Hey! I am Mart, I learned about EA a few years back through LessWrong. Currently, I am pursuing a PhD in the theory of quantum technologies and learning more about doing good better in the EA Ulm local group and the EA Math and Physics professional group.
Mart_Korz
Karma: 82
That makes a lot of sense!
Consumers might not know or think much about the health aspects of things
This describes me quite well in many of my health choices, and unfortunately this is apparently really common.
potassium salt is 10x as expensive as normal salt
In my case, I also did not find salt that is pre-mixed at a price that makes sense to me—I bought a pharma-grade bag of KCl and mixed it with usual table salt myself[1], which resulted in a net-price that is 3x of the usual sodium salt.
So it goes back to policy, and whether governments should just regulate sodium content even in salt—we didn’t really explore this, given the higher evidence base and cheapness of salt policies.
That sounds very reasonable—I’ll be looking forward to hearing about updates in the future!
- ↩︎
with the hope that diluting by 1⁄3 will not be too much for the anti-hygroscopic components of the store-bought table salt
- ↩︎
That makes a lot of sense—in practice, there are many relevant considerations and other interventions might well be preferable in many contexts.
The expert opinion
[...] though a Chinese RCT does show positive results, and the current evidence is convincing, still more studies are needed, with the magnitude of benefit not as large as you would think.
also sounds as if potassium-enriched salt surely helps to some degree, but probably isn’t a solution by itself. And I get the impression that research in the coming years will probably improve the uncertainties here.
Apart from this, I am a bit surprised that the costs (“perhaps double the price”) would be a problem for richer countries. If I am understanding this right, this should still be obviously worth it as a health expenditure? A very simple estimate might be:
lost expected life due to high blood pressure: ~2 years (scaling the DALY burden to a single person)
expected gains from switching to potassium-enriched salt: ~1/2 year (I am guessing)
expected costs: 80 years * 2⁄3 kg/year * $10/kg = ~$550
resulting cost-effectiveness (assuming 1 year = 1 DALY): $1100 / DALY averted
Of course this isn’t comparable to GiveWell effectiveness, but it is really cheap compared to other health expenses.
I just realized that I could also just follow the links and found a part of the answer
[...] Another expert is more bearish, noting that though a Chinese RCT does show positive results, and the current evidence is convincing, still more studies are needed, with the magnitude of benefit not as large as you would think. That said, because it’s a substitution of sodium for potassium, there’s a double benefit for cardiovascular health; people don’t consume enough potassium, and potassium lowers blood pressure. And while there is a concern that increasing potassium intake across the population can create risk to people with chronic kidney disease, the evidence is that such people tend to suffer from cardiovascular disease anyway – most hypertension sufferers have higher risk of diabetes/obesity etc.
in section 4.1 1) g)
and also
Of huge interest too is potassium substitution; though evidence of that is fairly new, they think it is a game changer that can accelerate action. They are trying to figure out the name (e.g. potassium-enriched salts) from a public relations perspective. Increasing potassium reduces heart disease – it is an effective strategy. Low sodium salts in general do cost more – perhaps double the price. Then again, Himalayan salts are similarly twice as expensive, yet people still buy it – the challenge is getting the message out there, and that it is good for you (i.e. benefits of potassium); in Australia they are trying to understand the barriers to scaling up. There is research on how to get potash in a scalable way – there is a lot of potassium out there, and only a small amount is food grade (20%), with the rest (80%) used for things like fertilizer.
in section 3.3. Global Salt NGO, point 2.
I am happy to learn that people are working on this :) And it does make sense that the increased price also creates difficulties for adoption. This certainly isn’t a trivial problem. Also, I agree that the public relations perspective is important. Here in Germany, there were large health problems due to missing Iodine, which were reduced by fortifying table salt—but even though the necessity for Iodine hasn’t changed, people/products are starting to use the fortified salt less.
Regarding increasing potassium intake:
A few weeks ago, I heard about this as a good idea via a podcast which claimed that getting closer to the potassium recommendations would remove a large part of the problems of high sodium consumption. I switched my salt to 2⁄3 sodium and 1⁄3 potassium a few weeks ago, and until now I didn’t notice negative effects on taste[1].
Given that potassium is not that expensive, my impression was that a public policy of “everyone, potassium is x% part of table salt from now on” would lead to a large chunk of the benefits without people having to change their taste preferences a lot (by both decreasing sodium by x% and increasing potassium consumption correspondingly). This would increase the prize of salt significantly, which should have similar effects to a sodium tax (the prices would still amount to low single-digit cent costs per day even for high salt consumption).I would be curious about your thoughts on this, given that you have researched this topic a lot more deeply :)
Nonetheless I could still imagine that there are a number of foods with completely excessive amounts of salt for which other interventions would still be a good idea.
- ↩︎
I trust the nutritionist enough to be confident that this change is a good idea for me personally, but I did not look up the sources and I might well have misunderstood the effect-size of increasing potassium consumption
- ↩︎
I am just coming from a What We Owe the Future reading group—thanks for reminding me of the gap between my moral untuitions and total utilitarianism!
One reason why I am not convinded by your argument is that I am not sure that the additional lifes lived due to the unintended pregnancies are globally net-positive:
on the one hand, it does seem quite likely that their lives will be subjectively worth living (the majority of people agrees with this statement and it does not seem to me that these lives would be too different) and that they would have net-positive relationships in the future.
but on the other hand, given a level of human technology, there is some finite number of people on earth which is optimal form a total utility standpoint. And given the current state of biodiversity loss, soil erosion and global warming, it does not seem obvious that humanity is below that number[1]
as a third part, given that these are unintended pregnancies, it does seem likely that there are resource limitations which would lead to hardships if a person is born. We would need to know a lot about the life situation and social support structures of the potential parents if we wanted to estimate how significant this effect is, but it could easily be non-trivial.
edited to add and remove:
the number of 100 pregnancies averted does not correspond to 100 fewer children being born in the end. A significant part of the pregnancies would only be shifted in time. I would be surprised if the true number is larger than 10 and expect it to be lower than this. My reasoning here is that the total number of children each set of parents is going to have will hardly be reduced by 100x from access to contraception. If this number started at 10 children and is reduced to a single child, we have a reduction that corresponds to 10 fewer births per death averted. And stated like this, even the number 10 seems quite high(sorry, there were a few confusions in this argument)
This being said, the main reason why I am emotionally unconvinced by the argument you give is probably that I am on some level unable to contemplate “failing to have children” as something that is morally bad. My intuitions have somewhat cought up with the arguments that giving happy lives the opportunity to exist is a great thing, but they do not agree to the sign-flipped case for now. Probably, a part of this is that I do not trust myself (or others) to actually reason clearly on this topic and this just feels like “do not go there” emotionally.
- ↩︎
It also does not seem obvious that we are above that number. Especially when trying to include topics like wild animal suffering. At least I feel confident that human population isn’t off from the optimum by a huge factor.
This is a good point, although I would argue that the reasons why practicing religion has these advantages is unrelated to it being a case of Pascal’s wager (if we let Pascal’s wager stand for promises of infinite value in general).
This is not enough to claim that Christianity as a whole holds this position, but there certainly exist sentiments in this direction such as
Revelation 3:15--16
I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.
(Holy Bible, New International Version)
I really like the description, but would like to add that infinities in the “size” of the universe could also refer to time: it might be that there is an infinite future which we could possibly influence even if the size of the universe is finite. I don’t think that anyone expects this to be true with anything approaching certainty (due to entropy it seems likely that there is no possibility to sustain life/agents indefinitely), but it does not seem ruled out to me that there could be relevant loopholes like cosmic expansion ensuring that entropy can just grow indefinitely or other unusual scenarios (like the possibility to create a pocket universe by triggering a big bang)).
Would one only use ‘direct steps’ in decision-making? How is “path dependency” interpreted?
I’m not sure what you are referring to here. I would flag that the relative value type specification is very narrow—it just states how valuable things are, not the “path of impact” or anything like that.
After talking to GPT about this[1], I think that my concern is actually already covered by your
If people were doing it by hand, there could be contradictory properties, as you mention. But with programming, which we likely want anyway, it’s often trivial or straightforward to make consistent tables.
and could be addressed to a large degree with a few automatized checks and a user interface (one could even auto-fill the table given the first line of entries by assuming ~maximum resulting uncertainty for the unknown correlations). I feel like this could be really helpful for reflecting on one’s values if done right, or overwhelming if done wrong.
- ↩︎
[GPTs answer includes a summary, so I’ll leave out my prompt:] I see your point now. You’re referring to a potential inconsistency in the triangle inequality context for relative values. Let’s use a concrete example to explore this. Suppose the relative value of ‘chocolate’ to ‘vanilla’ is given by a 90% credibility interval from 0.8 to 1.2, and ‘banana’ to ‘vanilla’ is from 1.0 to 1.5. This would imply that, based on your preferences for chocolate and banana ice cream relative to vanilla, ‘banana’ should have a relative value compared to ‘chocolate’ that lies within a certain range. If, however, you then provide a wide 90% credibility interval for ‘chocolate’ to ‘banana’ (e.g., 0.2 to 5), it may seem inconsistent with the narrower ranges implied by the comparisons with ‘vanilla’. In this case, it may be that you need to revisit your estimates for ‘chocolate’ to ‘vanilla’ and ‘banana’ to ‘vanilla’. If you feel a lot of uncertainty about ‘chocolate’ vs. ‘banana’, perhaps you also should feel more uncertainty about these options compared to ‘vanilla’ than you initially thought. You may have overestimated your confidence in these comparisons. Alternatively, if you’re confident in your estimates of ‘chocolate’ to ‘vanilla’ and ‘banana’ to ‘vanilla’, you may want to narrow down your 90% credibility interval for ‘chocolate’ vs. ‘banana’. In any case, it’s a good point to keep in mind when building a relative value table. You want to be consistent in your uncertainty estimates across different comparisons. If there seems to be a contradiction, it’s a sign that you may need to rethink some of your estimates.
- ↩︎
Thanks! I’ll reply in separate comments
Is the meaning of each entry “How many times more value is there in item1 than in item2? (Provide a distribution)”?
Yep, that’s basically it.
Okay, so maybe relative values are a more straightforward concept than I thought/feared :)
Ooh, that makes sense. Thanks!
So my idea of ‘strict relative values’ turns out to be an illusory edge case if we use distributions and not numbers, and in practice we’ll usually be in the ‘generalized case’ anyway.
I fear, my not-grokking the implications remains. But at least, I don’t mistakenly think I fully understood the concept any more.
It is probably not worth the effort for you to teach me all about the approach, but I’ll still summarize some of my remaining questions. Possibly my confusions will be shared by others who try to understand/apply relative value functions in the future
If someone hands me a table with distributions drawn on it, what exactly do I learn? What decisions do a make based in the table?
Is the meaning of each entry “How many times more value is there in than in ? (Provide a distribution)”?
Would one only use ‘direct steps’ in decision-making? How is “path dependency” interpreted?
what is the necessary knowledge for people who want to use relative value functions? Can I do worse compared to using a single unit by using relative values naively?
- ↩︎
As you write, this is not really well-defined as one would need correlations to combine the distributions perfectly. But there should still be some bounds one could get on the outcome distribution.
- ↩︎
For example, it might totally happen that I feel comfortable with giving precise monetary values to some things I enjoy, but feel much less certain if I try to compare them directly
I think you might not quite yet grok the main benefits of relative values
Thanks for your reply, you are probably right. Let my share my second attempt of understanding relative values after going through the web app.
‘strict’ relative values
If I did not overlook some part in the code, the tables created in the web app are fully compatible with having a single unit.
For every single table, one could use a single line of the table to generate the rest of the table. Knowing for all , we can use to construct arbitrary entries.
Between the different tables, one would need to add a single translation factor which one could then use to merge the tables to a big single table.
Without such a translation factor, the tables would remain disconnected (there could be a single unit for all tables, but it is not specified). Still, the tables could still be used to make meaningful decisions inside of the scope of each table.
If this is the intent of how relative values are meant to be used, my impression of their advantages is:
they are, in principle, compatible with a single value/utility function. One does not need to change one’s philosophy at all when switching over from using a single unit for measuring value.
they allow for a more natural thought process when exploring the value of interventions
one can use crisply defined units at each step of one’s research: “Person in city x of income y gets $1” can be distinguished from “Person in city x of income y gets $5″ as necessary.
throughout the process, one will tend to work ‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down’, that is for bottom-up, start out with very specific value-measures and expand their connections (via relative values / translation factors) to more and more abstract/general values (such as maybe WELLBYs)
If one feels that there is an unbridgeable gap between two currently non-connected groups of values, one can keep them as separate value tables and decide to add the connection some time in the future
thanks to using distributions, one can also decide to add a connection and use a very high uncertainty instead.
This version of relative values (let’s call it “strictly coherent relative values according to Mart’s understanding v2” or “strict relative values” for short) feels quite intuitive to me and also seems significantly similar to how givewell’s current cost-effectiveness analyses are done (except that they do not create a value table with all-to-all translations and there being no/fewer distributions[1].)
Your link to the usage of relative values in Finance seems to me to be compatible with this definition of relative values.
Beyond ‘strict’ relative values
But, from reading your OP (and the recommended section of the video), my impression is that relative values are intended to be used to describe situations more general than my “strict relative values”.
Your
and also David Johnston’s comments seem to refer to a much more general case.
For this more general version my ‘strictness’ equation would typically not be valid. Translated into David’s notation, the ‘strictness’ equation would be where is the reference value, and are the relative values comparing and .
David’s
Note that, under this interpretation, we should not expect i=j$. This is because items have different values in different contexts.
is clearly not compatible with ‘strictness’ [2].
In such a generalized case, I think that the philosophical status of what entries mean is much more complicated. I do not have a grasp on what the added degrees of freedom do and why it is good to have them. In my last comment, I kind of assumed that any deviation from strictness would be “irrational inconsistency” by definition. But maybe I am just missing the relevant background and this really does capture something important?
- ↩︎
This impression is based on the 2023 spreadsheet. This might well be a mistaken impression
- ↩︎
Proof: Insert and into the ‘strictness equation’ and see that the results are the reciprocals of each other
I would :)
Audio matters
Are there by any chance plans to collect the audio in a podcast feed?
I have little experience on quantifying value, so I don’t feel that I have a relevant opinion about approaches to this topic. But improving our conceptual tools for this clearly seems valuable :)
I feel like a commonly occurring result would be that the comparison tables include contradictory properties. If someone asked me about my relative preferences for apples, bananas and cherries, I think the chance would be significant that I give a ‘contradictory’ answer like “5 cherries = 1 apple or 1 banana, but also 1 apple = 2 bananas”. Using distributions might help, but I think a corresponding property of “tension between ratios” should still appear quite frequently.
It feels like a confusing property that one could get different results by converting to the final units, WELLBYs for example, in two steps instead of using a direct conversion. First translating everything to QALYs and then to WELLBYs would usually give different results than the direct path.[1]
Would the solution be to quantify all actions using their native units and then convert to the unit of interest without intermediate steps? I can see a case for this. If we are highly uncertain, avoiding unnecessary mental steps is a good idea.
Possibly something like this is the best we can do as long as we cannot define an explicit utility function. Still, I would be interested whether relative value functions could be a tool that helps us resolve confusions in what we value?
- ↩︎
I think that this is actually the additional information which having such a table adds compared to using a single central unit of comparison. If there were no path dependency, the table would be redundant and could be replaced by a single central unit (= any single line of the table). This makes me extra curious about the question of what this “extra information” really means?
- ↩︎
Hi Felix, I was involved in many of the discussions and will try to answer your questions.
you did a speed giving game? It’s about giving people the opportunity to choose for themselves, and there may also be some rebels in your target group. ;)
Yes, many of the students initially liked the idea of playpumps and chose them as preliminary favourite and some actually directly put their coin into the playpump-box[1]. After we provided them the more detailed info, most changed their decision and for one of them it just felt more proper to treat their putting their coin in the playpump-box as final, even though they would have made a different decision with their updated knowledge. For the second person, “rebel” actually kind of fits as a description at least for this one interaction with us :)
So with 1 € per person, this would make 29 players. How much time and people did you invest in the uni forum? How was the ratio with people getting a flyer / speaking with you and not participating in the giving game to those who did (had you more impressions on people than 29)?
Hmm, preparation was at maybe 30 h total (where most of this time was specifying what exactly we intended to do, reading about the experiences and guides from other groups, and also collecting and adopting the printed resources. If we were to repeat this in a few weeks or next semester, the preparation would be a lot faster) and we were two people who were present during the event itself, maybe 5 h each.
We made a lot of use of the giving game being a neat way to engage people without them feeling pressured or committing to anything in the future, so that I would say that the majority of people we reached also participated in the giving game. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can give a more more precise estimate.
Have fun with your intro meeting in six days. :)
Thanks!
- ↩︎
we were using large glasses, but ‘box’ feels like a better description of their purpose
- ↩︎
The library is well-visited today and there currently are no additional empty chairs left – if you join (you can recognize us by the copy of the book Doing Good Better) we can just switch to a more suitable part of the library.
If we move, I’ll correspondingly note this here as a comment.
I have the slight suspicion that the author did not set a clickable link to reduce self-promotion.
I hope it is thus okay if I add it here in the comments https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSXHJRBQ
For anyone interested: A Forum post with more background info about the novel is I’ve written a Fantasy Novel to Promote Effective Altruism
Are there considerations on whether naturally occurring things would have triggered decay already if it were (sufficiently) “easy to trigger”?
My expectation would be that e.g. neutron star+black hole merging events create quite extreme conditions and might rule out some possible ways/parameter regimes of vacuum decay?
Update on the giving game contributions towards PlayPumps International: With some delay, we were able to find a way to donate the 2 € which were selected to go to PlayPumps by our participants.