Doing good Better has some estimates on the effect of individual consumption choices on animal production, and takes them to be positive. I think its widely believed that they matterâraising animals costs money, and if corporations sell less animal products, they will produce less animals.
I have no especially interesting answers to the healthcare question.
Both actions will be much less effective than e.g. developing a regular donation habit, getting a good degree and choosing a world-improving career etc. But I donât think its healthy (or common!) for EAs to focus only on the most life-saving choices in their lives. Many EAs are vegan because they (rightly!) think it is just wrong for animals to be held in horrible conditions. Many EAs donate blood because they (probably rightly) think its an easy and positive way to help someone. I think its a good practice to not only focus on the highest-impact choices, but also to aim for a lifestyle in which we can integrate some lower-effort prosocial habits that one believes holds moral value.
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Iâd prioritize veganism. You may want to look into iron supplements (and generally supplement strategies for vegan diets), regardless of the blood donation issueâyour health is of great importance.
Thats interestingâI know of similar arguments in e.g. wartorn countries like Ukraine. If those hold up to scrutiny, donating blood in these countries would indeed be shockingly effective.
Yes that seems right. Iâd argue that a good consequentialist should devote quite some time to their characterâit will affect their future behaviour and consequences thereof, after all!
Whats the point of resuscitating a stranger with an emergency while in your absence, another person may have done it? It is good to help; it may save the strangers life (even if someone else would have saved them in your absence); it builds character etcetc. It also saves money for the hospital!
âDoes that mean there is no value in blood/âplatelet donation?â Of course not, I donât know why you would think that I hold that position. Do donate! I donate myself.
âAlso, it is said that life-saving surgeries have been postponed due to lack of blood/âplatelets. I guess it is hard to say if the postponement results in death.â I did not spot that in the source!
âFurthermore, Iâm not entirely sure the shelf-life of blood/âplatelets is even long enough for there to be an importation from another country (ig it depends on the country).â The US is the biggest importer of blood, with roughly 20% of global imports going to the US. https://ââtrendeconomy.com/ââdata/ââcommodity_h2/ââ3002
Why do blood donation groups incentivize blood donation? I am not as familiar with the US; in Germany it is much cheaper to acquire blood by paying a donor $50 or giving them some food and drink than to buy it elsewhere. The Red Cross in Germany, to my knowledge, gives donors food and drink and then sells the blood to hospitals to make some money for their other charitable ventures.
Again, I do think it is good to donate blood! You should donate blood. I should donate blood. Others should donate blood.
I do not think it is probably the current most effective altruism.
If one donation would save a life, I would expect the news updates to be different, e.g.
âPeople are dying left and right from a blood shortageâ
and to see a significant spike in mortality in the US.
I also would be surprised if such a problem could not be addressed by e.g. US health providers importing blood from other countries, which countries do quite routinely in times of shortages, to my knowledge.
I am not aware of any of these.
Generally, I take it that the burden of proof for effectiveness should lie on the new intervention. If you want people to switch from e.g. supporting AMF to e.g. supporting blood, you should provide compelling evidence. I donât think the above is sufficient as compelling evidence. It lacks crucial information (e.g. how many people are dying from a shortage right now? how much of a shortage is there? what alternative means are being used to avert a shortage? has there even been one death yet directly caused from said shortage? how much does my donating alleviate this shortage? what is the % chance of my donation saving a life that would otherwise be lost due to the shortage?), and rests more on abstract vibe-based back-of-the-envelope calculations, rather than an explicit attempt at establishing the value of blood donations (which, I think, would be a lot of work but also be a valuable thing for the forum!).
This source helps me see that now is a time where blood donations are especially needed, but it does not give me the means of evaluating that it would be more effective than alternative courses of action. Thank you for adding it in comments and post!
I donât mean to be discouraging, but it would help me greatly if you added some sources to the post and/âor added some explanation of how this qualifies as âprobably the current most effective altruismâ. In its current form, I find this quite unconvincing. While I do donate blood, I donât think itâs a priority over other work, and superficial googling did not convince me that it should be.
Hey there, thank you both for the helpful comments.
I agree the shorttermist/âlongtermist framing shouldnât be understood as too deep a divide or too reductive a category, but I think it serves a decent purpose for making clear a distinction between different foci in EA (e.g. Global Health/âFactory Farming vs AI-Risk/âBiosecurity etc).
The comment above really helped me in seeing how prioritization decisions are made. Thank you for that, Ardenlk!
Iâm a bit less bullish than Vasco on it being good that 80k does their own prioritization work. I donât think it is bad per se, but I am not sure what is gained by 80k research on the topic vis a vis other EA people trying to figure out prioritization. I do worry that what is lost are advocates/ârecomendations for causes that are not currently well-represented in the opinion of the research team, but that are well-represented among other EAâs more broadly. This makes people like me have a harder time funneling folks to EA-principles based career-advising, as Iâd be worried the advice they receive would not be representative of the considerations of EA folks, broadly construed. Again, I realize I may be overly worried here, and Iâd be happy to be corrected!
I read the Thorstadt critique as somewhat stronger than the summary you give- certainly, just invoking X-risk should not per default justify assuming astronomical value. But my sense from the two examples (one from Bostrom, one on cost-effectiveness on Biorisk) was that more plausible modeling assumptions seriously undercut at least some current cost-effectiveness models in that space, particularly for individual interventions (as opposed to e.g. systemic interventions that plausibly reduce risk long-term). I did not take it to imply that risk-reduction is not a worthwhile cause, but that current models seem to arrive at the dominance of it as a cause based on implausible assumptions (e.g. about background risk).
I think my perception of 80k as âpartisanâ stems from posts such as these, as well as the deprioritization of global health/âanimal welfare reflected on the website. If I read the post right, the four positive examples are all on longtermist causes, including one person who shifted from global health to longtermist causes after interacting with 80k. I donât mean to suggest that in any of these cases, that should not have been doneâI merely notice that the only appearance of global health or animal welfare is in that one example of someone who seems to have been moved away from those causes to a longtermist cause.
I may be reading too much into this. If you have any data (or even guesses) on how many % of people you advise you end up funneling to global health and animal welfare causes, and how many you advise to go into risk-reduction broadly construed, that would be really helpful.
I, too, would be happy to see more transparency about the 80.000 hour rankings. I think it would be especially valuable to see to which degree they reflect the individual judgment of decision-makers. I would also be interested in whether they take into account recent discussions/âcriticisms of model choices in longtermist math that strike me as especially important for the kind of advising 80.000 hours does (tldr: I take one crux of that article to be that longtermist benefits by individual action are often overstated, because the great benefits longtermism advertises require both reducing risk and keeping overall risk down long-term, which plausibly exceeds the scope of a career/âlife).
I think this would help me with a more general worry I have, and maybe others share. As a teacher at a university, I often try to encourage students to rethink their career choices from an EA angle. 80.000 hours is a natural place to recommend for interested students, but I am wary of recommending it to non-longtermist students. Probably good seems to offer a more shorttermist alternative, but are significantly newer and have less brand recognition. I think there would be considerable value in having the biggest career-advising organization (80k) be a non-partisan EA advising organization, whereas I currently take them to be strongly favoring longtermism in their advice. While I feel this explicit stance is a mistake, I feel like getting a better grasp on its motivation would help me understand why it was taken.I may be mistaken in taking 80.000 hours to lean heavily longtermist and Probably Good leaning heavily shorttermist, and would be happy to be corrected!
I have organized two small fundraisers with AMF, and in both cases, Rob was incredibly proactive and helpful, taking time to immediately respond to emails and hop onto calls. Many thanks, but a question remains: where does he find the time, and which time-management strategies does he use?
Duly noted ahahaha! I am glad I chose a different title for the daily nous post. Iâm not a native speaker, so I didnât pick up on it myself. Thanks!
PhilosoÂphers Against Malaria Fundraiser
CaÂreer ConÂverÂsaÂtion Week: PhilosÂoÂphy GradÂuÂate Student
It depends on what the final version looks like. Nick Laing makes some good suggestions; I could also see this go to e.g. a philosophy journal, given longtermism and intercultural philosophy are both topics that are currently popular in philosophy. Doing so would require a somewhat less EA-ish framing, and going away from the pragmatic âhow do we make peopleâ longtermist framing. Instead, it would require careful exposition of Longtermism, then exegetical work on how Muslim sources seem to accord or not accord with it. Most of this latter work is already quite well done in this post.
If you want to follow up on this, feel free to shoot me a message.
Have you considered polishing this for publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal? It is a very interesting case you make, and I think it would be valuable to make it citeable in academic publications.
Depends entirely on your interests! They are sorted thematically https://ââineffectivealtruismblog.com/ââpost-series/ââ
Specific recommendations if your interests overlap with Aaron_maiâs: 1(a) on a tension between thinking X-risks are likely and thinking reducing X-risks have astronomical value; 1(b) on the expected value calculation in X-risk; 6(a) as a critical review of the Carlsmith report on AI risk.
Re edit, you should definitely not feel embarrassed. A forum comment will often be a mix of a few sources and intuition rather than a rigorous review of all available studies. I donât think this must hold low epistemic status, especially for the purpose of the idea being exploration, rather than, say, a call for funding or such (which would require a higher standard of evidence). Not all EA discussions are literature reviews, otherwise chatting would be so cumbersome!
Iâd recommend using your studies to explore these and other ideas! Undergraduate studies are a wonderful time to soak up a ton of knowledge, and I look fondly upon mineâI hope youâll have a similarly inspiring experience. Feel free to shoot me a pm if you ever want to discuss stuff.
That is interesting. I am not very familiar with Pankseppâs work. That being said, Iâd be surprised if his model ( _these specific basic emotions_ ; these specific interactions of affect and emotion) were the only plausible option in current cogsci/âpsych/âneuroscience.
Re âall values are affectiveâ, I am not sure I understand you correctly. There is a sense in which we use value in ethics (e.g. Not helping while persons are starving faraway goes against my values), and a sense in which we use it in psychology (e.g. in a reinforcement learning paradigm). The connection between value and affect may be clearer for the latter than the former. As an illustration, I do get a ton of good feelings out of giving a homeless person some money, so I clearly value it. I get much less of a good feeling out of donating to AMF, so in a sense, I value it less. But in the ethical sense, I value it moreâand this is why I give more money to AMF than to homeless persons. You claim that all such ethical sense values ultimately stem from affect, but I think that is implausibleâlook at e.g. Kantian ethics or Virtue ethics, both of which use principles that are not rooted in affect as their basis.
Re: value learning at the fundamental level, it strikes me as a non obvious question whether we are âbornâ with all the basic valenced states, and everything else is just learning history of how states in the world affected basic valenced states before; or whether there are valenced states that only get unlocked/âlearned/âexperienced later. Having a child is sometimes used as an exampleâmaybe that is just tapping into existing kinds of valenced states, but maybe all those hormones flooding your brain do actually change something in a way that could not be experienced before.
Either way, I do think it may make sense to play around with the idea more!
Awesome, very exciting!