I develop software tools for the building energy efficiency industry. My background is in architectural and mechanical engineering (MS Penn State, PhD University of Maryland). I know quite a bit about indoor air quality and indoor infectious disease transfer, and closely follow all things related to climate change and the energy transition. I co-organize the local EA group in Denver, Colorado.
MatthewDahlhausen
Karma: 1,000
ASHRAE has long had standards and working groups on UVC, and recently published standard 241 on Control of Infectious Aerosols. The goal is to reduce transmission risk, not to support any one particular technology. Filtration is usually cheaper than Far-UVC and easier to maintain for the same level of infection control. Far-UVC/UVC is better in some niches, particularly in healthcare settings that require high air flow rates.
I suggest getting involved in ASHRAE and the research community that has been working on and developing standards for infection control for over a century.
From an EA perspective, I think it is more effective to promote adoption of ASHRAE Std 241 than the adoption of Far-UVC specifically.
-perspective of a Ph.D. mechanical engineer and ASHRAE member with experience in IAQ
Academic freedom is not and has never been meant to protect professors on topics that have no relevance to their discipline: “Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.”
If, say, a philosophy professor wants to express opinions on infanticide, that is covered under academic freedom. If they want to encourage students to drink bleach, saying it is good for their health, that is not covered.
We can and should have a strong standard of academic freedom for relevant, on-topic contributions. But race science is off topic and irrelevant to EA. It’s closer to spam. Should the forum have no spam filter and rely on community members to downvote posts as the method of spam control?
A clear example of a post that would be banned under the rules: why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die.
Reducing chronic health risks from indoor air pollution (mostly PM 2.5) generally entails different strategies than reducing infection risk from aerosols. Filtration can address both, but the airflow rates and costs can be quite different. UVC won’t do anything about PM 2.5, and may contribute to it with ozone formation.
I recommend reading the supporting literature and history behind ASHRAE Std 62.1 and Std 241, which cover ventilation and control for infectious diseases in buildings. There are also several recent studies by the National Academies on air pollution and infectious aerosols. The indoor air and infectious disease communities are quite large—with their own funding sources and conferences. It seems a lot of the “gaps” presented here are not unknown to experts, but just to the EA community and amateur researchers.
Meta level question:
How does Manifest have anything to do with Effective Altruism, and why is this on the EA forum?
Shouldn’t this post be on some other other channel internal to Manifest and the forecasting community?
It get there are some people that went to Manifest that are also in the EA movement, but it seems like the communities are quite distinct and have different goals. From comments and conversations, it seems pretty clear to me that this Manifest community has a strong hostility towards even considering the reputational risks platforming racist speakers has on the rest of the EA movement. Part of being a big tent movement means caring about not stinking up the tent for everyone else.
Let’s please firewall the Manifest community from EA?
I think that longtermism relies on more popular, evidenced-based causes like global health and animal welfare to do its reputational laundering through the EA label. I don’t see any benefit to global health and animal welfare causes from longtermism. And for that reason I think it would be better for the movement to split into “effective altruism” and “speculative altruism” so the more robust global health and animal welfare causes areas don’t have to suffer the reputational risk and criticism that is almost entirely directed at the longtermism wing.
Given the movement is essentially driven by Open Philanthropy, and they aren’t going to split, I don’t see such a large movement split happening. So I may be inclined towards some version of, as you say, “Stop doing stuff that looks weird, even if it is perfectly defensible by longtermist lights, simply because I have neartermist values and disagree with it.” The longtermist stuff is maybe like 20% of funding and 80% of reputational risk, and the most important longtermist concerns can be handled without the really weird speculative stuff.
But that’s irrelevant, because I think this ought to be a pretty clear case of the grant not being defensible by longtermist standards. Paying bay area software development salaries to develop a video game (why not a cheap developer literally anywhere else?) that didn’t even get published is hardly defensible. I get that the whole purpose of the fund is to do “hits based giving”. But it’s created an environment where nothing can be a mistake, because it is expected most things would fail. And if nothing is a mistake, how can the fund learn from mistakes?
A butterfly flaps its wings and causes a devastating hurricane to form in the tropics. Therefore, we must exterminate butterflies, because there is some small probability X that doing so will avert hurricane disaster.
But it is just as easily the case that the butterfly flaps prevent devastating hurricanes from forming. Therefore we must massively grown their population.
The point being, it can be practically impossible to understand the casual tree and get even the sign right around low probability events.
That’s what I take issue with—it’s not just the numbers, it’s the structural uncertainty of cause and effect chains when you consider really low probability events. Expected value is a pretty bad tool for action relevant decision making when you are dealing with such numerical and structural uncertainty. It’s perhaps better to pick a framework like “it’s robust under multiple decision theories” or “pick something that has the least downside risk”.
In our instance, two competing plausible structural theories among many are something like: “game teaches someone an AI safety concept → makes them more knowledgeable or inspire them to take action → they work on AI safety → solve alignment problem → future saved” vs. “people get interested in doing the most good → sees community of people that claim to do that, but that they fund rich people to make video games → causes widespread distrust of the movement → strong social stigma developed against people that care about AI risk → greatly narrowed range of people / worldviews because people don’t want to associate → makes it near impossible to solve alignment problem → future destroyed”
The justifications for these grants tend to use some simple expected value calculation of a singular rosy hypothetical casual chain. The problem is it’s possible to construct a hypothetical value chain to justify any sort of grant. So you have to do more than just make a rosy casual chain and multiply numbers through. I’ve commented before on some pretty bad ones that don’t pass the laugh test among domain experts in the climate and air quality space.
The key lesson from early EA (evidenced based giving in global health) was that it is really hard to understand if the thing you are doing is having an impact, and what the valence of the impact is, for even short, measurable casual chains. EA’s popular causes now (longtermism) seem to jettison that lesson, when it is even more unclear what the impact and sign is through complicated low probability casual chains.
So it’s about a lot more than effect sizes.
I do think there are things worth funding for which evidence doesn’t exist. The initial RNA vaccine research relied on good judgement around a hypothetical, and had a hard time getting funding for lack of evidence. It ended up being critical to saving millions of lives.
I think there are more ways some sort of evidence can be included in grant making. But the core of the criticism is about judgement, and I think a $100k grant for 6 months of video game developers time, or $50k grants to university student group organizers represent poor judgement (EAIF and LTFF grants). These grants have caused reputational harm to the movement, and that should have been easy to foresee. What has been the hit to fundraising for EA global health and animal welfare causes from the fallout from bad longtermism bets (FTX/SBF included)?
On the rationalization. Perhaps it isn’t a post-hoc rationalization, more of an excuse. It is saying “the funding bar was low, but we still think the expected value of the video game is more important than 25 lives”. That’s pretty crass. And probably worse than just the $100k counterfactual because of reputational spillover to other causes.
The post-hoc rationalization is referring to the “Note that this grant was made at the very peak of the period of very abundant (partially FTX-driven) EA funding where finding good funding opportunities was extremely hard.”
If it wasn’t a good opportunity, why was it funded?
Why does “infrastructure” and longtermist funding rely so heavily on pascal-mugging with evidence-free hypotheticals?
I can easily craft a hypothetical in the other direction on the video game. Perhaps funding such a game reinforces the impression that EA is a self-serving cult (as Steven Pinker does), causing more people to distance themselves from any longtermist ideas. It certainly has done so with me. Wasn’t accounting for negative impacts the point of your recent post on the messiness of bring hypotheticals into the real world?
“I was a fan of Effective Altruism (almost taught a course on it at Harvard) together w other rational efforts (evidence-based medicine, data-driven policing, randomista econ). But it became cultish. Happy to donate to save the most lives in Africa, but not to pay techies to fret about AI turning us into paperclips. Still support the idea; hope they extricate themselves from this rut.”—Steven Pinker
I think the pile-on of post-hoc rationalizations trying to defend or excuse this grant is evidence of the rot in EA in captured in Steven Pinker’s comment. People are earnestly defending the idea that $100k on a bay area software salary for a speculative video game is worthy of the EA label. Can we at least all agree that this money would have been better spent by GiveWell?
Why is it so hard to say that the grant was a mistake not only in hindsight, but at the time it was made?
“A cost-effectiveness of decreasing GHG emissions of 3.41 tCO2eq/$, with a plausible range of 0.182 to 31.4 tCO2eq/$.”
This is not a credible number, and Founders Pledge as of several years ago said they no longer stand behind the cost-effectiveness calculation you link to in your post.
It is based on an assumption that CATF nuclear advocacy will result in cheap enough reactors to replace coal in thermal electric power production. That is not credible now, and it wasn’t at the time when the BOTEC was made. Note the 0.5%/1%/2% assumptions that nuclear will displace coal that are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting in getting the numbers to work out. The percentages are far lower than that. Be careful of arbitrary bounding your analysis in whole numbers between 1-100%. I made a copy of the sheet when it came out to capture any changes or alterations—my copy has some cells labeled that are missing in yours.
The supposed climate benefits of nuclear advocacy are contested, and far more credible and sophisticated modeling shows the possibility that there are some zero-sum trade-offs in scaling that mean more nuclear power could result in higher cumulative emissions. I see it as even odds whether CATF nuclear advocacy increases or reduces emissions in expectation. But extremely likely (>95%) that CATF’s nuclear program was a total waste of philanthropic dollars.
The lesson is to be careful with BOTECs—use probability distributions instead of single-point numbers, and have several people red-team the analysis both in the numbers and the structure of the calculation.
Another issue is you are taking values derived from speculation and comparing them to measured cost-effectiveness from RCTs with a strong evidentiary basis.
Pointing to white papers from think tanks that you fund isn’t a good evidentiary basis to support the claim of R&D’s cost effectiveness. As with most things, the details matter quite a bit. The R&D benefit for advanced nuclear since the 1970s has yielded a net increase in price for that technology. For renewables and efficiency, the gains were useful until about the early 00s. After that, all the technology gains came from scaling, not R&D. You can’t take economy wide estimates for energy R&D funding and apply them to a specific federal bill if the technology mix is quite different. And historic estimates are not necessarily indicative of future gains; we should expect diminishing returns.
Furthermore, most of the money in BIL and IRA were for demonstration projects—advanced nuclear, the hydrogen hubs, DAC credits. Notably NOT research and development. You make a subtle shift in your cost effectiveness table where you use unreviewed historic numbers on cost-effectiveness for research and development, and then apply that to the much larger demonstration and deployment dollars. Apples and oranges. The needs for low TRL tech are very different from high TRL tech.
Lastly, a Bill Gates retweet is not the humble brag you think it is. Bill has a terrible track record of success in energy ventures; he’s uninformed and impulsive. Saying Bill Gates likes your energy startup is like saying Jim Cramer likes your stock. Both indicate a money-making opportunity for those who do the opposite.
(For those in the comments, you can track prior versions of these conversations in EA Anywhere’s cause-climate-change channel).
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Last time I checked, GG’s still linked to FP’s CATF BOTEC on nuclear advocacy. Yes, I understand FP no longer uses that estimate. In fact, FP no longer publishes any of its BOTECs publicly. However, that hasn’t stopped you from continuing to assert that FP hits around $1/ton cost-effectiveness, heavily implying CATF is one such org, and its nuclear work being the likely example of it. The BOTEC remains in FP’s control, and it has yet to include a disclaimer. Please stop saying you can hit $1/ton based on high speculative EV calcs with numbers pulled out of thin air. It is not credible and is embarrassing to those of us who work on climate in EA.
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I never intended to assert that FP still endorses REDD+. Merely to point out that the 2018 FP analysis of REDD+ (along with CCS and nuclear advocacy) was a terrible basis for Will to use in WWOTF for the $1/ton figure. While FP no longer endorses REDD+, FP’s recent reports contain all the same process errors that Lief points out about the 2018 report—lack of experience, over-reliance on orgs they fund, best guesses, speculation.
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“This bravado carries over into the blunt advice that MacAskill gives throughout the book. For instance, are you concerned about the environment? Recycling or changing your diet should not be your priority, he says; you can be “radically more impactful.” By giving $3,000 to a lobbying group called Clean Air Task Force (CATF), MacAskill declares, you can reduce carbon emissions by a massive 3,000 metric tons per year. That sounds great.
Friends, here’s where those numbers come from. MacAskill cites one of Ord’s research assistants—a recent PhD with no obvious experience in climate, energy, or policy—who wrote a report on climate charities. The assistant chose the controversial “carbon capture and storage” technology as his top climate intervention and found that CATF had lobbied for it. The research assistant asked folks at CATF, some of their funders, and some unnamed sources how successful they thought CATF’s best lobbying campaigns had been. He combined these interviews with lots of “best guesses” and “back of the envelope” calculations, using a method he was “not completely confident” in, to come up with dollar figures for emissions reductions. That’s it.
Strong hyping of precise numbers based on weak evidence and lots of hedging and fudging. EAs appoint themselves experts on everything based on a sophomore’s understanding of rationality and the world. And the way they test their reasoning—debating other EAs via blog posts and chatboards—often makes it worse. Here, the basic laws of sociology kick in. With so little feedback from outside, the views that prevail in-group are typically the views that are stated the most confidently by the EA with higher status. EAs rediscovered groupthink.”
Yeah, MacAskill and EA deserve the roasting on this one. FP’s report from 6 years ago was a terrible basis for the $1/ton figure. MacAskill should have never used it in WWOTF. The REDD+ section proved to be widely inaccurate; it underestimates cost by at least 10x, 200x if you account for permanence. The nuclear power advocacy BOTEC was even worse. And FP and GG still reference it!
Given the differentiation between normative and factual beliefs, I’m having a hard time parsing the last sentence in the post: “It is hard to maintain tragic beliefs. On the face of it, it makes the world worse to believe them. But in order to actually do as much good as we can, we need to be open to them, while finding ways to keep a healthy relationship with tragedy.”
Is the “worseness” a general worseness for the world, or specific to the believer? Does doing the most good (normative claim) necessarily require tragic beliefs (factual claim)? What is a “healthy relationship with tragedy”? Where does the normative claim that we should have only healthy relationships with tragedy derive its force? If we can’t have a “joyful” flavor of righteousness, does that mean we ought not hold tragic beliefs?
Personal feelings about tragic beliefs are incidental; for someone with righteous beliefs, whether or not they feel joy or pain for having them seems irrelevant. Though we can’t say with any certitude, I doubt Benjamin Lay had his personal happiness and health in the forefront of his mind in his abolitionist work. Perhaps instrumentally.
Should Benjamin Lay ought to not have lived in a cave, even if that meant compromising on acting out his tragic beliefs?
There are two kinds of belief. Belief in factual statements, and belief in normative statements.
“Insect suffering matters” is a normative statement, “people dying of preventable diseases could be saved by my donations” is a factual one. A restatement of the preventable disease statement in normative terms would look like: “If I can prevent people dying of preventable diseases by my donations at not greater cost to myself, I ought to do it.”
I think tragic beliefs derive their force from being normative. “Metastatic cancer is terminal” is not tragic because of its factual nature, but because we think it sad that the patient dies with prolonged suffering before they’ve lived a full life.
Normative statements are not true in the same way as factual statements; the is-ought gap is wide. For them to be true assumes a meta-ethical position. If someone’s meta-ethics disregards or de-emphasizes suffering, even suffering for which they are directly responsible, then “insect suffering matters” carries no tragic force.
The real force of tragic beliefs comes earlier. For insects, it is a consequence of another, more general belief: “suffering matters regardless of the species experiencing it”, combined with a likely factual statement about the capacity for insects to suffer, and a factual statement about our complicity. In fact, if one assumes the more general belief, and takes the factual statements as true, it is hard to avoid the conclusion “insect suffering matters” without exploding principles. At that point avoidance is more about personal approaches to cognitive dissonance.
I’m inclined to reserve the tragic label for unavoidable horrors for which we are responsible. Think Oedipus, Hamlet, or demodex mites. But I understand there is a tragic element to believing unpopular things, especially normative ones, given the personal costs from social friction.
I suggest being highly skeptical of the work coming from the Copenhagen Consensus Center. It’s founder, Bjorn Lomborg, has on several occasions been found to have committed scientific dishonesty. I wouldn’t use this report to make an determinations of what are the “best investments” without independently verifying the data and methodology.
Down-voted, because I think the argument’s premises are flawed, and the conclusions don’t necessarily follow from the premises. It relies heavily on a “fruit of the poison tree” idea that because EA gets resources from civilization, and civilization can create the tools of its destruction, EA is inherently flawed. That is nonsense. The argument could be used to dismiss any kind of action that uses resources as being morally corrupt and ineffectual. Surely at the margin there are actions that reduce existential risk more than promote it.
I watched the video and then downvoted this post. The video is a criticism of EA and philanthropy, but there isn’t anything new, thoughtful, or useful. I would have upvoted if I thought the criticism was insightful. We’ve had much better left-wing criticism of EA before on the forum.
Adam and Amy make basic mistakes. For example at 15:30, Adam says that GiveWell recommends funding AI alignment work, and that caused him to become critical because they weren’t also recommending climate change mitigation. Adam treats GiveWell, SBF, and the entire EA movement as the same entity. Amy claims that EA is entirely about saving human lives. Neither demonstrated they were aware of the intense debate on saving vs. improving lives, or the concern for animals.
Among Amy’s examples of good philanthropy are a billion dollars for the Amazon strike fund, and purchasing lots in NYC to make them community gardens instead of housing. Adam comes away from the conversation thinking that his philanthropic dollars that he gave to the Against Malaria Foundation would have better been spent on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC or a local community garden (60:00). Both celebrate scope neglect, nepotism, and a worldview that the root of problems is political. They mock trolley problems and other philosophy thought problems as a masturbatory, navel-gazing effort, with no real world implications. All they have to offer in support of their preferred charities is an onslaught of left-wing buzzwords.
Can you elaborate on why you think we will never eradicate factory farming? You point to near-term trends that suggest it will get worse over the coming decades. What about on a century long time scale or longer? Factory farming has only been around for a few generations, and food habits have changed tremendously over that time.
I think it’s important to consider how some strategies may make future work difficult. For example, Martha Nussbaum highlights how much of the legal theory in the animal rights movement has relied on showing similarities between human and animal intelligence. Such a “like us” comparison limits consideration to a small subset of vertebrates. They are impotent at helping animals like chickens, were much legal work is happening now. Other legal theories are much more robust to expansion and consideration of other animals as the science improves to understand their needs and behavior.
Using your line of argument applied to the analogy you provided would suggest that efforts like developing a malaria vaccine are misguided, because malaria will always be with us, and we should just focus on reducing infection rates and treatment.