Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howardđ¸
Karma: 1,007
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 definition of Fermi estimate linked in this post defines a Fermi estimate as aiming to be within 1 magnitude of true. Given just the Rethink Priorities welfare range estimates span several magnitudes (infinite really, given lower bound is 0), this at least is incorrect.
This sort of chaining of EV calculations is common on this forum. I think itâs counterproductive. Show the confidence intervals and it becomes clear that the result is as good as âI have no ideaâ, which is a fine thing to say. Just say that.
Sure
I would discourage you from doing guesswork this rough and legitimising it by calling it a âFermi estimateâ.
Most cells in your spreadsheet are commented âmy guessâ.
Sometimes confidence intervals are so wide that they donât tell us anything. I think thatâs the case here.
Unfair to ask people to consider the ethics of their food while their loved ones are dying of malaria and TB.
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.
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.
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.