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
I believe the values come from the 10th anniversary edition of the TLYCS book. They should be in the FAQ on the website and I’m surprised they’re not.
I think mainstream longtermist EA is already on a path to try and help create the hedonium shockwave if and only if it’s the right thing to do. The “only if” part seems really important—turning 99.999% of the accessible universe into hedonium seems like a quite bad idea unless you’re extraordinarily confident in your ethical views. But it does seem like one theoretically possible outcome of the type of long reflection MacAskill advocates in WWOTF:
As an ideal, we could aim for what we can call the long reflection: a stable state of the world in which we are safe from calamity and we can reflect on and debate the nature of the good life, working out what the most flourishing society would be. I call this the “long” reflection not because of how long this period would last but because of how long it would be worth spending on it. It’s worth spending five minutes to decide where to spend two hours at dinner; it’s worth spending months to choose a profession for the rest of one’s life. But civilisation might last millions, billions, or even trillions of years. It would therefore be worth spending many centuries to ensure that we’ve really figured things out before we take irreversible actions like locking in values or spreading across the stars.
It’s really not clear to me that there’s a better path to the hedonium shockwave than what longtermsists are already doing—trying to ensure humanity survives and prospers and makes it to a place where we have more hope of reaching a consensus about whether or not it’s the right course of action. Of course, if the shockwave really is the right thing to do, waiting to start it would lead to a great deal of astronomical waste. But this is a small price to pay relative to the risks of destroying ourselves or causing great harm if our moral views are wrong.
Yeah this is a really good point, I have no idea how to square the numbers with big grants from OP to THL
Thanks Vasco!
I checked the pages for each charity to get the scores.
I agree that AWF doesn’t directly evaluate cost-effectiveness, but I still think there’s a good chance they’re likely to be the EV maximizing option over THL. THL estimates that it costs them $2.63 to move a hen from a conventional to a cage-free system, or about 0.57 yr/$ given a 1.5-year lifespan. Last year, Emily Oehlsen from Open Phil said “We think that the marginal [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis.” Saulius’s 2019 analysis estimated that corporate campaigns pre-2019 impacted 41 chicken-years per dollar, so at a 5x reduction that’s 8.2 yr/$. I don’t want to take Emily’s numbers too literally, but that implies a >10x gap between the cost effectiveness values of OP’s marginal funding opportunity and THL. Since I’d expect AWF’s opportunities to look somewhat similar to OP’s, that leads me to guess that they’re likely to be on net more cost-effective than THL. This directionally agrees with some of the comments by insiders such as @James Özden on the GWWC evaluations thread as well. But I’d be very curious to hear more from folks who are more plugged in, this is just an outsider’s guess.
For what it’s worth, I do actually give to both AWF and THL, but give much more to AWF.
Good information!
A couple things to add to this very good comment:
In general, the landscape of charity evaluation for animal charities is less mature and quite a bit more uncertain than the landscape for global health and development charities. Any cost-effectiveness estimates are going to be coarse and debatable.
ACE has a partially qualitative cost-effectiveness scoring system. Their ratings (higher = better) for their recommended charities are:
Faunalytics: 5.7
New Roots Institute: 4.9
The Humane League: 4.7
Wild Animal Initiative: 4.5
Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği: 4.3
Shrimp Welfare Project: 4.3
Fish Welfare Initiative: 4.3
Sinergia Animal: 4.1
Good Food Institute: 3.8
Dansk Vegetarisk Forening: 3.7
Legal Impact for Chickens: 3.7
@Laura Duffy wrote a report at Rethink Priorities in which she estimated that corporate hen welfare campaigns avert 1.13 DALYs/$ and shrimp stunning interventions avert 0.038 DAYLYs/$. Both of these estimates were quite uncertain and depended on a lot of debatable assumptions (including possibly underrating the potential for shrimp stunning interventions to catalyze industry-wide changes), but I think this is one of the best estimates currently out there.
My personal advice would be that I think the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund is probably the expected value maximizing option, while The Humane League is probably the best option if you’re somewhat risk-averse.
Some data from open phil and EA funds grants:
Shrimp Welfare Project :
Open Philanthropy (September 2022): $300,000
Open Philanthropy (November 2023): $2,000,000
EA Funds (Q1 2022): $45,000
EA Funds (Q1 2022): $45,000
EA Funds (Q4 2022): $210,000
EA Funds (Q3 2023): $130,000
Insect Institute:
None listed
Arthropoda Foundation:
None listed
Aquatic Life Institute:
Open Philanthropy (June 2022): $100,000
Open Philanthropy (November 2022): $150,000
Open Philanthropy (December 2023): $550,000
EA Funds (Q1 2022): $80,000
EA Funds (Q1 2022): $80,000
EA Funds (Q3 2022): $80,000
EA Funds (Q4 2022): $200,000
Crustacean Compassion:
Open Philanthropy (February 2021): $786,830
Open Philanthropy (January 2023): $863,595
EA Funds (Q3 2021): $92,000
EA Funds (Q3 2022): $59,000
EA Funds (Q3 2023): $2171
EA Funds (Q4 2023): $84,000
IMO if EA funds isn’t representative of EA, I’m not sure what is. I think the different funds do a good job of accurately representing the broad diversity of viewpoints and approaches within the community, and I would personally be very sad if EA funds dropped the EA branding.
Agreed that this seems surprisingly under-discussed
Thanks so much for your response, that all makes sense!
You’re understanding question 3 correctly—GiveWell’s moral weights look like the following, which is fairly different from valuing every year of life equally.
Thanks so much for going on the podcast and for the incredible work that you and everyone involved in r.i.c.e. are doing! It’s amazing that you’ve been able to save so many lives so cost-effectively. I did have a few questions I was curious about though:
In discussing your room for more funding, you mentioned likely cost-effectiveness improvements from economies of scale as the program grows. That makes complete sense to me on the current margin, but I’m curious if you have thoughts about how the cost-effectiveness might change if the program were to scale up say an order of magnitude. It seems like both r.i.c.e.‘s staff and the medical college staff are exceptionally engaged and motivated. Do you sense of how important that’s been to the program’s success, and of whether that would be hard to maintain and replicate if the program expanded substantially more broadly? I know that for example in early childhood education interventions, there’s quite a bit of evidence of negative scale-up effects where programs that look really great in pilots have ended up looking a lot less good when implemented at large scale. (This isn’t at all intended to be a negative on r.i.c.e.’s current or near-term work, I’m just curious how optimistic or non-optimistic to be about the larger potential of kangaroo mother care programs)
In talking about why this program wasn’t done before r.i.c.e.‘s intervention and why it isn’t done in more places, you said “There are just a few paediatricians who work there, and they had just a few nurses working with them. And that’s just not going to be enough for this many babies. The government of Uttar Pradesh recognises this; the Department of Medical Education is working hard to open more new medical colleges and new nursing colleges.” Given that context, do you worry that part of what r.i.c.e is doing in the short-run is reallocating medical care from being provided to other people to being provided to the babies in the program? I of course don’t think this is an argument for r.i.c.e. being ineffective—I think there are strong reasons to think that the care you’re providing is doing more good than the counterfactual use of the nurses’ time, and that in the long-run the supply of nurses is relatively elastic. But I’m curious if this might be a reason to think the program is less cost-effective than it initially appears.
GiveWell’s moral weights take a time-relative interest account-like approach to the value of a human life, in which saving the life of a newborn infant is weighted as moderately less valuable than saving the life of an older child. This leads to GiveWell estimating r.i.c.e.’s cost-effectiveness as about 30% lower than it would have been if they had weighted preventing infant deaths as equally valuable as preventing the deaths of older children. Do you personally have any thoughts about the right approach to making these kinds of difficult tradeoffs when evaluating different charities? And how important a consideration do you think this moral weight question is for donors who are considering donating to r.i.c.e. vs. GiveWell’s current top charities.
Hm I don’t obviously see the analogy with the common app—hiring employees and admitting students seem quite different.
Are there antitrust concerns with multiple orgs (even if nonprofit) using a common screener?
FYI you described the “Electric Shrimp Stunning: a Potential High-Impact Donation Opportunity” post as “SWP’s CEA of stunners,” but I have no affiliation with SWP.
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)
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?
Great list (and thanks for the shoutout)!
I would add @Laura Duffy’s How Can Risk Aversion Affect Your Cause Prioritization? post