Thanks for carrying out this analysis! Do you have a spreadsheet with the calculations? Personally, I find itās much easier for me to understand the calculations and assumptions in that format. Being able to make a copy and play around with the input values to see which inputs drive the end line result is also super helpful.
MathiasKBšø
Karma: 6,504
ļ[Linkpost] SiĀtuĀaĀtional AwareĀnessāThe Decade Ahead
Thanks! Very kind of you to say that
Gene drives remove the need to continuously rear and drop screwworms. Counting insect welfare I would wager advocacy for using gene drives looks better not worse.
Thanks, Iām looking forward to that post!
Iāll be honest, to me the numbers sound too good to be true, so Iām curious to understand the assumptions that go into those numbers and whether I agree with them.
If the numbers really are that good thatās quite exciting!
https://āāforum.effectivealtruism.org/āātopics/āācorporate-animal-welfare-campaigns
According to research by the Welfare Footprint Project, both of these asks substantially decrease hours in pain experienced by farmed chickens,[2][3] decreasing chicken suffering by an estimated 30%ā60%.[4][5]
According to estimates by Å imÄikas,[6] corporate campaigns between 2015 and the end of 2018 will improve the welfare of 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent.
Is there a cost-effectiveness analysis available where I can read how you arrived at these numbers?
Cost per client served: $4.7
Cost per unintended pregnancies averted: $3.60
Cost per maternal death averted: $685
Cost per DALY: $1.63
Cost per CYP: $2.31
Policy adĀvoĀcacy for eradĀiĀcatĀing screwĀworm looks reĀmarkĀably cost-effective
I donāt find find this argument all too compelling. Who pays for the governmentās ability to protect the wealthy? In absence of a government, why wouldnāt the wealthy pay someone else to protect their wealth?
That said I completely agree with the last sentence and I think taxation is very reasonable. Deciding that taxation is theft and therefore always wrong, is after all the worst argument in the world.
I donāt mean to argue for libertarianism, but I do want advocates of socialism to be mindful of how they plan to enforce it.
Good question, worth exploring!
One point not brought up, which I think is somewhat important to me is how socialist policies are to be enforced.
I personally dislike the implicit threat of violence enforcement of those policies requires. Iāll be the first to admit itās difficult to create a functional society without the use or threat of force, but I still would like to see it treated it as a necessary evil not to be used lightly.
There are many laws which would be less popular if one added to the end: āor weāll beat you upā, but in some sense every law has this implicitly written. Weāre just not very mindful of it!
I think itās reasonable for vegans to ask someone whether they would still eat meat if they had to kill the animal themselves. In a similar manner, would you be fine with forcing someone into a car and locking them into a cell if they refused to hand over everything they had earned that month?
This is far from a knockdown argument and somewhat of a strawman, but it matters to me. I place value on people being free to live their lives how they see fit. Anyone should be welcome to form a socialist commune, but it should be out of ones own volition.
I think thereās a lot of local maxima that are very juicy. I would encourage people to look at the opportunities around them that others would miss, and try my best to foster a culture that helps its members discover them.
A great example of someone doing this is Abdurrahman who took the initiative to create EA in Arabic which I expect will be really impactful. I donāt expect there were many EA jobs available to him in Saudi, but he looked around and found a gap (no resources on EA in one of the worldās biggest languages) and executed on the opportunity.
I am currently looking into an animal welfare intervention which South American EAās would be much better suited to do than anyone else. Some time ago I looked into policy interventions to improve the water sanitation efforts of the Jal Jeevan Mission in India. An Indian EA from the right state would be much better suited to carry out the sanitation advocacy for JJM than I am.
Iāve yet to find a region of the world without opportunities, but most of them wonāt be listed in a career guide!
Iām grappling with this exact issue. I think AI is the most important technology humanity will event, but Iām skeptical of the EV of much work on the technology. Still it seems that it should be the only reasonable thing to spend all my time thinking about, but even then Iām not sure Iād arrive at anything useful.
And the opportunity cost is saving hundreds of lives. I donāt think there is any other question that has cost me as much sleep as this one.
forecasting newsletter by nuno sempere
Excerpt from the most recent update from the ALERT team:
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1: What a week! The news, data, and analyses are coming in fast and furious.
Overall, ALERT team members feel that the risk of an H5N1 pandemic emerging over the coming decade is increasing. Team members estimate that the chance that the WHO will declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) within 1 year from now because of an H5N1 virus, in whole or in part, is 0.9% (range 0.5%-1.3%). The team sees the chance going up substantially over the next decade, with the 5-year chance at 13% (range 10%-15%) and the 10-year chance increasing to 25% (range 20%-30%).
their estimated 10 year risk is a lot higher than I would have anticipated.
write, write, write.
PriĀors and Prejudice
I suspect the primary reasons you want to break up Deepmind from Google is to:
Increase their autonomy, reducing pressure from google to race
Reduce Deepmindās access to capital and compute, reducing their competitiveness
Perhaps that goes without saying, but I think itās worth explicitly mentioning. In a world without AI risk, I donāt believe you would be citing various consumer harms to argue for a break up.
The traditional argument for breaking up companies and preventing mergers is to reduce the companyās market power, increasing consumer surplus. In this case, the implicit reason for breaking up Deepmind is to decrease its competitiveness thus reducing consumer surplus.
I think itās perfectly fine to argue for this, I just really want us to be explicit about it.
Iām awestruck, that is an incredible track record. Thanks for taking the time to write this out.
These are concepts and ideas I regularly use throughout my week and which have significantly shaped my thinking. A deep thanks to everyone who has contributed to FHI, your work certainly had an influence on me.
I think Iām sympathetic to Oxfordās decision.
By the end, the line between genuine scientific inquiry and activistic āresearchā got quite blurry at FHI. I donāt think papers such as: āProposal for a New UK National Institute for Biological Securityā, belong in an academic institution, even if I agree with the conclusion.
at giveffektivt.dk we cover transaction costs of donating. Similar to donation matching, itās likely the money we spend on transactions would be donated anyways.
I think itās fine to do this, but iām unsure where the line should be drawn. We find that many people who donate worry far too much about transaction and overhead costs. By alleviating one of those we make it much more attractive to donate (though I donāt think weāve A/āB tested this actually).
But following this logic should we say that ā5 dollars could save a lifeā if we thought this would increase total donations? Despite this sentence being literally true, it feels highly misleading and I would have mixed feelings about such a message. (In practice I donāt think stating this would increase donationsāif anything the opposite)
My own belief is that this type of messaging often brings its benefits in the short term, but incurs its costs in the long term, if a donor feels deceived and becomes less inclined to donate going forward.
This ultimately is the heuristic I go by. If someone were to read up on a claim after donating, would they feel deceived? If yes, then donāt make the claim.
I donāt personally think I would feel deceived about donor matching, so my intutition is that its fine, but maybe others feel different.