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All of weeatquince🔸's Comments + Replies

Announcing ACE's 2025 Charity Recommendations

I think practically everyone would prefer 10 h of hurtful pain over 12 min of excruciating pain under WFI's definitions. Do you disagree?

I disagree.

It looks like on average people would be indifferent between 10 h of hurtful pain over 12 min of excruciating pain. People are diverse and there would be very high variation and very strong views in both directions, but some people (such as a noticeable minority of women in the cited study) would prefer short sharp very painful fix over ongoing pain.

(One possible source of error here is I might have syste... (read more)

Announcing ACE's 2025 Charity Recommendations

weeatquince🔸2d7

Thank you Vasco

AGREE ON THERE BEING SOME VALUE FOR MORE RESEARCH

I agree AIM 2025 SADS were below ideal robustness and as such I have spent much of the last few weeks doing additional research to improve the pain scaling estimates. If you have time and want to review this then let me know.

I would be interested in Rethink Priorities or others doing additional work on this topic.

AGREE ON THE LIMITS OF CONDENSING TO A SINGLE NUMBER

I have adapted the 2026 SAD model to give outputs at the four different pain levels, as well as a single aggregated num... (read more)

Vasco Grilo🔸

14h

This implies 10 h of "awareness of Pain is likely to be present most of the time" (hurtful pain) is as bad as 12 min (= 10/50*60) of "severe burning in large areas of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture" (excruciating pain). In contrast, I think practically everyone would prefer 10 h of hurtful pain over 12 min of excruciating pain under WFI's definitions. Do you disagree? Great addition! I was not super clear. I said "The takeaway for me is that we have basically no idea about which pain intensities to use when they differ so much". I meant "basically no idea about which results to trust when they differ so much". I feel like I have a better sense about which pain intensities to use based on my own time trade-offs, and the behaviours of others than suggested by the difference of a factor of 8.90 k between the 2 sets of pain intensities aggregated by AIM in 2025. I very much agree. It is just worth keeping in mind that improving the estimates is often more cost-effective than using them from the point of view of improving future decisions. I agree with using all the available evidence in principle. However, I personally put so little weight on evidence suggesting the trade-off between hurtful and excruciating pain I mentioned above that I can neglect it in practice. I am not confident the women (or the whole public) are underestimating the "worst pain imaginable". I said "I guess their "10/10 pain" was disabling as defined by WFI", but I can see it being excruciating. At the same time, "I [still] doubt the women in the study would be indifferent between 2 h of "severe burning in large areas of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture" and 18 h of a "1/10 pain".

Announcing ACE's 2025 Charity Recommendations

weeatquince🔸3d5

Hi Vasco. Firstly, it should be noted that the overall ratio used for the 2025 SADs was 1000x not 7x. The updated 2026 ratio based on more extensive research is 50x.

Secondly on "I do not see how one would be indifferent between these". You might be surprised if it does not match your personal experience, but many people are indifferent between relatively extreme levels of pain, including people who have been through quite extreme pain. Just as an example this study on 37 women who have just gone through labour, roughly one third of them would prefer a 9/10... (read more)

Vasco Grilo🔸

Thanks for the reply. Right. There was a weight of 45 % on a ratio of 7.06, and of 55 % on one of 62.8 k (= 3.44*10^6/54.8), 8.90 k (= 62.8*10^3/7.06) times as much. My explanation for the large difference is that very little can be inferred about the intensity of excruciating pain, as defined by the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI), from the academic studies AIM analysed to derive the pain intensities linked to the lower ratio. The study is not relevant for assessing excruciating pain? Excruciating pain is "not normally tolerated even if only for a few seconds". Here is the clarification of what this means from Cynthia Schuck, WFI's scientific director. I doubt the women in the study would be indifferent between 2 h of "severe burning in large areas of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture" and 18 h of a "1/10 pain". I believe excruciating pain is way more intense than their "9/10 pain" assuming they are indifferent between 2 h of "9/10 pain" and 18 h of "1/10 pain". From the study, "In the questionnaire, the intensity of pain was evaluated using an NRS 0–10, with 0=no pain and 10=worst pain imaginable". However, this does not imply the women's "10/10 pain" was excruciating. I guess their "10/10 pain" was disabling as defined by WFI. I think point estimates like AIM's SADs derived from aggregating such different results have very little robustness. The takeaway for me is that we have basically no idea about which results to trust when they differ so much. I believe this calls for a more robust estimation method and input research, not for aggregating more widely different results, although I still expect large uncertainty will remain (just not so large). @vicky_cox, has AIM has considered commissioning surveys asking random people, people who regularly experience disabling pain, and people who have experienced excruciating pain about how they trade-off WFI's pain and pleasure categories. I believe Rethink Priorities' (RP's) surveys and data analysis te

APPG for Future Generations past impact review and personal retrospective

weeatquince🔸1mo4

Thank you done.

Where did you donate this year?

weeatquince🔸2mo5

UK political animal welfare work

Don't Eat Honey

weeatquince🔸7mo3

I believe it is a relatively common beekeeping practice to clip a wing of the queen bee to prevent the colony leaving

Three polls: on timelines and cause prio

weeatquince🔸9mo2

60% agree

Bioweapons are an existential risk.
With current technology probably not an x-risk. With future technology I don’t think we can rule out the possibility of bio-sciences reaching the point where extinction is possible. It is a very rapidly evolving field with huge potential.

weeatquince's Quick takes

weeatquince🔸1y40

Global healthShow more

I think people working on animal welfare have more incentives to post during debate week than people working on global health.

The animal space feels (when you are in it) very funding constrained, especially compared to working in the global health and development space (and I expect gets a higher % of funding from EA / EA-adjacent sources). So along comes debate week and all the animal folk are very motivated to post and make their case and hopefully shift a few $. This could somewhat bias the balance of the debate. (Of course the fact that one side of the debate feels they needs funding so much more is in itself relevant to the debate.)

geoffrey

Quickly throwing in a related dynamic. I suspect animal welfare folks have more free time to post online. Career advancement in animal welfare is much more generalist than global health & development. This means there's not as many career goals to 'grind' towards, leaving more free time for public engagement. Alternative proteins feel like a space where one can specialize, but that's all I can think of. I'd love to know of other examples. In contrast, global health & development has many distinct specialities that you have to focus on if you want to grow your career. It's not uncommon for someone's career to be built on incredibly narrow topic like, say, the implications of decentralization for regulating groundwater pollution. There are even 'playbooks' for breaking into the space, and they rarely align with writing EA Forum posts, or really any public writing.

Michael St Jules 🔸1y25

I also expect prioritizing animals over global health in EA to correlate with being more engaged in online EA discussion, in part because I would guess:

The animal advocacy community intersects so much with EA, whereas global health has a relatively larger non-intersecting space with EA, including the effective parts of each. Effective animal advocacy supporters engage relatively more with other EAs and people close to EA than do EA global health supporters.
1. Basically all cost-effectiveness/cost-benefit discussion in animal advocacy is close to the EA commun

... (read more)

CB🔸

That's true. However, even given these incentives, I would have expected more votes/interactions from people favouring global health - given that it is a very established field that feels instinctively good and well-known by most. Animal welfare was supposed to be the underdog here. Moreover, there were fewer arguments favouring global health, and they felt much less convincing (personal opinion, but this felt reflected in votes). So, although there is probably a bias to factor in, I still think that most people on the forum genuinely think animal welfare is the better choice for an additional $100m.

Jason

Another data point might be how well organized the animal-advocacy folks seemed to be on the Manifund EA Community Choice project (although I believe Manifund did some outreach as well). I assumed some of the same reasons were in play there. More generally, discussions on this topic have a flavor of GH being the known quantity and AW being the option with much more uncertainty. Or stated differently, the crux for most participants was going to be predominately how good the marginal dollar for AW is, more so than how good that dollar would be in GH. That's an easier topic for AW people to write on. Also, people are typically more motivated to write in favor of their cause area than in an attempt to deflate the effectiveness of a different cause area.

doebem: Cause Prioritization Research in Brazil (2023/2024)

weeatquince🔸1y2

Hi there, I was wondering what you mean by "real estate speculation": what the issue is and in what ways it is tractable? Thank you for any insights you can give, hoping to do some research into housing issues in LMICs :-)

weeatquince🔸2y6

No this seems more than just semantic. It does seem like I've underestimated the ability to influence B2B companies. I stand corrected. Thank you.

weeatquince🔸2y2

Thank you for considering my comments

To be clear I would consider the target of the campaign in those cases to be on the hospital or the university and those to be B2C organizations in some meaningful way.

Tyler Johnston

Huh, interesting! I guess you could define it this way, but I worry that muddies the definition of "campaign target." In common usage, I think the definition is approximately: what is the institution you are raising awareness about and asking to adopt a specific change? A simple test to determine the campaign target might be "What institution is being named in the campaign materials?" or "What institution has the power to end the campaign by adopting the demands of the campaigners?" In the case of animal welfare campaigns against foodservice providers, it seems like that's clearly the foodservice companies themselves. Then, in the process of that campaign, one thing you'll do is raise awareness about the issue among that company's customers (e.g. THL's "foodservice provider guide" which raised awareness among public institutions), which isn't all that different from raising awareness among the public in a campaign targeting a B2C company. I suppose this is just a semantic disagreement, but in practice, it suggests to me that B2B businesses are still vulnerable, in part because they aren't insulated from public opinion—they're just one degree removed from it. EDIT: Another, much stronger piece of evidence in favor of influence on B2B: Chicken Watch reports 586 commitments secured from food manufacturers and 60 from distributors. Some of those companies are functionally B2C (e.g. manufacturing consumer packaged goods sold under their own brand) but some are clearly B2B (e.g. Perdue Farms' BCC commitment).

weeatquince🔸2y5

Additionally if you want to show that you can credibly engage policymakers (which I think you might need to do in order to put pressure on these companies) I would expect transparency of people and funding sources to help a lot.

weeatquince🔸2y9

What are the key leverage points to get these companies to listen to campaigners such as yourself? How does this differ from the animal right space and how will this affect your strategy? What do you have in terms of strategy documents or theory of change?

Some thoughts on my mind are:

To the best of my understanding the animal rights corporate campaigning space is unable to exert much or any influence on B2B (business to business) companies. Animal campaigns only appear to have influenced B2C (business to consumer) companies. An autonomous coding agent f

... (read more)

Tyler Johnston

Thanks for the comment! I agree with a lot of your thinking here and that there will be many asymmetries. One random thing that might surprise you: in fact, the sector that animal groups have had the most success with is a B2B one: foodservice providers. For B2B companies, individual customers are fewer in number and much more important in magnitude — so the prospect of convincing, for example, an entire hospital or university to switch their multi-million dollar contract to a competitor with a higher standard for animal welfare is especially threatening. I think the same phenomenon might carry over to the tech industry. However, even in the foodservice provider case, public perception is still one of the main driving factors (i.e., universities and hospitals care about the animal welfare practices of their suppliers in part because they know their students/clients care). Your advice about outreach to employees and other stakeholders is well-taken too :) Thanks!

Charity Entrepreneurship Is Overestimating the Value of Saving Lives by 10%

weeatquince🔸2y2

Hi, Thank you. All good points. Fully agree with ongoing iterative improvement to our CEAs and hopefully you will see such improvements happening over the various research rounds (see also my reply to Nick). I also agree with picking up on specific cases where this might be a bigger issue (see my reply to Larks). I don’t think it is fair to say that we treat those two numbers as zero but it is fair to say we are currently using a fairly crude approximation to get at what those numbers are getting it in our lives saved calculations.

For a source on discounti... (read more)

Charity Entrepreneurship Is Overestimating the Value of Saving Lives by 10%

weeatquince🔸2y12

Hi Nick, Thank you very much for the comment. These are all good points.

I fully agree with you and Larks that where a specific intervention will have reduced impact due to long run health effects this should be included in our models and I will check this is happening.

I apologise for the defensiveness and made a few minor edits to the post trying to keep content the same.

That's not a reason not to continuously be improving models.

To be clear, we are always always improving our CEA models. This is an ongoing iterative process, and my hope is the... (read more)

NickLaing

Nice one I love that response. Makes sense that you aren't confident about this particular change yet, are discussing improvement with the team and that you are concerned about the overall situation that on balance you think your numbers are too low and you probably want a increase rather than a decrease. To reiterate I love that you have a model which can actually be scrutinised and meaningfully iterated - I still can't really get my head around GiveWell's but maybe I haven't tried hard enough. No matter what system is used error's are going to be massive, so why not make it more understandable and editable?

Mikolaj Kniejski

I just want to flag that I've raised the issue of the inconsistencies in the use of discount rate (if by "the discount rate in the GBD data" you mean the 3% or 4% discount rate in the standard inputs table) in an email sent a few days ago to one of the CE employees. Unfortunately, we failed to have a productive discussion, as the conversation died quickly when CE stopped responding. Here is one of the emails I sent:

Charity Entrepreneurship Is Overestimating the Value of Saving Lives by 10%

weeatquince🔸2y2

Thank you Larks. This is a very good point and I fully agree.

In any cases where this happens it should be incorporated into our current model. That said I will check this for our current research and make sure that in any such cases (such as say pulmonary rehabilitation for COPD where patients are expected to have a lower quality of life if they survive) this is accounted for.

Charity Entrepreneurship Is Overestimating the Value of Saving Lives by 10%

weeatquince🔸2y13

Hi there. I am Research Director at CE/AIM

Note that Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) has now rebranded to AIM to reflect our widening scope of programs

[Edited for tone]

Thank you so much for engaging with our work in this level of detail. It is great to get critical feedback and analysis like this. I have made a note of this point on my long list of things to improve about how we do our CEAs, although for the reasons I explain below it is fairly low down on that list.

Ultimately what we are using now is a very crude approximation. That said it is one I am extre... (read more)

Mikolaj Kniejski

I might have been too directive when writing this post. I lack the organizational context and knowledge of how CEAs are used to say definitively that this should be changed. I ultimately agree that this is a small change that might not affect the decisions made, and it's up to you to decide whether to account for it. However, some of the points you raised against updating this are incorrect. I might have focused too much on the 10% reduction, while the real issue, as Elliot mentioned, is that you ignore two variables in the formula for DALYs averted: Missing out on three 10% reductions in error X results in a difference of 0.1^3 = 27.1% which could be significant. I generally view organizations as growing through small iterative changes and optimization rather than big leaps. My critique is only valid if you are trying to measure DALYs averted. If you choose to do something similar to GiveWell, which is more arbitrary, then it might not make sense to adjust for this anymore. The three changes to the value of life saved come from different frameworks: 1. GiveWell values don't represent DALYs averted but are mixed with other factors such as survey results. 2. HLI's work is based on the assumption that death isn't the worst possible state and that there is a baseline quality of life that must be met for a life to be worth living. 3. The change I'm suggesting is compatible with your current method of estimating the value of life saved. It doesn't introduce any new assumptions; it simply makes some assumptions explicit. Unless you state something like, "We used those values initially but then detached them from their original formulas and now we will update them in another way," my suggestion should fit within your existing framework. EDIT: I can't say much about the GiveWell 1.5% rate, but I've heard it comes from the Rethink Priorities review, but it suggests 4.3% discount rate: can you direct me somewhere where I can read more about it?

NickLaing2y19

I don't buy your line of argument that just because what you do "crude approximation" or "scratching the surface" (which I agree with and many commentators have pointed out) is a reason not to include new variables to your model. That seems like conflating two issues. Obviously assumptions and errors are massive, but that's not a reason not to continuously be improving models.

Like @Larks says its not about a constant 10% reduction, but taking something extra into account which makes sense could meaningfully be added to the model.

Just because it... (read more)

Larks2y10

I think the issue isn't so much a constant -10%, but that some specific life-saving interventions might saves lives yet leave people with unusually low quality of life, and for those interventions the error term might be much larger than 10%.

Dear EA, please be the reason people like me will actually see a better world. Help me make some small stride on extreme poverty where I live -- by the end of 2024.

weeatquince🔸2y2

Antony, If you are looking for early stage funding and support for your charity or a project if it you could consider applying to the charity entrepreneurship program when applications re-open in a few months. There is an option to apply with your own idea.

See https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/

(Disclaimer commenting in a personal capacity)

Anthony Kalulu, a rural farmer in eastern Uganda.

Thanks so much for sharing this. I will keep an eye at CE, and their upcoming application cycle.

AIM Animal Initiatives

weeatquince🔸2y17

Hi, I am Charity Entrepreneurship (CE, now AIM) Director of Research. I wanted to quickly respond to this point.

– –

Quality of our reports

I would like to push back a bit on Joey's response here. I agree that our research is quicker scrappier and goes into less depth than other orgs, but I am not convinced that our reports have more errors or worse reasoning that reports of other organisations (thinking of non-peer reviewed global health and animal welfare organisations like GiveWell, OpenPhil, Animal Charity Evaluators, Rethink Priorities, Founders Pl... (read more)

mildlyanonymous2y10

I think it is quite clear that a lot of your research isn't at the bar of those other organizations (though I think for the reasons Joey mentioned, that definitely can be okay). For example, I think in this report, collapsing 30 million species with diverse life histories into a single "Wild bug" and then taking what appear to be completely uncalibrated guesses at their life conditions, then using that to compare to other species is just well below the quality standards of other organizations in the space, even if it is a useful way to get a quick sense of things.

AIM Animal Initiatives

weeatquince🔸2y8

I went though the old emails today and I am confident that my description accurately captured what happened and that everything I said can be backed up.

AIM Animal Initiatives

weeatquince🔸2y46

Another animal advocacy research organization supposedly found CE plagiarizing their work extensively including in published reports, and CE failed to address this.

Hi, I am Charity Entrepreneurship (CE, now AIM) Director of Research. I wanted to quickly respond to this point.

I believe this refers to an incident that happened in 2021. CE had an ongoing relationship with an animal advocacy policy organisation occasionally providing research to support their policy work. We received a request for some input and over the next 24 hours we helped that policy org... (read more)

mildlyanonymous

Thanks for sharing this! It differs from the narrative I’ve heard elsewhere is critical ways, but I don’t really know much about this situation, and just appreciate the transparency.

Friendship as a sacred value

weeatquince🔸2y6

This is a great post and captured something that I feel. Thank you for writing it Michelle!!

This is why we can’t have nice laws

weeatquince🔸2y2

Thank you for a nuanced and interesting reply.

This is why we can’t have nice laws

weeatquince🔸2y44

Thank you so much for an excellent post.

I just wanted to pick up on one of your suggested lessons learned that, at least in my mind, doesn’t follow directly from the evidence you have provided.

You say:

These wins suggest a few lessons. ... the value of cross-party support. Every farm animal welfare law I’m aware of, globally, passed with cross-party support. ... We should be able to too: there are many more conservative animal lovers than liberal factory farmers.

To me, there are two very opposing ways you could take this. Animal-ag industry is benefiting fr... (read more)

freedomandutility

I think you’re asking a general question of whether we should politicise or depoliticise issues we care about. I pretty much always think the answer is depoliticise, because very crudely, I expect the right and left to be in power about 50% of the time in 50% of the places, so if we want the laws we want everywhere, we should depoliticise things we care about.

emre kaplan🔸2y12

I can't speak for Lewis but as an animal advocate running an organisation, my bigger concern is that politicisation is irreversible and destroys option value.

LewisBollard2y26

Thanks, this is a good point. I agree that it's not obvious we should choose A) over B).

My evidence for A) is that it seems to be the approach that worked in every case where farm animal welfare laws have passed so far. Whereas I've seen a lot of attempts at B), but never seen it succeed. I also think A) really limits your opportunities, since you can only pass reforms when liberals hold all key levers of power (e.g. in the US, you need Democrats to control the House, Senate, and Presidency) and they agree to prioritize your issue.

My sense is that most his... (read more)

EV investigation into Owen and Community Health

weeatquince🔸2y45

Have you considered blinded case work / decision making? Like one person collects the key information annonomises it and then someone else decides the appropriate responce without knowing the names / orgs of the people involved.

Could be good for avoiding some CoIs. Has worked for me in the past for similar situations.

Julia_Wise🔸2y17

Thanks — yes, we've done this in some cases.

Will Aldred2y17

(Fwiw, the Forum moderation team does this for many of our cases.)

Rethink Priorities needs your support. Here's what we'd do with it.

weeatquince🔸2y6

Thank you for the correction

Rethink Priorities needs your support. Here's what we'd do with it.

weeatquince🔸2y0

Thank you Saulius. Very helpful to hear. This sounds like a really positive story of good management of a difficult situation. Well done to Marcus.

If I read between the lines a bit I get the impression that maybe more junior (be that less competent or just newer to the org) managers at Rethink with less confidence in their actions not rocking the Rethink<->funder relationship were perhaps more likely to put unwelcome pressure on researchers about what to publish. Just a hypothesis, so might be wrong. But also the kind of thing good internal policies, good onboarding, good senior example setting, or just discussions of this topic, can all help with.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

saulius2y17

No, sorry, I wasn't saying that. My manager was Jacob Peacock, he was a great manager. He didn't put any unwelcome pressure and wasn't the one who talked to me about the email to OpenPhil. He said that I can publish my WAW articles on behalf of RP but then Marcus disagreed.

Rethink Priorities needs your support. Here's what we'd do with it.

weeatquince🔸2y44

[Edit: as per Saulius' reply below I was perhaps to critical here, especially regarding the WAW post, and it sounds like Saulius thinks that was manged relatively well by RP senior staff]

I found this reply made me less confident in Rethink's ability to address publication bias. Some things that triggered my 'hmmm not so sure about this' sense were:

The reply did not directly address the claims in Saulius's comment. E.g. "I'm sorry you feel that way" not "I'm sorry”. No acknowledgement that if, as Saulius claimed, a senior staff told him that it was wrong to

... (read more)

saulius2y36

It sounds like Rethink stopped Saulius from posting a WAW post (within a work context) and it also looks like there was a potential conflict of interest here for senior staff as posting could affect funding

It is true that I wasn’t allowed to publish some of my WAW work on behalf of RP. Note that this WAW work includes not only the short summary Why I No Longer Prioritize Wild Animal Welfare (which got a lot of upvotes) but also three longer articles that it summarises (this, this, and this). Some of these do not threaten RP’s funding in any way. ... (read more)

Rethink Priorities needs your support. Here's what we'd do with it.

weeatquince🔸2y23

Hi Peter, Rethink Priorities is towards the top of the places I'm considering giving this year. This post was super helpful. And these projects look incredible, and highly valuable.

That said I have a bunch of questions and uncertainties I would love to get answers to you before donating to Rethink.

1. What is your cost/benefit. Specially I would love to know any or all of:

Rethink's cost per researcher year on average, (i.e. the total org cost divided by total researcher years, not salary).
Rethink's cost per published research report (again total org cost no

... (read more)

Peter Wildeford2y15

How will you prioritise amongst the projects listed here with unrestricted funds from small donors? Most of these projects I find very exciting, but some more than others. Do you have a rough priority ordering or a sense of what you would do in different scenarios, like if you ended up with unrestricted funding of $0.25m/$0.5m/$1m/$2m/$4m etc how you would split it between the projects you list?

I think views on this will vary somewhat within RP leadership. Here I am also reporting my own somewhat quick independent impressions which could update upon f... (read more)

Peter Wildeford2y15

Can you assure me that Rethink's researchers are independent?

Yes. Rethink Priorities is devoted to editorial independence. None of our contracts with our clients include editorial veto power (except that we obviously cannot publish confidential information) and we wouldn't accept these sorts of contracts.

I think our reliance on individual large clients is important, but overstated. Our single largest client made up ~47% of our income in 2023 and we're on track for this to land somewhere between 40% and 60% in 2024. This means in the unlikely event tha... (read more)

Peter Wildeford2y12

Rethink's cost per published research report that is not majority funded by "institutional support"

Our AI work, XST work, and our GHD work were entirely funded by institutions. Our animal welfare work was mostly funded by institutions. However, our survey work and WIT work were >90% covered by individual donors, so let's zoom in on that.

The survey department and WIT department produced 31 outputs in 2023 against a spending of $2,055,048.78 across both departments including all relevant management and operations. This is $66,291.90 per report.

Notably ... (read more)

Peter Wildeford

Collectively, RP's AI work, global health + development work, animal work, worldview investigations work, and survey work lead to the generation of 90 reports in 2023. The budget for these six departments was $7,838,001.20, including all relevant management and operations. This results in $87,088.90 per report. This excludes the XST and special projects departments because their core outputs are not intended to be research papers. To be clear, many of our outputs weren’t public, but I tried to norm the count to a sense of what a substantial EA Forum report would be. If I may add some editorialization, I'd note that I'm sure we or other organizations could produce a report more cheaply, but we've found that investing a lot more per report in doing presentations, outreach, networking, etc. has magnified the impact per report. I worry that looking at outputs per dollar is more of a vanity metric and we actually need to do more to quantify impact per report.

Peter Wildeford2y15

Hi Sam,

Thanks for the detailed engagement! I am going to respond to each with a separate reply.

Rethink's cost per researcher year on average, (i.e. the total org cost divided by total researcher years, not salary).

I think the best way to look at this is marginal cost. A new researcher hire costs us ~$87K USD in salary (this is a median, there is of course variation by title level here) and ~$28K in other costs (e.g., taxes, employment fees, benefits, equipment, employee travel). We then need to spend ~$31K in marginal spending on operations and ~$28K i... (read more)

bruce2y21

Can you assure me that Rethink's researchers are independent?.

I no longer work at RP, but I thought I'd add a data point from someone who doesn't stand to benefit from your donations, in case it was helpful.

I think my take here is that if my experience doing research with the GHD team is representative of RP's work going forwards, then research independence should not be a reason not to donate.^[1]

My personal impression is that of the work that I / the GHD team has been involved with, I have been afforded the freedom to look for our best guess of what... (read more)

Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare

weeatquince🔸2y5

Hi Marcus thanks very helpful to get some numbers and clarification on this. And well done to you and Rethink for driving forward such important research.

(I meant to post a similar question asking for clarification on the rethink post too but my perfectionism ran away with me and I never quite found the wording and then ran out of drafting time, but great to see your reply here)

Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare

weeatquince🔸2y13

Hi Emily, Sorry this is a bit off topic but super useful for my end of year donations.

I noticed that you said that OpenPhil has supported "Rethink Priorities ... research related to moral weights". But in his post here Peter says that the moral weights work "have historically not had institutional support".

Do you have a rough very quick sense of how much Rethink Priorities moral weights work was funded by OpenPhil?

Thank you so much

Marcus_A_Davis2y34

We mean to say that the ideas for these projects and the vast majority of the funding were ours, including the moral weight work. To be clear, these projects were the result of our own initiative. They wouldn't have gone ahead when they did without us insisting on their value.

For example, after our initial work on invertebrate sentience and moral weight in 2018-2020, in 2021 OP funded $315K to support this work. In 2023 they also funded $15K for the open access book rights to a forthcoming book based on the topic. In that period of 2021-2023, for public-fa... (read more)

weeatquince🔸2y2

Hi, Debugging worked. It was a Chrome extension I had installed to hide cookie messages what was killing it. Thank you so much!!

EA Forum feature suggestion thread

weeatquince🔸2y3

Hi. I started drafting a reply but had to stop and now a week later I cannot find where I was drafting it. I would love to be able to see all the places where I have draft comments/replies autosaved. Thank you!

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸

This is probably not useful anymore, but on Chrome you can open the browser development tools (Right click + "inspect element", or "ctrl+shift+I"), go to the "Application" tab, and in the Storage -> Local storage section you can see all your drafts. (The process on other browsers to access local storage is similar)

weeatquince🔸2y2

Can this be updated. This is the default "Contact us" page (if I click the sidebar on the right and click "contact us" it brings me here). But this page seems very out of date. Could be worth updating it.

There is no intercom bubble on the right nor is there a "hide intercom" button on the edit profile page. There is a hide intercom button on the account settings page but it does not do anything. There are also a bunch of comments saying similar stuff below but they have not been replied too.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

JP Addison🔸

I've updated it. One oversight of the page was that it didn't mention that intercom was desktop-only. If you're one desktop and you don't see it, can you try the new debugging steps? But also feel free to email us.

The Risks and Rewards of Prioritizing Animals of Uncertain Sentience

weeatquince🔸2y2

Alternatively, one might adjust ambiguous probability assignments to reduce their variance. For example, in a Bayesian framework, the posterior expectation of some value is a function of both the prior expectation and evidence that one has for the true value. When the evidence is scant, the estimated value will revert to the prior.^[30] Therefore, Bayesian posterior probability assignments tend to have less variance than the original ambiguous estimate, assigning lower probabilities to extreme payoffs.^[31]

Would you say this is being ambigui... (read more)

Hayley Clatterbuck

Hi weeatquince, This is a great question. As I see it, there are at least 3 approaches to ambiguity that are out there (which are not mutually exclusive). a. Ambiguity aversion reduces to risk aversion about outcomes. You might think uncertainty is bad because leaves open the possibility of bad outcomes. One approach is to consider the range of probabilities consistent with your uncertainty, and then assume the worst/ put more weight on the probabilities that would be worse for EV. For example, Pat thinks the probability of heads could be anywhere from 0 to 1. If it's 0, then she's guaranteed to lose $5 by taking the gamble. If it's 1, then she's guaranteed to win $10. If she's risk averse, she should put more weight on the possibility that it has a Pr(heads) = 0. In the extreme, she should assume that it's Pr(heads) = 0 and maximin. b. Ambiguity aversion should lead you to adjust your probabilities The Bayesian adjustment outlined above says that when your evidence leaves a lot of uncertainty, your posterior should revert to your prior. As you note, this is completely consistent with EV maximization. It's about what you should believe given your evidence, not what you should do. c. Ambiguity aversion means you should avoid bets with uncertain probabilities You might think uncertainty is bad because it's irrational to take bets when you don't know the chances. It's not that you're afraid of the possible bad outcomes within the range of things you're uncertain about. There's something more intrinsically bad about these bets.

Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation

weeatquince🔸2y6

Sorry to be annoying but after reading the post "Animals of Uncertain Sentience" I am still very confused about the scope of this work

My understanding is that any practical how to make decisions is out of the scope of that post. You are only looking at the question of whether the tools used should in theory be aiming to maximise true EV or not (even in the cases where those tools do not involve calculating EV).

If I am wrong about the above do let me know!

Basically I find phrases like"EV maximization decision procedure" and "using EV maximisation to make th... (read more)

Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation

weeatquince🔸2y4

"The team is only a few months old and the problems you're raising are hard"

Yes a full and thorough understanding of this topic and rigorous application to cause prioritisation research would be hard.

But for what it's worth I would expect there are easy some quick wins in this area too. Lots of work has been done outside the EA community just not applied to cause prioritisation decision making, at least that i have noticed so far...

Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation

weeatquince🔸2y4

Amazing. Super helpful to hear. Useful to understand what you are currently covering and what you are not covering and what the limits are. I very much hope that you get the funding for more and more research

Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation

weeatquince🔸2y8

I am very very excited to see this research it's the kind of thing that I think EAs should be doing a lot more of and it seems shocking that it takes us more than a decade to get round to such basic fundamental questions on cause prioritisation. Thank you so much for doing this.

I do however have one question and one potential concern.

Question: My understanding from reading the research agenda and plan here is that you are NOT looking into the topic of how best to make decisions under uncertainty (Knightian uncertainty, cluelessness, etc). It looks ... (read more)

Bob Fischer

Thanks for this. You're right that we don't give an overall theory of how to handle either decision-theoretic or moral uncertainty. The team is only a few months old and the problems you're raising are hard. So, for now, our aims are just to explore the implications of non-EVM decision theories for cause prioritization and to improve the available tools for thinking about the EV of x-risk mitigation efforts. Down the line---and with additional funding!---we'll be glad to tackle many additional questions. And, for what it's worth, we do think that the groundwork we're laying now will make it easier to develop overall giving portfolios based on people's best judgments about how to balance the various kinds and degrees of uncertainty.

Nathan Young's Quick takes

weeatquince🔸2y11

I think 90% of the answer to this is risk aversion from funders, especially LTFF and OpenPhil, see here. As such many things struggled for funding, see here.

We should acknowledge that doing good policy research often involves actually talking to and networking with policy people. It involves running think tanks and publishing policy reports, not just running academic institutions and publishing papers. You cannot do this kind of research well in a vacuum.

That fact combined with funders who were (and maybe still are) somewhat against funding people (e... (read more)

Reflections on my time on the Long-Term Future Fund

weeatquince🔸2y4

Thank you Asya for all the time and effort you have put in here and the way you have manged the fund. I've interacted with the LTFF a number of times and you have always been wonderful: incredibly helpful and sensible.

Select examples of adverse selection in longtermist grantmaking

weeatquince🔸2y2

Thanks Linch. Agree feedback is time consuming and often not a top priority compared to other goals.

Select examples of adverse selection in longtermist grantmaking

weeatquince🔸2y14

These short summary reasons in this post forwhy grants are not made are great and very interesting to see.

Was wondering do the unsuccessful grant applicants tend to recieve this feedback (of the paragraph summary kind in this post) or do they just get told "sorry no funding"?

I wonder if this could help the situation. I think if applicants have this feedback, and if other granters know that applicants get feedback they can ask for it. I've definitely been asked "where else did you apply and what happened" and been like "I applied for x grant and got feedbac... (read more)

Linch2y31

I can't speak about all cases, but I think for most cases in the rough cluster of situations like the above, we do not currently give reasons for rejection at the level of granularity of the above. I'm a bit sad about this but I think it's probably the right call. I remember a specific situation some months ago where I wrote fairly elaborate feedback for an applicant but I was dissuaded from sending it, in retrospect for probably the right reasons.

If we have something like 3x the current grantmaker capacity, I'd love for us to give more feedback, but... (read more)

20 concrete projects for reducing existential risk

weeatquince🔸2y8

1.
I really like this list. Lost of the ideas look very sensible.
I also really really value that you are doing prioritisation exercises across ideas and not just throwing out ideas that you feel sound nice without any evidence of background research (like FTX, and others, did). Great work!

– –
2.
Quick question about the research: Does the process consider cost-effectiveness as a key factor? For each of the ideas do you feel like you have a sense of why this thing has not happened already?

– –

3.
Some feedback on the idea here I know... (read more)

Buhl

Thanks, appreciate your comment and the compliment! On your questions: 2. The research process does consider cost-effectiveness as a key factor – e.g., the weighted factor model we used included both an “impact potential” and a “cost” item, so projects were favoured if they had high estimated impact potential and/or a low estimated cost. “Impact potential” here means “impact with really successful (~90th percentile) execution” – we’re focusing on the extreme rather than the average case because we expect most of our expected impact to come from tail outcomes (but have a separate item in the model to account for downside risk). The “cost” score was usually based on a rough proxy, but the “impact potential” score was basically just a guess – so it’s quite different from how CE (presumably) uses cost-effectiveness, in that we don’t make an explicit cost-effectiveness estimate and in that we don’t consult evidence from empirical studies (which typically don’t exist for the kinds of projects we consider). Re: “For each of the ideas do you feel like you have a sense of why this thing has not happened already?” – we didn’t consider this explicitly in the process (though it somewhat indirectly featured as part of considering tractability and impact potential). I feel like I have a rough sense for each of the projects listed – and we wouldn’t include projects where we didn’t think it was plausible that the project would be feasible, that there’d be a good founder out there etc. – but I could easily be missing important reasons. Definitely an important question – would be curious to hear how CE takes it into account. 3. Appreciate the input! The idea here wouldn’t be to just shove people into government jobs, but also making sure that they have the right context, knowledge, skills and opportunities to have a positive impact once there. I agree that policy is an ecosystem and that people are needed in many kinds of roles. I think it could make sense for an individual pr

20 concrete projects for reducing existential risk

weeatquince🔸2y8

Also keen on this.

Specifically, I would be interested in someone carrying out an independent impact report for the APPG for Future Generations and could likely offer some funding for this.

Why is EA so enthusiastic about forecasting?

Answer by weeatquince🔸Jul 11, 20236

why is Tetlock-style judgmental forecasting so popular within EA, but not that popular outside of it?

The replies so far seem to suggest that groups outside of EA (journalists, governments, etc) are doing a smaller quantity of forecasting (broadly defined) than EAs tend to.

This is likely correct but it is also the case that groups outside of EA (journalists, governments, etc) are doing different types of forecasting than EAs tend to. There is less "Tetlock-style judgmental" forecasting and more use of other tools such as horizon scanning, scenario planning,... (read more)

CE: Rigorously prioritizing the top health security (biosecurity) ideas

weeatquince🔸3y3

Hi John.

Thank you for the feedback and comments.

On deforestation. Just to be clear the result of our prioritisation exercise was our top recommendations (ideas 1-2) on subscription models for new antibiotics and stopping dangerous dual use research. The ideas 4-7 (including the deforestation one) did well in our early prioritisation but ultimately we did not recommend them. I have made a minor edit to the post to try to make this clearer.

The stopping deforestation report idea was originally focused on limiting the human animal interface to prevent zo... (read more)

2[anonymous]3y

Yes sorry that's me not reading properly.

CE: Rigorously prioritizing the top health security (biosecurity) ideas

weeatquince🔸3y4

I would have to check this with Akhil, the lead author, but my understanding is that this CEA compares a case where the PASTEUR act passes with a business as usual case where very few (but not zero) new anitbiotics are developed.

I agree this is probably overly-optimistic as we can and probably should assume that someone is likely to do something about antibiotic resistance in the next few decades. Good spot!

And thank you for the great questions and for looking over things in such detail.

CE: Rigorously prioritizing the top health security (biosecurity) ideas

weeatquince🔸3y9

Hi Ben, happy to justify this. I was responsible for the alternate estimate of 10%-17.5%

– –

These numbers here are consistent with our other estimates of policy change. Other estimates were easier (but not easy) to justify as they were in better evidenced areas and tended to range between 5% and 40% (see 2022 ideas here). Areas with the best data were road safety policy, where we looked at looked at 84 case studies finding a 48% chance of policy success, and food fortification policy, where we looked at 62 case studies (in Annex) with a 47% chance of succes... (read more)

Ben Stewart

That all makes sense and seems thorough, thanks!

Longlist of Causes + Cause Exploration Contest

weeatquince🔸3y14

My entry:

Modern slavery

(Disclaimer the following is my initial impressions based on 2 minutes of Googling, cannot promise accuracy)

Scale – 400k-1million people are in slavery in the DRC. They lead horrendous lives suffer a myriad of terrible health conditions and are not free. The number is huge, more than die of Malaria each year, more than die of AIDs each year. EAs have looked into US criminal justice but there might be nearly as many slaves in the DRC as there are prisoners in the US and ALL of them are being held unjustly and likely suffer in ma... (read more)

Joel Tan🔸

Cheers, Sam!