re: Pure Earth: GiveWell notes that its Pure Earth estimates are “substantially less rigorous than both our top charity cost-effectiveness estimates,” so I don’t want to read too much into it. However, a claim that an intervention is merely 18X better at helping poor people than they are at helping themselves still strikes me as extraordinary, albeit in a way that we become acclimated to over time.
As to what good social theory would look like here, there is some nice work in sociology on the causes and consequences of lead exposure in America (see Muller, Sampson, and Winter 2018 for a review). I don’t expect EA orgs to produce this level of granularity when justifying their work, but sometheory about why an opportunity exist would be very much appreciated, at least by me.
I’ve followed your work a bit w.r.t. animal welfare. That’s 15 chicken DALYs right? That seems plausible to me. The theory I would construct for this would start with the fact that there are probably more chickens living on factory farms at this moment than there are humans alive. Costco alone facilitates the slaughter of ~100M chickens/year. If you improve the welfare of just the Costco chickens by just 1% of a DALY per chicken, that’s 1M DALYs. I could very much believe that a corporate campaign of that magnitude might cost about $66K (approximately 1M/15). So I find this claim much less extraordinary.
re: Pure Earth: GiveWell notes that its Pure Earth estimates are “substantially less rigorous than both our top charity cost-effectiveness estimates,” so I don’t want to read too much into it. However, a claim that an intervention is merely 18X better at helping poor people than they are at helping themselves still strikes me as extraordinary, albeit in a way that we become acclimated to over time.
For reference, Pure Earth’s estimate of 1 DALY/$ is 5.59 (= 1/(18*0.00994)) times GiveWell’s estimate.
I’ve followed your work a bit w.r.t. animal welfare.
Thanks!
That’s 15 chicken DALYs right?
No, it is 15.0 “normal” DALY/$, i.e. 1.51 k times (= 15.0/0.00994) as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
Thanks for clarifying. That inevitably rests on a strong assumption about the relative importance of chicken welfare to human welfare, and it looks like your work builds on Bob Fischer’s estimates for conversion. That’s a fine starting point but for my tastes, this is a truly hard problem where the right answer is probably not knowable even in theory. When I’m discussing this, I’ll probably stick to purely empirical claims, e.g., “we can make X chickens’ lives better in Y ways” or “we can reduce meat consumption by Z pounds” and be hand-wavy about the comparison between species. YMMV.
That inevitably rests on a strong assumption about the relative importance of chicken welfare to human welfare, and it looks like your work builds on Bob Fischer’s estimates for conversion.
Yupe, I relied on Rethink Priorities’ (RP’s) median welfare range of chickens of 0.332. However, even for their 5th percentile of 0.002, which is 0.602 % (= 0.002/0.332) of their median, corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be 9.09 (= 0.00602*1.51*10^3) times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities. Uncertainty in other variables besides the welfare range means there might be something like a 5 % chance of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare being less cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities, but I believe we should be comparing the expected cost-effectiveness of both interventions, not a worst-case scenario of corporate campaigns with the expected scenario of GiveWell’s top charities.
That’s a fine starting point but for my tastes, this is a truly hard problem where the right answer is probably not knowable even in theory.
Even if it is not knowable in theory[1], trade-offs are inevitable, so our actions implicitly attribute a given welfare range to chickens. So I would say we might as well rely on the best empirical estimate we have from RP instead of our vague intuitions.
Thank you for the additional context!
re: Pure Earth: GiveWell notes that its Pure Earth estimates are “substantially less rigorous than both our top charity cost-effectiveness estimates,” so I don’t want to read too much into it. However, a claim that an intervention is merely 18X better at helping poor people than they are at helping themselves still strikes me as extraordinary, albeit in a way that we become acclimated to over time.
As to what good social theory would look like here, there is some nice work in sociology on the causes and consequences of lead exposure in America (see Muller, Sampson, and Winter 2018 for a review). I don’t expect EA orgs to produce this level of granularity when justifying their work, but some theory about why an opportunity exist would be very much appreciated, at least by me.
I’ve followed your work a bit w.r.t. animal welfare. That’s 15 chicken DALYs right? That seems plausible to me. The theory I would construct for this would start with the fact that there are probably more chickens living on factory farms at this moment than there are humans alive. Costco alone facilitates the slaughter of ~100M chickens/year. If you improve the welfare of just the Costco chickens by just 1% of a DALY per chicken, that’s 1M DALYs. I could very much believe that a corporate campaign of that magnitude might cost about $66K (approximately 1M/15). So I find this claim much less extraordinary.
You are welcome!
For reference, Pure Earth’s estimate of 1 DALY/$ is 5.59 (= 1/(18*0.00994)) times GiveWell’s estimate.
Thanks!
No, it is 15.0 “normal” DALY/$, i.e. 1.51 k times (= 15.0/0.00994) as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities.
Thanks for clarifying. That inevitably rests on a strong assumption about the relative importance of chicken welfare to human welfare, and it looks like your work builds on Bob Fischer’s estimates for conversion. That’s a fine starting point but for my tastes, this is a truly hard problem where the right answer is probably not knowable even in theory. When I’m discussing this, I’ll probably stick to purely empirical claims, e.g., “we can make X chickens’ lives better in Y ways” or “we can reduce meat consumption by Z pounds” and be hand-wavy about the comparison between species. YMMV.
Yupe, I relied on Rethink Priorities’ (RP’s) median welfare range of chickens of 0.332. However, even for their 5th percentile of 0.002, which is 0.602 % (= 0.002/0.332) of their median, corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be 9.09 (= 0.00602*1.51*10^3) times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities. Uncertainty in other variables besides the welfare range means there might be something like a 5 % chance of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare being less cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities, but I believe we should be comparing the expected cost-effectiveness of both interventions, not a worst-case scenario of corporate campaigns with the expected scenario of GiveWell’s top charities.
Even if it is not knowable in theory[1], trade-offs are inevitable, so our actions implicitly attribute a given welfare range to chickens. So I would say we might as well rely on the best empirical estimate we have from RP instead of our vague intuitions.
I think it is, as I strongly endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarianism.