I work as an engineer, donate 10% of my income, and occasionally enjoy doing independent research. I’m most interested in farmed animal welfare and the nitty-gritty details of global health and development work. In 2022, I was a co-winner of the GiveWell Change Our Mind Contest.
MHR
This is great work on a really sad topic. Well done putting this together
Thanks!
Has RP published anything laying out its current plans for funding and/or executing work on AI governance and existential risk? I was surprised to see that no RP team members are listed under existential security or AIGS anymore. Is RP’s plan going forward that all work in these areas will be carried out by special projects initiatives rather than the core RP team? And how does that relate to funding? When RP receives unrestricted donor funds, are those sometimes regranted to incubated orgs within special projects?
Fantastic and important work (as always)!
Figure 3 is somewhat concerning—if I squint I can sort of see some vague agreement between the different sources, but it’s pretty all over the place. Do you have a sense of whether this is an area where funding additional field research would be a good idea, or do you think this is lower-priority than other potential research questions related to shrimp welfare?
Thanks for your response! That’s very interesting (and scary)
@Aaron Bergman’s Pigeon Hour gets close to this https://www.aaronbergman.net/podcast
Here’s the Cochrane withdrawal notice.
Looks like they plagiarized from this paper, which found:
Results: Thirteen placebo-controlled comparisons have examined the therapeutic effect of zinc lozenges on common cold episodes of natural origin. Five of the trials used a total daily zinc dose of less than 75 mg and uniformly found no effect. Three trials used zinc acetate in daily doses of over 75 mg, the pooled result indicating a 42% reduction in the duration of colds (95% CI: 35% to 48%). Five trials used zinc salts other than acetate in daily doses of over 75 mg, the pooled result indicating a 20% reduction in the duration of colds (95% CI: 12% to 28%).
Great post on a really important subject! I did have a question that came up after clicking through to the Effective Animal Advocacy Survey results. The results say:
We asked direct work respondents the following question: “Imagine that someone has been working for 10 years building up experience and expertise that would make them an excellent candidate for one of the roles that is *hardest to hire for* in your organisation. Would you be more excited about that person applying for one of those roles at your organisation, or donating money to your organisation that was the equivalent of 50% of the salary of that role?” We then asked them the same question again but replaced “one of the roles that is *hardest to hire for* in your organisation” with “*a campaigns, corporate engagement, or volunteer management* role in your organisation.”[25]
For both questions, we offered them the following options: “Much more excited about them applying” (coded as 1), “Somewhat more excited about them applying” (2), “Roughly similarly excited either way” (3), “Somewhat more excited about them donating” (4), and “Much more excited about them donating” (5).
Here are the average scores:
These results seem like a vote in favour of careers in direct work in general, even for role types that are not necessarily “hardest to hire for.” We note below that the average salary seems to be around $50,000 or so in animal advocacy nonprofits in the global North, though the average salary might be higher for roles that are “hardest to hire for,” such as leadership and senior management roles. So you could interpret these results as suggesting that organisations would rather receive one additional very-high quality applicant for the roles that are hardest to hire for than receive $25,000 or more (each year for the length of time that the applicant might otherwise have been employed for).
I’m curious if you have any thoughts on a slightly different variation on this question, which is how organizations working in low and middle income countries would respond if they were given the choice between one more qualified candidate and $25,000 more funding each year. I ask because as you pointed out in the piece, someone in a high income country considering ETG could choose to donate to organizations working in LMICs. It would strike me as pretty surprising if orgs in LMICs would prefer one additional highly qualified candidate over enough funding for ~2 FTEs.
Amazing! I’ll be very excited to read it!
SWP’s Vietnam Scoping Report estimates that the rate of survival to slaughter is just 5% in extensive systems. That would imply that even though extensive systems are responsible for a small fraction of shrimp production, they might be responsible for a much higher fraction of overall shrimp deaths. Have you found evidence that either supports this estimate or calls it into question?
This is an absolutely fantastic report! Thanks so much to authors and reviewers, and I hope we get more research in the future to answer the many remaining unknowns!
FYI the EAG Boston link currently goes to the 2023 event
Seems like this could be a good resource!
Minor note is that the number of forum users peaked in Nov. 2022 and has been declining since.
Great work!
Thanks for posting this, I’m very excited to see the discussion it generates! One note: in the Acute Malnutrition Treatment section under Treatment effects, the sheet linked on “relatively steep discount” is currently private.
Very interesting, thanks for pulling this data!
Worked for me just now, gave $50 to The Humane League :)
Thanks Sjir! That helps me understand the circumstances better, and I do see why the GWWC funds might serve a useful role in today’s funding ecosystem. If I could wave a magic wand and reorganize EV, I might still be tempted to think that the best course of action would be to change the EA funds’ processes rather than adding new funds entirely (e.g. having AWF/LTFF make unsolicited grants in addition to the application process), but what you’re saying makes a fair amount sense given how EV is structured.
Very exciting to see this rolled out! I love the new recommendations page, and I’m thrilled that GWWC is taking the “evaluate the evaluators” mission seriously. The one thing I’m kind of confused by is the new GWWC funds. Don’t EA funds already serve as the natural choice for donors who want high impact giving opportunities within a particular cause area and don’t want to worry about having to manually update their selections as recommendations change? Having a duplicate set of funds within Effective Ventures seems like it will add overhead and confusion without necessarily providing a clear benefit. In trying to think through the potential benefits, I do see how having the GWWC funds would make it possible to not recommend certain EA funds in future years if you were to find issues with their grantmaking. However, it seems like those kinds of issues could also be addressed via the EA funds making changes in response to the GWWC research team’s findings. Having two sets of competing funds trying to do the same thing within EV just appears to me to be a potentially poor use of resources unless there’s a clear justification for keeping them separate.
My apologies if this question has already been addressed elsewhere, I tried to look back through the previous announcement and AMA but may have missed some discussions.
I agree with this comment. It’s worth nothing that the methodology used in this analysis isn’t the same as the methodology used in the CURVE sequence. In the “How Can Risk Aversion Affect Your Cause Prioritization” report, @Laura Duffy weighted 1 year of disabling pain at 2 to 10 DALYs and 1 year of excruciating pain at 60 to 150 DALYs. I expect that dying is at least disablingly painful and potentially excruciatingly painful, so these weights would imply a >5x improvement in cost-effectiveness (but even at the upper end, this probably wouldn’t be cost-competitive with top EA interventions).
In general, I think it’s a good step to try and actually put interventions from different cause areas on the same scale, but I continue to think that because DALYs are a unit of health status and not a unit of utility, trying to use them as a unit of comparison is unlikely to be optimal (see here and here for more)