Mid-career climate science researcher in academia
Previously used display name “Pagw”
Mid-career climate science researcher in academia
Previously used display name “Pagw”
I feel pretty sure that you are not ethically obliged to pay anything out of your savings. And you haven’t done anything wrong so I don’t think you have anything to feel guilty about.
As a subsidiary question, can anyone say how the property has been used so far eg the rough sum over meetings of number of attendees times length of meeting in days? Or some other measure of utilisation/cost saving?
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.
“it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist”
As a climate scientist reading this, I just thought I’d pick up on that and say I have not got that impression from reading the reports or conversations with my colleagues who are IPCC authors. I’ve not seen any strong evidence presented that the IPCC systematically understates risks—there are a couple of examples where risks were perhaps not discussed (not clearly underestimated as far as I’ve seen), but I can also think of at least one example where it looked to me like IPCC authors put too much weight on predictions of large changes (sea ice in AR5). (This is distinct from the thought that the IPCC doesn’t do enough to discuss low-likelihood, high-impact possibilities, which I agree with.)
“I don’t want to put words in their mouths, but Peter overall seemed very positive”
As Peter, just in case this should come back to bite me if misinterpreted, I just thought I’d say I could give an informed review of certain physical climate science aspects and the report seems to capture those well. I am positive about the rest as being an interesting and in depth piece of scholarship into interesting questions, but I can’t vouch for it as an expert :-)
When thinking about whether to donate to Helen Keller International’s Vitamin A supplementation program, I wondered whether this is problematic for animal welfare, since Vit A is usually derived from animal sources as I understand it. So I asked HKI and they said their Vit A is chemically synthesised without animal origin, though their capsules do contain gelatin sourced from cattle. My perception is that the use of gelatin wouldn’t be expected to contribute a lot to animal welfare problems (though it might matter for people who never want to fund purchasing of animal products). I just thought I’d share this in case anyone else wondered.
People downvoting—it would be useful to know why.
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 Michael for the post. I happened to be thinking in similar terms recently regarding how to divide donations between saving human lives and increasing welfare of farmed animals (though nothing like as thoroughly and generally). I thought perhaps this could be an interesting real-world example to analyse:
This review estimated that saving a life in a very poor country would result in a reduction in births of 0.33-0.5, hence giving 0.5-0.67 extra lives. Though, the uncertainty in the various studies included indicates to me it could plausibly give 1 extra life.
1 extra human life perhaps gives ~60 years of extra life (not counting extra descendants, so maybe it’s an underestimate).
Then I remember reading estimates that for every typical westerner there are around 5-10 farmed animals alive at a given time to produce the animals products they eat (though I can’t remember the source, and I’m not sure if this includes fish). An extra person in a developing world country isn’t going to consume as much as a typical westerner straight away of course, but I suppose the long-term consumption could be this large if they or their descendants reached present western levels of wealth and factory farming was still prevalent then, so it could be a reasonable pessimistic estimate of the effect of saving a human life on the increase in the number of farmed animals.
This 2018 Founders Pledge report gives a mean estimate of the effect of The Humane League’s corporate campaigns alone as “10 hen-years shift from battery cages to aviaries [equivalent] per dollar received” [p.68].
Perhaps shifting a hen from a battery to aviary system could be taken to be a tenth as good as removing an animal from the system (just based on a not-very-informed intuition).
So an estimate of an amount to donate to THL to be likely to offset any negative impact on animal welfare from saving a human life (using pessimistic figures to give the rough upper end of the uncertainty range) is [no. of extra human lives] x [no. of extra human years lived per life] x [no. of farmed animals per person]/[no. of animal years saved per $] = 1 x 60 x 10/(10*0.1) = $600.
This is ~20% of the cost of saving one life through Malaria Consortium from GiveWell’s 2020 cost effectiveness analysis. So perhaps this indicates that if you wanted to donate to save lives from malaria but were worried about potential negative impacts on farm animal welfare, splitting donations between MC and THL in a 5:1 ratio would be an option robustly better than doing nothing. (But the THL fraction may need to be higher if impacts on fish, long-term impacts of increasing the human population or other things I’ve not thought of need to be included).
Does this sound reasonable?
(Edited to correct “4:1 ratio” to “5:1 ratio”)
It seems like there are quite a lot of people/orgs who made plans based on promised money that now seems unlikely to arrive. Is there a lesson that can be learned about how to reduce risk in grant awarding e.g. by waiting until funds are securely in the foundation’s hands? Or is there no way to avoid this risk given potential clawbacks, even in cases of bankruptcy that don’t involve any fraud?
Just thought I’d say I’m actually interested by Vasco’s comment. I don’t see why it’s not related—the post is meant to be assessing overall cost-effectiveness (according to the title), so effects on animals are potentially relevant (edit: OK the title refers to HLI’s analysis and the comment is about GiveWell’s, but it applies to both, so I’d accept it). If the point were only written about elsewhere, then it could easily be missed by readers interested in this topic. That said, a fuller write up of how the meat eater problem may affect views on which charities are most cost-effective would also be helpful I think.
Just to make a point on this comment related to how the forum works, it looks like people don’t like it on net, but there may be a substantial minority interested in animal welfare considerations who find it helpful (I count myself here), and therefore it would be valuable for these people. But currently it’s automatically hidden as if it’s spam-like and not worth reading for anyone. This seems suboptimal, and perhaps a more strict bar for hiding comments should be set. Comments with low scores are sent to the bottom of the page anyway, so it’s unlikely to be that bothersome.
It may also be valuable for people to be able to see the numbers of upvotes and downvotes separately, so they can see if there’s a minority of readers who appreciate their comments vs getting pure downvotes, which give different messages in terms of feedback.
Given the current forum workings, it seems like people should be cautious about downvoting comments where a substantial minority of others may disagree and think it’s a useful point and wouldn’t want it hidden (and use disagree voting to indicate difference of judgement).
Peer review is very variable so it’s hard to say what “the depth of peer review” is. I checked the bits I was asked to check in a similar way as I would a journal article. No I didn’t myself really review the methodology. The process was also quite different from normal review in involving quite a few back-and-forth discussions—I felt more like I was helping make the work better rather than simply commenting on its quality. It also differed in that the decision about “publishing” was taken by John rather than a separate editor (as far as I know).
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.
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?
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.
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.
“we estimate StrongMinds at roughly 6x GD”—this seems to be about 2⁄3 what HLI estimate the relative impact to be (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zCD98wpPt3km8aRGo/happiness-for-the-whole-household-accounting-for-household) - it’s not obvious to me how and why your estimates differ—are you able to say what is the reason for the difference? (Edited to update to a more recent analysis by HLI)
Thanks for this. One thing that perplexes me about the Ricke et al. (2018) analysis is that the SCC for most African countries looks to be lower than for the USA (fig.2), whereas the general consensus seems to be that the impacts of climate change will have far worse effects on individuals’ utilities in Africa. So this makes me wonder have they properly captured the effect of marginal utility changing with income? I’m not an economist, so I don’t know how to judge this myself.
But 80k didn’t just “affiliate” with SBF—they promoted him with untrue information. And I don’t see this addressed in the above or anywhere else. Particularly, his podcast interview made a thing of him driving a Corolla and sleeping on a beanbag as part of promoting the frugal Messiah image, when it seems likely that at least some people high up in EA knew that this characterisation was false. Plus no mentioning of the stories of how he treated his Alameda co-founders. And perhaps 80k and yourself were completely ignorant of this when the podcast was made, but did nobody tell you that this needed to be corrected? Either way, it doesn’t seem good for EA functioning.
My sense is that this idea that some people high up in EA lied or failed to correct the record has cast a shadow over everyone in such positions, since nobody has given a credible account of who knew and lied/withheld that information that I know of. It contributes to a reduction in trust. It’s not like it’s unforgiveable—I think it is understandable that good people might have felt like going along with some seemingly small lies for what they saw as a greater good, and I think everyone in such positions generally has very impressive and admirable achievements. But it’s hard to keep credibility with general suspicion in the air. If you really had no knowledge then I feel sorry that this seems likely to also affect you.