Nice post Joey, thanks for laying it out so clearly.
I agree with almost all of this. I find it interesting to think more about which domains / dimensions I’d prefer to push towards prioritization vs. pluralism:
Speaking loosely, I think EA could push more towards pluralism for career decisions (where personal fit, talent absorbency and specialization are important), and FAW/GHD/GCR cause prioritization (where I at least feel swamped by uncertainty). But I’m pretty unsure on where to shift on the margin in other domains like GiveWell style GHD direct delivery (where money is ~fungible, and comparisons can be meaningful).
e.g. I suspect I’m more willing to prioritize than you on bednets vs. therapy. I think you / AIM are more positive than me about therapy (as currently delivered) on the merits. Sure, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but having spent a bit of time with the CEAs, I just find it real hard to get to therapy being more cost-effective than bednets in high burden areas.
you could pretty easily imagine a GW-like charity evaluator that ranks income as x4 as important as GW does coming to pretty different but still highly compelling top charities
I agree moral weights are one of the more uncertain parameters, though I think the range of reasonable disagreement given current evidence is a bit less wide than implied here. I’d love to see someone dive deep on the question and actually make the case that we should be using moral weights for income 4x higher vs. health, rather than they’re plausible.
I guess a general theme is that I worry about a tendency to string together lots of “plausible” assumptions without defending them as their best guess, and that eroding a prioritization mindset. I think you’d probably agree with that in general, but suspect we have different practical views on some specifics.
Hi, James! When it comes to assessing bednets vs therapy or more generally, saving a life vs happiness improvements for people, the meat eater problem looms large for me. This immediately complicates the trade-off, but I don’t think dismissing it is justifiable on most moral theories given our current understanding that farm animals are likely conscious, feel pain, and thus deserve moral consideration. Once we include this second-order consideration, it’s hard to know the magnitude of the impact given animal consumption, income, economic growth, wild animal, etc. effects. You’ve done a lot of work evaluating mental health vs life-saving interventions (thanks for that!), how does including animals impact your thinking? Do you think it’s better that we should just ignore it (like GiveWell does)?
I think this goes back to Joey’s case for a more pluralistic perspective, but I take your point that in some cases, we may be doing too much of that. It’s just hard to know how wide a range of arguments to include when assessing this balance...
Hi Wayne, that’s fair. I hadn’t been including farmed animal welfare in the comparison because I don’t think people donating to therapy organizations are doing it for animal welfare reasons.
I don’t think it would be practical for givewell to include animal welfare in its evaluations. I think donors who care about both animal and human welfare would have more impact giving to separate projects optimising for each of those goals
I think donors who care about both animal and human welfare would have more impact giving to separate projects optimising for each of those goals
I think donors who care about human and animal welfare, in the sense of valuing 1 unit of welfare the same regardless of species, had better support animal welfare interventions roughly exclusively, instead of interventions optimised for human welfare as well as ones optimised for human welfare. I estimate:
Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
The Shrimp Welfare Project is 64.3 k as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
Nice post Joey, thanks for laying it out so clearly.
I agree with almost all of this. I find it interesting to think more about which domains / dimensions I’d prefer to push towards prioritization vs. pluralism:
Speaking loosely, I think EA could push more towards pluralism for career decisions (where personal fit, talent absorbency and specialization are important), and FAW/GHD/GCR cause prioritization (where I at least feel swamped by uncertainty). But I’m pretty unsure on where to shift on the margin in other domains like GiveWell style GHD direct delivery (where money is ~fungible, and comparisons can be meaningful).
e.g. I suspect I’m more willing to prioritize than you on bednets vs. therapy. I think you / AIM are more positive than me about therapy (as currently delivered) on the merits. Sure, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but having spent a bit of time with the CEAs, I just find it real hard to get to therapy being more cost-effective than bednets in high burden areas.
I agree moral weights are one of the more uncertain parameters, though I think the range of reasonable disagreement given current evidence is a bit less wide than implied here. I’d love to see someone dive deep on the question and actually make the case that we should be using moral weights for income 4x higher vs. health, rather than they’re plausible.
I guess a general theme is that I worry about a tendency to string together lots of “plausible” assumptions without defending them as their best guess, and that eroding a prioritization mindset. I think you’d probably agree with that in general, but suspect we have different practical views on some specifics.
Hi, James! When it comes to assessing bednets vs therapy or more generally, saving a life vs happiness improvements for people, the meat eater problem looms large for me. This immediately complicates the trade-off, but I don’t think dismissing it is justifiable on most moral theories given our current understanding that farm animals are likely conscious, feel pain, and thus deserve moral consideration. Once we include this second-order consideration, it’s hard to know the magnitude of the impact given animal consumption, income, economic growth, wild animal, etc. effects. You’ve done a lot of work evaluating mental health vs life-saving interventions (thanks for that!), how does including animals impact your thinking? Do you think it’s better that we should just ignore it (like GiveWell does)?
I think this goes back to Joey’s case for a more pluralistic perspective, but I take your point that in some cases, we may be doing too much of that. It’s just hard to know how wide a range of arguments to include when assessing this balance...
Hi Wayne, that’s fair. I hadn’t been including farmed animal welfare in the comparison because I don’t think people donating to therapy organizations are doing it for animal welfare reasons.
I don’t think it would be practical for givewell to include animal welfare in its evaluations. I think donors who care about both animal and human welfare would have more impact giving to separate projects optimising for each of those goals
Hi James.
I think donors who care about human and animal welfare, in the sense of valuing 1 unit of welfare the same regardless of species, had better support animal welfare interventions roughly exclusively, instead of interventions optimised for human welfare as well as ones optimised for human welfare. I estimate:
Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
The Shrimp Welfare Project is 64.3 k as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
Small thing. I think phrasing is the the “meat eating” problem is better here, will continue to plug this.
Thanks for having in mind the meat-eating problem, Wayne. You may be interested in my post GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?.