Thank you so much! I’m very happy to hear it was helpful for you.
Nicholas Kruus🔸
Karma: 540
Thanks for catching the typo! I’ve updated the post to fix it. Not sure how that happened...
I think it’s reasonable to be skeptical. The results seem somewhat too good to be true. That said, the study seemed to have been carefully conducted, so, if the results are bunk, I doubt it was intentional.
I apologize for this confusion. I’ve updated the section with the inaccurate statement @Richard Y Chappell quoted.
Thank you for bringing up other important considerations and limitations of these studies. You are right that, with this post, I don’t intend to make any claims about the extent to which anyone should let productivity effects determine their decision whether or not to have children. I’m just hoping to help better inform those who factor it into their choice (although, again, you make a good point about these studies’ failure to account for the counterfactual of people who want children deciding against it).
Good catch; thank you very much. I misinterpreted the findings—an embarrassing mistake on my part. I’ve updated the post to address this.
Unfortunately, not in the studies I have read…
Thanks for doing that! I’d love to hear what he has to say.
Unfortunately, I’m learning the article may be a bit misleading. I’d see some of the other comments for more details.
Thank you for your investigation.
That is disappointing...
However, there’s still at least some benefit from increased plant-based product sales by providing revenue to plant-based companies for R&D and other expenses.
Unfortunately, it also shows its impact has been decreasing since 2020 (which the first graph doesn’t show).
That finding pleasantly surprised me too! Though, I want to keep in mind that this is just one survey.
To get the ball rolling on this discussion, I’ll pitch in some trends I’ve noticed (although might be completely wrong about!)
The following seem popular (at least lately):
Highly detailed and thorough research reports (example)
Or summaries of them?
Personal narratives about things like...
Mental health
EA commitments (e.g., taking the GWWC pledge)
EA community interactions
Introductions to EA
Intuitions about EA-related philosophies
Positive posts that...
Well-thought-out criticism of EA
Drama at EA-aligned orgs (e.g., FTX, OpenAI board, Nonlinear)
This really piqued my interest when I listened to the Podcast episode, but after some investigation, I was unable to verify his estimated 1 billion screwworm infections per year. I couldn’t find any estimates at all—only a study of its infection rate in a sample of pigs. Still, I think it’s a cause that STRONGLY deserves further research (namely estimates of annual screwworm infections) given its potential benefit.
The compliments and feedback are highly appreciated. I have implemented your recommendations.
I think, accounting for the information you’re asking about, there are strong consequentialist and deontological reasons not to murder anyone.
First, from a consequentialist perspective, murdering someone puts yourself and the Effective Altruism community at serious legal and reputational risk. This would be irrational and irresponsible given that you have many other, more effective, ways to reduce the suffering of factory farmed animals. We also have uncertainty about the moral status of non-human animals, so we need to be careful when trading off between the lives of humans and other species.
Second, from a deontological (and perhaps virtue-ethical) standpoint, murder is simply inexcusable. Since we face moral uncertainty about which moral framework is correct, I believe we ought not to do anything that would be clearly immoral on moral views other than consequentialism.
See more detailed information here (the page is about careers, but 80% of it applies to this case as well): https://​​80000hours.org/​​articles/​​harmful-career/​​