I took Giving What We Can pledge in May 2022.
Miguel Lima Medín
Karma: 122
On your comment about Part A: “it’s not the most relevant to animal welfare”, I think there are some questions which are relevant, such as:
18. If we did not use a list approach, please describe any alternative approaches you would propose to define which minimally processed meat products are included?All products derived from animals should be included, irrespective of the extent of processing after slaughter. The criteria for labeling should be based on how the animals are treated during their lives, rather than on how much the industry transforms the meat after slaughter.
I don’t see how processing more or less the meat has any influence to the wellbeing of the animals used.
Many thanks Ben Stevenson and jojo_lee for sharing your responses! It was useful for inspiration and to save time.
I add a couple of answers which I think were missing in your lists. Please note my English will probably contain errors as I’m not a native speaker.
23. Should the written origin of food be accompanied by a national flag or other symbol?
There should be a symbol for countries with animal wellfare standards similar or higher than those of the UK, and a symbol for countries with lower standards or no standard at all.
73 Please share any further comments on the monitoring and enforcement proposals.:
Cameras with public streaming should be mandatory on animal factories and slaughterhouses. This would make the conditions more transparent for the consumer, and would reduce the costs of auditing and monitoring by the government as the public can also participate and report non-compliance.
The mandatory requirement for Spanish slaughterhouses to install video surveillance systems can be used as a starting point for legislation in UK.
I tried your recommendation with the jar and I was surprised about the sound. It was interesting.
Have you considered setting up a French foundation that would receive the funds from the donors and then allocate to several programs? There are several experiences in different countries: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/tax-deductibility
I personally donate through Ayuda Efectiva in Spain.
I find this format very useful. The Challenges and Co-founder fit sections help us to understand our personal fit for each one of the charity ideas. The three level summaries let the reader decide how much time she/he wants to spend.
A heads-up: in your Sign up: Charity Entrepreneurship Online Talk (Top ideas 2023) form you list the salt fluoridation program but it is not described in this post. I wonder if this is an error on the form or whether you missed to copy its details into this post.
Other explanation of the investors’ expectations for 2033 is that they have seen the words “peak oil demand” written more and more frequently in the latest reports by IEA and other energy forecasters.
Oil demand can decrease by a combination of economic slowdown and oil intensity improvement. Oil intensity defined as the volume of oil needed to produce a fixed economic output. If we replace oil by other energy sources or increase the efficiency of our energy use we will improve the oil intensity. If we improve the oil intensity fast enough then we won’t see a significant economic impact. I guess the main point of Corentin’s argumet is about the speed of this transition.
Years ago, I read a paper explaining why oil price can’t go above a certain threshold. Oversimplifying it, the economic system can’t work above a certain cost of energy, so when this level is surpassed, some business will stop being profitable, the demand for oil will decrease and prices will go down. I might be missing some nuances and probably I’m not explaining it completely accurate, but this is how I understood it.
I would love to find the paper again to go through it, but unfortunately, I can’t recall the title nor the authors. I wonder if someone here have some references about the topic of how expensive an oil barrel can become before demand starts to shrink.
For point 1, if future human beings are better off (they live longer and happier lives), then (all else being equal) we should value more one of these better future lives than one life from today’s world. Therefore we shouldn’t discount its value for this reason.
When we believe that policy advocacy interventions are highly cost-effective, are we considering the end-to-end costs or only the first link in the chain?
As an example, for road-safety, are we counting A or B?:
Salary costs of a group of people spending their time to convince the authorities to pass a law limiting speed
Costs in “A” + costs of writing and publishing the law + costs of communicating about the new law in the media + costs of changing the speed limit signals, etc.
If this is the case, then advocacy will allways be the most cost-effective option. As long as you have a small probability to convince the government, it will allways be cheaper to convince someone else to fix an issue with their money than spending your money to fix the issue.
Congratulations! Great job by CE and all these founders.
I’m impressed by the “sodium taxation policy advocacy to control hypertension to be 190,927 DALYs per USD 100,000, which is around 300x as cost-effective as giving to a GiveWell top charity” cited in the Centre for exploratory altruism research site.
Hi Pablo,
I was expecting to join tomorrow. No need for you to start the meeting today.
Other possible question for this FAQ:
How much of EA’s money came from FTX Future Fund?
As per the post Historical EA funding data from August 2022, the estimation for 2022 was:
* Total EA funds: 741 M$
* FTX Future Fund contribution: 262 M$ (35%)
If anyone has more up to date analysis, or better data, please report it.
And many thanks for the very clear and useful summary. Well done.
Lorenzo, I agree the expert traders and investor have more technical skills about investment. But it seems to me that MacAskill and FTX Future Fund board had more direct information about the personality of SBF and the personal connections among the leaders and the group dynamics. So, when it comes to your statement “having access to way less information”, I don’t think this is the case.
You may want to update your post including a link to the court document with the conversations.
The document is linked only in a couple of the articles published in the news, but it is much easier to find if you include it in the post.
Will McAskill conversation starts on page 87. This was a very fast review from my end, I may have missed something else before page 87, if you want to be completely sure please have a second look.
https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/ro.xehDmXvHk/v0
I’m sorry to read about your personal experiences.
I didn’t know about the suicide in 2018, this is terrible ☹
I’m very concerned about the reports that misogyny is so common. I’m quite new to EA and I live in a small city without an EA circle.
affected EA circles – Next steps by men
Complaints included in this post are a call for men on these circles to react. There must be a deep reflection individually and collectively by all men.
Am I paying attention to what my female colleagues report? Am I sure I’m behaving appropriately? What can I do to make my group and my community more welcoming to women? Do I suspect of any inappropriate behavior by any male colleague? Am I telling him that it is not acceptable?
Code of conduct
I’m fully onboard with the need for a code of conduct. Your suggestions make sense to me.
Abuse of power
This is a sensitive and important topic. I’m not sure how this can be incorporated in the code of conduct or what other measures can be taken but given the situations you report it must be addressed by the community.
On the grants side of your formula, there are huge differences in flexibility between different projects. The direct cash transfers of Give Directly can scale up and down very rapidly.
On the donors’ side of your formula, it is not only about size but also volatility and reliability. There are big donors with stable wealth and a track record of regular predictable donations.
In my mind a sensible overall allocation would have at least as much money going to very flexible projects (ex: direct cash transfers) as the amount of money coming from very unpredictable sources (ex: one big donor whose wealth coming from risky assets varies a lot every week). This would capture the high rewards of volatile donors, without putting so much uncertainty to the teams who need some stability over the time.
For sure, this is always under the assumption that all donors, big or small, predictable or volatile, meet a minimum ethical standard in their practices.
For Open Philanthropy it is responded in this post:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mCCutDxCavtnhxhBR/some-comments-on-recent-ftx-related-events
For other funders I guess the response will be simmilar.
I guess a short common sense answer for funders could be:
1st) put commitments on hold and wait until there is more clarity of the actual impact
2nd) identify gaps, assess by urgency/importance
3rd) reprioritize and balance portfolios
For workers and organizations relying on donors:
1st) do not assume you will not be impacted if you don’t receive directly funds from FTX. The money you were relying on may be redirected in the future to other projects previously funded by FTX
2nd) put on hold financial decisions (hiring staff, buying, etc.) in the short term until you get a bit more clarity
3rd) reorganize your personal/organization budget
Corentin, you might be interested on this European project to explore pathways towards post-growth economics
To explore “how dramatic reductions in energy and resource use can be achieved, while at the same time ending poverty and ensuring decent lives for all” seems to me a very important and neglected problem. Based on the difficulties highlighted in your post I’m not sure how tractable it is, but I’m glad that some funds go into researching this issue.
It would be good to have a proposal for responses to 49 and 50, from the charities who studied Animal Welfare metrics. I recognize my ignorance on this topic.