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I’m an independent researcher working on EA topics (Global Priorities Research, Longtermism, Global Catastrophic Risks, and Economics).
Hauke Hillebrandt
Karma: 3,618
I have not looked at this deeply, so take all of this with a grain of salt, but a quick scan makes me believe that this is very hyped.
Having skimmed the paper it seems the only thing the authors do and what is peer-reviewed is estimate earth’s theoretical maximum capacity for reforestation.
There are few problems:
1) Feasibility: “200 GtC is a technical potential assuming every hectare of forestland on earth is increased to 100% forest cover”
https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1147190442145898496
“An assessment of the biophysical capacity for restoring global tree cover provides a necessary but insufficient foundation for evaluating where tree cover can be feasibly increased. The kinds of trees as well as how and where they are grown determine how and which people benefit. In some contexts, increasing tree cover can elevate fire risk, decrease water supplies, and cause crop damage by wildlife. Reforestation programs often favor single-species tree plantations over restoring native forest ecosystems. This approach can generate negative consequences for biodiversity and carbon storage (5), threaten food and land security, and exacerbate social inequities. How restored lands are governed determines how reforestation costs and benefits are distributed.”
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/24
There are no dollar signs or economic feasibility analysis in that paper. So the people who wrote it just cited some number that is not peer-reviewed and even if loosely based on previous numbers might not work at the scale.
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2) There seems to be no scientific consensus how much (or even if!) new trees are a GHG sink on net. Some legitimate papers even suggests that new trees could be a net GHG source. (the paper does not make any new contributions to this question and I think just assumes that trees absorb GHG).
For instance, see this recent paper in Nature communications:
a) “Limited capacity of tree growth to mitigate the global greenhouse effect under predicted warming” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10174-4
b) this recent paper in PNAS (top journal as well)
“On-going carbon uptake due to forest demography is large, but much smaller than previous influential estimates have suggested. Contrary to previous findings, these latest data sources indicate that the sink is predominantly in mid-high latitude, rather than tropical, forests.”
given the enormous stakes I think it would be a mistake for even donors and organisations who do value diversity as a terminal value to dedicate resources to this instead of focusing on their core mission. Nor do I think there are likely to be significant instrumental benefits.
I very strongly disagree.
At the very least, consider the instrumental benefits from avoiding the PR-risk of the community adopting your far-out view that we ought not value diversity at all. This seems like a legitimate risk for EA, as evidenced by your comment having more upvotes than the author of this thread.
However, my sense is that, despite problems with diversity in EA, this has been recognized, and the majority view is actually that diversity is important and needs to be improved (see for instance CEA’s stance on diversity).
Mergers and Acquisitions seems underexplored in EA.
current artificially low salaries in EA often lead to people making inefficient time/money tradeoffs.
I agree that this is common, so I agree with your central point, which is important.
But I’m not sure I like your suggestions to move towards other demanding costly signals, like encouraging workaholism.
Rather, a better solution, which seems to be the norm in the not-for-profit world, might be to simply pay slightly, but non-trivially, below market rates, so if someone could earn $500/h in the private sector for similarly pleasant work, EA orgs could just pay ~80%. This should deter people who only care about money, while employees who net >$800k/y (> than current current EA non-profits exec compensation) still don’t need to penny pinch and be efficient (buy a house close to work in a city like SF, raise a family, live a solidly middle-class lifestyle, fly business class), if they just forgo high-end luxury goods. There could be a progressive ‘EA tax’ build into the salary, so if support staff only earn $50/h, EA orgs might want to pay ~95% or something and offer Google-like perks like a catered food and laundry service to make them more efficient.
I think these are all more efficient costly signals than frugality, but my impression is that they tend to be regarded by people (both inside and outside EA) as worse signals of altruism, and I’m wondering why that is.
Some more random thoughts:
People really don’t like it when people earn very high amounts. Politicians often play up their frugality to the point where they’re probably bad at their job (e.g. former Austrian chancellor who made a point of flying coach or José Mujica driving an old car)… people seem to like this though as evidenced by them being voted into office. Utilitarian arguments for higher salaries might come across as self-serving.
Also, in finance, costly signals are long hours and conspicuous consumption, as retaining employees is very valuable and frugal people could retire after a working for just a couple of years (maybe that’s why EAs did so well in finance- they didn’t have diminishing returns in utility to salary increases- all without the drug habit).
Long hours need not be cost-effective… maybe you could rather pay two EA org people $100k/y, than one person $250k/y. Especially because the nonprofit world is not as zero sum as the private sector where working very hard might pay off much more. Perhaps different work intensities lend themselves well to EtG in the for-profit world vs. say philosophy in the non-profit world. In the non-profit world, objectives are often much less clearly defined, and so it might not make sense to work very hard, but rather more deliberate… (see Bezos shifting from working very hard in the beginning of Amazon while in execution mode, to later saying he sleeps 8 hours a night because he’s just making very high-level prioritization decisions (not unlike a philosopher).
If you’re privileged in other ways, it’s easier to get away with dropping out (or even use it as a countersignal). It’s an intersectional issue.
The amount spent on deployment subsidies is drastically out of proportion to how much is spent on public R&D.[188] In Germany, one study critical of subsidies suggests up to $580 billion overall will be spent till 2020 on clean energy generally, while the German government projects to only spend ~$620 billion until 2050.[189] The majority of these billions will be spent on subsidies.
German solar subsidies dwarf public R&D funding by a factor of 120 (!),[190] when economic modelling has suggested that the optimal ratio should be roughly one-to-one.[191] [192]
Globally, clean energy deployment subsidies are around $140 billion annually.[193] compared to R&D.
I have talked to several people in government about this, but our views on the importance of clean energy innovation also seem uncontroversial within large parts of the academia, but have not made it outside of academia yet.
This view is shared by a number of academics, international organisations, and members of the private sector, including:
Daron Acemoglu, the most cited economic scholar in the recent decade, argues that optimal climate change policy requires both carbon pricing and subsidies for clean energy research.[202] He further argues that clean energy research should be heavily front-loaded to carbon taxation, which can be phased in gradually to minimize switching costs for industry. This argument has no bearing on the how high carbon taxes should be in absolute terms, nor how high clean energy R&D should be in the future, only that the latter should be prioritized. Put simply, it makes no sense to have most of our R&D spending later this century, but a high carbon tax can still be introduced at a later stage.
The International Energy Agency, which notes that because public R&D on energy technologies grew only at an average rate of only 2% per year in the last 5 years[203], there is need for more and that more spending on public and private clean energy R&D spending would be productive.[204]
The Breakthrough Energy Coalition,[205] a private sector coalition of billionaires led by Bill Gates, has started a venture to invest in breakthrough energy projects.
We came across a few recently published and unpublished papers that reached similar conclusions to ours and so we believe in the coming years our views might be more mainstream.[83],[84],[85]
All citations can be found at:
Thanks (strongly upvoted for trying to falsify a central claim). All opinions are mine.
1. While the interesting paper you cite shows that policies bad for growth are at historic lows and argues that much progress has been made, 20% of all countries still have bad policies, and 25% of SSA countries. Given the potential very high effectiveness of growth policy, that we tried to demonstrate in the piece, the value of information of looking into this further is high.
2. I do cite Rodrik in the Appendix who argues that these days, “standard prescriptions” (i.e. Washington Consensus) might not work any longer and we should be skeptical of top-down, comprehensive, universal solutions (though perhaps there are some more generalizable policy prescriptions to be discovered with further research—Rodrik for instance expands the Washington consensus with an additional 10 policy prescriptions).
However, technical assistance by more specialized agencies (e.g. DFID, USAID, GIZ as well as the World Bank’s country offices), and also NGOs such as the International Growth Center, the Copenhagen Consensus, etc. might be able to do “growth diagnostics” to find out where growth is bottlenecked and then help with tailor-made policies on a country-by-country basis.
They might also help with implementation issues, and even indifference issues.
Excellent and underrated post. I actually told Greg a few years ago that this has become part of my cognitive toolkit and that I use this often (I think there are similarities to the Tinbergen Rule—a basic principle of effective policy, which states that to achieve n independent policy targets you need at at least n independent policy instruments).
This tool actually caused me to deprioritize crowdfunding with Let’s Fund, which I realized was doing a multiobjective optimization problem (moving money to effective causes and doing research), and that I needed to focus on one thing.
Another instance in which I used this is in my climate policy paper, where I mentioned suspicious convergence:
“Advanced economies sometimes give aid to emerging economies for environmentally harmful projects: to increase tourism,[278] to build gas power plants,[279] and sometimes even to build coal power plants.[280] Does this reflect a lack of policy coherence? Why not fund projects that make sense from both the perspective of the climate and poverty reduction? For instance, one natural experiment in Brazil showed that paying “extremely poor households for forest conservation” reduced deforestation by 3-5%.[281] A recent randomized controlled trial[282] found that conditional cash transfers to forest-owning Ugandan farmers to conserve forest owned by them prevented emissions at a rate of $0.46 per ton of CO₂.[283]
Given that the lower bound for the social cost of carbon has been estimated to be $125 per ton,[284],[285] should there be a scaling up of such interventions? Would this policy-coherent approach to preventing both poverty and climate change be the most effective? We argue that—perhaps counterintuitively—it might not be.
At a first approximation, a policy-coherent approach appears preferable, and giving aid for gas plants seems counterproductive. However, gas will make up a non-trivial fraction of energy for the foreseeable future, and, in terms of emissions and air pollution it produces, gas is much better than coal. Energy access is vital for industrial development, which reduces poverty; despite the fact that it violates principles of policy coherence, it might be optimal to give aid for gas power. To get a bit more technical: Multi-objective optimization is generally harder than single-objective optimization.[286] It might therefore be more effective to optimize for poverty reduction or economic growth in aid project A, be that through fostering tourism or cheaper electricity access through gas. Then , in ‘aid’ project B (which then is not really an aid project, but a climate change project), one should optimize for the most effective climate change prevention . There is an allure to policy coherence and optimizing for several objectives at once, but it would be a suspicious convergence if the best poverty reduction methods happened to be the most effective ways to combat climate change as well.
Aid should reduce poverty and/or stimulate growth at the same time that other funding is used to combat climate change in the most effective way. One of these ways is performance-based pay for the conservation of rainforests.[287] For example, Norway pledged up to $1 billion in performance-based pay for the conservation of Brazilian rainforests. Preventing deforestation in Brazil is very cost-effective, at $13 per ton of CO₂ equivalent averted on average.[288] Performance targets can be independently verified through satellite imaging. Such efforts should be disconnected from aid budgets, while the international community could pay for the preservation of rainforests globally.”
Very interesting—I’ve been thinking about a generalized theory of bikeshedding that also applies to careers, where some people will have initial exposure to a career through, say, an internship, and because they then know that topic very well and are ambiguity averse, they’ll just continue with it until the end of their lives. Because they do value impact they’ll post-hoc rationalize their choice as very important and then fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy.
I had similar thoughts on Gates recently after watching his netflix documentary:
“The Gates foundation focuses on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), because diarrheal deaths are about 1m/year.
They invested quite heavily in this and also seem to routinely leverage money from governments, and influence the discourse on the relative priority of WASH within global development. This could be net negative because global health might not be as effective as other economic development interventions (c.f. the work by Lant Pritchett).
He seems to have spent an extraordinary amount of money on WASH and just generally global development.
What caused him to focus on this? And what is thus the more distal cause for the EA focusing on global health? Thinking about this might uncover non-optimal path dependency.
There seem to be a few causes:
because he read a NYT article by Nicholas Christofis on diarrheal disease, which because it affects people directly.
because he experienced burnout at Microsoft and wanted to do something more meaningful and direct
He personally went to India and vaccinated children himself giving him an emotional attachment to the cause
I used to be quite the fan of Gates until now, and though I thought his foundation could have done better if it were more flexible, I always thought he gets things roughly right.”
Thank you for the detailed write-ups.
I will focus on where I disagree with the the Chris Chambers / Registered Reports grant (note: this is Let’s Fund’s grantee, the organization I co-founded).
1. What if all clinical trials became Registered Reports?
You write:
“Chambers has the explicit goal of making all clinical trials require the use of registered reports. That outcome seems potentially quite harmful, and possibly worse than the current state of clinical science.”
I think, if all clinical trials became Registered Reports, then there’d be net benefits.
In essence, if you agree that all clinical trials should be preregistered, then Registered reports is merely preregistration taken to its logical conclusion by being more stringent (i.e. peer-reviewed, less vague etc.).
Relevant quote from the Let’s Fund report (Lets-Fund.org/Better-Science):
“The principal differences between pre-registration and Registered Reports are:
In pre-registration, trial outcomes or dependent variables and the way of analyzing them are not described as precisely as could be done in a paper
Pre-registration is not peer-reviewed
Pre-registration also often does not describe the theory that is being tested.
For the reason, simple pre-registration might not be as good as Registered Reports. For instance, in cancer trials, the descriptions of what will be measured are often of low quality i.e. vague, leading to ‘outcome switching’ (i.e. switching between planned and published outcomes) [180], [181]. Moreover, data processing can often involve very many seemingly reasonable options for excluding or transforming data[182], which can then be used for data dredging pre-registered trials (“With 20 binary choices, 220 = 1,048,576 different ways exist to analyze the same data.” [183]). Theoretically, preregistration could be more exhaustive and precise, but in practice, it rarely is, because it is not peer-reviewed.”
Also, note that exploratory analysis can still be used in Registered Reports, if it’s clearly labelled as exploratory.
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2. Value of information and bandwidth constraints
You write:
“Ultimately, from a value of information perspective, it is totally possible for a study to only be interesting if it finds a positive result, and to be uninteresting when analyzed pre-publication from the perspective of the editor.“
Generally, a scientist’s priors regarding the likelihood of treatment being successful should be roughly proportional to the value of information. In other words, if the likelihood that a treatment is successful is trivially low, then it is likely too expensive to be worth running or will increase the false positive rate.
On bandwidth constraints: this seems now largely a historical artifact from pre-internet days, when journals only had limited space and no good search functionality. Back then, it was good that you had a journal like Nature that was very selective and focused on positive results. These days, we can publish as many high-quality null-result papers online in Nature as we want to without sacrifice, because people don’t read a dead tree copy of Nature front to back. Scientists now solve the bandwidth constraint differently (e.g. internet keyword searches, how often a paper is cited, and whether their colleagues on social media share it).
In your example, you can combine all 100 potential treatments into one paper and then just report whether it worked or not. The cost of reporting that a study was carried out are trivial compared to others. If the scientist doesn’t believe any results are worth reporting they can just not report them, and we will still have the record of what was attempted (similar to it being good that we can see unpublished preregistrations on trials.gov that never went anywhere as data on the size of publication bias).
3. Implications of major journals implementing Registered reports
You write:
“Because of dynamics like this, I think it is very unlikely that any major journals will ever switch towards only publishing registered report-based studies, even within clinical trials, since no journal would want to pass up on the opportunity to publish a study that has the opportunity to revolutionize the field.”
This is traded-off by top journals publishing biased results (which follows directly from auction theory where the highest bidder is more likely to pay more than the true price; similarly, people who publish in Nature will be more likely to overstate their results. This is borne out empirically. See https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201)
Registered Reports are simply more trustworthy and this might change the dynamics so that there’ll be pressure for journals to adopt the registered Reports format or fall behind in terms of impact factor.
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3.1 On clarity
You write:
“As a result, large parts of the paper basically have no selection applied to them for conceptual clarity,”
On clarity: Registered reports will have more clarity because they’re more theoretically motivated (see https://lets-fund.org/better-science/#h.n85wl9bxcln4) and the reviewers, instead of being impressed by results, are judging papers more on how detailed and clear the methodology is described. This might aid replication attempts and will likely also be a good proxy of the clarity of the conclusion. Scientists are still incentivized to write good conclusions, because they want their work to be cited. Also, the importance of the conclusion will be deemphasized. In the optimal case of a RR, “ a comprehensive and analytically sophisticated design, vetted down to each single line of code by the reviewers before data collection began,” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0652-0 is what happens during the review.
What is missing from the results section is pretty much only the final numbers that are plugged in after review and data collection and the result section then “writes itself”. The conclusion section is perhaps almost unnecessary, if the introduction already motivates the implications of the research results and is already used as a more extensive speculative summary in many papers.
I think the conclusion section will be quite short and not very important section in registered reports as is increasingly the case (in Nature, there’s sometimes no “redundant” conclusion section).
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4. Is reducing red tape more important?
You write:
>>Excessive red tape in clinical research seems like one of the main problems with medical science today
I don’t think excessive red tape is one of the main problems with medical science (say on the same level of publication bias), that there are no benefits of IRBs, nor that Registered Reports adds red tape or has much to do with the issue you cite. I think a much bigger problem is research waste as outlined in the Let’s Fund report.
Most scientists who publish Registered Reports describe the publication experience as quite pleasant with a bit of front-loaded work (see e.g. https://twitter.com/Prolific/status/1153286158983581696). In my view, the benefits far outweigh the costs.
5. On Differential technological development aspect of Registered Reports
On differential tech development and perhaps as an aside: note that more reliable science has wide-ranging consequences for many other cause areas in EA. Not only global development has had problems with replicability (e.g. https://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/pre-results-review-journal-development-economics-lessons-learned-so-far and the “worm wars”), but also areas related to GBCRs (e.g. there’s a new Registered Reports initiative for research on Influenza see https://cos.io/our-services/research/flu-lab/).
Would shutting down EA grants significantly reduce the overall quantity of meta funding in the community or would the freed up resources be routed into the Meta-fund?
Yes, interesting take.
Aside from risk aversion, in the appendix, I list some more cognitive biases that might be at play for why people prefer RCTs.
Relatedly, perhaps people sympathetic to long-termism might believe that speeding up growth might speed up GCRs from emerging technologies. And while it is unclear when growth will speed up x-risk at all (see for instance), I think that when it comes to differential technological development, not all growth is equal.
What speeds up risks from emerging technologies is mostly growth in highly technical sectors in high-income countries. Growth in low-income countries will not increase world growth much and is less likely to cause risks from emerging technologies.
Put simply: Burundi’s catch-up growth won’t speed up global growth by much, is unlikely to speed up risks from AI or bio any time soon. Growth has been argued to lead to “Greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy.” Perhaps growth in poor countries will actually increase stability and thus be good from a differential technological development point.
Lower skilled labor also competes with AI R&D and so increasing trade and migration decrease AI R&D (see “Why Are [Silicon Valley] Geniuses Destroying Jobs in Uganda?”.
But even if growth in poor countries will slightly increase x-risks, then it might still be optimal to support it and offset the x-risk increase through targeted interventions to decrease x-risks. This is because multiobjective optimization for both x-risk reduction and global poverty is likely harder than single objective optimization for the most effective interventions in each category separately.
Thank you very much Gabe and Max for the constructive feedback! I really appreciated it and have upvoted your post.
Having said that I disagree with your main arguments and conclusions – I largely agree with John’s response above (hence replying to his post).
Some more thoughts on this, which are mine and also not necessarily John’s.
On my judgment call of favoring theory over very noisy empirical evidence, I wanted to add that:
“Financial economists have found that a randomly chosen portfolio of as few as fifty stocks achieves 90% of the diversification benefits available from full diversification across the entire market. The reason is that once one owns shares of a few dozen of them, the diversification gains from ownership of shares in additional corporations are small.”
John Y. Campbell et al., Have Individual Stocks Become More Volatile? An Empirical Exploration of Idiosyncratic Risk, 56 Journal of Finance 1 (2001). As cited in Weyl’s Radical Markets.
So that means the effects of divestment are likely small and hard to pick up. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Generally, multi-objective optimization is harder than single-objective optimization, and it is usually probably better to optimize for financial returns without social impact constraints with investments that feed your charitable giving and then to optimize for social impact through non-profits without profit-making constraints. As one of the economists in the survey that John cited says: “Hard to believe that adding constraints on portfolio choice leads to higher returns”.
On shareholder advocacy:
Shareholder advocacy might very well have some impact. The question is how much effective than normal advocacy it is. Shareholder advocacy has costs and I don’t think there’s a free lunch here. For instance, it has time costs and socially motivated shareholder advocacy should theoretically reduce a corporation’s profits because it moves the corporation away from its goal to maximize profits.
I also wonder what the added value of being a shareholder for advocacy is. In other words, in theory, there should not be much reason for corporations to listen substantially more to minority stakeholders (or any shareholder for that matter) more so than non-shareholder advocacy, because their goal is to maximize shareholder value. I also worry that there might be displacement effects: one corporation that does not exploit socially harmful ways of making profits might bow under pressure and change their ways, but another purely financially motivated corporation might fill in.
The examples you cite might mostly be because of a corporation’s financial self-interest. Tyson investing in clean-meat is actually an example that I’ve cited in my mission hedging piece. Or it might just be good PR and trivially expensive for corporations. To take your example: “At $7 million in annual firearms sales, the category represents less than 1/175th of 1 percent of Kroger’s $123 billion in revenues.” https://eu.cincinnati.com/story/money/2018/03/19/kroger-assault-rifles-magazines/437241002/, given that the profits of this will be quite small it would be hard to see that normal advocacy might not have had the same effect. I feel like you imply that shareholder’s ‘might’ does substantial work here and makes it particularly effective, but there are costs and the effectiveness is unclear.
I think there can be some effective shareholder activism:
“Shareholder activism is an alternative middle ground approach in which investments are used to submit and vote on shareholder proposals that influence firms directly. Due to Securities and Exchange Commission rules, a foundation only has to own $2,000 in market value of the firm’s securities (continuously for one year) in order to submit a proposal to be voted on by all shareholders (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (1998)). Thus shareholder activism would be an additional benefit of investing in a firm but is not expected to motivate a sizable investment level.” https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2017042pap.pdf
This is likely to be effective, but more a clever hack that can be exploited with a few 10s of million dollars and does not warrant SRI on this scale which also uses up a lot of philanthropic bandwidth.
Meta-level: Great comment- I think we should be starting more of a discussion around theoretical high-level mechanisms of why charities would be effective in the first place—I think there’s too much emphasis on evidence of ‘do they work’.
I think the main driver of the effectiveness of infectious disease prevention charities like AMF and deworming might be that they solve coordination/ public goods problems, because if everyone in a certain region uses a health intervention it is much more effective in driving down overall disease incidence. Because of the tragedy of the commons, people are less likely to buy bed nets themselves.
For micronutrient charities it is lack of information and education—most people don’t know about and don’t understand micronutrients.
Lack of information / markets
Flagging that that there were charities—DMI and Living Goods—which address these issues, and so, if these turn out to explain most of the variance in differences in cost-effectiveness you highlight then these need to be scaled up. I never quite understood why a DMI-like charity with ~zero marginal cost-per-user couldn’t be scaled up more until it’s much more cost-effective than all other charities.
I think Rory Stewart is lying… he has had problems with this recently:
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/356-islam-freedom
(not endorsing Sam Harris here and not saying Stewart is not directionally correct).
I doubt that Nick Beckstead literally said ‘I don’t care about poverty’.
He seems bitter that his EA org was unable to raise funds from the Future Fund even though it had a different focus area and risk profile. Now he’s shoehorning his peeves into the FTX fraud.
How can we encourage people to include a 75 word Tl;dr: in every post? 75 words seems to be what is visible in the preview pane when hovering over the title of a post.
Perhaps after hitting submit, people could be prompted if they wanted to add a Tl;dr to the top of the post.
I really don’t understand how distributing nets can keep people in poverty.
There is one paper from 2009 suggesting that, in the short run, eradicating malaria can lower income per capita slightly but only by a few percentage points and in the longer run it raises income. This is because it doesn’t affect prime age workers so much.
Agreed.. a good way to think about this is that since you get ~5% annual returns on stocks, annual rent equivalent is ~5% of the property value, and so the opportunity cost is spending ~$750k/y or $62.5k per month on conference accommodation.
Protect our Future PAC spent unprecedented levels on Carrick’s campaign, and they seem to have spent $1.75M on attack ads against Salinas, which maybe biggest ‘within party’ attack ad budget in a primary. Seems understandable this can be seen as a norm violation (attack ads are more sticky) and perhaps it’s poor ‘cooperation with other value systems’.
On the other hand, SBF donated to the House Majority PAC, which financed John Fetterman’s campaign.
Justifying potentially bad stuff with “the stakes of the work EA does” feels like a slippery slope and a bit fanatic. There should be principled reasons that holds true for all charities, the cost-benefit approach you use the second part of your comment is better. Related: this thread on whether it’s okay to work in the Tobacco industry.