I am an attorney in a public-sector position not associated with EA, although I cannot provide legal advice to anyone. My involvement with EA so far has been mostly limited so far to writing checks to GiveWell and other effective charities in the Global Health space, as well as some independent reading. I have occasionally read the forum and was looking for ideas for year-end giving when the whole FTX business exploded . . .
Jason
Karma: 17,020
As a non-vegan, I noticed myself becoming at least somewhat more aware of my dietary consumption choices after pulling the trigger on my first animal-welfare donation (and likely because of doing so). I don’t have a great explanation of why, but it might be worth seeing if you experience the same effect.
I do not think it is good to create taboos around this question. Like, does that mean we shouldn’t post anything that can be construed as concluding that it’s net harmful to donate to GiveWell charities? If so, that would make it much harder to criticise GiveWell and find out what the truth is. What if donating to GiveWell charities really is harmful? Shouldn’t we want to know and find out?
The taboo would be around advocacy of the view that “it is better for the world for innocent group X of people not to exist.” Here, innocent group X would be under-5s in developing countries who are/would be saved by GiveWell interventions. That certain criticisms of GiveWell couldn’t be made without breaking the taboo would be a collateral effect rather than the intent, but it’s very hard to avoid over-inclusiveness in a taboo.
There have been social movements that assert that “it is better for the world for innocent group X of people not to exist” and encourage people to make legal, non-violent decisions premised on that belief. But I think the base rate of those social movements going well is low (and it may be ~zero). Based on that history and experience, I would need to see a very compelling argument to convince me that going down that path was a good idea here. I don’t see that here; in particular, I think advocacy of the reader donating a share of their charitable budget to animal-welfare orgs to offset any potential negative AW effects of the lifesaving work they fund is considerably less problematic.
Relatedly, I also don’t see things going well for EA if it is seen as acceptable for each of us to post our list of group X and encourage others to not pull members of group X out of a drowning pond even if we could do so costlessly or nearly so. Out of respect for Forum norms, I’m not going to speculate on who other readers’ Group Xs might include, but I can think of several off the top of my head for whom one could make a plausible net-negative argument, all of whom would be less morally objectionable to include on the list than toddlers....
In general, people have complex preferences about their giving, so I think it is better to be transparent instead of assuming no one would care about the additional information.
I think GiveWell is sufficiently transparent here—its value proposition is that donating a few thousand dollars will, in expectancy, save the life of a child under five in the developing world. Whether or not this is a good thing is largely left as an exercise to the reader. I do not expect GiveWell to do my moral philosophy homework for me.
I also think it’s fairly obvious that people tend to eat meat and cause carbon emissions, that more children in a heavily resource-constrained country means spreading available resources more thinly across the country’s children, and so on. Because these things are fairly obvious, donors who are concerned about the sign value of the saving-lives output are free to conduct their own research.
If GiveWell dwelled a ton on the upside collateral effects of saving a life—such as harping on the possibility that the life you can save will cure cancer—then I would be more favorably inclined to a view that it was inappropriately selective in its presentation of second-order effects.
At the risk of being a bit of a downer during a Celebration, I’d like to create a little room to acknowledge people who haven’t felt in a position to give as much as they had hoped / expected / planned for due to life circumstances. I’m unfortunately in that camp this year.[1] So I would like to express empathy with anyone who is in the same boat and feeling sad and/or guilty about it. If we are giving what we can (not in the capitalized sense), sometimes we aren’t in a position to give as much and have to radically accept that.
- ^
This is due to two separate family-of-origin situations that are consuming a lot of my financial and other resources to mitigate. One of them—involving a terminally-ill parent—is also why I’ve been less active on-Forum as of late.
- ^
What is it that makes “I won’t donate to save lives because I think it creates a lot of animal suffering” repugnant but “I won’t donate to save lives because I prefer to have more income for myself” not?
I think actively advocating for others to not save children’s lives is a step beyond a mere decision not to donate. I read it this way:
Action: Write EA Forum post criticizing lifesaving as net-negative activity.
Implied Theory of Impact: Readers decide not to donate to GiveWell et al. --> Fewer lives get saved --> Less meat gets eaten --> Fewer animals suffer.
If I’m reading the theory of impact correctly, innocent children dying is a key part of the intended mechanism of action (MoA) -- not a side effect (as it is with “prefer to have more income for myself”).
There are obviously some cruxes here—including whether there is a moral difference between actively advocating for others not to hand out bednets vs. passively choosing to donate elsewhere / spend on oneself, and whether there is a moral difference between a bad thing being part of the intended MoA vs. a side effect. I would answer yes to both, but I have lower consequentialist representation in my moral parliament than many people here.
Even if one would answer no to both cruxes, I submit that “no endorsing MoAs that involve the death of innocent people” is an important set of side rails for the EA movement. I think advocacy that saving the lives of children is net-negative is outside of those rails. For those who might not agree, I’m curious where they would put the rails (or whether they disagree with the idea that there should be rails).
At least in the US, charity bingo, raffles, etc. are a fairly common thing in some segments of society. I don’t think these are generally seen as controversial or problematic, although I also get the impression that they don’t raise huge amounts of money per individual event. So I don’t think all of the downsides you describe are inherent to the charity-gambling mashup. Whether there is some middle path that brings in significantly more money than bingo at a VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) post without bringing in the pathologies of for-profit gambling is an interesting question. My guess is that the relatively low stakes and occasional nature of extant charity bingo & raffles go a long way to explaining why those efforts seem unobjectionable.
I had these results in mind.
The proposition asserted upthread was “[t]he EA community still donates far more to global health causes than animal welfare.” If I understood your response correctly, you suggested that this is a function of the largest donors’ decisions. That many of us, including myself, favor giving the marginal last dollar to AW is also a function of those big-donor decisions.
As far as survey data, I specifically had the response to Please give a rough indication of how much you think each of these causes should be prioritized by EAs. I took that wording to invite the respondent to divvy up the entire pie of EA resources. I would read them as suggesting that GHD > AW in the community’s collective ideal cause prio, but by considerably less than donation numbers would imply. It’s of course possible that the 2024 survey will show different outcomes.
There was also this response, although the high SDs make interpretation a bit confusing to me:
But the debate week question and the donation election were about marginal funding, which limits the breadth of the conclusions one can draw from those data. IIRC, many of the discussions—and at least my own votes trending toward AW—were heavily influenced by the small percentage of EA funding that is going into AW. Perhaps the EA Survey is the best sense of general community sentiment on the community’s relative cause prio here?
Eating meat seems indirect enough that offsetting feels acceptable. When you purchase meat, the harm unfolds as follows: A farm reviews the previous year’s demand and decides to expand operations to supply another 1,000 chickens. Of course, this decision typically occurs for every 1,000th chicken sold. This level of indirectness feels similar to the harm caused by emitting CO₂ during a commute. For instance, my emissions might exacerbate a flood by 0.1% twenty years later, leading to one extra death for every 1,000 commutes on average.
One could classify a whole lot of harms as “indirect enough” under this logic. I’m hesitant to trot out examples involving serious mistreatment of human beings on the Forum. However, I submit that consideration of some examples along those lines would suggest that while “indirect enough” (as described in your post) may be a necessary precondition to offsetting being morally acceptable, it is not a sufficient precondition.
The CO2 hypothetical strikes me as meaningfully different. There’s a sustainable amount of CO2 emission, and certain forms of offsetting can ensure that your net contribution to CO2 emission does not exceed your fair share of the sustainable amount. In that scenario, you’re not violating the side constraint of taking more than your net fair share from the commons at all.
I continue to think many (but not all) offset calculations are too low in ways that may be problematic from a deontological perspective. For instance, some end up shifting much of the cost of one’s own morally problematic conduct onto third parties, which doesn’t seem to fit within a deontological framework. And standards for crediting impact need to be stricter here because multiple counting is a much more meaningful problem than when an altruistic donor is deciding where to donate. But that is somewhat of a different issue.
David offered Scott an opportunity to comment, and Scott turned it down. You can see that David also offered Julia an opportunity to comment on a short quote included in the blog post, and he ran the four-paragraph statement she provided which included context for the quoted material. Moreover, the leaked e-mail is not new, and Scott has had both the time and the platform to contextualize it if he wished to do so.
If Scott has made public statements clearly inconsistent with the e-mail that David missed, then it would be much more helpful to show the receipts rather than vaguely assert that he has “actively pushed back against a lot of discussion around HBD on his blog and related spaces.” Even accepting that assertion at face value, a history of pushing back against some unspecified elements of HBD discussion isn’t inconsistent with the views expressed in the e-mail or otherwise discussed in David’s post.
I don’t see a viable connection here, unless you make “EA principles” vague enough to cover an extremely wide space (e.g., considering ~consequentialism an “EA principle”).
I would feel more positively about this if there were a carveout for organizers with financial need, with hourly stipends capped at the wages typically received by students at the university in question. At least at the US undergraduate level, I think it would be plausible to operationalize with financial need in a semi-objective albeit imperfect manner.[1]
EA faces challenges with socioeconomic and other forms of diversity as it is. Without getting into broader arguments over diversity, at a minimum we want the most qualified people to get jobs in the ecosystem. That doesn’t jive with giving a leg up to those who have family or other resources that allow them to build career capital through volunteering for unpaid, part-time work. Given how competitive the EA job market is, making what seems to be a common resume/career-building experience inaccessible to would-be organizers with financial need strikes me as moving in the wrong direction here.
- ^
E.g., receiving need-based financial aid, having a FAFSA Expected Family Contribution of no more than $X, having worked at a paid, part-time student job prior to becoming an organizer that the organizer is giving up.
- ^
Note that the currently quoted pay for part-time organizers is somewhat lower than the linked comment, which quoted a then-current version of the OP website.
Current version reads:
Part-time/student organizers
Undergraduates organizing part-time typically receive a stipend that generally equates to $21-27/hr in the US and £15-19/hr in the UK. Non-undergraduates organizing part-time typically receive a stipend that generally equates to $25-32/hr in the US and £18-23/hr in the UK.
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/open-philanthropy-university-organizer-fellowship/
It looks like they do, or at least did, allow funding for <10 hr/week:
“Group leaders may ask for funding for organizers working less than 10 hours per week using either form above, rather than having those organizers fill out a separate application.”
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/open-philanthropy-university-organizer-fellowship/
My guess is that the downsides of paid organizing would be diminished to the extent that the structure and compensation somewhat closely tracked typical university-student employment. I didn’t see anything in the UK report about what typical rates might be, but at least back in my day most students were at fairly low hourly rates. Also, paying people for fewer than (say) 8-10 hours per week would not come across to me as roughly replacement income for foregone typical university-student employment because I don’t think such employment is typically available in smaller amounts. [Confidence: low, I am somewhat older by EA standards.]
There’s a chart showing it was in the high 60s to mid 70s in previous years, except one year at 91% because that year had virtual acceptances.
That’s not fraud, without more—Vasco didn’t suggest that anyone obtain loans that they did not intend to repay, or could not repay, in a no-doom world.
Every contract has an implied term that future obligations are void in the event of human extinction. There’s no shame in not paying one’s debts because extinction happened.
[highly speculative]
It seems plausible to me that the existence of higher degrees of random error could inflate a more error-tolerant evaluator’s CEAs for funded grants as a class. Someone could probably quantify that intuition a whole lot better, but here’s one thought experiment:
Suppose ResourceHeavy and QuickMover [which are not intended to be GiveWell and FP!] are evaluating a pool of 100 grant opportunities and have room to fund 16 of them. Each has a policy of selecting the grants that score highest on cost-effectiveness. ResourceHeavy spends a ton of resources and determines the precise cost-effectiveness of each grant opportunity. To keep the hypo simple, let’s suppose that all 100 have a true cost effectiveness of 10.00-10.09 Units, and ResourceHeavy nails it on each candidate. QuickMover’s results, in contrast, include a normally-distributed error with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 3.
In this hypothetical, QuickMover is the more efficient operator because the underlying opportunities were ~indistinguishable anyway. However, QuickMover will erroneously claim that its selected projects have a cost-effectiveness of ~13+ Units because it unknowingly selected the 16 projects with the highest positive error terms (i.e., those with an error of +1 SD or above). Moreover, the random distribution of error determined which grants got funded and which did not—which is OK here since all candidates were ~indistinguishable but will be problematic in real-world situations.
While the hypo is unrealistic in some ways, it seems that given a significant error term, which grants clear a 10-Unit bar may be strongly influenced by random error, and that might undermine confidence in QuickMover’s selections. Moreover, significant error could result in inflated CEAs on funded grants as a class (as opposed to all evaluated grants as a class) because the error is a in some ways a one-way rachet—grants with significant negative error terms generally don’t get funded.
I’m sure someone with better quant skills than I could emulate a grant pool with variable cost-effectiveness in addition to a variable error term. And maybe these kinds of issues, even if they exist outside of thought experiments, could be too small in practice to matter much?
simply make it easier to apply!
The acceptance rate being 84% makes me think that most admittees could be admitted using a less time-consuming application process. Maybe there could be some criteria that would allow someone to submit an abbreviated application if done by an early deadline, and receive either an admission or a request to submit the full application by the final deadline?
Trolley problems are sufficiently abstract—and presented in the context of an extraordinary set of circumstances—that they are less likely to trigger some of the concerns (psychological or otherwise) triggered by the present case. In contrast, lifesaving activity is pretty common—it’s hard to estimate how many times the median person would have died if most people would not engage in lifesaving action, but I imagine it is relatively significant.
If I am in mortal danger, I want other people to save my life (and the lives of my wife and child). I do not want other people deciding whether I get medical assistance against a deadly infectious disease based on their personal assessment of whether saving my life would be net-positive for the world. That’s true whether the assessment would be based on assumptions about people like me at a population level, or about my personal value-add / value-subtract in the decider’s eyes. If I have that expectation of other people, but don’t honor the resulting implied social contract in return, that would seem rather hypocritical of me. And if I’m going to honor the deal with fellow Americans (mostly white), and not honor it with young children in Africa, that makes me rather uncomfortable too for presumably obvious reasons.
We sometimes talk about demandingness in EA—a theory under which I would need to encourage people not to save myself, my wife, and my son if they concluded our reference class (upper-middle class Americans, likely) was net negative for the world is simply too demanding for me and likely for 99.9% of the population too.
Finally, I’m skeptical that human civilization could meaningfully thrive if everyone applied this kind of logic when analyzing whether to engage in lifesaving activities throughout their lives. (I don’t see how it make sense if limited to charitable endeavors.) Especially if the group whose existence was calculated as negative is as large as people who eat meat! In contrast, I don’t have any concerns about societies and cultures functioning adequately depending on how people answer trolley-like problems.
So I think those kinds of considerations might well explain why the reaction is different here than the reaction to an academic problem.