I’m just a normal, functioning member of the human race, and there’s no way anyone can prove otherwise
Matt_Sharp
Karma: 989
I don’t think we should care about biodiversity inherently. But it could be instrumentally valuable to protect large areas of nature until we have a much more detailed understanding of the species that are out there—and the potential food sources and medicinal compounds etc that could be valuable to humans and animals. My intuition is that the best interventions in this area will fall well short of the best interventions in other cause areas—but would still be a big step up from improving a basketball team!
If vegans do have higher rates of depression, it seems like there are several possible explanations:
1. It is indeed due to diet/nutrients.
2. There is a selection effect—people who go vegan are more likely to suffer from depression, but it’s not due to a vegan diet. For example, perhaps people who go vegan are less conformist/willing to go against social norms, and this corresponds to a psychological profile that increases risk of depression.
3. Relatedly, it may be that going vegan is distressing because of seeing other people’s animal consumption. This might not just be due to greater awareness of animal suffering, but because it creates a barrier between a vegan and friends/family/rest of society—i.e. the main driver may be social exclusion.
I’ve not looked at any literature on this—perhaps there are some studies which largely rule out 2 and 3. I expect it may be a combination of the explanations (anecdotally 2 and 3 are both true for me—I was anxious and depressed before going vegan. And veganism makes it harder to connect with some people, particularly e.g. when dating)
“there isn’t much reason for many classes of vegans/vegetarians to experience increased rate of depression due to distress about other people’s animal consumption: those who would identify health, environment, culture, some forms of religion, etc. as their primary motivation for their diet.”
I agree this is likely for those where their own health is the primary motivation. But I could easily imagine that people who intensely care about the environment, culture, or their religion being distressed (to the point of depression) when they are surrounded by a society that widely dismisses and often mocks their values.
This is a good point. I may be misinterpreting the cited research, but if the proposed training increases disclosures of CSA, that will (a) presumably reduce ‘costs as a consequence’ (which includes a monetised value of the physical and emotional harm suffered) but (b) plausibly increase ‘costs in response’ (due to increased police, prison, and safeguarding costs)
Considering that immigrants are also cheaper to the state than the native-born, and they outearn the native-born, migrants who arrived 2019-2023 will make a net contribution to British finances.
I do not think that the UK should restrict immigration for fiscal reasons. If the UK does choose to restrict immigration—as it seems inclined to do—it should be clear about why. It is not because immigrants have placed “public services and housing access… under too much pressure” and immigration threatens the welfare state. Rather, it is simply because voters don’t like it very much.
Your analysis seems reasonable. But it’s plausible that immigration can both (a) make a net contribution to government finances and (b) place “public services and housing access...under too much pressure” (at least in the short-medium term). This depends on the scale of immigration, and the speed at which additional services, infrastructure, and housing can be developed. Some things can be developed quickly, but others might take decades (e.g. major new transport infrastructure). In recent decades the construction of new housing (and supporting public services) does not seem to have kept pace with the relatively rapid growth in population, mostly driven by immigration.
I agree that we shouldn’t only care about the perspective of humans. But if humans aren’t around then much of the potential energy on Earth will simply go unused (unless another technologically advanced species evolves or visits Earth from elsewhere). So yes, this would be a waste.
energy can neither be created nor be destroyed, it is naturally a zero sum game
While energy cannot be created or destroyed at the level of the universe, this doesn’t mean it’s a zero sum game from the perspective of life on Earth. There is a huge amount of energy available in the form of atomic energy, solar energy, tidal energy etc that is simply going unused. If humans use this, no-one loses out.
The amount is related to the value by some constant, unless you’re implying a time factor
Yes, I and others have explicitly been saying time is a factor, e.g. see my 2 examples above and comments by others. The amount is likely not related to value by some constant. The value that a given amount of money can buy will vary over time.
but as far as I can see, the timing concern is a red herring, as in my model the pump is already primed and wealthy enough donors are dying in week one.
I’ll be honest, I don’t understand this point, or why it means the value of a donation won’t change over time.
I may just be misunderstanding. But I don’t think there’s much more to say on this, unless e.g. you’re able to share your model on Excel or Google sheets.
results in more money per unit time donated within the population, that would seem to be more effective to me
This is still only considering the amount of money donated, not the value of what the money can buy.
No, I don’t understand your point. The fact that some people are dying and donating now doesn’t answer the question of whether people who are not dying now should donate or invest now.
I don’t think it’s specifically about the EA population.
The value of donations may change over time. Your model shows that investing results in having more money to donate in the future. But it doesn’t seem to take into account the value of that money (or the value of what the money can buy). This might change over time.
A couple of examples:
Assume everyone invests now rather than donates.
But in the year 2035 humanity is destroyed .
The value of the investments then becomes zero. We would have been better off donating to help prevent whatever caused humanity’s destruction.
(Tobias makes this point in his footnote above - ‘If there’s an existential catastrophe, donating at death won’t matter anyway’.)
Assume the world continues to get richer, and the poorest benefit the most. The world’s poorest increase their income from £1000 per year now to £4000 in 20 years time.
The value of your investments double in this time, so you are now able to donate £2000 to someone instead of £1000.
But donating £2000 in the future to someone who has £4000 is plausibly less valuable than donating £1000 today to someone who only has £1000.
This also relates to ogtutzauer and Henry Howard’s points—the sooner the recipient receives a donation, the faster they can invest it.
Those are cases where the value of the donation declines. There could be other cases where the value of donation increases—perhaps as a result of new research showing how resources can be used more effectively, or a new treatment etc. In this case, there would be more money in the future (due to returns on investment) and more cost-effective things to spend this money on.
Thanks, this is helpful. I think I was wrong, and as you/Diana suggest scallops actually have a more developed nervous system than mussels
This is a good suggestion.
My (limited) understanding is that scallops might be even better than oysters and mussels as they are typically larger (so fewer are killed to obtain a given quantity of protein)
and are possibly even less neurally developed(edit: this seems wrong—see below)I also wonder about wider ecosystem impacts. As @Vasco Grilo🔸 has suggested, the impact on soil invertebrates may dominate the moral value of farming on the land—but there is huge uncertainty.
I’d be surprised if there is a similarly large population of aquatic organisms that are impacted by the farming of bivalves (scallops, oysters, mussels). If so, they may be a more morally robust option than any land-derived option, whether animal or plant. But I’ve not researched this at all (I’ve tagged Vasco in case this is something he wants to look into!)
An existential risk is a one-shot scenario for humanity. We are the single participant. There is no larger portfolio to average out the 99.9% chance of failure
But there may well be a large portfolio of actions we can take to reduce existential risk. In most cases there are many shots we can take.
Related—see Ambitious Impact’s Founding to Give program and intro post here. I wonder how the first cohort are getting on...
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?
Given the focus here on companies, rather than non-profits, I wonder if this should be framed in terms of investments rather than donations. It seems like the companies mentioned aren’t easy to invest in.
One option here is Agronomics. This is an investment company that trades on the London Stock Exchange, and has a portfolio of over 20 companies, including 5 that focus on precision fermentation (as well as several that are ‘fermentation derived’, and others that work on cultured meat):
https://www.agronomics.im/portfolio/
I don’t know how this compares to donating to the Good Food Institute. I expect GFI’s work benefits many more companies working in the sector by influencing government regulation. On the other hand, Agronomics promises a potentially large return on investment.
(disclaimer: I own shares in Agronomics)