Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howardđ¸
Karma: 893
Welcome Aditi. I organise the Melbourne The Life You Can Save meetup group. We meet once a month (usually at the Fluffy Torpedo ice cream shop in Fitzroy) and we organise talks at schools/âworkplaces about effective giving. Let me know if you want to be added to our email list, would be great to have you along.
Thereâs also an EA Melbourne group and the Melbourne Giving What We Can community if youâre not already involved with them.
I suspect another explanation, which is that there is a lot of skepticism about the effects of unconditional cash transfers. The debate about their effects, particularly long-term, is ongoing. E.g.:
Lots of serious people are waiting and watching to get more results from more trials and to make sure nothing bad happens.
There are so many countries that GiveDirectly doesnât cover, so there seems to be a lot of room for other charities to pop up in these areas.
And many patients donât listen or they make mistakes. In an opt-in system that is considered their responsibility, but in an opt-out system like youâre proposing, bad outcome will be blamed on the potassium fortification program. Not politically viable
I think that U-curve is narrower with potassium than with iodine, calcium, or fluoride. The consequence of severe hyperkalemia is cardiac arrest so itâs quite serious. Most people would have to consume a lot of potassium to get to that point but certain subgroupsâpeople with kidney failure for exampleâwould be susceptible.
Supplements with a U-shaped benefit/âharm curve like that and different effects in different subgroups arenât appropriate for universal supplementation. This is not that different to trying to add antihypertensives to the water supply.
Like most antihypertensive treatment, potassium supplementation needs to be implemented case-by-case and on a voluntary basis so that the subpopulation that needs less potassium arenât involuntarily harmed.
Thanks for all your work Luke. Enjoy some time off.
No we should not limit development of poor countries because weâre worried about them building up their factory farm industries.
Thereâs a lot of moral uncertainty when comparing animal and human welfare, so that utility calculus will almost always be a dead end. Meanwhile what we can be quite certain of is that limiting global development will be really harmful to the people in those developing countries. It would also look very hypocritical for rich countries to turn around and tell poor countries they shouldnât develop because of animal rights and therefore damaging to the relationship between developing countries and development economists.
Itâs a no from me.
Keen to listen to/âwatch this if itâs released. Thanks for posting it
âSlowâ and âpainfulâ very different. âSlowâ yes, you could study how long it takes for freezing to kill them or stop their neurons firing, though this doesnât seem like very useful information. âPainfulâ is the key and the problem: I donât see any way toward quantifying how subjectively âpainfulâ something is for an insect and how much we should spend to avoid that pain, hence there will always be a stalemate when it comes to implementation.
A lot of the data assumes growth and survival as your main measures of welfare/âstress which is just doing the industryâs yield optimisation research for them rather than welfare research. It is analogous to setting up a chicken welfare institute that tries to make bigger and longer-living chickens. A proxy of welfare, in a way, but we donât need welfare research orgs to do this work.
The other concrete data in those papers are things like: the demonstrated preference of BSF maggots for honey over sugar water, data on the optimal grinding method to kill BSF maggots most quickly, and data on optimal densities to normalise breeding behaviours. The part that is betrayed by confidence intervals is the implementation. Without any way to define or measure the value of maggot suffering with any confidence, thereâs no way to know whether the costs of implementing any of these changes are justified. At least with vertebrates we have some intuitions about how much their suffering matters to fall back on.
What would change my mind on the usefulness of this work is if I was shown some research from an animal welfare organisation that produced some concrete information (i.e. not qualified by massive confidence intervals) about âwhat is good or badâ for an animal or âwhat conditions they might find torturousâ, beyond what we can already intuit.
So far have not seen anything like this, and I simply cannot imagine what sort of experiments or work you could do to get any useful information on this.
Inform what welfare requiremens ought to be put into law when farming insects
Assumes confidence intervals narrower than weâll ever obtain, I think.
Yes torturing insects is bad if we could just as easily not. Donât need a 20-page report to justify that.
The part where we try to quantify suffering is hampered by the massive confidence intervals that are inherent to any discussion of insect suffering, and which I donât see being narrowed by further pondering.
I agree that the field is full of uncertainty.
The breadth of the confidence intervals in any animal suffering research, particularly once it moves away from vertebrates, makes me feel like this work wonât ever lead to any actionable conclusions beyond âtorturing things is bad, avoid if possibleâ, which we sort of knew from the start.
I broadly donât buy that because conclusions seem strange, we shouldnât engage with them...
Sure but this is a post asking for money to set up a foundation to explore these conclusions, which, in the case of shrimp, insects, mites, and nematodes, are almost always either:
So uncertain as to be completely impractical (the confidence intervals in the Rethink Priority Welfare Estimates are so wide as to be almost meaningless, even if you agree with the underlying analysis)
Demanding of a complete upturn of human socioeconomic development goals (i.e. weâre not building factories or research institutes if weâre all Jains functionally paralysed by not wanting to step on ants)
I donât think we need a(nother) foundation to tell us that, all else being equal, not torturing insects is better than torturing them, or that taking spiders outside (as I do, too) is better than killing them. This we can mostly all agree on. But any attempt to go beyond that and seriously quantify this suffering and run calculations on it is an intellectual dead end and a resource and reputation sink.
Iâve never been able to understand how any serious consideration of insect welfare doesnât immediately lead to the unacceptable conclusion that any cause other than the welfare of demodex mites or nematodes is almost meaningless.
How do you envision useful, practical ideas emerging from further insect/âarthropod welfare work, rather than just a lot of absurd conclusions?
To me this sort of work seems to risk playing into the stereotype of the EA community as head-in-the-cloud philosophisers who care more about intellectualising than practical outcomes
It sounds like youâre saying that GiveWell in general is funding constrained because it canât give out all the grants it would like to. My question was specifically whether the top charities (AMF, Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller, New Incentives) are fully-funded.
This question is important to me because I am Australian and unable to tax deduct donations to GiveWell but can tax deduct donations to the top charities.
A terrifying thought. Whales are the worst perpetrators of this but people arenât willing to discuss the uncomfortable solution:
Thatâs a great link, cheers
I donât find this reassuring. Farmers intermittently having to test large amounts of their livestock and crops for the presence of CRISPR and running counter-gene drives sounds really difficult and expensive.