I have a somewhat basic question: If I’m currently of the view that OpenAI is reckless and I’d choose for them to stop existing if I could, does it follow that I should want Musk to win this? Or at least that I should want OpenAI to fail to restructure?
(Also, if you want OpenAI to successfully restructure, I’d love to know why. Is it just a “we need to US to win the race with China” thing?)
Great idea! I will add this to the product backlog. We’re currently trying to add the carbon emissions from one’s diet :)
Thanks Saulius! The in-some-cases 100% adjustments for conservatism should easily cover considerations like this. I agree they exist and matter
From first hand experience, I think critics should make more of an effort to ensure that the charities have actually received your communications and had a chance to review it. When my organization was the subject of a critical post, the email from the critic had landed in my spam, so I only learned of the critique when reading it on the forum.
What’s more, as an organization of 2 people, one of which was on leave at the time of the notice, we couldn’t have reasonably responded to it without stopping critical work to keep the lights on. The smaller the organization being critiqued is, the less flex capacity they have to respond quickly to these sorts of things, and so they should be given a longer grace period.
I can’t believe how often I have to explain this to people on the forum: Speaking with scientific precision makes for writing very few people are willing to read. Using colloquial, simple language is often appropriate, even if it’s not maximally precise. In fact, maximally precise doesn’t even exist—we always have to decide how detailed and complete a picture to paint.
If you’re speaking to a PhD physicist, then say “electron transport occurs via quantum tunneling of delocalized wavefunctions through the crystalline lattice’s conduction band, with drift velocities typically orders of magnitude below c”, but if you’re speaking to high-school students teetering on the edge of losing interest, it makes more sense to say “electrons flow through the wire at the speed of light!”. This isn’t deception—it’s good communication.
You can quibble that maybe charities should say “may” or “could” instead of “will”. Fine. But to characterize it as a wilful deception is mistaken.
If charities only spoke the way some people on the forum wish they would, they would get a fraction of the attention, a fraction of the donations, and be able to have a fraction of the impact. You’ll get fired as a copywriter very quickly if you try to have your snappy call to action say “we have estimates that state every $1 you donate will spare 1,770 piglets from painful mutilations”.
I think it’s pretty safe to assume that the reality of most charities’ cost-effectiveness is less than they claim.
I’d also advise skepticism of a critic who doesn’t attempt to engage with the charity to make sure they’re fully informed before releasing a scathing review. [I also saw signs of naive “cost-effectiveness analysis goes brrr” style thinking about charity evaluation from their ACE review, which makes me more doubtful of their work].
It’s also worth noting that quantifying charity impact is messy work, especially in the animal cause area. We should expect people to come to quite different conclusions and be comfortable with that. FarmKind estimated the cost-effectiveness of Sinergia’s pig work using the same data as ACE and came to a number of animals helped per dollar that was ~6x lower (but still a crazy number of pigs per dollar). Granted, the difference between ACE and Vetted Causes assessments are beyond the acceptable margin of error
Great idea!
Sure thing! Done!
I am also skeptical of small percentages but more so because I think that the kinds of probability estimates that are close to 0 or 1 tend to be a lot more uncertain (perhaps because they’re based on rare or unprecedented events that have only been observed a few times).
I’m no statistician, but I’m not sure that we can say that small percentages tend to be exaggerated though… For one, I recall reading in Superforecasters that there’s evidence that people tend to underestimate the likelihood of rare events and overestimate the likelihood of common ones in forecasting exercises, so that’s an piece of evidence pointing towards small probabilities generally being too low rather than too high. Secondly, a low probability can equally be framed as a high probability of that event not happening. So in short—I agree that probability estimates that are close to 0 or 1 tend to be less certain, but not that probability estimates close to 0 tend to be overestimates any more than underestimates
Love this comment. This is an angle we’ve considered for encouraging vegans to donate
Oops here’s the other one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
Sorry I’ve been unclear—let me clarify: When we use the term ‘offset,’ we mean it in a quantitative sense—doing an amount of good for animals that’s comparable in magnitude to the harm caused by one’s diet. Whether this good deed makes eating meat ethically equivalent to not eating meat is a complex philosophical question that reasonable people can disagree on. But for someone who is going to eat meat either way (which describes most of our users), adding a donation that helps farmed animals is clearly better than not adding that donation.
The calculator is simply a tool to help people understand what size of donation would create a comparable scale of positive impact to their diet’s negative impact. We’ve found this framing resonates with people who care about animals but aren’t ready to change their diet
We do use moral weights, in the sense that the Suffering Adjusted Day (SAD) methodology considers both probability of sentience and welfare ranges :)
We agree that there may be morally relevant differences between carbon offsetting and meat offsetting. But as I mention in my FAQ comment, given how the calculator is actually being used (i.e. by people who had no intention of changing their diet), the important question isn’t whether eating meat and then paying to offset it is morally equivalent to not eating the meat. The important question is whether eating meat and donating is morally better than eating meat and not donating. The answer to that seems like a resounding ‘yes’
Good on your Mum!
Since we carved it out as it’s own page in ~September 2024 it’s had 4336 visits from 3169 visitors (that’s just those who accepted cookies—we can’t see those who didn’t).
Since we turned on the ability to track “offset donors” seperately in mid-December, we’ve had ~30 offsetters sign up. We also have reason to believe that a fair few people who were convinced to donate by the offset calculator ended up making normal donations, not through the calculator
Is offsetting harms ethically the same as not doing them?
This is a fascinating question, which Scott Alexander has blogged about twice (here and here). But ultimately, it’s not crucial to the value of this tool. The key question isn’t whether donating while eating meat is as good as going vegan (since, we think it is likely that almost no one using the calculator will be planning to change their diet otherwise). The question is whether eating meat and donating is better than eating meat and not donating. We think the answer to that is a confident “yes”.
Don’t we want people to change their diets?
It’s great when people change their diets! We just think that the movement against factory farming needs to test a variety of strategies for achieving its goals. Having multiple ways that individuals can take action—with different levels of commitment required—makes it more likely that people will take a first step in helping. Our aim is to expand the menu of options, not replace existing approaches.
Won’t offsetting cause people to change their diet less due to moral licensing?
We take this possibility very seriously, but we don’t see it as likely and believe it’s far outweighed by the benefits.
Given historically low rates of diet change, most people using our calculator wouldn’t have otherwise changed their diet. In fact, we hear frequently from donors using the calculator that they weren’t willing or able to change their diet and are glad to have found another way to help (see testimonials in the post^). Even in the rare case where someone does donate instead of changing their diet, the effect for animals would be neutral or (more likely) positive since we’ve built conservative assumptions into our calculator.
Moreover, taking a first step to help animals through donations may actually make people more open to future actions, as it helps them see themselves as someone who takes action on factory farming rather than someone who avoids thinking about the issue. It’s not just that beliefs drive actions – actions also shape beliefs. I’ve personally met a number of people who went vegan purely for health reasons only to find themselves becoming increasingly convinced by the ethical arguments over time. Forthcoming research from Samantha Kassirer supports the view that getting people to take actions that help farmed animals can increase their moral sympathy towards them 6 months later.
Finally, we think the benefit from the majority of users now eating meat and donating instead of eating meat and not donating safely outweighs potential negative effects.
Isn’t FarmKind the charity with that novel donation matching model?
Yes, we were.
We originally launched with a ‘split and boost’ donation model inspired by Giving Multiplier’s research. If you’re a regular forum reader, you may have first heard of us through a critique of this model. We shared a detailed response at the time, addressing those concerns, which you can see here.
Nonetheless, we’ve since decided to deprioritize this donation model and it’s no longer available on our website. We found that (unlike Giving Multiplier) we need to do quite a bit of persuading for people to be willing to support the farmed animal cause in the first place. By the time they’re convinced to donate, adding complexity to the process can create more friction than benefit. While the model continues to work well for Giving Multiplier (who’ve raised over $4M), we’ve found a simpler approach better serves our context.
You’re right! I swear I read it like 3 times before asking 😳
I think I got confused because in both the text and figure 3, that sentence comes after a heading about “the odds of quitting smoking” so I read the subsequent “less likely”s to mean “less likely to quit smoking” instead of “less likely to smoke”. Sorry about that
Far from convinced that continued existence at currently likely wellbeing levels is a good thing