Strong advocate of just having a normal job and give to effective charities.
Doctor in Australia giving 10% forever
Henry Howardđ¸
Karma: 1,202
[Question] Is donaÂtion-matchÂing deÂcepÂtive?
[Question] Do the GiveWell charÂiÂties need money curÂrently?
This doesnât seem very useful. All well and good to declare that lots of animals might have âconscious experienceâ, but without a way to define âconscious experienceâ or having any way to compare the value of the âconscious experienceâ of different animals, where does it get us?
I worry that this is just abstract philosophical noise that distracts from productive efforts like developing alternative proteins, exposing and lobbying against the cruelty of factory farming, and eliminating the poverty and desperation that underlies a lot of the global indifference to animal suffering.
I think overall this post plays into a few common negative stereotypes of EA: Enthusiastic well-meaning people (sometimes with a grandiose LoTR reference username) proposing grand plans to solve an enormously complex problem without really acknowledging or understanding the nuance.
Suggesting that we simply develop an algorithm to identify âhigh quality contentâ and that a combination of crowds and experts will reliably be able to identify factual vs non-factual information seems to completely miss the point of the problem, which is that both of these things are extremely difficult and thatâs why we have a disinformation crisis.
Many good points:
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Use of expected value when error bars are enormously wide is stupid and deceptive
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EA has too many eggs in the one basket that is GiveWellâs research work
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GiveWell under-emphasises the risks of their interventions and overstates their certainty of their benefits
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EA is full of young aspiring heroes who think theyâre the main character in a story about saving the world
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Longtermism has no feedback mechanism and so is entirely speculative, not evidence-based
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Mob think is real (this forum still gives people with more karma more votes for some reason)
But then:
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His only suggestions for a better way to reallocate power/âwealth/âopportunity from rich to poor are: 1. acknowledging that itâs complex and 2. consulting with local communities (neither are new ideas, both are often already done)
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Ignores the very established, non-EA-affiliated body of development economists using RCTs; Duflo and Banerjee won the Nobel memorial economics prize for this and Dan Karlan who started Innovations for Poverty Action now runs USAID. EA might be cringe but these people arenât.
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Sounds very difficult when deadly drugs like fentanyl, midazolam and propofol can easily be injected through an intravenous line. You canât get an IV line on a baby in-utero, I think thatâs why injection into the heart is done in that case.
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The massive error bars around how animal well-being/âsuffering compares to that of humans means itâs an unreliable approach to reducing suffering.
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Global development is a prerequisite for a lot of animal welfare work. People struggling to survive donât have time to care about the wellbeing of their food.
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Aside from impossibility of quantifying fetal suffering with any certainty and the social and political intractability of this idea: potassium chloride is often directly injected into the fetal heart, not the veins, so the comparison to lethal injection or animal euthanasia might be wrong
Doesnât pass the sniff test for me. Two concerns:
Every vegetarian Iâve met or heard of is vegetarian because of either a) animal welfare, b) climate change or c) cultural tradition. It seems very unlikely that any of these factors could be strongly genetic.
Theyâre determining genetic heritability by comparing identical twin pairs with non-identical twin pairs (i.e. if the identical twins are more similar in their preferences than non-identical twins, they assume that thereâs more of a genetic component). I imagine that there could be lots of confounders here. Growing up as an identical twin is a different experience to being a non-identical twin. There could be different environmental factors between the two situations (e.g. maybe identical twins tend to feel closer and more closely mimic each otherâs behaviours/âchoices).
If any of these think tanks had good evidence that their strategy reliably affected economic development, the strategy would quickly be widely adopted and promoted by the thousands of economic development researchers and organisations striving to find such a strategy. Economic development is not a neglected or underfunded field.
Development economics is a full-fledged academic field. Very intelligent people have been working very hard on finding way to improve economic development for many years. Unlikely that outsiders on an internet forum will see neglected solutions.
Would be ecstatic to be proven wrong. In the meantime this sort of post makes the community look arrogant and out of touch.
The error bars on the Rethink Prioritiesâ welfare ranges are huge. They tell us very little, and making calculations based on them will tell you very little.
I think without some narrower error bars to back you up, making a post suggesting âwelfare can be created more efficiently via small non-human animalsâ is probably net negative, because it has the negative impact of contributing to the EA community looking crazy without the positive impact of a well-supported argument.
I think you could say this about any problem. Instead of working on malaria prevention, freeing caged chickens or stopping climate change should we just all switch to working on AI so it can solve the problems for us?
I donât think so, because:a. I think itâs important to hedge bets and try out a range of things in case AI is many decades away or it doesnât work out
and
b. having lots more people working on AI wonât necessarily make it come faster or better (already lots of people working on it).
This seems to rest heavily on Rethink Prioritiesâ Welfare Estimates. While their expected value for the âwelfare rangeâ of chickens is 0.332 that of humans, their 90% confidence for that number spans 0.002 to 0.869, which is so wide that we canât make much use of it.
Seems to be a tendency in EA to try to use expected values when just admitting âI have no ideaâ is more honest and truthful.
Most suffering in the world happens in farms.
You state this like itâs a fact but itâs heavily dependent on how you compare animal and human suffering. I donât think this is a given. Formal attempts to compare animal and human suffering like Rethink Prioritiesâ Animal Welfare Estimates have enormous error bars.
Worthy being cautious in a world where ~10% of the world live on <$2 a day.
It kills ~350,000 people a year. The fatality rate isnât as important as the total deaths.
âOnly prolongs existenceâ
Preventing malaria stops people from suffering from the sickness, prevents grief from the death of that person (often a child), and boosts economies by decreasing sick days and reducing the burden on health systems
The âterrible trifectaâ of: trouble getting started, keeping focused, and finishing up projects seems universally relatable. I donât know many people who would say they donât have trouble with each of these things. Drawing this line between normal and pathological human experiences is very difficult and is why the DSM-V criteria are quite specific (and not perfect).
It might be useful to also interview people without ADHD, to differentiate pathological ADHD symptoms from normal, universal human experiences.
The risks of overdiagnosis include:
People can develop unhealthy cognitive patterns around seeing themselves as having a âdiseaseâ when theyâre actually just struggling with the standard human condition
They might receive harmful interventions that they donât need
It adds unnecessary burden to health systems.
The Open Phil report you link to says:
This suggests that Open Phil is pulling back funding as GiveWell finds funding from non-Open Phil sources. I suspect that if GiveWell was getting fewer non-Open Phil donations Open Phil would pick up the slack again.
Donations to GiveWell are effectively indirect donations to Open Phil, which is fine if you like Open Phil.
The Life You Can Save recommends several charities beyond the GiveWell five. I get the impression that GiveWellâs assessments are more thorough and stringent, but thatâs irrelevant if theyâre fully funded.