Dan Wahl
Please consider using
starscore (or approval) voting next year instead of RCV
Hey Pat, thanks for the heads up. You’re right that, despite working on desktop and via the LinkedIn mobile app, the search link doesn’t seem to work on mobile browsers.
One quick workaround is to request the desktop site on the mobile browser, which seems to load properly on my side.
Excited to see this is returning for another year! A few notes:
- This year’s match is (currently) “only” for up to $50,000 (for reference, last year a total of $620K was matched), and might not last very long
- See e.g. my Every.org profile for a list of ~75 EA-aligned orgs on the site (as of Nov. 2021)
- Note that you can fund your Every.org account straight from your DAF
- Here’s last year’s post, with some helpful info in the comments too
Ah! Ctrl+Enter does work in the Playground. I was doing most of my development in VS Code—not sure if it’s also supposed to work there, but I don’t see it in the keybindings.json.
Re: settings persistence in Playground, do they also come along with the share links? The critical ones for me would be Sample Count and the Function Display Settings.
Looking forward to auto-formatting as well!
Calculating up to
annually_averted_health_dalys_time_discountedwas taking me well over a minute in v0.3.0, but is down to ~5 seconds in v0.3.1--a big improvement!
I originally had to comment the actual model output (dollars_per_daly_equivalents_averted(20)) because it wouldn’t return at all in v0.3.0, but now it’s ~2 mins in v0.3.1.
For reference, the whole Causal model takes ~5 seconds to update.
One such project, already underway, is our work on interspecies comparisons of moral weight.
FYI this link gives me an “Access Denied” error.
This is interesting, thanks for writing it up! I recently did an analysis of US cities (mostly looking for a wintering location, not a full move), and Tulsa ended up scoring relatively low, which was disappointing since I know there’s a growing EA community there.
I’m really curious in your biking experience in particular, since that’s the category where it fared the worst. I looked at bike commuter data, but I guess that’s just a proxy for good commuter infrastructure, which is what I probably care about. Why do you think so few Tulsans bike at the moment?
I’ve been thinking about relocation recently too, though mostly through the lens of finding a better wintering location in the US. This post inspired me to at least upload (if not exactly document) my analysis to date. See here:
https://github.com/danwahl/schelling-out/blob/main/schelling-out.ipynb
And the current top 10:
biking housing vegan winter summer total City State Berkeley California 2.142016 -2.166879 2.770248 3.772590 0.0 1.303595 Gainesville Florida 1.117079 0.854543 0.780399 3.384664 -0.0 1.227337 Tempe Arizona 1.329176 -0.184675 1.161235 3.508773 -0.0 1.162902 Portland Oregon 1.999723 -0.720326 2.868659 1.473931 0.0 1.124397 New Orleans Louisiana 0.739080 0.053609 1.451345 3.197368 -0.0 1.088280 Hollywood Florida -0.717470 -0.222100 2.601399 3.434937 -0.0 1.019353 Boulder Colorado 2.702441 -1.017822 0.899562 2.222392 -0.0 0.961315 Cambridge Massachusetts 2.433792 -1.559463 1.255650 2.648835 -0.0 0.955763 Orlando Florida -1.171810 0.527952 1.594634 3.601198 -0.0 0.910395 St. Petersburg Florida -0.573223 0.002294 1.410371 3.478732 -0.0 0.863635(Scores are
log2where0is Chicago, andtotalis the average of each row.)Of the factors mentioned above, this focuses almost entirely on (my) “Personal fit” via considering things like weather, bike-ability, vegan-friendliness, etc. But I’m also keen to explore the “Coordination with other EAs working on shared cause areas and projects” and “Opportunities for movement-building in non-saturated EA hubs” points via new community Schelling points (hence the name).
Originally I made a digital SSC podcast (feed) so that I could listen through the back catalog of posts (the human reader version didn’t start until ~2017). I ended up getting used to the robot narrator, so I just kept it running on ACX. One small upside is that the digital versions get created within minutes of new posts.
This is awesome! I did something similar for Astral Codex Ten (feed, post) a while back. The human version is also good, if you like that kind of thing.
Here’s a sheet with a bunch of EA(-adjacent) tech initiatives: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yzmg02j8PnvjlV_KX3Vf_u9TNdAS63N-9xy2txmTg-A/edit?usp=sharing
Along these lines, preventing childhood lead poisoning is another potential candidate.
Thanks for this (somewhat overwhelming!) analysis. I tried to do something similar a few years back, and am pretty enthusiastic about the idea of incorporating more uncertainty analysis into cost effectiveness estimates, generally.
One thing (that I don’t think you mentioned, though I’m still working through the whole post) this allows you to do is use techniques from Modern Portfolio Theory to create giving portfolios with similar altruistic returns and lower downside risk. I’d be curious to see if your analysis could be used in a similar way.
I’ve done a little work on this, using techniques from modern portfolio theory, and uncertainty estimates from GiveWell and ACE to generate optimal charity portfolios. See here for a background post, and here for my 2016 update.
To echo some of the other comments, I also think this kind of detailed, external “red teaming” of cost-effectiveness calculations is great in general, and I’d like to see more of it. As someone who has supported Sinergia in the past, I was concerned about some of the claims, and took a few hours to do some shallow research of my own. Tl;dr, my personal opinion of Sinergia hasn’t changed much, pending their response.
To address the specific criticisms:
I
Sinergia’s claim in Committed Companies 2023:
Subsequent calculations assume that this commitment went into effect in 2023, well in advance of Brazil’s legal deadline of 2030. However, Pig Watch 2023 states that JBS intended for this commitment to take effect in 2027, and Pig Watch 2024 updates this to “no longer has a defined deadline”.
Depending on the timing, this could tell a consistent story in which JBS committed to the 2023 deadline, then changed it to 2027/undefined after Sinergia published the Committed Companies 2023 sheet. However, I would have expected the 2024 edition of Pigs in Focus to reduce JBS’s ear notching ranking, but they still receive the full three points (which may suggest that Sinergia is not closely monitoring all of their existing commitments).
II
Sinergia’s claim in Committed Companies 2023:
From the (translated) link to JBS’s 2020 policy:
I admit to not totally understanding the nuances here, but I read this as: Sinergia acknowledges that JBS already had a commitment to transition from individual to collective gestation (they refer to this as a “mixed system”, I think because it still involves some use of gestation crates?) by 2025, and is not taking credit for this change. They do claim partial responsibility for JBS’s commitment to adopt crate-free systems for all new units starting in 2023.
While this does sound like a distinct policy, I don’t understand exactly how it relates to the “Para novos Projetos de Unidades de Produção de Leitões” (For new Piglet Production Unit Projects) section on JBS’s current animal welfare page.
III
In Committed Companies 2023, Sinergia does include claims about teeth clipping from these four companies, usually as part of a broader list of “Multilations banned” (including surgical castration and ear notching).
Re: Alegra specifically, from Pig Watch 2022:
Alegra’s rating in Pigs in Focus changed from one to three points between 2022 and 2023, so it seems at least plausible that Sinergia helped persuade them to end grinding. And indeed Pig Watch 2023 confirms:
Note: the company appears to have backtracked on this commitment in 2024, which (unlike #1 above) is reflected in the latest Pigs in Focus (though I’m not sure what happened with the 2022 column).
IV
Sinergia says:
Sinergia’s criteria for full points on its “Criterion 4: Banning surgical castration” Pigs in Focus metric:
In the 2022 version of Pigs in Focus, Sinergia says of Aurora:
And then in the 2023 edition:
So the way I read this, Aurora already had a policy recommending immunocastration prior to 2022, but still allowed surgical castration with anesthesia (but not analgesia) to be performed in some cases. I’m not clear what Sinergia claims changed in Aurora’s 2023 commitment, but it plausibly could be either a complete ban on surgical castration, or the introduction of analgesia?
V
From Sinergia in Committed Companies 2023:
Note: assuming “JBS” here is just a copy-paste error, but it could be something more fundamental.
From Pigs in Focus 2023:
Like #2 above, Sinergia seems to be making a more limited claim that BRF is transitioning to crate-free (not just group housing or collective gestation) for new units starting in 2023. This at least seems consistent with BRF’s 2019 commitments (prior to Sinergia’s involvement), translated: