PhD in Economics (focus on applied economics and climate & resource economics in particular) & MSc in Environmental Engineering & Science. Key interests: Interface of Economics, Moral Philosophy, Policy. Public finance, incl. optimal redistribution & tax competition. Evolution. Consciousness. AI/ML/Optimization. Debunking bad Statistics & Theories. Earn my living in energy economics & finance and by writing simulation models.
FlorianH
The post mentions
Giving Green agrees with the consensus EA view that the framing of “offsetting personal emissions” is unhelpful
To some degree such a consensus seems natural, though I believe the issues with the idea of offsetting do not automatically mean helping people in search specifically of effective (or thus maybe least ineffective) offsetting possibilities is by nature ineffective.
I wonder: is the mentioned “consensus” detailed/made most obvious in any particular place(s) - blog, article, … ?
Thanks, interesting case!
1. We might have loved to see the cartel here succeed, but we should probably still be thankful for the more general principle underlying the ruling:
As background, it should be mentioned that it is a common thing to use so-called green policies/standards for disguised protectionist measures, aka green protectionism: protecting local/domestic industry by imposing certain rules, often with minor environmental benefits (as here at least according to the ruling), but helping to keep out (international) competition.
So for the ‘average’ citizen, say those for whom animal welfare may be relevant but not nearly as central as for many EAs, the principles underlying the ruling seem very sensible. Potentially even crucial for well-functioning international trade without an infinitude of arbitrary rules just to rip off local consumers.
Governmental policy (minimal welfare standards) is the place for addressing the public goods problem that Paul and other commentators describe: here that would mean binding animal welfare standards, agreed in the democratic process.
2. An potentially much larger issue w.r.t. trading laws preventing higher welfare standards, is related to WTO/GATT rules, making it (seemingly) ambiguous whether a country is even allowed to politically raise welfare standards and apply these to imports (which is necessary for the effectiveness of the domestic rule):
Free trade rules are regularly used by industry lobbies to delegitimize proposals for higher domestic animal welfare standards, with the claim that imposing welfare restrictions on imported foods would be impossible as it violated free trade rules. In reality, it is not trivial to interpret the relevant paragraphs of the trade agreements & case rulings, although I would imagine it to be difficult for anyone to attack a country for imposing high-welfare standards in a reasonably transparent way; nevertheless, the uncertainty around the issue is being successfully abused in the political discourse.
I find “new enlightenment” very fitting. But wonder whether it might at times be perceived as a not very humble name (must not be a problem, but I wonder whether some, me included, might at times end up feeling uncomfortable calling ourselves part of it).
Love the endeavor. But the calculation method really should be changed before anyone interested in the quantification of the combined CO2+animal suffering harm should use it, in my opinion: a weighted product model is inappropriate to express the total harm level of two independent harms, I really think you want to not multiply CO2 and animal suffering harm, but instead separately sum them, with whichever weight the user chooses. In that sense, I fully agree with what MichaelStJules also mentioned. But I want to give an example that makes this very clear—and please let me know if instead, it seems like I misread your calculation details in https://foodimpacts.org/methods :
Imagine a product A with 0 CO2 but a huge animal suffering impact, B with huge CO2 but 0 suffering, and C with non-zero but tiny impact on both dimensions. Your weighting would favor either A or B (or both), while for any rational person C would necessarily be preferable. Your WPM may sound nicer in theory but it cannot be applied here, I’d really want to see it changed before considering the model usable for quantitative indications of the harm on a general level!
NB: I actually have an interest in using your model in the medium-term future! We’re trying to set up an animal food welfare compensation scheme, and happen to have CO2 on our list in addition to animal suffering itself, www.foodoffset.org (very much work in progress).
Thanks, I think antipathy effects towards the name “Effective Altruism”, or worse, “I’m an effective altruist”, are difficult to overstate.
Also, somewhat related to what you write I happen to have thought to myself just today: “I (and most of us are) am just as much an effective egoist as an effective altruist”, after all even the holiest of us probably cannot always help ourselves putting a significantly higher weight on our own welfare than on those of average strangers.
Nevertheless, some potential upside of the current term – equally I’m not sure it matters much at all, but I attribute a small chance to them being really important: If some people are kept away by the name’s bit geeky/partly unfashionable connotation, maybe these are exactly the people that would anyways be mostly distractors. I think the bit narrow EA community has this extraordinary vibe along a few really important dimensions, and it seems invaluable (in that sense while RyanCarey mentions we may not attract the core audience with different names, I find the problem might be more another way round, we might simply dilute the core).
Maybe I’m completely overestimating this, and maybe it’s not outweighing at all the downside of attracting/appealing to fewer. But in a world where the lack of fruitful communication threatens entire social systems, maybe having a particularly strong core in that regard is highly valuable.
Surprised to see nothing (did I overlook?) about: The People vs. The Project/Job: The title, and the lead sentence,
Some people seem to achieve orders of magnitudes more than others in the same job.
suggest the work focuses essentially on people’s performance, but already in the motivational examples
For instance, among companies funded by Y Combinator the top 0.5% account for more than ⅔ of the total market value; and among successful bestseller authors [wait, it’s their books, no?], the top 1% stay on the New York Times bestseller list more than 25 times longer than the median author in that group.
(emphasis and [] added by me)
I think I have not explicitly seen discussed whether at all it is the people, or more the exact project (the startup, the book(s)) they work on, that is the successful element, although the outcome is a sort of product of the two. Theoretically, in one (obviously wrong) extreme case: Maybe all Y-Combinator CEOs were similarly performing persons, but some of the startups simply are the right projects!
My gut feeling is that making this fundamental distinction explicit would make the discussion/analysis of performance more tractable.
Addendum:
Of course, you can say, book writers and scientists, startuppers, choose each time anew what next book and paper to write, etc., and this choice is part of their ‘performance’, so looking at their output’s performance is all there is. But this would be at max half-true in a more general sense of comparing the general capabilities of the persons, as there are very many drivers that lead persons to very specific high-level domains (of business, of book genres, etc.) and/or of very specific niches therein, and these may have at least as much to do with personal interest, haphazard personal history, etc.
I also wonder about the same thing. Further Pledge does not answer this particular desire of committing to a limited personal annual consumption while potentially saving for particular—or yet to be defined—causes later on. This can make sense also if one believes one’s future view on what to donate towards being significantly more enlightened.
I could see such a pledge to not consume above X/year to be valued not overly much by third parties, as we cannot trust our future selves so much I guess, and even investing in own endeavors, even if officially EA, might at times be quite self-indulgent in some ways.
Still, I guess it would be possible to invest one’s money into an EA-aligned fund that would later be able to disburse money only to aligned causes, incl. possibly your own project. That could provide some value in some situations.
Maybe it’d be easier, and worthwhile, to simply have an organization collecting pledges (and accompany one’s verification of it) to not spend more than X/year; I think there might be a bunch of people interested in it.
Part of your critique is mostly valid in cases where donors have a fixed donation budget and allocate it to the best cause they come across, taking into account a potential leverage factor. I wonder whether instead a lot of the donors—mind EAs are rare—donate on a whim, incentivized by the announcement of the matching, without that they would have donated that money anywhere else with any particularly high probability.
I see another critique to apply with the schemes that have matching “up to a specified level, say $500,000”, and I think you have not mentioned exactly that one explicitly. That additional critique is as follows: If that level of $500k is expected to be reached in due time, then anyone whose donation had been matched before the fund ran dry, has in fact led not to a total donation increase > his personal contribution, but instead in fact to one < than his personal contribution (in the most extreme case 0): because of his donation, the fund has run dry a bit earlier, leaving room for one other person less to donate within the scheme; the total matchmaker contribution remains anyway $500k, but one third person less was incentivized to contribute (because you ‘dried out’ the matching fund earlier). So the matching in reality means your donation has had less impact rather than more, even if you and all donors would not have had other opportunities to donate, i.e. even independently of what I see as one of the main critiques you mention.
Just re Anxiety prevalence: It seems to me that Anxiety would be a kind of continuum, and you may be able to say 50% of people are suffering from anxiety or 5%, depending on where you make the cutoff. Your description implicitly seems to support exactly this view (“Globally, 284 million people—3.8% of all people—have anxiety disorders. Other estimates suggest that this might be even higher: according to the CDC, 11% of U.S. adults report regular feelings of worry, nervousness, or anxiety and ~19% had any anxiety disorder in the past year according to the NIH and Anxiety and Depression Association of America.”), plus maybe that the Anxiety America guys like to quote impressive numbers for their domain. ⇒ Could be useful if you found more tangible ways to express what’s going on anxiety-wise in how many heads.
I find this a rather challenging post, even if I like the high-level topic a lot! I didn’t read the entire linked paper, but I’d be keen to understand whether you think you can make a concise, simple argument as to why my following view may be missing sth crucial that immediately follows from the Harsanyi vs. Rawls debate (if you think it does; feel free to ignore):
The Harsanyi 1975 paper which your linked post also cites (and which I recommend to any EA), is a great and rather complete rebuttal of Rawls core maximin-claim. The maximin principle, if taken seriously, can trivially be seen to lead to all sorts of preposterous choices that are quite miraculously improved by adding a smaller or larger portion of utilitarianism (one does by no means need to be a full utilitarian to agree with this), end of story.
Thank you! I was actually always surprised by H’s mention of the taxation case as an example where maximin would be (readily) applicable.
IMHO, exactly what he explains in the rest of the article, can also be used to see how optimal taxation/public finance should rather only in exceptional cases be using a maximin principle as the proxy rule for a good redistributive process.
On the other hand, if you asked me whether I’d be happy if our actual very flawed tax/redistribution systems would be reformed such as to conform to the maximin—es, I’d possibly very happily agree on the latter, simply as a lesser of two evils. And maybe that’s part of the point; in this case, fair enough!
I find it a GREAT idea (have not tested it yet)!
I miss a clear definition of economic growth here, and the discussion strongly reminds me of the environmental resources focused critique of growth that has started with 1970′s Club of Rome—Limits to Growth, there might be value to examine the huge literature around that topic that has been produced ever since on such topics.
Economic growth = increase in market value, is a typical definition.
Market value can increase if we paint the grey houses pink, or indeed if we design good computer games, or if we find great drugs to constantly awe use in insanely great ways without downsides. Or maybe indeed if we can duplicate/simulate brains which derive lot of value, say, literally out of thin air—and if we decide to take into account their blissful state also in our growth measure.
If we all have our basic needs met, and are rich way beyond it, willingness to pay for some new services may become extremely huge; even for the least important services—merely as we have nothing to do with our wealth, and as we’re willing to pay so little on the margin for the traditional ‘basic’ goods who are (in my scenario assumed to be) abundant and cheaply produced.
So the quantitative long-run extent of “economic growth” then becomes a bit an arbitrary thing: economic growth potentially being huge, but the true extra value possibly being limited.
‘Economic growth’ may therefore be too intangible, too arbitrary a basis for discussing the nature of long-run fate of human (or what ever supersedes us) development.
Maybe we should revert back to directly discussing limits to increase in utility (as come comments here already do).
Incentivizing Donations through Mutual Matching
You’re right. I see two situations here:
(i) the project has a strict upper limit on funding required. In this case, if you must (a) limit the pool of participants, and/or (b) their allowed contribution scales, and/or (c) maybe indeed the leverage progression, meaning you might incentivize people less strongly.
(ii) the project has strongly decreasing ‘utility’-returns for additional money (at some point). In this case, (a), (b), (c) from above may be used, or in theory you as organizer could simply not care: your funding collection leverage still applies, but you let donors judge whether they find they discount the leverage for large contributions, as they judge the value of the money being less valuable on the upper tail; they may then accordingly decide to not contribute, or to contribute with less.
Finally, there is simply the possibility to use a cutoff point, above which the scheme simply must be cancelled, to address the issue that you raise, or the one I discuss in the text: to prevent individual donors to have to contribute excessive amounts, when more than expected commitments are received. If that cutoff point is high enough so that it is unlikely enough to be reached, you as organizer may be happy to accept it. Of course one could then think about dynamics, e.g. cooling-off period before you can re-run the cancelled collection, without indirectly (too strongly) undermining the true marginal effect in a far-sighted assessment of the entire situation.
In reality: I fear even with this scheme, if in some cases it hopefully turns to be practical, many public goods problems remain underfunded (hopefully simply a bit less strongly) rather than overfunded, so, I’m so far not too worried about that one.
From what I read, Snowdrift is not quite “doing this”, at least not in as far as the main aim here in Mutual Matching is to ask more from a participant only if leverage increases! But there are close links, thanks for pointing out the great project!
Snowdrift has people contribute as an increasing function of the # of co-donors, but the leverage, which is implicit, stays constant = 2, always (except for those cases where it even declines if others’ chosen upper bounds are being surpassed), if my quick calculation is right (pretty sure*). This may or may not be a good idea with +- rational contributors (either way, I btw think it would be valuable for transparency to indicate this leverage explicitly to readers of the snowdrift page, it’s a crucial factor for donors imho). Pragmatically it may turn out to be a really useful simplification though.
Here instead, Mutual Matching tries to motivate people by ensuring that they donate more only as leverage really increases. I see this as key innovation also relative to Buchholz et al. (maybe worth looking at that paper, it might be closer to snowdrift, as it also does not make donations directly conditional on leverage I think, tbc). As I discuss, this has pros and cons; the main risk being that the requested donation increases quickly with the leverage and thus with the # of participants.
Thanks to your links I just saw also the Rational Street Performer Protocol, which I should also look at, even if it equally seems to focus on donating more as more is given in total, rather than like here explicitly as leverage is increased; it makes the timing question very explicit, which is a dimension I have here not much looked at yet.
Will expand the text & make the connections to both asap!
*snowdrift: Each gives 0.1 ct per participant, meaning for 1000 (or 5000) you give 1$ (or 5$) and thanks to you all these others give 1$ (or $5) more in total than without you, i.e. extra leverage of constantly 1 in addition to your own contribution itself, meaning total leverage of your contribution = 2 always.
Research vegan cat food as ideal EA cause!? Might also be ideal for human vegan future as ‘side’-effect too.
Cats are obligate carnivores; must eat meat (or animal products) according to typical recommendations (and cats tend to refuse most non-animal foods). At least, there seems to exist no vegan cat food that is recommended as a main diet for cats without further warnings; often cats would seem to not accept mostly non-animal foods
I guess—but am not sure (?) - animals fed to cats mean significantly more animals are grown in factory farms
Somewhat counterintuitively, in the whole cat food domain, the concept of animal welfare standards, does not even seem to exist. You can find some seemingly higher-welfare standard products but they are extremely rare
Even if often large shares of the ingredients are “chicken meal”, “fish meal” etc., I guess lots of this meal one way or another still could have been replacing some human foods in some places. What I have definitely seen, often major shares of ingredients in the cat foods are “meat” and not just inner organs or broth (although I cannot exclude that ‘meal’-based ones may dominate total sales volumes)
I guess we’re pretty good feed all sorts of animal pieces to (i) ourselves in sausages, chicken nuggets, and the like and/or (ii) other food industry animals. So my prior is that cats do not only get stuff that is completely redundant in the food industry.
I calculate* (very rough) for ca. 220 mio. house cats worldwide, and considering 50% of their meat food to correspond to extra meat production, 6 600 ton/day quality-adjusted meat consumption, or around 0.9% of human’s meat consumption.
The few articles I read online about to which degree cats require a meat diet, point mainly to elements that sound like those that we can easily mix/synthesise from non-animal foods and chemical processes (Taurine, Vitamins A, Arginine, Niacin, maybe some other fatty/amino-acids)
Oddly, the pages tend to list these few elements, insisting that therefore the cat must eat meat, while I’d think: “Euhm, if it’s just that, it would seem simple to mix the right thing” ⇒ maybe the pages just do not enter into more subtle details that are crucial for an obligate carnivore
IMHO, we could very easily test out food/supplements mixtures to check how easily one can replace which share of meat for cats without impairing their health. Given the billions of factory animal lives at stake, even some risk for the corresponding “test animals” might be completely justifiable in the worst case, and naive me thinks we might make extremely quick progress on this front if we really want
If we nail this, the positive side-effects could be: “Hey look, they even feed the obligate carnivores with this mix nowadays, surely you can also become vegan with zero hesitation with a human adjusted formula!”—i.e. finally the stories of your vegan friend who end up at the doctor who recommends him to eat meat (!) etc. could finally really be stories only of the past. (I know many think it already is; maybe you’re right; but I know in practice at least for many this is simply not how they see it)
In fact, for each of (i) the cat-not-eating animals, and (ii) side-effect for human diet, I’d not be surprised if expediently trying to get vegan food that even cats can eat, would be justified
EA dietitians, am I just naive or could this be a thing?
I reckon one drawback of an ideal vegan cat diet could be that many more might want to keep cats. I see some possibilities on net impact from cats+food directly then:
Only few more cats: lower net animal consumption and lower net land-use and lower food costs for poor people (and for cat holders)
Much more cats: vegan diet more than offsetting the spared animal food industry footprint, i.e. larger net land-use change for agriculture, higher food prices for poor
Whether house cats are at all net “happy” or not, I do not know.
* Calculation, based on rough values:
220 mio domestic cats (ignoring 480 mio stray)
3 kg avg. weight (might be slightly low side)
2% of cat weight meat food/day
=60g/cat daily meat = 30g/cat daily “extra” animal meat if quality-adjusting with 50% (see text above)
=6 600 t/day extra meat productionAnd with approx. 90g meat/day per human (beef veal pork poultry and sheep acc. to OECD) for the 8 bn humans, i.e. with 750 000 t meat/day human consumption, the cat’s share is
= 0.9%, bit simplistically approximated.
What about this to reduce the pbly often overwhelming stigma attached to showcasing one’s own donations?!
Maybe the main issue is that I’m showing off with the amount I donate, rather than towards which causes. So: Just show where to, or maybe which share to where I donate, avoiding to show the absolute amount of donations.
Ok, so you do your donations, I do some other donations. But: You showcase my donations, I showcase yours. No clue whether that’s stupid and not much better than simply not showing any personal donations. Maybe then, a bunch of us are donating to whatever each of us likes, but each of us simply showcases the group’s aggregate donations: “Hey, I’m in this group of five and it donated these amounts to here and here; I gave only a small share, but you could participate in sth similar”.
Couldn’t agree more with
In my impression, the most influential argument of the camp against the initiative was that factory farming just doesn’t exist in Switzerland.[2] Even if it was only one of but not the most influential argument, I think this speaks volumes about both the (current) debate culture
In a similar direction, there’s more that struck me as rather discouraging in terms of intelligent public debate:
In addition to this lie you pointed to apparently being popular*, from my experience in discussions about the initiative, the population also showed a basic inability to follow most basic logical principles:
Even many of the kindest people who would not want to harm animals, believed, as a sort of fundamental principle, it’d be bad to prescribe what animals people can and cannot eat, thinking that, therefore, it is fundamentally not okay to impose (such) animal welfare protection measures.
All while no single person (there will be the odd exception; but it really is an exception) would have claimed that the existing animal welfare laws would be unwarranted/should be abolished/relaxed.
Indeed, I think I’m not the only one to whom the nudge towards eating more fully vegan would seem a highly welcome side-effect of a stay in the hotel.