I run the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH), a cause prioritization research and grantmaking organization.
Joel Tanšø
Karma: 1,872
Disclosure: Sarah and Ben are friends, and we came out of the same CE incubation batch, so Iām not unbiased here.
I think itās speaks well of a personās integrity, objectivity, and concern for impact that theyāre able to make a clear eyed assessment that their own project isnt having the desired impact, and then going ahead to shut it down so as to not burn counterfactually valuable resources.
Itās something thatās worth emulating, and I do try to apply this myselfāvia regular CEAs and qualitative evaluations of CEAECHās expected impact (especially as a meta org with a more indirect path to impact). Weāre only wasting our own time otherwise!
Hi Vasco,
The GiveWell team handling the nutrition portfolio reached out to me to discuss salt policy, and SSB taxes are on their longlist, iirc. Of note is the fact that Vital Strategies (which have gotten GiveWell grants for their alcohol policy work, also does SSB tax advocacy).
Iāve generally moved to the view that geomeans are better in cases where the different estimates donāt capture a real difference but rather a difference in methodology (while using the arithmetic makes sense when we are capturing a real difference, e.g. if an intervention affects a bunch of people differently).
In any case, this report is definitely superseded/āout-of-date; Stanās upcoming final report on abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios is far more representative of CEARCHās current thinking on the issue. (Thanks for your inputs on ASRS, by the way, Vasco!)
Hi Nick!
Yep, thatās definitely a concern for governments (same with other policy interventions for nutrition). For fundersāto be fair, thatās not much different from direct delivery (e.g. for vaccinations or contraception, we canāt really know the impact until we finish our M&E and see the uptake rates/ādisease rates change)
Hi Mo,
I donāt think I read that part of Michaelās thesis before, but it does look interesting!
In general, I think itās fairly arbitrary what a cause isāan intervention/āsolution can also be reframed as a problem (and hence a cause) through negation (e.g. physical activity is a preventative solution to various diseases like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, and in a real sense physical inactivity is a problem; having an ALLFED-style resilient food supply is a mitigatory solution to nuclear winterāeven if we canāt prevent nuclear exchange, we can perhaps stop billions from dying from famineāand in that sense lack of foods capable of growing in abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios is a problem).
Yep, thatās what Jeroen submitted, and he posted it to the forum after. I think itās a really useful perspective to have. In GHD, we already have various risk factors that we can address to solve multiple diseases (e.g. hypertension for coronary heart disease, stroke, kidney disease etc), and it makes sense to apply this perspective more broadly.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
(1) On the evidence base for mass media interventions: Our choice to prioritize mass media (and so attempt more detailed modelling) was based on it (a) looking good in cost-effectiveness at a a shallower research stage with a less; (b) being recommended by the WHO as the most cost-effective intervention for promoting physical activity; and (c) generally, mass media interventions being 2nd only to policy in cheap scalability.
We relied on the study you cited (Abioye, Hajifathalian & Danaei), and took into consideration all three meta-analyses (impact on sedentary behaviour, sufficient walking, and sufficient physical activity), while discounting based on the degree to which measured outcome is dissimilar to GBD/āWHO definitions of sufficient physical activity (>= 600 METs minutes per week). We did not exclude the sedentary meta-analysis results based on the fact that its reliant on a low quality outlier, but did perform our own analysis, to discount it (and the other meta-analyses) on the basis of underlying study quality (especially with respect to endogeneity) and publication bias.
We also considered whether the studies being from high-income countries biases the result (n.b. on the one hand, ageing high income countries are older and more sedentary, which implies a larger group of potential beneficiaries and greater population-level effect size; on the other hand, as Rosie Bettle of FP notes in her report on mass media interventions, its potentially the case that basic healthcare knowledge is more lacking in poorer countries, so you canāas with vaccine uptakeāincrease uptake there in a way).
Overall, we do think thereās is an effect, but itās highly uncertain, and thereās a real chance itās zero. For more details, see the ultra-long (and fairly tedious) discussion in this cell (Tractability:B12) of the CEA.
(2) Built environment changes: We did take a look at this option (seeAnnex A in our CEA for a qualitative discussion of the available intervention options, and the relevant evidence base/āexpert feedback). We ultimately prioritized mass media (for reasons discussed above), but I do think such environment changes will be substantially more impactful but also much, much harder.
For one, if weāre talking about not just high-income countries but LMICs, the situation is very different. Zoning is just much less a factor than in the rich world (they may not have much on the books, and whatās on the books may not be enforced), so the problem they face isnāt the one that the US/āUK etc face and which YIMBYs are trying to solve. Their major cities are also extremely dense, and people have low vehicle ownership rates (but worse congestion and air pollution). Making these cities more walkable isnāt just a matter of allowing dense housing, but spending a lot of money to improve public transport, solving air pollution etc, and thatās a fundamentally much harder ask for poor countries.
I used Abioye, Hajifathalian & Danaei on mass media, and Kang et al on pedometers. We also looked at a bunch of other interventions (e.g. built environment measures, digital interventions, point-of-decision prompts like posters by stairs, etc) - do take a look at Annex A in our CEA for a qualitative discussion of the available intervention options, the relevant evidence base/āexpert feedback, and why we prioritized government public education campaigns.
You can always reach out via the forum!
https://āāforum.effectivealtruism.org/āāposts/āāW93Pt7xch7eyrkZ7f/āācause-area-report-antimicrobial-resistance
Thoughts about EGI vs policy advocacy, Joey? Odds of success will should be lower but expected impact higher than either DD/āEGI. For learning value I imagine itās something in betweenāstrong emphasis on communications, but youāre also working in a local LMIC context, and forced to adapt, unlike EGI attempts based in your home country.
It depends on whether you take a person-affecting view or totalist view. On the former, the baby isnāt a person (and wonāt be, if you donāt save him/āher), and so does not and never will have actual preferences in not dying (since that requires fairly sophisticated views of self over time etc). Hence, despite the fact that saving the baby will achieve comparatively more QALYs, thereās nothing wrong in saving the mother instead. I think this makes sense, though not everyone accepts PAC (e.g. Richard, who also posted here, and has an excellent philosophy blog worth reading, tends towards a more totalist view in population ethics).
For what itās worth, itās also important to think about the implications that your position here will have on abortion, since any totalist view here has repugnant conclusions there.
You might want to reach out to Akhil Bansal, who was a Schmidt officer on AMR and now runs an AMR funding circle. Heāll be very up to date on this issue.
While the idea of moral licensing makes sense to me in theory, Iām not too persuaded by the empirical evidence, at least from the cited meta-analysisāthe publication bias is enormous, as the authors note.
GiveWell has funded Vital Strategyās alcohol work, OP has their global health policy focus area (inclusive of alcohol) and CE has incubated the Centre for Alcohol Policy Solutions (though I have limited visibility on their success since incubation a few years ago).
Check out CEās report on alcohol and tobacco for a short primer; you can also compare their assessment of success rates and neglectedness.
https://āāwww.charityentrepreneurship.com/āāhealth-reports
(1) I think Joeyās right, and Iāll phrase the issue in this wayāa lot of EAs underrate the impact of habit-formation and overrate the extent to which most of your choices even require active willpower. Your choices change who you are as a person, so what was once hard becomes easy.
Iāve always given at least 10% to effective charities, and now itās just something I do; itās barely something I have to think about, let alone require some heroic exertion of will. And while Iām not vegan, I am successfully eating less meat even on a largel6 keto diet, and what surprised me is how much easier it is than I thought it would be.
(2) Letās accept for the sake of argument that there is a lot of heterogeneity, such that for some people the impact of habit formation is weak and it is psychologically very difficult for them to consistently adhere to non-job avenues to impact (e.g. donating, being vegan, etc). Even so, how would one know in advance? Why not test it out, to see if youāre in the group for which habit formation impact is high and these sacrifices are easy, or if you are in the other group?
Surely itās worth doingāthe potential impact is significant, and if itās too hard you can of course stop! But many people will be surprised, I think, at just how easy certain things are when they become part of your daily routine.
GiveWell is available (search Clear Fund)!
Itās been some time, and Stan Pinsent was the primary on this project (I only provided some some input). Copying from what he wrote previously:
āHow much sooner life extension technology is expected to arrive with an additional USD 10 million in research, conditional on radical life extension being possible? In 2020 Aubrey de Grey predicted that a 10x increase in funding would accelerate SRFās research by a factor of 2. It seems reasonable to assume that as a major proponent of life extension research (de Grey has donated his career and most of his personal wealth to it), this estimate is optimistic. De Grey, who was fired in 2021 and started his own research organization, later said that talent, not money, is the main barrier to progress. Since his 2020 prediction, SRF recieved a record USD 30 million annual income in 2021, which means that funding is probably now less effective than it once was. Given SNS expenditure of USD 3-5 million per year up to 2020, I interpret de Greyās prediction as āwith $40m funding research would progress twice as far in a year as it would have with $4m fundingā. However, we have added complication of SRFās recent $30m windfall. I assume that in light of the improved funding situation, SRFās annual expenditure will grow to $20m a year. Let a year of research at a funding level of $20m be our āunit yearā. Then the number of unit-years of research performed in a year with $Xm extra funding can be modelled as R = ((X+20m)/ā20m)^log10(2) (with R=unit years of research, F=funding). This fits the prediction well because (1) when X=0, one unit-year of research is completed and (2) when the total funding is multiplied by 10, the research output doubles. Given that we are considering the impact of an $Xm donation, the question can be framed as āhow many extra unit years of research could be achieved in a year with $(X+20)m funding?ā. So I calculate number of unit-years of research that can be performed in a year with $(X+20)m funding, then subtract 1. Note that because the prediction only extended to total funding levels up to $40m, this formula is only valid for X<$20m.ā
CEARCH did a shallow dive on ageing a few months ago (link), but our tentative conclusion is that life extension reasearch doesnāt look too cost-effective (n.b. ideas tend to look good up front and worse as we understand the idea more and discount for more complications, so if anything we should expect the cause to even less cost-effective than current estimates suggest).
In any case, Nuno has a list of relevant research here if anyone wants to read more.
Thanks Aisling and team!
Iām generally a big fan of health policy interventionsāfor traffic regulation my main uncertainty is over whether speed limits are even binding, to make a difference in dense urban environments where terrible traffic jams occur anyway and enforcement is poor, such that changing the de jure policy may not do much. Any general thoughts on the issue?
If Iām understanding this concern correctly, itās along the lines of: ātheyāre not making a financial sacrifice in shutting down, so itās less praiseworthy than it otherwise would beā.
Just to clarify, charity founders (at least CE ones) take a pay cut to start their charityāthey would earn more if working for other EA organizations as employees, and much more if in tech/āfinance/āconsulting/ācareers that typical of people with oxbridge/āivy/āetc education levels. The financial sacrifice was already made when starting the charity, and if anything, quitting is actually better for you financially.