David T

Karma: 1,186

David T Jan 10, 2025, 8:44 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Miquel Banchs-Piqué (prev. mikbp)’s comment on: Is Musk still net-positive for humanity?
“Has he been net positive for humanity overall” would be be clearer that it’s looking at everything he’s done so far
But I actually think it’s more interesting if it’s an ambiguous question. The stuff he’s done so far is significant but not necessarily aligned with what he’s doing now and what he might do or intend to do in future. The trajectory he is on now is… not upward. The influence that he has now isn’t necessarily more than when few people knew who he was, and he sounded more strategic as well as more amicable then. And the stuff he may or may not do in future is speculation.

David T Jan 10, 2025, 8:09 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Is Musk still net-positive for humanity?
Yep. I agree it can be interpreted in other ways and would agree with you that taking everything into account he’s probably had more impact at the margin on the positive stuff than the negatives, so far. There was certainly a bigger shortage of people with the means and the motivation to take on EVs and commercial space in the early 2000s^[1] than peopl willing to spout stupid stuff on social media in the last three years.
1. ^
  I think battery and photovoltaics were coming down in manufacturing cost over the last decade regardless, but you don’t automatically get complex products out of that...

David T Jan 10, 2025, 2:19 PM
22 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Is Musk still net-positive for humanity?
I think the use of the word “still” makes this a much easier “no” than it might otherwise have been. SpaceX and Tesla have been hugely significant companies, he’s played more role in them than he is sometimes credited with and it’s not at all obvious that other companies would have done similar things on similar timelines in his absence, but if he were to divest all his shares in both companies and start slagging them off tomorrow, electric car sales and tech development would be fine (EV sales might even rise...) and the number of space launches would continue to rise. Even if both companies went down with him, the viability of electric cars and commercial space launch businesses is demonstrated now.^[1] I also don’t think that Twitter would be rainbows and sunshine in his absence or that Trump wouldn’t have won without his endorsement, but the empowering of engineers is a past accomplishment, and the empowerment of terrible people^[2] Musk’s current focus.
So that leaves what he might do differently in future. For people optimistic his flirtation with Trump was a strategy to give him the ability to do amazing things that only being trusted with lots of government budget could achieve, the initial indications aren’t positive. There are no big space or cleantech or AI pledges: instead his “Manhattan Project” DOGE looks like a fundamentally unserious boondoggle generating memes about government waste (even if you think cutting government waste is the most important challenge of our time and Elon is an excellent choice to do it, it seems non-obvious that it will have much teeth or that it would operate significantly less effectively with Vivek Ramaswamy in sole charge. If you thought Elon in charge of NASA might lead to amazing advances… well he’s busy with other things). And he certainly doesn’t seem to be a moderating force around Trump, at least not outside very specific areas he cares about like H1-B visas and Chinese parts of the Tesla supply chain.
He has, of course, sounded sincerely interested in the topic of AI safety before and has legitimate criticisms of OpenAI, but his main contribution to the field of AI other than storming out of that company in a dispute over who would run it is to take more risks than others around autonomous vehicle control tech and build an LLM chatbot whose distinguishing feature is that it’s trained to be rude rather than polite. And it’s difficult to argue that a man who was talking about the need to become an interplanetary species not that long ago and is now getting bigger dopamine hits out of the responses to tweets about how the US should overthrow the UK government is heading in the direction of thoughtfulness and caution.
1. ^
  though losing SpaceX would significantly delay future launches...
2. ^
  if my politics were broadly aligned with the nativist, populist right here in the UK, I’d probably be even more disappointed with his selection of figures to promote and fights to pick.

David T Jan 7, 2025, 9:47 PM
−1 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Vegetarian or not..?
I’m struggling to understand your framing of the moral licensing argument. “Moral licensing” is widely considered to be self-deceiving weakness where people [unconsciously] convince themselves that as they’ve done something moral they can happily make other choices with complete indifference to their moral consequences rather than a pragmatic approach to optimising altruism. In that sense, the idea that that participating in some small way in a campaign against meat alleviates any concern about about possible moral implications of eating it is a pretty pure example of moral licensing, whereas it seems non-obvious that the additional impactful pro-animal activity you would only feel able to participate in if you ate meat first actually exists. Sure, you might donate to something you identify as impactful but there’s no guarantee you’re not deceiving yourself far more about the counterfactual that you’d have been unable to commit to if you hadn’t started eating meat. The last thing I’d consider from the starting point of worrying about my future capacity for self-deception is doing stuff I believe is bad in the hope it hacks my mindset into doing more good.
Some people hold sincere beliefs in animal welfare matters whilst eating meat they believe to be “cruelty free” is fine and if you’re one of them, or feel it’s impossible to avoid eating it or simply don’t think it’s an issue that’s different,^[1] but “I might need to start doing things I think are bad again because I’m concerned that otherwise I might be less capable of doing things which are good” doesn’t feel like the right lesson to be learning from EA
1. ^
  I am not qualified to tell people to never eat meat...

David T Jan 7, 2025, 5:49 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Why are bond yields anomalously rising following the September rate cut?
I think poor economic growth figures in a number of countries and the anticipated volatility, inflation and economic performance following the election of US President signalling enthusiasm for trade wars (and with a track record of deficit spending to pump stock markets) is likely a bigger issue than any development in AI in the last quarter

David T Jan 5, 2025, 12:50 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Parkinson’s Law and the Ideology of Statistics
You wrote about “this suggests a profitable investment scheme in which an outside investor either lends the Lesothans the money to feed their cattle adequately, or buys or rents the cattle, feeds them optimally, and gets more out of them than the Lesothans otherwise would” which sounds a lot like trying to create markets to me. The World Bank also tried creating profitable markets for cattle and cattle field and educating farmers to get more out of them than they otherwise would. According to Ferguson, this was a mistake because the Lesothans had no desire to market their cattle, and much more realistic routes to boost their income than trying to maximize milk yields.
(he also argued the same thing about crop sales; it was supplementary food they had little intention of selling)

David T Jan 5, 2025, 12:49 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Parkinson’s Law and the Ideology of Statistics
Individuals within communities didn’t own the land, there were customary rights to use it as a commons, generally apportioned at the whim of a local chief. The Lesothan government’s proposals were [at least superficially] compatible with orthodox microeconomic theory that the land would yield more if portions of it were fenced off and intensively farmed by land-owning individuals or corporations, and to the limited extend that land titles actually existed in Lesotho, the government and their favoured chiefs were entitled to put fences around valuable portions and develop, lease or sell it to people with the means to exploit it. Lesothans who customarily grazed cattle or collected reeds from those portions of land before nominal landowners fenced it off obviously felt differently.
The process probably resembled the enclosure of common land in 18th century Great Britain more than privatization of state-owned industries (also commonly recommended by the World Bank), but it certainly had far more to do with putting land into private ownership than Stalinist collectivization. There’s not much doubt that the government of the time was authoritarian and that its process for allocating land was corrupt, but it was fundamentally driven by the market logic that privately owned land would see more capital investment and higher yields. Ferguson wasn’t accusing the World Bank of paying too little attention to “ideas that would occur to anyone who understood the content of introductory college-level courses in microeconomics and finance”, he was accusing them of not understanding anything else.

David T Jan 4, 2025, 9:29 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Parkinson’s Law and the Ideology of Statistics
Your post seems to perfectly underline the classic aid critique of drawing too many conclusions from fitting too few facts, but perhaps not in the way you intended
As the original review linked notes, Ferguson’s Anti Politics Machine argues that development economists working on Lesotho in the World Bank drew conclusions from basic statistics and economic theory which they would never have made if they had a wider understanding of Lesotho culture or had at least asked more Lesothans what they wanted. A key example detailed is that Lesothans rarely sold their cattle, which World Bank economists concluded was due to lack of market access, but Ferguson argues is a complete misunderstanding of how Lesothans saw cattle herds (bred as inherited wealth, not a source of income from selling off).
For some reason rather than engage with this detail, you choose to derive your own conclusions from a summary of the same basic facts the World Bank economists based their recommendations on, which happen to include the same conclusions the World Bank economists jumped to: if there’s barely any cattle sales it’s probably a case of needing better access to markets. As you correctly note, this is the sort of analysis people who have completed an introductory microeconomics course (i.e. basically everyone carrying out economic research at the World Bank...) are likely to conduct.
Similarly, the Lesotho government’s privatization of select plots of land that outraged villagers in a culture where land was mostly commonly owned^[1] sounds a lot less like something Stalin would approve of and a lot more like a dubious idea that gets signed off by someone who’s very familiar with microeconomic theory of land improvement and has found the evidence of underexploitation of land for crops you propose looking for, but hasn’t considered that the Lesothan government and local people might have other motivations
I’m agnostic about the benefits of the sort of full blown “historical and ethnographic study”, that Ferguson recommends, but it sure beats deriving the ills of complex programs and organizations from a handful of bullet points.
1. ^
  in fairness, this detail isn’t in the original article, though it’s not exactly an obscure detail you wouldn’t expect anyone positing land reform as the real problem to have found out...

David T Dec 28, 2024, 7:53 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
Effective bednets have a relatively short shelf life due to both loss of insecticide and physical damage.
People in target regions can and do buy bednets, though for much of the target market the cost might still represent a day’s income so they won’t necessarily be inclined to replace them at optimal intervals. (On the other hand, it’s a tiny fraction of a typical GiveDirectly handout, which is probably why “people buy bednets with it” isn’t a major feature of their research even in regions with significant malaria). Consumers see [not necessarily as effective] alternative products purporting to achieve mosquito control in the same shops , and won’t necessarily prioritise purchasing replacement nets when it represents a large spend for them, their reason for doing so is the existing bednet doesn’t seem to be working, and people who are relatively informed about malaria prevention are also informed that governments and NGOs tend to dispense bednets for free… Programmes dispensing free nets tend to provide advice on using them properly too.
Bednets on sale in some local markets are often untreated, so buying replacements locally isn’t necessarily even a good decision.

David T Dec 26, 2024, 11:36 AM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guive’s comment on: Eric Neyman’s Quick takes
I think in practice most people have ethical frameworks where they have lexicographic preferences, regardless of whether they are happy making other decisions using a cardinal utility framework.

I suspect most animal welfare enthusiasts presented with the possibility of organising a bullfight wouldn’t respond with “well how big is the audience?”. I don’t think their reluctance to determine whether bullfighting is ethical or not based on the value of estimated utility tradeoffs reflects either a rejection of the possibility of human welfare or a specieist bias against humans.

I like your framing though. Taken to its logical conclusion, you’re implying:

(1) Some people have strong lexographic preferences for X over improved Y

(2) Insisting that the only valid ethical decision making framework is a mathematical total utilitarian one in which everything of value must be assigned cardinal weights implies that to maintain this preference they must reject the possibility of Y having value

(3) Acting within this framework implies they should also be indifferent to Y in all other circumstances, including when there is no tradeoff

(4) Demanding people with lexographic preferences for X shut up and multiply is likely to lead to lower total utility for Y. And more generally a world in which everyone acts as if any possibility they assign any value to may be multiplied and traded off against their own value sounds like a world in which most people will opt to care about as few possibilities as possible.

David T Dec 23, 2024, 5:34 PM
6 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
Random Indians, not rich Indians. I would appreciate it if you could represent my post fairly.
“Random Indians” is a group which includes poor Indians (i.e. recipients of anti-poverty measures, which have non-random targeting) and rich Indians (typically not recipients of GiveWell or AIM charitable interventions). The assumption you make by using a mean consumption figure is that poor Indians and rich Indians alike consume ~11 shrimp per year. That’s what the text you quoted said, and a perfectly fair representation of your post
I actually think it’s an unfair representation of my post to accuse me of misrepresenting you simply because I spelled out the logical implications of your choice of figure, especially when I have also presented multiple reasons why I believe zero would be more representative of the amount they were likely to consume, and even more representative of the marginal impact of a typical GiveWell/AIM recipient surviving on Indian aquaculture production.
I explicitly said in the post “The harms would be smaller for a random person helped by such GiveWell’s grants or Ambitious Impact’s organisations”, and then argued why it is unclear this changes my conclusions.
My argument is that the median survivor due to GiveWell/AIM aid causes zero harm via aquaculture, and even the small minority of survivors who do consume shrimp are unlikely to have any impact upon numbers of shrimp culled in factory farms. I’m aware your post above argues that meat consumption may be linearly related to welfare via the common factor that is GDP, but I don’t think the relatively small diminution in self-reported welfare from lower incomes you’ve considered here is anywhere near enough to doubt that the survival of Indians without access to aquaculture products might be net positive in the welfarist framework you presented!
I feel we’re going in circles here, so I’ll wish you a happy Christmas and am unlikely to continue the discussion.

David T Dec 23, 2024, 12:03 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
Even no consumption of shrimp would lead to saving lives in India being harmful neaterm if I kept all my other parameters constant, and there would always be significant uncertainty even if my point estimate suggested the benefits to humans are larger than the harms to animals nearterm.
Yes, but I don’t see any reason to assume that the uncertainty skews in favour of humans dying rather than humans surviving. Particularly not when the assumptions you used to reach this conclusion were that that poor Indians receiving nutrition supplementation have access to the same ~11 farmed shrimp per year in their diet as rich Indians, and that the positives of 1 Indian human living for 1 year are no more than the negatives of four shrimp being farmed.
I think in an area of high uncertainty we should default to the idea that humans should survive (and maybe change their dietary preferences) and not to the idea that they should die
The consumption of poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person helped in India in 2022 would have to be less than 19.3 % (= 1/5.17) as large as that of a random person for extending human lives to increase welfare nearterm
Sure. But since food choices are skewed heavily by budgets and aquaculture is a premium export market, and the supply chains to send 11 farmed shrimp per year to every man, woman and child in interior villages don’t exist, I don’t think the evidence points to the median GiveWell beneficiary consuming any of the ~13 farmed aquatic animals per year you’ve attributed to them. The idea that GiveWell donations have a non-zero effect on the size of the aquaculture industry at the margin is even more dubious, given that the economics of farming in a region which exports nearly all of its aquaculture products are highly unlikely to factor in a few thousand GiveWell non-beneficiaries dying to their demand calculations and reduce production accordingly.
Others have suggested that proposing that people shouldn’t be allowed to survive on the basis of things they might choose to eat in future. I think it would be worse to condemn them for things they are statistically unlikely to even get the opportunity to eat.
Either way, it’s a view you’re perfectly entitled to and have clearly done some research into, but I don’t think it’s a glaring omission that an organization that considers it axiomatic that human lives are worth saving hasn’t invested time in doing their own “so actually, under what set of assumptions can we conclude humans shouldn’t be saved” calculations.

David T Dec 22, 2024, 11:39 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
I do not ask GiveWell for “massive amounts of time” in the context of effects on animals.
I revised this during the time in which you were replying to say “use researcher and writer time” instead, precisely because I didn’t want to give the appearance of misrepresenting your post. Though it would certainly take a massive amount of time for GiveWell to address every detailed contrarian argument that actually humans surviving is bad or that welfare ought to be weighted by country or nationality or potential economic output or religion or proximity to the donor or any other mechanism dreamed up by people who have totally different axiomatic beliefs. It seems rather pointless for an organization focused on quantifying how effective organizations are at preserving human life to spend time explaining the precise nature of their disagreements with people holding the contrary belief that it would be better for humans not to live. Clearly there is no agreement to be found there.^[1]
I don’t think animal welfare charities should feel obliged to quantify possible negative impacts on human welfare of their activity in the interests of supposed impartiality either.
I would say animals matter a lot on non-hedonic views
I agree it is possible to conclude that animal welfare should be prioritised over human welfare using other moral frameworks. I actually find deontological arguments for prioritising animal welfare more convincing than ones filled with arbitrary utility estimates. But the specific framing of the argument you want GiveWell to address is based on total welfarist hedonism with valence symmetry and multiple ancillary assumptions about the relative moral weight of animal lives they clearly don’t agree with. Adding the expectation they engage with even more forms of argument that human life is bad would make the proposed standard of reasoning transparency more unreasonable to impose upon them, not less.
I don’t think GiveWell should apportion any more time to the question “what if it’s better for humans to die” than the Shrimp Welfare Project should to “what if shrimps don’t have welfare and all we’re doing is making human lives a little worse”. Both are clearly and transparently incommensurate with their beliefs, and people that think that humans don’t deserve to live given their dietary habits or that shrimps don’t have meaningful welfare ranges can always find and advocate different causes.
I also think one should be very wary of supporting interventions which can easily increase suffering a lot nearterm in the hope that integrating moral uncertainty makes it worthwhile.
I think one should be wary of diverting funding which fairly unambiguously decreases well-established sources of nearterm suffering on the basis of a set of guesses about welfare impacts on aquatic animals with pretty dissimilar biology.^[2]
I relied on the shrimp supply (production plus net imports) per capita in 2022
Nothing indicates that this supply statistic subtracts out exports. You linked to some total shrimp production stats, and an ambiguous source you caveated which suggests Indians consume half a kilo of shrimp per capita which would be the majority of their domestic product (despite the fact India is the world’s largest shrimp exporter and exports nearly all their produce). Elsewhere, I’ve seen it suggested India’s per capita consumption of shrimp is of the order of 100 grams (1.6% of overall seafood consumption). That’s less than a restaurant serving per person: it’s clearly not being transported to remote villages to be dished out to kids whose diet is so poor vitamin supplementation meaningfully increases their survival chances!
I suspect most recipients of GiveWell funding in India have never even seen a shrimp.
acknowledged the people helped by GiveWell and AIM would cause less harm to animals than random people, but I do think this resolves the meat-eater problem.
If the majority of people in India helped by GiveWell and AIM eat no aquaculture products which is likely true, then by the estimates you posted above, it resolves the meat eater problem as presented in this post for those people (specifically the net benefit in human DALYs is greater than the net harms caused to chicken welfare from egg and occasional meat consumption).^[3] I agree that you acknowledged that poor people consumed less, but only in the context of dismissing it as a relevant factor^[4]
And yes, your estimates don’t factor in future economic growth which could reasonably be expected to increase meat and shrimp consumption by a lot. But you also assume the Shrimp Welfare Project’s India-centred campaigns have no impact on the aquaculture practises they’re campaigning about despite heartily recommending them as effective!^[5]
I did not follow. I estimate saving lives in India would be harmful nearterm even for no consumption at all of shrimp
At the RP midpoint used in the table in your post, 3.05 of the 4.55 animal harms per year you estimate surviving Indians responsible will be responsible for are attributed to shrimp welfare ergo most^[6] of the quantifiable harm is based on [apparently incorrect] assumptions about shrimp consumption. I agree that this still estimates saving lives as net harmful, though it becomes net positive for the average Indian to live (yay!) under your estimates as soon as the rest of aquaculture is omitted from the equation. Which is not insignificant when there’s no scientific consensus about whether sea life experiences welfare at all, never mind how to quantify the impact of aquaculture.
1. ^
  if they were going to enormously expand the scope of their impact calculations to engage with people with fundamentally different starting axioms, it would probably be more productive to do additional calculations to engage with supporters of QALYs or “values of a statistical life”with lower weighting for the poor...
2. ^
  bearing in mind that there isn’t even scientific consensus on whether they experience welfare at all, never mind the welfare impact of aquaculture
3. ^
  to be fair there are other farmed animals like goats (which are considerably more likely to be consumed by poor non-vegetarians than farmed shrimp) left out of the calculations whose consumption animal welfare enthusiasts can reasonably attach negative weight to, although I don’t think those animals are often factory farmedin India.
4. ^
  I found the argument that as meat consumption was broadly correlated with GDP per capita and life satisfaction is also broadly correlated with GDP per capita unconvincing given the relatively small impact of GDP on satisfaction. If the beneficiaries are typically consuming negligible amounts of animal produce you can’t just write off the net benefit by assuming their lives can’t be worth living!
5. ^
  there seem to be quite a few reasons to believe that shrimp stunning practices actually will change over time in India (it’s not obviously costly, the SWP isn’t the only organization pushing it and seems to be getting at least some positive responses, and India is characterised by influential religions unusually receptive to arguments about invertebrate welfare)
6. ^
  (FWIW I also edited to removed the word “majority” whilst you were drafting your response to try to avoid confusion, though I don’t think it’s incorrect in the sense I’ve used it)

David T Dec 22, 2024, 6:30 PM
3 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
GiveWell’s moral weights do not depend on the country, which is highly controversial, in the sense the vast majority of people value humans in their country more. However, I would disagree with GiveWell changing their approach to align more closely with societal views, because I do not think welfare intrinsically depends on the country you are born (although the country one is born influences welfare).
You don’t seem to expect them to devote researcher and writer time towards “reasoning transparency” justifying treating all human lives of approximately equal value though? So I’m not sure why you would expect them to devote more time and effort to coming up with BOTECs to prove that this value is non-negative, an axiomatic GiveWell assumption which is no more hidden than your own longer list of axiomatic assumptions (hedonic welfare characterised by valence symmetry and the approximate accuracy of a long list of assumptions about how to quantify it is the one true way to allocate resources). If you think the meat-eater problem is a compelling reason to avoid averting human DALYs, you’re not going to GiveWell’s list of human DALY averting charities for inspiration any more than someone who believes that true charity begins with looking after people closest to you or involves religious salvation.
FWIW even if we accept your axioms there’s substantial reason to doubt your own conclusion (as you acknowledge with your “low confidence” statement) that saving human lives is bad. Most obviously, you appear to have imputed that the average Indian reliant on donations for lifesaving (typically in poverty) will grow up to consume shrimp (a relatively high-value foodstuff) roughly in proportion to the number of shrimp farms in India (which exports up to 95% of its shrimp production). That estimate that’s probably off by at least one order of magnitude accounts for a large fraction of your estimated negative impact of saving an Indian child’s life

David T Dec 22, 2024, 5:33 PM
2 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: Non-Profit Casino
I don’t see any reason to believe that the same amount of gambling would take place in aggregate. Most entertainment businesses grow the market and this one is promoting new motivations for potentially different people to participate in an activity which is often addictive. And if you’re running a bricks and mortar casino you’re facing the same high operating costs as the competition: I don’t see any reason to believe you’d reach profitability without putting in similar amounts of effort to entice new players, encourage people to return on days they weren’t planning to gamble and encouraging people to shovel more money into machines after they’ve already lost more than they planned.

David T Dec 20, 2024, 11:25 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Brad West🔸’s comment on: Non-Profit Casino
You could have a great night in which you win hundreds or thousands of dollars, but even if you lose, they know that your losses are helping to dramatically better the world.
A cynic reads this as “you could have a great night in which you deprive a few hundred people of malaria nets, but at least in the long run they and also random unrelated and typically obnoxious corporations might stand to benefit from the gambling addiction this has instilled in you....”. Possibly the first part of the proposition is slightly less icky if the house is simply taking a rake from a competitors in a game of skill, but still.
Maybe I just know too many people broken by gambling.

David T Dec 20, 2024, 5:14 PM
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Contrails: an underrated climate mitigation opportunity?
Thanks for the very interesting post.
I don’t work in commercial aviation any more, but can offer a few pointers
- Eurocontrol are exactly the people you want taking this seriously—they regulate European airspace. So whilst I think it probably is neglected relative to other climate proposals in terms of funding vs estimated impact, it may not be neglected by the right people.
- For related reasons, I think it’s way more tractable than most interventions: changing altitude under certain conditions is a lot easier than dissuading people from flying or consuming. And there is an established track record of regulators enforcing environmental rules and costs like noise restrictions and NOx emissions charges (along with sticks governments haven’t beat them with yet like carbon taxing jet fuel)
- On the other hand it seems like it’s actually true the current state of scientific consensus hasn’t resolved the important question of when and where to divert yet (see the variability factors in your infographic) and the diversion usually does result in increased fuel burn (and some contrails are even cooling!) And flight directions are a complex multidimesional problem
- Airspace controllers will need to be involved because airlines are unlikely to do anything voluntarily that impacts their profit margins (which are on average small anyway) regardless of how settled the science. In general, being “greener” through lower fuel consumption actually saves them money; this is an obvious exception.
  - An indirect “stick” approach like levying fines or additional charges on airlines causing contrails whilst passing through particular airspace sounds neat, but whilst theoretically contrails observed from the ground or orbit can be matched to ADS-B readings of aircraft that recently passed through that space, systematically validating that in a legally-valid way in congested airspace seems tricky...
- I can’t see it being practical to achieve via consumer pressure and wider public awareness campaigns run the risk of getting mixed up with “chemtrails” conspiracy theories
  - If you want a possible exception to airline lack of sympathy, a UK startup airline Zeroavia is owned by eco-activist billionaire Dale Vince. Their hydrogen powered fleet claims they already intend to capture water emissions to release at lower altitude ^[1] for the stated purpose of avoiding contrails. Zeroavia are a very atypical airline, currently have zero flights and I’m not sure how much aviation industry executives actually respect Dale, but if you wanted to outreach to an airline that actually might be sympathetic and see PR benefits of shouting about contrails, they’d be a starting point
So I think there’s definitely something to be worked on here, but its going to take industry experts more than grassroots campaigning. I think there are probably some really interesting algorithm development projects there for people with the right skillsets too…
(For anyone interested in space, an analogous situation is the aluminium oxide deposited in the mesosphere by deorbiting spacecraft. This used to be negligible. It isn’t now that constellations of 10s of 1000s of satellites with short design lives in LEO are a thing. The climate impact is uncertain and not necessarily large but probably negative; the impact on ozone depletion could be much more concerning. Changing mindsets on that one will be harder)
1. ^
  which sounds seriously expensive to me....

David T Dec 19, 2024, 9:12 PM
−2 points
2 ∶ 1
on: Question about deontology
Clearly consciously sacrificing a life and unintentionally setting in motion a very indirect chain of events which leads to someone dying are not the same thing, especially in deontology which cares much more about rules and principles than effects.
Frankly butterfly effects are a bigger problem for forms of consequentialism/utilitarianism, where you do care solely about ends, and are faced with the problem that not only might the utility impact of all those “butterfly effects” you cause vastly exceed the ways you try to help people, but if you choose to factor them in they also raise the prospect that whether you’re a moral person or not is completely incalculable...

David T Dec 18, 2024, 8:23 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Seeking Support: Help Fish Welfare Initiative Develop Remote Sensing Technology
Hi FWI. I have actually worked on both Earth Observation projects and projects looking at other forms of remote sensing for assessing water quality in aquaculture (but don’t have the technical skillset to participate in your challenge). A few (hopefully helpful) points:
- any sort of useful model is going to require calibrating against background data on the variables you select (particularly as you appear to be working with small, shallow freshwater pools which have different appearance in visual spectrum imagery that probably represents differences in factors other than those you’re quantifying e.g. mineral content and depth)
  - since obviously any past water quality shared is going to be highly correlated with the current water quality in a given pool, it would make sense to evaluate models on their ability to pick up change from previous levels in future samples using future images rather than simply on predicting which pools have the most ammonia....
  - the more observations you can share, the better the chance the model actually works
- the variables you’ve highlighted are theoretically detectable using EO, but they’re relatively weak indicators perturbed by other stronger indicators and things like weather (at least it’s normally sunny there!). Depending on how much water you collect at how many points in the farm, presumably there’s some natural variation in the samples you collect too.
- free satellite imagery such as Copernicus typically has 1 pixel representing 10-20m on the ground so some of your lakes might be only about 2-4 pixels accross. Large pixel sizes don’t necessarily stop major changes in water quality being picked up in multispectral imagery (and aren’t necessarily an issue if you’re measuring the sea surrounding a coastal fish farm, but it’s going to significantly affect the fidelity of your results. Unfortunately, I suspect commercial imagery (spatial resolutions more of the order of 0.5m pixels) is outside your budget
- if you’re currently only occasionally collecting data, satellite revisit rate should be fine
I wouldn’t be hugely optimistic about success in the short term as I suspect the scope of what you’re looking at is a lot more subtle than “spot the effects of leachate on the massive lake” and the data you have so far may not be enough

David T Dec 17, 2024, 9:22 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: My Problem with Veganism and Deontology
The other problem with the “indirect enough” argument is that the donations are even more indirect
Sure, the meat people eat is usually killed long before it’s ordered and eating a few dozen chickens per year doesn’t individually shift an industry. But likewise, a $1000 donation doesn’t meaningfully affect an advocacy charity’s ability to win a court case.
Both only work in aggregate, and on a causal basis the link between meat demand and factory farming is much more robustly-established than advocacy charity income and relative absence of factory farms^[1]
And standards for crediting impact need to be stricter here because multiple counting is a much more meaningful problem than when an altruistic donor is deciding where to donate
This is a good point too. If you’re using donations to prioritise in a counterfactual scenario, what part of the outcome is actually “your impact” is irrelevant. If you’re using them to buy indulgences, that’s less obviously the case.
1. ^
  on a money basis it’s less certain, but I still don’t think vegan diets are dramatically more expensive than meat ones, and the DALY impact of eating half a chicken doesn’t seem to be very different from favourable estimates of DALY impact of a dollar donation to Legal Impact for Chickens…