Former math student at the University of Utah. Now teaching, but with hopes for something a bit more impactful.
Hank_B
Karma: 135
[Question] Help with an ordinary career
Honestly, I only know of a few organizations here. MSI, PSI, and planned parenthood international are the ones coming to mind. I think there are more. There’s one newer organization that is buying radio ads to encourage usage of contraception which might be cheaper than supply-side provision of contraception. It might be Development Media International (https://www.developmentmedia.net/what-we-do/focus-areas/) that I’m thinking of.
That’s a good question. Some other organizations I’ve seen in this scene do things other than family planning (the one that comes to mind is population service international (PSI)), so using the numbers from a more “pure” family planning org like MSI probably gets a better cost per life prevented than say using the numbers from PSI? But other than that, I haven’t done much comparative work here and don’t have solid recommendations.
Yeah, I think this is a huge source of uncertainty that could push in the opposite direction. Additionally, I think that maybe more people being born than the counterfactual could increase the chances of space colonization? And that might massively expand suffering (spread wild animals throughout space, digital minds maybe, …) but that has even more uncertainty to go along with its larger magnitude.
Maybe Family Planning Charities Are Better For Farmed Animals Than Animal Welfare Ones
B12 deficiency is common among people who don’t eat meat, eggs, or diary and has some nasty potential results: fatigue, nerve damage, anemia, higher risk of strokes, etc.
Supplementing b12 either through pills or fortified foods seems pretty important for anyone not eating many animal products.
To explain why I retracted: I re-read your original post and noticed that you were talking about salience, and I think you’re probably right that this isn’t a very salient aspect of the process. At first, I thought you were saying something like ‘the steps occur sequentially, so the suggestion of the post can’t be implemented’ which seems wrong. But ‘the steps occur sequentially, so it might not occur to someone to back-track in their thinking and revise the result they got in the first step afterwards’ seems probably right, although I have no idea how big of an explanation that is compared to other reasons the OP’s suggestion isn’t very common.
I’m confused why the process being sequential is a reason that this isn’t occurring. Suppose someone was writing a RCT grant proposal and knew in advance how expensive the treatment was compared to the control. They find the optimal ratio of treatment to control, based on the post above. Then, they ask for however much money they need to get a certain amount of power (which would be less money than they would have needed to ask for not doing this).
Or alternatively, run the sample size calculation as you suggest. Convert that into a $ figure, then use the information in the post above to get more power for that same amount of money and show the grant-maker the second version of one’s power calculations.
I feel like, if we write here to communicate, accessibility is pretty important, maybe more important than the other two (or at least, not clearly less important than them). Why do you think otherwise?
What does “blow it up” mean for an EA who decides the culture is beyond fixing, but who doesn’t have significant power within the community? Is it leaving the community in search for a better one to do good in?
I think my above reply missed the mark here.
Sticking with the cow example, I agree with you that if we removed their pain at being separated while leaving the desire to be together intact, this seems like a Pareto improvement over not removing their pain.A preferentist would insist here that the removal of pain is not what makes that situation better, but rather that pain is (probably) dis-prefered by the cows, so removing it gives them something they want.
But the negative hedonist (pain is bad, pleasure is neutral) is stuck with saying that the “drugged into happiness” image is as good as the “cows happily reunited” image. A preferentist by contrast can (I think intuitively) assert that reuniting the cows is better than just removing their pain, because reunification fulfills (1) the cows desire to be free of pain and (2) their desire to be together.
This response is a bit weird to me because the linked post has two counter-examples and you only answered one, but I feel like the other still applies.
The other thought experiment mentioned in the piece is that of a cow separated from her calf and the two bovines being distressed by this. Michael says (and I’m sympathetic) that the moral action here is to fulfill the bovines preferences to be together, not remove their pain at separation without fulfilling that preference (e.g. through drugging the cows into bliss).
Your response about Pareto Improvements doesn’t seem to work here, or seems less intuitive to me at least. Removing their sadness at separation while leaving their desire to be together intact isn’t a clear Pareto improvement unless one already accepts that pain is what is bad. And it is precisely the imagining of a separated cow/calf duo drugged into happiness but wanting one another that makes me think maybe it isn’t the pain that matters.
Spreading wild animals to space isn’t bad for any currently existing humans or animals, so it isn’t counted under thoughtful short-termism or is discounted heavily. Same with a variety of S-risks (e.g. eventual stable totalitarian regime 100+ years out, slow space colonization, slow build up of Matrioshka brains with suffering simulations/sub-routines, etc.)
“I really love you!”
“You mean you enjoy my company a lot?”
“Well of course, and I want you to be happy.”
“I enjoy your company and want you to be happy as well, so I guess I love you too!”
That doesn’t seem creepy to me. In fact, I’ve had this discussion with myself before (about what it means to love someone) and (1) liking them and (2) wishing them happiness, are about what I got.
As for people existing, I think the first 2 levels are clearly true regardless of axiology. As for 3, I think a hedonist could say something like “Person X gives me great pleasure, a good thing” and “Person X is happy, another good thing”. All 4 of those statements (1, 2, and my revised versions of 3) seem totally fair and non-weird to me, but perhaps I’m misunderstanding you.
Hank_B’s Quick takes
This is pretty amusing Matt, unsure why you’ve been down-voted here. More seriously, rationalization of one’s preferences is a real trap!
This seems at least a bit different from going veg*n in “private” so to speak. If you stop eating meat and tell no-one not immediately impacted by this choice, why would that lead to scaring off people from EA?
Granted, you seem to be talking about a large portion of EAs being veg*n, a large enough portion that meat is not served at the events and a potential new-comer would feel like the only omnivore there. I think this cuts against EA organizations advocating for veg*nism and towards providing non-veg*n food at EA events, but not necessarily against one’s own personal consumption choices.
I find the argument for veg*nism based on expected value fairly compelling. In a developed nation, factory farming is dominant. In a factory farm, it seems like ~all animals have net negative lives. Not eating animal products reduces demand for those animal products, leading to less animals with net negative lives being raised on factory farms.
You say that this value isn’t very big, and perhaps it isn’t. But neither is the cost? Veg*n food in my experience is as healthy, potentially cheaper, and similarly effortful to make as home-cooked non-veg*n food.
You mention moral licensing. My prior for social science research being true is pretty low so I’d tend to think this effect is small or non-existent. A 5-second google search revealed a meta-analysis of ~90 studies studying ~7000 participants, only including those with a control. They found the magnitude of the effect to be a Cohen’s d of .31 which is small. Also unpublished studies had smaller effect sizes than published ones, which makes me more skeptical.
Informal citation: A Meta-Analytic Review of Moral Licensing. Irene Blanken et al. 2015.
You also mention health/energy costs. As far as I know, the consensus is that well-planned diets whether veg*n or not are all healthy, with some (crappy? I haven’t looked into it) research that veganism is good for you. Vegan for Life by Jack Norris and Virginia Messina gives this conclusion and seems to be right. I hope someone will tell me if this opinion about health is wrong though!
As far as I can tell, Richard Bruns is talking about the quality-adjusted life year or QALY.
The reason it is a year is essentially arbitrary, a year is decently long without being too long for the purposes of public health where QALYs first got used.
The way we deal with “healthy, happy, and flourishing” as a single unit is much trickier. For traditional QALY calculations, researchers simply ask people how they feel when experiencing certain things (like a particular surgery or a disease) and normalize/aggregate those responses to get a scale where 0 quality is as good as death, 1 is perfect health, and negative numbers can be used for experiences worse than death.Then you multiply quality by quantity. The Wikipedia article on this is good and goes into more depth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
Note: I don’t know how Bruns intends to measure quality of life yet, I expect we’ll have to wait.
That’s true! Maybe the potential human would have been born to poorer than average parents (because those are the people who need help accessing contraception), thus being poorer on average (and so consuming less meat).
Or maybe the potential human would be born to more educated on average parents (since those are the people who’d be interested in using contraception?)? Thus being richer on average and eating more meat.