was caused by The Trial Pledge?
For example, roughly 10% of those who have taken a š¹Trial Pledge are now šø10% Pledges
Note many of these pledgers might have taken The 10 % Pledge anyway, just slightly later than they would have without The Trial Pledge.
Our community includes 9,840 lifetime members pledging ā„10% of their income, plus 1,117 trial pledgers, together making up our 10,957 strong giving community
Thanks, Nick. I have upvoted your comment because I appreciate when people share the rationale for their strong down or upvotes. I guess (with low confidence) my comment may still be valuable at least to people who have not noted my point about increasing the consumption of animal-based foods in my related post, which is only at the end of the summary, raising awareness for impacts on soil animals, and normalising discussion about these. The major downsise is that many people like you already know my point, and do not like the repetition.
Thanks for sharing, Aditya! Relatedly, Faunalytics has estimates of the number of animal lives and living time per kg and portion of food.
I think increasing the consumption of animal-based foods is beneficial due to increasing the welfare of wild animals way more than it decreases the welfare of farmed animals. I estimate School Plates in 2023, and Veganuary in 2024 harmed soil nematodes, mites, and springtails 5.75 k and 3.85 k times as much as they benefited farmed animals. I calculate those animals have a welfare range of 0.324 %, 1.79 %, and 3.09 % of that of silkworms, which implies a very low capacity for welfare on an individual basis, but I believe increasing the consumption of animal-based foods increases the living time of soil animals so much that effects on them still dominate those on farmed animals. I estimate buying beef decreases the living time of those soil animals by 95.8 M animal-years per $.
Hi Hannah and William,
Do you think it would be feasible to run this analysis for wild soil nematodes, mites, or springtails? If so, how much would it cost? I would be happy to contribute with 3 k$. I estimate effects on the welfare of soil nematodes, mites, and springtails are the driver of the vast majority of interventions targeting vertebrates.Ā