david_reinstein

• david_reinstein 25 Mar 2024 19:52 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Fore­cast Which Psy­chol­ogy Stud­ies Repli­cate With Me­tac­u­lus for the Trans­par­ent Repli­ca­tions Project

  Amanda Metskas and Clare Harris will present on this today by the way—https://​​www.unjournal.org/​​news/​​transparent-replications-and-open-science

• david_reinstein 16 Mar 2024 17:00 UTC

  28 points

  8 ∶ 0

  on: New video: You’re richer than you realise

  Great video, will share!

  One question – in the interviews you incorporated, people stated that they thought it would be very expensive to save a life (£100k+) and even more (!) internationally.
  
  Was this the norm? Because in the academic research I’ve seen people tend to state very low amounts, vastly underestimating the true (~£5k) cost. (This also seems to be happening iirc in my own ongoing work with Janek Kretschmer and Paul Smeets. Also why I was interested in seeing someone develop a “how much does it cost to save a life quiz and calculator”?)
  
  If this £100k+ estimate was fairly normal in your street interviews, I’m wondering if you framed this in a particular way, or whether you stated something before asking them this question that made them think of these larger numbers. Potential useful to know how to frame this question for other research work and other contexts so that people are getting at ‘what we really mean by cost to save a life’.

• david_reinstein 16 Mar 2024 16:26 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ma­ter­nal Health Ini­ti­a­tive is Shut­ting Down

  Thanks for this detailed report. It’s likely to be helpful to other organizations to understand the reasoning and evidence base behind this in considering whether to start or fund adjacent projects. Il

  Some things that woukd also be nice com apologise if you already did this.

  Can you share your data and code or spread sheets in case other researchers or founders want to revisit this? potentially this is something students and academic researchers would want to help you with.

  You often report pre-values and a “lack of significant difference”. Of course, this could be driven by lack of statistical power in small samples. it would be helpful if you could report, confidence intervals for these. if you have the bandwidth, it would be helpful if you could do some equivalent test or even Bayesian analysis in a decision framework.

• david_reinstein 11 Mar 2024 16:09 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Find­ing EA-rele­vant eco­nomics sem­i­nars: cu­rated lists?

  Someone reminded me about NE&EP Normative Economics and Economic Policy. This is a good and useful seminar series, and helpfully, they do post their topics.
  It tends to be more focused on economic theory, but not exclusively so.
  
  That said, I’m mainly looking for in-person opportunities atm, in part to help build and maintain ties and contacts, in part to have something that I actually do in ‘meat space’.
  
  But I generally am very supportive of online or hybrid presentations and conferences. And if we were to make a curated list, we should include both.

[Question] Find­ing EA-rele­vant eco­nomics sem­i­nars: cu­rated lists?

• david_reinstein 9 Mar 2024 16:43 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Some im­por­tant re­search ques­tions in economics

  Thanks for this. We are trying to prioritize this work for evaluation, feedback and rating at Unjournal.org. Aiming to incorporate your suggestions soon.

• david_reinstein 9 Mar 2024 0:04 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: david_reinstein’s comment on: Eco­nomics of An­i­mal Welfare: Call for Abstracts

  We now have a good team in this area (still looking for more).

  We’re now particular interested in people submitting and suggesting research in this area for The Unjournal to evaluate.

• david_reinstein 7 Mar 2024 22:33 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What do XPT fore­casts tell us about AI risk?

  I’m going through the hosted paper (“Forecasting Existential Risks”) and making some comments in hypothes.is (see here).
  
  I first thought I saw something off, but now see that it’s because of the difference between total extinction risk vs catastrophic risk. For the latter, the superforecasters are not so different from the domain experts (about 2:1). Perhaps this could be emphasized more.
  
  Putting this in a ‘data notebook/​dashboard’ presentation could be helpful in seeing these distinctions.

• david_reinstein 25 Feb 2024 0:07 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Can we help in­di­vi­d­ual peo­ple cost-effec­tively? Our trial with three sick kids

  Could this could be made even close to cost-effective and scaleable? If so, I think it has strong potential appeal. Perhaps not so much to hard-core rationalists and EAs, but as a bridge to making mainstream donation more effective. From this perspective, I’m more optimistic about your ‘hands on charity’ proposal.
  
  I discussed this concept in a 2021 post a while back (see especially ‘my proposal sketch’). Wonder what you think.

• david_reinstein 8 Feb 2024 20:10 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Diet that is ve­gan, fru­gal, time-effi­cient, ~ev­i­dence-based and as­cetic: An ex­am­ple of a non-Huel EA diet?

  Curious about the “rescue meat” thing.

  My take is that buying “about-to-expire meat on discount when in the grocery store” incentivizes meat production less than buying expensive super-fresh premium meat.

  On the other hand, stores that visibly see meat rotting on the shelves may be (emotionally?) inclined to reduce their meat orders in the future.

• david_reinstein 8 Feb 2024 20:07 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Diet that is ve­gan, fru­gal, time-effi­cient, ~ev­i­dence-based and as­cetic: An ex­am­ple of a non-Huel EA diet?

  What does raisins have to do with “building muscle in my core”?

• david_reinstein 28 Jan 2024 1:21 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Agustín Covarrubias’s comment on: Surgery Works Well Without The FDA

  Yes to that footnote but the original abbreviation is confusing. It should be something like “disease adjustments to life years” .. not “disease adjusted life years”. Bc life years are good in general.

• david_reinstein 26 Jan 2024 22:30 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: ‘Ex­is­ten­tial Risk and Growth’ Deep Dive #2 - A Crit­i­cal Look at Model Conclusions

  Ideally, someone who is an expert both in economic growth theory and existential risk would do a really deep analysis of the model presented in the paper, but in the absence of this we feel that giving our thoughts on this is useful.

  Do you still believe this is the case? Any updates on the relevance etc?

• david_reinstein 26 Jan 2024 15:12 UTC

  6 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Round­ing Up Effec­tively at Supermarkets

  I think this would be challenging, but might be worth pursuing, or at least trying, for the learning value. It involves the project of social change, changing attitudes and engaging the non-EA community, learning about their attitudes towards widening moral circles, the ways they are misinformed about the effectiveness of GH&D charities in LMICs (and maybe about farmed animals, etc.; although that could be a stretch) and whether this drives their attitudes or the other way around (see my project here on ‘barriers to effective giving’.
  
  This sort of project that could be attempted by students/​student groups or part-time volunteers, and it might be motivating and fun. E.g., I thought, “in UK university towns, where students often come from around the world, why do the local coops almost always only have a box for ‘local charities’”

  
  Ideally, they would do so in a coordinated to organize and their efforts, collect and share their insights, etc.
  
  Somewhat relevant to the EA Market Testing project, which is not currently very active. (However, Lucas Moore at GWWC is coordinating some efforts and collaboration and this might be relevant to him/​them.)

• david_reinstein 23 Jan 2024 16:21 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: SummaryBot’s comment on: Pre­sen­ta­tion—The Un­jour­nal: Bridg­ing the gap be­tween EA and academia

  A pretty good AI generated summary of my largely AI generated post.

Pre­sen­ta­tion—The Un­jour­nal: Bridg­ing the gap be­tween EA and academia

• david_reinstein 22 Jan 2024 18:38 UTC

  8 points

  3 ∶ 1

  on: Grant­mak­ers should give more feedback

  I mostly agree with you on the 2nd order consequences. But also, I think a bit of feedback is usually justified even considering the first-order consequences, as I mainly argued in the comment here to Linch’s post, and others had similar comments.
  
  Another perspective: many grant applicants and potentially impactful entrepreneurial EAs may waste a lot of time exploring a very dark space. They may spend a lot of time writing and rewriting proposals.
  
  They do not know whether they are ‘close to being fundable’ or very far from it, so they don’t know:
  
  - When to give up
  - How much to make backup/​fallback plans
  - How to change their plans/​proposal
  - How much to ‘jump’ in adjusting their proposal in this dark space … whether to make small or large adjustment
  - In what direction to adjust
  
  

• david_reinstein 21 Jan 2024 2:07 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: So­cial sci­ence re­search on an­i­mal welfare we’d like to see

  Thanks, this is relevant for researchers and people funding research and prioritizing/​evaluating it. This includes Unjournal.org; we are looking to prioritize the evaluation of research relevant to animal welfare, and we have built/​are building a ‘field specialist’ team focusing on this.
  
  Some expansion on the theory of change/​paths to impact/​logic model for some of the leading cases could be particularly helpful. (You mention we should reach out to Martin Gould on this—I plan to do so.)

  While some of these might be amenable to simpler ‘desk research’ (literature reviews, simple BOTECs, coalescing information), I think many of the more interesting ones could require some heavier lifting in terms of research depth and methodological expertise. I’m not saying the ’80% of the ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ research’ would not necessarily have value here, but it is my sense is that more in=depth rigorous work may be warranted, and potentially worth funding.

  For example:
  

  By how many years do animal welfare corporate commitmets speed up reforms that might eventually happen anyway due to factors like government policy, individual consumer choices, or broad moral change?

  This is a challenging causal inference question; while case studies and ‘plausible inference’ from qualitative approaches could have value. It could also potentially be addressed quantitatively with methods like difference-in-differences, synthetic panels, and natural experiments. This might also require some expertise in dynamic/​time-series models. It seems high-value, given that funding corporate campaigns have been claimed to be among the highest-impact animal welfare opportunities.

  What percentage of people will be veg*n in 20, 50, or 100 years?

  I guess the ToC here is that this informs the priority one should give to interventions to improve farmed-animal welfare conditions … because ’if most people are vegan anyways, it matters less. Or perhaps this is about the cost side of increasing global prosperity (meat-eaters dilemma) or supporting pro vs anti-natal policies?
  
  I suspect predicting this out 100 years will be extremely difficult, in the sense that quantitative models and expertise might have little value. But for 10 or 20 years out, I think social science modeling expertise could be meaningful.

  But some of the other questions seem more straightforwardly amenable to quantitative social science work, including careful and feasible RCTs, and sometimes non-RCT causal inference methods, and Bayesian statistical inference and presentation. E.g.,

  How impactful would it be to get already sympathetic celebrities to speak up more on animal welfare?

  Looking at simple before/​after comparisons, or aggregating casual media reporting on this could be misleading. An RCT here seems feasible.

  ...What is the impact on sales of labeling laws that restrict the terms that can be used to describe/​sell PBMAs and other plant-based products?

  This seems like something mainstream academic/​professional economists might consider or already be considering, perhaps in conjunction with legislative testimony or court cases. It seems amenable to formal empirical analysis, perhaps in the ‘empirical industrial organization/​quantitative marketing’ literatures. But it is by no means simple… to estimate impact on quantities sold, considering competitive price responses, responses of substitute products, time trends and seasonality, etc.

[Question] Sugges­tions for non­profit bud­get­ing/​ac­counts/​le­gal courses/​MOOCs/​material

• david_reinstein 10 Jan 2024 23:35 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An­nounc­ing Con­fido 2.0: Pro­mot­ing the un­cer­tainty-aware mind­set in orgs

  Any chance for a Slack plugin?