JamesSnowden

Karma: 911

JamesSnowden 26 Nov 2023 14:47 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
Implicitly, yes. Though don’t use that exact formulation. money vs daly comparison is based on reported preference not swb. Daly vs swb comparison implicitly writes off time spent asleep where I assumed 1 daly = difference between 40->100 on swb scale.

If didn’t exclude sleep in botec, would make alcohol look worse as happiness bump from alcohol would be for lower % of time. (Set row 21 to 24)

JamesSnowden 24 Nov 2023 17:42 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
>Another thought—you measure the effects of alcohol on subjective wellbeing as a fraction of someone’s waking hours. This seems right from a subjective wellbeing perspective. But is that also the way you think about the value lost by a death? By consistency, you would also need to implicitly downweight the disvalue a death by a third for the time people spend asleep. Or do you already do that in your moral weights?
Oh that’s interesting. It’s been a while now since I did this, but I think I was implicitly doing that with this calc

JamesSnowden 24 Nov 2023 17:34 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
>I’m not sure I follow the claim that if you assume that alcohol taxation merely shifts the tax burden, there aren’t strong reasons to think the deadweight loss will be greater from alcohol taxation vs other forms of taxation. The subjective wellbeing study found that drinking increases people’s wellbeing by almost as much as spending time with friends. It seems unlikely to me that if the tax were instead eg on income that the benefits of the income would be as large as this. Intuitively, this seems off.
Interesting. That doesn’t seem off to me. If I’m understanding correctly, the implication of your view is that people would generally be better off if they consumed more alcohol and less of other goods on the margin. Is that right?
To put it another way: increasing taxes on alcohol has two effects on consumer surplus: (i) deadweight loss (ii) a transfer from consumers to the government. I think (ii) is probably positive. Almost all taxes involve some amount of deadweight loss, but we do them anyway because we think public goods and redistribution are worth it.
TBC, I’m not claiming that higher excise taxes on alcohol relative to other goods merely shifts the tax burden. If we assume perfect rationality (which I believe would be mistaken), having unequal marginal taxes between goods does result in some additional deadweight loss. But it is a counterveiling factor.
>On your botec on the benefits of alcohol, a lot rides on you assuming that a death from alcohol accounts for 40 units of value
~~A unit of value (in GiveWell’s terms) is equivalent to doubling consumption for a person for a year. A DALY is 2.3 units of value. So you want to be dividing your estimates by 2.3.~~
~~The Global Burden of Disease estimates ~30 YLLs and ~10 YLDs per death~~ (I didn’t include YLDs in the BOTEC and I underestimated YLLs which makes it conservative, though I also didn’t discount the GBD estimates for imperfect evidence quality and black market consumption not addressable through policy which makes it optimistic. I’d guess these ~cancel).
Edit: didn’t see your second comment when writing this where you saw this
>On the other hand, none of this considers hangovers.
Yeah, although interestingly (IIRC) the Baumberg study didn’t find any effect on SWB the day after drinking (though I’m skeptical—maybe people didn’t feel like inputting how sad they were on their phone when they were hungover!)

JamesSnowden 23 Nov 2023 14:21 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
Hi Nick, thanks for your thoughts.
I agree air quality is meaningfully different from the other areas we highlight in terms of domestic salience (at least in India). But it’s not clear to me whether the existence of nascent government funding (and the consequent opportunity to improve the allocation of that funding) make philanthropic opportunities better or worse.
Efforts like the NCAP framework and 15th Finance Commission budget allocations in India are fairly new, and there aren’t well-developed playbooks for prioritizing and addressing sources of air pollution in this context. So we think there are large potential benefits to helping improve the effectiveness of those efforts. Among other things, we’re doing that by supporting organizations to help governments develop and implement specific action plans (e.g.), developing better models to enable cost-effectiveness analysis (e.g.), and providing independent assessment of progress against policy goals (e.g.). We think these are areas where philanthropic funding may be able to have an outsized impact. Santosh gives some more examples of grants he’s made in this part of his podcast. We’re also exploring working in other countries in South Asia with fewer government resources allocated to air quality than India. The program hasn’t been running long enough to make confident claims of impact yet.

JamesSnowden 22 Nov 2023 20:45 UTC
12 points
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in reply to: Barry Grimes’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
Thanks Barry,
At GiveWell (where I was working when we started the suicide prevention work), we discounted the impact to account for people who would otherwise die by suicide potentially living somewhat worse lives than a typical person in their context. Given the empirical and moral uncertainty, that estimate was based on a deliberative process and preference aggregation of different staff views rather than a single bottom-up model. Open Phil hasn’t yet decided whether to incorporate a similar discount.
An overview of how GiveWell thought about it is available on this page and a selection of the evidence considered is in this Google Doc.
Speaking for myself, the evidence in that doc did update me towards valuing suicide prevention through means restriction highly. Interviews with survivors and psychological autopsies suggests that suicide (particularly pesticide suicide) is often impulsive and in response to short term life events. Under 5% of suicide attempt survivors go on to die by suicide in the next 5 years, which suggests that most survivors regret their first attempts and prefer to be alive.
I agree that, all else equal, addressing the social determinants of mental health would be preferable to preventing suicide by means restriction. But means restriction has empirically been very successful at reducing suicide rates.
Thanks for sharing the Lund paper!

JamesSnowden 22 Nov 2023 20:41 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
Thanks for the thoughts Kartik!
(Speaking for myself; the 10% estimate comes from work I did at GiveWell but others at Open Phil and GiveWell may disagree with me)
I agree we shouldn’t dismiss consumer surplus entirely, and in retrospect would soften some of the wording in that doc – I think the irrationality point is important but not totalizing. The Nielsen idea is interesting and I’d like to think about it more. I think internalities are less bimodally distributed between people than your model, which muddies the waters, but I wonder if an analysis like that could still be informative.
Fwiw the program we funded is primarily focused on taxation, which is a nice mechanism to balance a recognition of externalities / internalities with a general prior towards personal choice. I’d estimate higher than 10% if that wasn’t the case. A focus on tax means the reduced consumption will be from the drinks for which people had the lowest willingness to pay, limiting lost consumer surplus.^[1] It also results in increased tax revenue, so could be considered as trading off against alternative ways of raising tax revenue with their own deadweight loss in consumer surplus.
TBC, I recognize the inherent fragility / subjectivity of the 10% estimate and I suspect different people would come to quite different conclusions about what input to use, so I’d be excited to see more efforts to estimate this considering the broad sweep of evidence.
1. ^
  Of the two studies I could find on consumer surplus, the one which attempted to estimate consumer surplus from a marginal increase in price (rather than for typical consumption) estimates a loss of €58 million in consumer surplus, compared to a €700m improvement in “health, productivity, and non-financial welfare losses” (Anderson and Baumberg 2010, pg 34), implying an offsetting impact of ~8%. (Though I think there are a bunch of ways in which that study isn’t analogous to the models we use, including a higher estimate of non-health impacts, so difficult to know what to make of it).
  This also raises a separate worry about the extent to which taxation affects heavy drinkers, where the marginal harm is likely highest, which we tried to account for separately in the effect size estimate.

JamesSnowden 29 Jul 2023 4:56 UTC
14 points
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on: Launching the meta charity funding circle (MCF): Apply for funding or join as a donor!
Thanks for pulling this together! It’s great to see more funders in the space

JamesSnowden 10 Jul 2023 19:21 UTC
14 points
9 ∶ 1
in reply to: MichaelPlant’s comment on: The Happier Lives Institute is funding constrained and needs you!
Thanks for editing Michael. Fwiw I am broadly on board with swb being a useful framework to answer some questions. But I don’t think I’ve shifted my opinion on that much so “coming round to it” didn’t resonate

JamesSnowden 7 Jul 2023 23:28 UTC
123 points
35 ∶ 4
on: The Happier Lives Institute is funding constrained and needs you!
>Since then, all the major actors in effective altruism’s global health and wellbeing space seem to have come around to it (e.g., see these comments by GiveWell, Founders Pledge, Charity Entrepreneurship, GWWC, James Snowden).
I don’t think this is an accurate representation of the post linked to under my name, which was largely critical.
What links here?

JamesSnowden 29 Mar 2023 0:42 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Assessment of Happier Lives Institute’s Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of StrongMinds
Thanks Jason, mostly agree with paras 4-5, and think para 2 is a good point as well.
Do you think the neutral point and basic philosophical perspective (e.g., deprivationism vs. epicureanism) are empirical questions, or are they matters on which the donor has to exercise their own moral and philosophical judgment (after considering what the somewhat limited survey data have to say on the topic)?
I think the basic philosophical perspective is a moral/philosophical judgement. But the neutral point combines that moral judgement with empirical models of what peoples’ lives are actually like, and empirical beliefs about how people respond to surveys.
I wonder if, insofar as we do have different perspectives on this (and I don’t think we’re particularly far apart, particularly on the object level question), the crux is around how much weight to put in individual donor judgement? Or even how much individual donors have those judgements?
My experience of even EA-minded (or at least GiveWell) donors is that ~none of them have a position on these kinds of questions, and they actively want to defer. My (less confident but based on quite a few conversations) model of EA-minded StrongMinds donors is they want to give to mental health and see an EA-approved charity so give there, rather than because of a quantitative belief on foundational questions like the neutral point. As an aside, I believe that was how StrongMinds first got on EA’s radar—as a recommendation for Founders Pledge donors who specifically wanted to give to mental health in an evidence-based way.
It does seem plausible to me that donors who follow HLI recommendations (who I expect are particularly philosophically minded) would be more willing to change their decisions based on these kinds of questions than donors I’ve talked to.
I’d be interested if someone wanted to stick up for a neutral point of 3 as something they actually believe and a crux for where they give, rather than something someone could believe, or is plausible. I could be wrong, but I’m starting out skeptical that belief would survive contact with “But that implies the world would be better if everyone in Afghanistan died” and “a representative survey of people whose deaths you’d be preventing think their lives are more valuable than that”
What do you think?

JamesSnowden 27 Mar 2023 20:48 UTC
39 points
6 ∶ 2
in reply to: MichaelPlant’s comment on: Assessment of Happier Lives Institute’s Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of StrongMinds
Sure, happy to elaborate.
Here’s figure 4 for reference:
I think each part of this chart has some assumptions I don’t think are defensible.
1. I don’t think a neutral point higher than 2 is defensible.
You cite three studies in this report.^[1] My read on what to conclude about the neutral point from those is:
i) IDinsight 2019 (n=70; representative of GW recipients): you highlight the average answer of 0.56, but this is excluding the ¹⁄₃ of people who say it’s not possible to have a life worse than death.^[2] I think including those as 0 more accurately reflects their preferences, so 2/3*0.56=0.37/10
ii) Peasgood et al, unpublished (n=75; UK): you say ²⁄₁₀ and I can’t find the study so I’m taking that at face value.
iii) Jamison and Shukla, unpublished (n=600, US, Brazil, China): you highlight the average answer of ²⁵⁄₁₀₀. In private communication with the author, I got the impression that 1.8/10 was probably more appropriate because the scale used in this study isn’t comparable to typical life satisfaction scales.^[3]
So what to make of this? I think you could reasonably put weight in the largest study (1.8/10). Or you could put weight on the most representative study (0.37). I lean towards the latter, because I intuitively find it quite likely that less well off people will report lower neutral points (I don’t feel certain about this, and hoping Jamison & Shukla will have enough sample to test it). But either way, I don’t see any way of combining these studies to get an answer higher than 2.
In addition, a neutral point of 5 implies the average person in over 40 countries would be better off dead. A neutral point of 2.5 implies the average person in Afghanistan would be better off dead. I find these both jarring implications.
HLI’s belief that a neutral point of 5 is within a reasonable range seems to come from Diener et al. 2018.^[4] But that article’s not explicit about what it means by “neutral point”. As far as I can tell from a quick skim, it seems to be defining “neutral” as halfway between 0 and 10.
2. I don’t think 38% is a defensible estimate for spillovers, which puts me closer to GiveWell’s estimate of StrongMinds than HLI’s estimate of StrongMinds.
I wrote this critique of your estimate that household spillovers was 52%. That critique had three parts. The third part was an error, which you corrected and brought the answer down to 38%. But I think the first two are actually more important: you’re deriving a general household spillover effect from studies specifically designed to help household members, which would lead to an overestimate.
I thought you agreed with that from your response here, so I’m confused as to why you’re still defending 38%. Flagging that I’m not saying the studies themselves are weak (though it’s true that they’re not very highly powered). I’m saying they’re estimating a different thing from what you’re trying to estimate, and there are good reasons to think the thing they’re trying to estimate is higher. So I think your estimate should be lower.
3. I don’t think strong epicureanism is a defensible position
Strong epicureanism (the red line) is the view that death isn’t bad for the person who dies. I think it’s logically possible to hold this position as a thought experiment in a philosophy seminar, but I’ve never met anyone who actually believes it and I’d be deeply troubled if decisionmakers took action on the basis of it. You seem to agree to some extent,^[5] but by elevating it to this chart, and putting it alongside the claim that “Against Malaria Foundation is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptions” I think you’re implying this is a reasonable position to take action on, and I don’t think it is.
So I think my version of this chart looks quite different: the x-axis is between 0.4 and 2, the StrongMinds estimate’s quite a bit closer to GiveWell than HLI, and there’s no “epicureanism” line.
What does HLI actually believe?
More broadly, I’m quite confused about how strongly HLI is recommending StrongMinds. In this post, you say (emphasis mine)
We conclude that the Against Malaria Foundation is less cost-effective than StrongMinds under almost all assumptions. We expect this conclusion will similarly apply to the other life-extending charities recommended by GiveWell.
And
We’re now in a position to confidently recommend StrongMinds as the most effective way we know of to help other people with your money.
But you’ve said elsewhere:
HLI does not (yet) take a stance on these different philosophical views.
That strikes me as inconsistent. You’ve defined a range of assumptions you believe are reasonable, then claimed that StrongMinds > AMF on almost all of those assumptions. And then said you don’t take a stance on these assumptions. But you have to actually defend the range of assumptions you’ve defined as reasonable. And in my view, they’re not.
1. ^
  “Empirical work on how individuals interpret the scale could be helpful but is extremely limited. A small (n = 75) survey in the UK found that respondents would choose death over life at a life satisfaction level of about ²⁄₁₀ (Peasgood et al., unpublished, as referenced in Krekel & Frijters, 2021). A survey of people living in poverty in Ghana and Kenya estimated the neutral point as 0.56 (IDinsight, 2019, p. 92; n = 70). There are also preliminary results from a sample of 600 in the USA, Brazil, and China that finds a neutral point of ²⁵⁄₁₀₀ (Jamison & Shukla, private communication). At the Happier Lives Institute, we are currently working on our own survey to explore this topic further and hope to share our results soon.” Elephant in the bednet
2. ^
  “Approximately one third of respondents stated that it’s not possible to have a life that’s worse than death. These respondents cited deontological frameworks such as the inherent and immeasurable value of life regardless of other factors. The remaining respondents (close to two thirds) indicate that there are points on the ladder where life is worse than death. For these respondents, this point is substantially lower than their current life satisfaction scores –the average point identified was 0.56 on a ladder from 0 to 10, compared to their current average life satisfaction score of 2.21” IDInsight 2019, pg 94
3. ^
  I’m not sharing the full reasoning because it was private correspondence and I haven’t asked the authors if they’d be comfortable with me sharing.
4. ^
  “Other wellbeing researchers, such as Diener et al. (2018), appear to treat the midway point on the scale as the neutral point (i.e., 5 on a 0-10 scale).” Elephant in the bednet
5. ^
  “Although what we might call strong Epicureanism, the view that death is not bad at all, has few takers, there may be more sympathy for weak Epicureanism, where death can be bad, but relatively more weight is given to living well than living long” Elephant in the bednet

JamesSnowden 23 Mar 2023 5:02 UTC
8 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Assessment of Happier Lives Institute’s Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of StrongMinds
Thanks Jason, makes sense.

I think I’m more skeptical than you that reasonable alternative assumptions make StrongMinds look more cost effective than AMF. But I agree that StrongMinds seems like it could be a good fit for some donors.

JamesSnowden 22 Mar 2023 19:33 UTC
49 points
24 ∶ 4
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Assessment of Happier Lives Institute’s Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of StrongMinds
FWIW I don’t think GiveDirectly should be “the bar” for being considered one of the most effective organizations in the global health and development space.
I think both 5x and 10x differences are big and meaningful in this domain, and I think there are likely billions of dollars in funding gaps between GiveWell’s bar (~10x) and GiveDirectly. I think donors motivated by EA principles would be making a mistake, and leaving a lot of value on the table by donating to GiveDirectly or StrongMinds over GiveWell’s recommendations (I say this as someone who’s donated to both StrongMinds and GiveDirectly in the past, and hugely respects the work they both do).
Recognize this might be a difference in what we mean by “one of” the most effective, but wanted to comment because this sentiment feeds into a general worry I have that a desire for pluralism and positivity within GH&D (both good and important things!) is eroding intensity about prioritization (more important IMO).

JamesSnowden 16 Feb 2023 20:40 UTC
30 points
6 ∶ 0
on: Transitioning to an advisory role
I felt happy reading the nice things your colleagues are saying about you Max, all of which ring true to me. I admire your humility, thoughtfulness and level-headedness, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you get up to next!

JamesSnowden 27 Jan 2023 2:29 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: MvK’s comment on: Open Philanthropy Shallow Investigation: Tobacco Control
Thanks, this looks like a helpful report!

It looks like this estimate comes from the proportion of countries the Bloomberg consortium and World Bank worked in that passed various policies over a decade without adjusting for the counterfactual chance of policy changes without their work.

I’m curious if CE had any luck trying to estimate the counterfactual (Eg by looking at other countries, trends before BB, or diving deep on individual case studies)?

Fwiw when I looked at this a few years ago (at GiveWell, not OP) I couldn’t find any evidence of a difference in policy change by comparing countries BB worked in more vs less.

I don’t think this is good evidence against impact (policy spillovers, selection, BB’s global work, and no data before BB make it difficult to do this comparison) but it made me think unfortunately we can’t learn much about the counterfactual from the high level quantitative comparison and made me want to fall back on going deep on qualitative case studies instead.

JamesSnowden 26 Jan 2023 10:02 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joel Tan’s comment on: Open Philanthropy Shallow Investigation: Tobacco Control
Interesting thoughts Joel. Is the analysis in (9) public / could you point me towards it?

(I work at open phil but only made a tiny contribution to this report; I’m just curious)

JamesSnowden 18 Nov 2022 6:33 UTC
29 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Open Phil is seeking applications from grantees impacted by recent events
(I work at Open Phil on Effective Altruism Community Building: Global Health and Wellbeing)

Our understanding is that only a small proportion of FTXFF’s grantees would be properly classified as global health or animal welfare. Among that subset, there are some grantees who we think might be a good fit for our current focus areas and strategies. We’ve reached out individually to grantees we know of who fit that description

That being said, it’s possible we’ve missed potential grantees, or work that might contribute across multiple cause areas. If you think that might apply to your project, you can apply through the same form.

JamesSnowden 21 Nov 2019 5:32 UTC
5 points
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on: The Economic Lives of the Poor
Very helpful summary, thanks

JamesSnowden 22 Jun 2019 19:03 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: MichaelPlant’s comment on: Announcing the launch of the Happier Lives Institute
On (1)
>people inflate their self-reports scores generally when they are being given treatment?
Yup, that’s what I meant.
>Is there one or more studies you can point me to so I can read up on this, or is this a hypothetical concern?
I’m afraid I don’t know this literature on blinding very well but a couple of pointers:
(i) StrongMinds notes “social desirability bias” as a major limitation of their Phase Two impact evaluation, and suggest collecting objective measures to supplement their analysis:
“Develop the means to negate this bias, either by determining a corrective percentage factor to apply or using some other innovative means, such as utilizing saliva cortisol stress testing. By testing the stress levels of depressed participants (proxy for depression), StrongMinds could theoretically determine whether they are being truthful when they indicate in their PHQ-9 responses that they are not depressed.” https://strongminds.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/StrongMinds-Phase-Two-Impact-Evaluation-Report-July-2015-FINAL.pdf
(ii) GiveWell’s discussion of the difference between blinded and non-blinded trials on water quality interventions when outcomes were self-reported [I work for GiveWell but didn’t have any role in that work and everything I post on this forum is in a personal capacity unless otherwise noted]
https://blog.givewell.org/2016/05/03/reservations-water-quality-interventions/
On (2)
May be best to just chat about this in person but I’ll try to put it another way.
Say a single RCT of a cash transfer program in a particular region of Kenya doubled people’s consumption for a year, but had no apparent effect on life satisfaction. What should we believe about the likely effect of a future cash transfer program on life satisfaction? (taking it as an assumption for the moment that the wider evidence suggests that increases in consumption generally lead to increases in life satisfaction).
Possibility 1: there’s something about cash transfer programs which mean they don’t increase life satisfaction as much as other ways to increase consumption.
Possibility 2: this result was a fluke of context; there was something about that region at that time which meant increases in consumption didn’t translate to increases in reported life satisfaction, and we wouldn’t expect that to be true elsewhere (given the wider evidence base).
If Possibility 2 is true, then it would be more accurate to predict the effect of a future cash transfer program on life satisfaction by using the RCT effect of cash on consumption, and then extrapolating from the wider evidence base to the likely effect on life satisfaction. If possibility 1 is true, then we should simply take the measured effect from the RCT on life satisfaction as our prediction.
One way of distinguishing between possibility 1 and possibility 2 would be to look at the inter-study variance in the effects of similar programs on life satisfaction. If there’s high variance, that should update us to possibility 2. If there’s low variance, that should update us to possibility 1.
I haven’t seen this problem discussed before (although I haven’t looked very hard). It seems interesting and important to me.

JamesSnowden 21 Jun 2019 19:28 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Announcing the launch of the Happier Lives Institute
Excited to see your work progressing Michael!
I thought it might be useful to highlight a couple of questions I personally find interesting and didn’t see on your research agenda. I don’t think these are the most important questions, but I haven’t seen them discussed before and they seem relevant to your work.
Writing this quickly so sorry if any of it’s unclear. Not necessarily expecting an answer in the short term; just wanted to flag the questions.
(1) How should self-reporting bias affect our best guess of the effect size of therapy-based interventions on life satisfaction (proxied through e.g. depression diagnostics)?
My understanding is that at least some of the effect size for antidepressants is due to placebo (although I understand there’s a big debate over how much).
If we assume that (i) at least some of this placebo effect is due to self-reporting bias (rather than a “real” placebo effect that genuinely makes people happier), and (ii) It’s impossible to properly blind therapeutic interventions, how should this affect our best guess of the effect size of therapy relative to what’s reported in various meta-analyses? Are observer-rating scales a good way to overcome this problem?
(2) How much do external validity concerns matter for directly comparing interventions on the basis of effect on life satisfaction?
If my model is: [intervention] → increased consumption → increased life satisfaction.
And let’s say I believe the first step has high external validity but the second step has very low external validity.
That would imply that directly measuring the effect of [intervention] on life satisfaction would have very low external validity.
It might also imply a better heuristic to make predictions on the effect of future similar interventions on life satisfaction would be:
(i) Directly measure the effect of [intervention] on consumption
(ii) Use the average effect of increased consumption on life satisfaction from previous research to estimate the ultimate effect on life satisfaction.
In other words: when the link between certain outcomes and ultimate impact differs between settings in a way that’s ex ante unpredictable, it may be better to proxy future impact of similar interventions through extrapolation of outcomes, rather than directly measuring impact.
What evidence currently exists around the external validity of the links between outcomes and ultimate impact (i.e. life satisfaction)?