Mid-career climate science researcher in academia
Previously used display name “Pagw”
ClimateDoc
Karma: 456
A very interesting summary, thanks.
However I’d like to echo Richard Chappell’s unease at the praising of the use of short-term contracts in the report. These likely cause a lot of mental health problems and will dissuade people who might have a lot to contribute but can’t cope with worrying about whether they will need to find a new job or even career in a couple of years’ time. It could be read as a way of avoiding dealing with university processes for firing people—but then the lesson for future organisations may be to set up outside a university structure, and have a sensible degree of job security.
Thanks, it’s good to know it’s had input from multiple knowledgable people. I agree that this looks like a good thing even if it’s implemented imperfectly!
Thanks for putting together the doc.
For the suggested responses, are they informed by expertise or based on a personal view? This would be useful to know where I’m not sure about them. E.g. for the question on including images, I wondered if they could be misleading if they show animals (as disease and other health problems aren’t very visible, perhaps leading people to erroneously think “those animals look OK to me” or similar).
I also wonder if there’s a risk from this that products get labelled as “high” welfare when the animals still suffer overall, reducing impetus for further reform. I think the scheme would still be good, but I wonder if there’s scope to add an argument that labels like “high” should be reserved only for cases where welfare is independently assessed to indeed be probably positive and high.
the second most upvoted comment (27 karma right now) takes me to task for saying that “most experts are deeply skeptical of Ord’s claim” (1/30 existential biorisk in the next 100 years).
I take that to be uncontroversial. Would you be willing to say so?
I asked because I’m interested—what makes you think most experts don’t think biorisk is such a big threat, beyond a couple of papers?
I guess it depends on what the “correct direction” is thought to be. From the reasoning quoted in my first post, it could be the case that as the study result becomes larger the posterior expectation should actually reduce. It’s not inconceivable that as we saw the estimate go to infinity, we should start reasoning that the study is so ridiculous as to be uninformative and so not the posterior update becomes smaller. But I don’t know. What you say seems to suggest that Bayesian reasoning could only do that for rather specific choices of likelihood functions, which is interesting.
It’s a potential solution, but I think it requires the prior to decrease quickly enough with increasing cost effectiveness, and this isn’t guaranteed. So I’m wondering is there any analysis to show that the methods being used are actually robust to this problem e.g. exploring sensitivity to how answers would look if the deworming RCT results had been higher or lower and that they change sensibly?
A document that looks to give more info on the method used for deworming looks to be here, so perhaps that can be built on—but from a quick look it doesn’t seem to say exactly what shape is being used for the priors in all cases, though they look quite Gaussian from the plots.
Hmm it’s not very clear to me that it would be effective at addressing the problem—it seems a bit abstract as described. And addressing Pascal’s mugging issues seems like it potentially requires modifying how cost effectiveness estimates are done ie modifying one component of the “cluster” rather than it just being a cluster vs sequence thinking matter. It would be good to hear more about how this kind of thinking is influencing decisions about giving grants in actual cases like deworming if it is being used.
Something I’ve wondered is whether GiveWell has looked at whether its methods are robust against “Pascal’s mugging” type situations, where a very high estimate of expected value of an intervention leads to it being chosen even when it seems very implausible a priori. The deworming case seems to fit this mould to me somewhat—an RCT finding a high expected impact despite no clear large near term health benefits and no reason to think there’s another mechanism to getting income improvements (as I understand it) does seem a bit like the hypothetical mugger promising to give a high reward despite limited reason to expect it to be true (though not as extreme as in the philosophical thought experiments).
Actually, doing a bit of searching turned up that Pascal’s mugging has been discussed in an old 2011 post on the GiveWell blog here, but only abstractly and not in the context of any real decisions. The post seems to argue that past some point, based on Bayesian reasoning, “the greater [the ‘explicit expected-value’ estimate] is, the lower the expected value of Action A”. So by that logic, it’s potentially the case that had the deworming RCT turned up a higher, even harder to believe estimate of the effect on income, a good evaluation could have given a lower estimate of expected value. Discounting the RCT expected value by a constant factor that is independent of the RCT result doesn’t capture this. (But I’ve not gone through the maths of the post to tell how general the result is.)
The post goes on to say ‘The point at which a threat or proposal starts to be called “Pascal’s Mugging” can be thought of as the point at which the claimed value of Action A is wildly outside the prior set by life experience (which may cause the feeling that common sense is being violated)’. Maybe it’s not common sense being violated in the case of deworming, but it does seem quite hard to think of a good explanation for the results (for an amateur reader like me anyway). Has any analysis been done on whether the deworming trial results should be considered past this point? It seems to me that that would require coming up with a prior estimate and checking that the posterior expectation does behave sensibly as hypothetical RCT results go beyond what seems plausible a priori. Of course, thinking may have evolved a lot since that post, but it seems to pick up on some key points to me.
It looks like >$10M were given by GiveWell to deworming programs in 2023, and from what I can tell it looks like a large proportion of funds given to the “All Grants” fund went to this cause area, so it does seem quite important to get the reasoning here correct. Since learning about the issues with the deworming studies, I’ve wondered whether donations to this cause can currently make sense—as an academic, my life experience tells me not to take big actions based on results from individual published studies! And this acts as a barrier to feeling comfortable with donating to the “All Grants” fund for me, even though I’d like to handover more of the decision-making to GiveWell otherwise.
What good solutions are there for EAs leaving money to charity in wills, in terms of getting them legally correct but not incurring large costs?
I’ve found this 2014 forum post that looks to have good info but many of the links no longer work—for example, it has a broken link to a form for getting a free will—does a resource like that still exist somewhere?
There’s also the GWWC bequests page. When I tried their “tool”, it directed me to an organisation called FareWill—has anyone used them and found it to give a good result?
I get the impression that the low-cost will services out there are based on templates for leaving assets to family and friends and aren’t so well suited to having charities as the main beneficiaries—in particular, including clauses for what to do if the charities no longer exist and some broader instruction needs to be given (I tried freewills.co.uk, but it didn’t produce something suitable). Has anyone found a will-writing service that worked well at a reasonable cost? Or is using a solicitor the recommended way in these cases, and am I wrong to think that would cost hundreds of pounds? [Edit to add—I live in England, so info relevant for there is particularly welcome.]
Edit to add some keywords for searching, as someone pointed out to me that searching for “will” brings up lots of other things!: testament, writing will, leave money to charity.
We saw in Parts 9-11 of this series that most experts are deeply skeptical of Ord’s claim
How is it being decided that “most experts” think this? I took a look and part 10 referenced two different papers with a total of 7 authors and a panel of four experts brought together by one of those authors—it doesn’t seem clear to me from this that this view is representative of the majority of experts in the space.
Harvard Health says that avoiding infection is part of strengthening one’s immune system
I was intrigued so looked at the link. It has heading “Healthy ways to strengthen your immune system” and says in one bullet point under this “Take steps to avoid infection, such as washing your hands frequently and cooking meats thoroughly”, but doesn’t say anything about why this would help strengthen the immune system (it just links to a page with steps for reducing infection risk). A possible alternative interpretation is that this is meant as advice for not getting sick rather than making the immune system more effective, and this seems more likely to me. But it’s not clear.
A minor thing on the CO2 emissions reductions is it should probably be considered whether the trees would be cut down anyway if they weren’t used for wood. I think you’d want to know the net deforestation due to collecting firewood, presuming that forest expansion would be cut back anyway for other reasons.
Just thought I’d note that I checked again and the CAF DAF’s minimum balance has gone up to £25k and has a minimum fee of £600/ann.: https://www.cafonline.org/individual-trust-supporting-documents
The most common pushback (and the first two comments, as of now) are from people who think this is an attempt at regulatory capture by the AI labs
This is also the case in the comments on this FT article (paywalled I think), which I guess indicates how less techy people may be tending to see it.
“According to CE’s weighted animal welfare index”—the link seems broken—I think the bit after the final ”/” needs to be removed
Regarding the question of what philosophical view should be used, I wonder if it would also matter if someone were something like prioritarian rather than a total utilitarian. StrongMinds looks to focus on people who suffer more than typical members of these countries’ populations, whilst the lives saved by AMF would presumably cover more of the whole distribution of wellbeing. So a prioritarian may favour StrongMinds more, assuming the people helped are not substantially better off economically or in other ways. (Though, it could perhaps also be argued that the people who would die without AMF’s intervention are extremely badly off pre-intervention.)
Though if you wanted to reduce wild animal populations, you could pay to destroy habitats without also causing farm animal suffering, or maybe even do something productive e.g. keep growing crops but burn them for fuel rather than use them as animal feed. Not that I’d particularly advocate this, but I think it argues against a view that it could be optimal to not reduce farm animal populations on these grounds.
Fair questions to ask. I’d hope the quality of information obtained through uni courses is much better than random selection of reading material, as profs who have spent many years studying a subject should know which are the key texts to read, the most important facts to understand and the key arguments on each side of controversial issues. I think a random selection approach would generally yield information low in importance. (Perhaps articles from certain blogs wouldn’t do too badly, but how would you know which blogs to choose and avoid getting sucked into ones that sound plausible but are terrible?) Edit to add: But doing some reading around the internet before deciding whether to embark on a course of further study could perhaps be a good thing to do.
I don’t really see working in different jobs for a few months doing much to broaden thinking in the ways a uni education would—people I know in regular jobs seem to mostly be focussed on getting narrowly defined tasks done and not much on reflective thinking. Though it may be quite complementary as it could highlight things that an academic education wouldn’t (George Orwell’s writings of working in various jobs come to mind—but it seems rare for workers to take on this journalistic mindset). Edit to add: I also think workplaces will tend to have people with more correlated mindsets (e.g. work in an AI lab and most people around you will probably think developing AI is great), which isn’t very good for developing an accurate worldview, whereas at a university I think you’d be more likely to be exposed to a greater variety of views. Though I don’t have a measure for how well this works in practice (and I think people probably do cluster into groups with similar views to a fair extent). Of course, uni profs and students will tend to be correlated in thinking that uni is good ;-)
Of course that’s not to say there aren’t plenty of profs who focus on unimportant info, are poor at explaining, are biased etc. And as I said I think narrow uni courses are less good for getting a broader perspective. Honestly, I’m not sure how good an average uni education is by this measure (including at “top” unis). But finding a good one could be very valuable.
It would be interesting to have a way to test this, but I can’t think of a good objective test of having broad knowledge.
I agree that any sense of shame about dropping out should be removed and that university may not be the best route for everyone. However, the post seems to mainly make the argument for dropping out for people who have a firm idea of what they want to do, and I don’t think most early-stage university students would have much idea (or even if they believe they do, that their ideas would be a good).
Similar to Guy Raveh, I think university may be most valuable for getting exposure to a broader set of ideas (though specialised courses like those that are common in the UK are less good for this). Also, for getting time to consider future directions that one may not have if working full time.
PS As an academic, I may be biased—though I don’t feel like I’m very inhibited from talking about the downsides of the academic route!
“At a certain point, we just have to trust the peer-review process”
Coming here late, found it an interesting comment overall, but just thought I’d say something re interpreting the peer reviewed literature as an academic, as I think people often misunderstand what peer review does. It’s pretty weak and you don’t just trust what comes out! Instead, look for consistent results being produced by at least a few independent groups, without there being contradictory research (researchers will rarely publish replications of results, but if a set of results don’t corroborate a single plausible theoretical picture, then something is iffy). (Note it can happen for whole communities of researchers to go down the wrong path, though—it’s just less likely than for an individual study.) Also, talk to people in the field about it! So there are fairly low cost ways to make better judgements than believing what one researcher tells you. The scientific fraud cases that I know involved results from just one researcher or group, and sensible people would have had a fair degree of scepticism without future corroboration. Just in case anyone reading this is ever in the position of deciding whether to allocate significant funding based on published research.
“Science relies on trust, so it’s relatively vulnerable to intentionally bad, deceptive actors”
I don’t think science does rely on trust particularly highly, as you can have research groups corroborating or casting doubt on others’ research. “Relatively” compared to what? I don’t see why it would be more vulnerable to be actors than most other things humans do.