Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howardđ¸
Karma: 1,072
âBut those guys almost definitely arenât consciousâ. Based on what?
I find that the simplest argument against the shrimp welfare movement is that if the same reasoning is applied to demodex mites or nematodes you could easily come up with expected value calculations that prove that every pursuit of humanity is irrelevant in comparison to the importance of our finding a solution to the suffering of these microscopic organisms.
Reductio ad absurdum, therefore these expected value calculation Fermi estimates are probably not a complete and or maybe even useful approach to ethics.
I canât see where youâve mentioned the case numbers, which seem to be quite low.
Wikipedia says:
2008, more than 50 cases/âyear were reported from only 4 countries: Turkey, Iran, Russia and Uzbekistan
From 1995 to 2013, 228 cases of CCHF were reported in the Republic of Kosovo, with a case-fatality rate of 25.5%.[24]
Between 2002â2008 the Ministry of Health of Turkey reported 3,128 CCHF cases, with a 5% death rate
Understanding that there are a few hundred rather than thousand or million cases of the disease around the world annually is important context because it makes it more difficult to fight cost-effectively
Havenât heard of this one before though, thank you
A big fear that drives concern about euthanasia is that weâll end up in a world where people who donât really want to die will feel pressured to kill themselves because they donât want to be a burden on the health system or their loved ones.
Moral arguments like this one are the exact sort of thing thatâs stopping euthanasia from being accessible in the cases where it would be clearly good (e.g. end stage terminal cancer causing severe pain)
Disappointing
Ambitious Impact, which runs Charity Entrepreneurship, also runs Founding To Give, which is very much focused on earning to give.
The post suggests that 4 person-years of âcareful analysisâ will find âpromising funding opportunities in this spaceâ.
Development economics does that careful analysis already, why would we make breakthroughs reinventing it?
Development Economics
One of the forumâs highest rated posts is about how we should simply improve economic growth in poor countries
I believe that Seva and the Fred Hollows Foundation (Both in The Life You Can Saveâs top charities list) both do distribution of eyeglasses.
On this page Fred Hollows says they distributed 154,476 pairs of glasses in 2023: https://ââwww.hollows.org/ââwhat-we-do/ââour-impact/ââ
Seva distributed 59,005 pairs of glasses in 2023 according to their annual report. The first page of the report is a picture of a 10 year-old who got a new pair of glasses!: https://ââwww.seva.org/ââsite/ââDocServer/ââSeva_annual_report_2023.pdf
That assumes that âfurther researchâ will reduce these confidence intervals significantly, which I am skeptical of.
You could fund 1000 PostDocs for 1000 years each to study âwhy is there something rather than nothingâ or âis one personâs perception of blue the same as anotherâsâ and itâs no given that youâll get closer to an answer.
You canât bake-in something as unpredictable as how movements and counter-movements evolve and interact.
We need to be more open to uncertainty and consider unexpected ways in which our best laid plans may go astray. Animal Welfare is rife with these uncertainties.
This seems very ungenerous to the global health space:
Malaria nets are based on RCTs. Hereâs a Cochrane review of 22 RCTs:
Against Malaria Foundation does quite intensive monitoring of uptake (not perfect, but youâre implying none)
New Incentives is based on an RCT and also monitors many metrics
Malaria consortium is also based on RCTs and does monitoring
Seva and Fred Hollows track and publish their cataract surgery numbers
Innovations for Poverty Actionâs main purpose is to trial interventions and measure them
studies of the effectiveness of the types of interventions these charities use are generalized, with adjustments for context
That is how RCTs work. You canât have a separate RCT for every situation unfortunately.
I wouldnât advocate giving $100M to Make A Wish just for optics.
But you shouldnât ignore optics, because it affects tractability and can have downstream effects on other parts of the movement.
In a decision between two options where itâs ambiguous which is better (global health vs animal welfare) but one has better optics, it is particularly relevant.
I think we agree: the massive uncertainty in the utility calculus approach to this problem could go either way and so it tells us nothing.
In the end weâre forced to fall back on our moral intuitions like: âharpooning whale feels badâ and comparative arguments like: âwell if you wouldnât suffocate your dog, how can you pay someone to suffocate a pig?â. This is the only feasible approach.
Public support is important for getting things done actually. Itâs affects tractability.
In the case where itâs ambiguous which of options A and B are better, but they have different levels of public support, it becomes an important consideration.
I didnât say universal or 50% support. Many women were against, many men were for. My point is that it had a stronger support base than shrimp welfare before we tried to regulate it.
The idea that you can go regulating without considering public support/âresistance is silly
Velocity vs displacement
Keeping the public on side is actually quite important for getting things done.
Backlash against the thing youâre trying to promote blows out costs, making the plan less cost-effective
50% of people are women so I think womenâs suffrage had a pretty strong support base before it was made law. Similar story for your other examples I think: build support, then laws. Abolition seems like an example of where a counter-movement blew out the cost of change a lot.
The calculations around shrimp welfare have very high uncertainty. Look at the confidence intervals on the rethink priorities welfare ranges. Why this uncertainty is workable and demodex mite uncertainty is not Iâm not clear on.