I’m just a normal, functioning member of the human race, and there’s no way anyone can prove otherwise
Matt_Sharp
Karma: 960
This is happening! Last month in the UK dog food containing cultured chicken meat went on sale—albeit so far just as a trial in a single pet shop.
This seems like an interesting post that synthesises a range of ideas and draws out some important implications.
However, at the moment it’s essentially a wall of text, which might be deterring people from engaging with the content. For better engagement, I’d recommend improving readability by:
Adding an executive summary (for ease, maybe share it with ChatGPT and ask it to do this, then tweak). The introduction clearly sets out the structure, but isn’t really a summary. Note that there is a Forum bot that sometimes add an executive summary as a comment, but I think authors should be encouraged to do this themselves.
Formatting the section headings (e.g. larger font, bold)
Adding subsection headings that summarise the key point of that subsection/paragraph
I’m inclined to agree that EAs should think more politically in general.
But the value of specific actions depends on both scale/leverage and the probability of success.
Influencing governments in the short-term has a low probability of success, unless you’re already in a position of power or it’s an issue that is relatively uncontroversial (e.g. with limited trade-offs).
Because of the scale of government spending, it could still be worth trying—but the main value might be in learning lessons on how to get better at influencing in the future, rather than having any immediate impact.
“Much of the evidence we cite is from charities’ own webpages. Charities have the ability to change their webpages to potentially alter, conceal, and/or destroy evidence that we have cited”
https://web.archive.org/ (aka Wayback Machine) regularly saves old versions of webpages. Maybe select a bunch of charities at random to see how thorough it is? In theory the charities could ask for old versions of their websites to be deleted from the archive, but there’s no guarantees the archive would comply with their request and if they did it would look very suspicious if basically every other charity is on there.
Benefits (conservative estimates):
10% improvement in policy decisions
Applied to city budgets ($100M-1B+)
Yearly benefit: $10M-100M per city
Net Present Value (30 years, 5% discount rate): $150M-1.5B per city
I upvoted because I think you’re touching on some interesting ideas. But I think you have a lot to do to demonstrate the scale of benefits you describe—if you have a more detailed analysis, I’d encourage you to link to it in the above section.In particular:
What evidence there is for (at least) a 10% improvement in policy decisions? I can see how the process would be a substantial improvement over a ‘pure democracy’ (as you describe). But what you describe sounds very similar to what policy-focused civil servants should already be doing (at least in the UK, for national policy), in terms of assessing evidence and listening to various experts and advocates. Perhaps there is a gap at city-level?
You appear to have taken the ’10% improvement’, and then multiplied it by the annual city budget in order to get the yearly benefit, and then multiplied this by 30 (with a 5% discount rate) to get the benefit over 30 years. This makes sense if ‘10% improvement’ literally means 10% improvement in outcomes (rather than ‘reallocating 10% of the budget’).
But if this does mean 10% improvement in outcomes, it seems extremely implausible to me that such improvements can reoccur year-on-year. If a city’s budget is horribly misallocated at the start, then there could be substantial improvements in the first few years—but you’ll pretty quickly get to the point where there are relatively minor differences in the marginal cost-effectiveness of different activities.
[edit: I think this is wrong—a specific 10% improvement made in year 1 could of course reoccur in subsequent years. But there is an assumption that this 10% improvement wouldn’t have been made at any other time without Election by Jury]
Could you provide some real (or even theoretical) examples to support your claims?
You also mention x-risk. But even if what you are proposing is successful, I imagine it would take at least several decades to become widespread. Given the costs you indicate per city, I imagine it would be easier and much faster to try to influence existing politicians and civil servants?
I expect that the best thing to do will vary substantially depending on whether we’re considering
(a) the EA community / movement-building per se
(b) EA-aligned organisations trying to implement specific projects for a given cause area
(c) fundraising
With (a), we’d want to consider some of the cultural risks or unintended consequences (e.g. as pointed by David Mathers and titotal) alongside the benefit of different perspectives. But this is less important for (b), where engaging and collaborating with people with more conversative perspectives could be critical for a project to succeed. With (c) I guess we should welcome and encourage funding from most sources, at least from small/medium donors (with larger donors we may want to be more cautious in case of reputational risks—but this obviously doesn’t just apply to conservatives!)
Strong upvote for bothering to read the terms and conditions!
“You say that viewed from your and many EA’s moral framework, nature has no value?”
No—Gemma said nature has no “intrinsic moral value”. There is a difference between intrinsic value and instrumental value. Intrinsic value is something that is valued for its own sake. Instrumental value is where something is valuable because it contributes to something else.Nature clearly has instrumental value, i.e. “we care about environmental protection primarily because of its impact on sentient beings”.
But nature isn’t the only thing that has an impact on sentient beings. The question is how we should best use additional resources (e.g. time and money) to improve outcomes for sentient beings.
Spending more on protecting nature is obviously one option, but not the only one. If we spend more on nature, we have less to spend on human disease and animal welfare etc. So we need to consider all the options, and focus on where we can do the most good.
That might be right. Another explanation is that even if she takes x-risk seriously, she thinks it’s easier build political support around regulating AI by highlighting existing problems.
I don’t have a clear answer—but if your concern is intense suffering of animals, why not get involved with animal rights/welfare activism? Is there a reason to favour climate activism?
This is just speculation, but I wonder if it’s more cost-effective to donate to a Senate candidate who is also running in a Presidential swing state? Maybe Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Arizona?
It seems plausible that a strong Senate candidate could inspire voters to get out and vote for a President they’re not enthusiastic about—essentially a ‘reverse coattails’ effect (though I don’t think there’s particularly strong evidence for this)
Also in the article “The Animal and Plant Health Agency—part of the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs—gave the product the go-ahead.”
I think there are a bunch of EAs working at Defra—I wonder if they helped facilitate this?
Lab-grown meat approved for pet food in the UK
“The UK has become the first European country to approve putting lab-grown meat in pet food.
Regulators cleared the use of chicken cultivated from animal cells, which lab meat company Meatly is planning to sell to manufacturers.
The company says the first samples of its product will go on sale as early as this year, but it would only scale its production to reach industrial volumes in the next three years.”
I have taken the pledge but I’m not currently donating 10%, so don’t feel I can authentically promote it to others right now.
I guess it’s worth waiting to see what each party says in its manifesto.
But unless the polls dramatically tighten, it doesn’t seem particularly valuable to spend time weighing up which party to vote for at a national level because it’s highly likely (>90%) that Labour will win.
What might be valuable is considering the top couple of candidates in your local constituency (once candidates are confirmed) and going along to a hustings event to directly ask them for their views. Some constituencies will be determined by a relatively small number of votes—potentially a few hundred or even a few tens. But even if it’s a relatively safe seat, this could help nudge the winning candidate to support better safety/regulation.
I’m also confused as to why $10bn per disease is suggested, given the much higher costs of the listed examples.
However, it seems plausible that costs per disease will substantially decrease as we learn more about biology and how to successfully run eradication campaigns. For example, developing a new vaccine technology against one virus could make it much easier and cheaper to develop vaccines against related viruses.
I sort of agree, but a couple of points:
I think advice can be useful from those who have tried something but failed (though plausibly many of those who eventually succeeded will have initially failed).
If we only seek advice from those who have quite easily succeeded, we risk hearing a biased view of the world that may not be the best advice for us. We may have more in common with those who failed, and may be better off hearing from these people in order to avoid their mistakes.
Presumably, we would like to hear from a broad range of people who have been successful (possibly at different things).
In order to hear all of these different views, it would be useful for someone to research, collate, and summarise them. But to do this well, what actually matters are research and communications skills—not necessarily the ability to do the things that the successful people have done.
For example, you don’t have to be a successful entrepreneur in order to interview 50 entrepreneurs and write about what they have in common. In this case, we should take into account the writer’s previous success at being a researcher and writer, not their entrepreneurial success.
This sounds potentially valuable. However, it’s important to establish what the added value of this project would be.
What current processes/systems/databases do scientists currently use to identify relevant research and bacteria? What about these existing processes/systems/databases is most in need of improving? Which scientists in the field have you spoken to about this in order to identify the main challenges they face when using existing systems?
Also...is there a reason for only focusing on antibiotic producing bacteria and not including fungi?
https://www.socialchangelab.org/ might have some relevant insights here. They’ve done some work on which factors matter most for protest movements. Though I’m not sure what they’re currently working on, or if they have any relevant quantitative estimates and comparisons with other interventions.
Related—see Ambitious Impact’s Founding to Give program and intro post here. I wonder how the first cohort are getting on...