I’m a doctor working towards the dream that every human will have access to high quality healthcare. I’m a medic and director of OneDay Health, which has launched 35 simple but comprehensive nurse-led health centers in remote rural Ugandan Villages. A huge thanks to the EA Cambridge student community in 2018 for helping me realise that I could do more good by focusing on providing healthcare in remote places.
NickLaing
Karma: 7,642
Small thing. I think phrasing is the the “meat eating” problem is better here, will continue to plug this.
I might well have overstated it. My argument here though is based on previous work of individual team members, even before they joined RP, not just the nature of the previous work of the team as part of RP. All 5 of the team members worked publicly (googlably) to a greater or lesser extent on animal welfare issues before joining RP, which does seem significant to me when the group undertaking such an important project which involves such important questions assessing impact, prioritisation and funding questions across a variety of causes.
It might be a”cross cause team”, but there does seem a bent here..
1. Animal welfare has been at the center of Derek and Bob’s work for some time.
2. Arvon founded the “Animal welfare library” in 2022 https://www.animalwelfarelibrary.org/about
3. You and Hayley worked (perhaps to a far lesser extent) on animal welfare before joining Rethink too. On Hayley’s faculty profile it says”With her interdisciplinary approach and diverse areas of expertise, she helps us understand both animal minds and our own.”
And yes I agree that you, leading the team seems to have the least work history in this direction.This is just to explain my reasoning above, I don’t think there’s necessarily intent here and I’m sure the team is fantastic—evidenced by all your high quality work. Only that the team does seem quite animal welfar-ey. I’ve realised this might seem a bit stalky and this was just on a super quick google. This may well be misleading and yes I may well be overstating.
This sounds great and I instinctively really like it. My reservation is when im the research will end up being somewhat biased towards animal welfare, considering that has been a major research focus and passion for most of these researchers for a long time.
My weak suggestion (I know probably not practical) would be to try and intentionally hire some animal welfare skeptic philosophy people to join the team to provide some balance and perhaps fresh perspectives.
I don’t have a suggestion, but I’ve been encouraged and “heartwarmed” by the diverse range of responses below. Cool to see people with different ways of holding their hope and motivation, whether its enough for us to buy a bed net tomorrow or we do indeed have grander plans and visions, or we’re skeptical abut whether “future designing” is a good idea at all.
Applying my global health knowledge to the animal welfare realm, I’m requesting 1,000,000 dollars to launch this deep net positive (Shr)Impactful charity. I’ll admit the funding opportunity is pretty marginal…
Thanks @Toby Tremlett🔹 for bringing this to life. Even though she doesn’t look so happy I can assure you this intervention nets a 30x welfare range improvement for this shrimp, so she’s now basically a human.
Yeah me too its amazing
Oh yeah that’s super interesting that the mortality effect doesn’t change the cost-effectiveness estimate that much. I wonder why that is excactly? Might look into it later!
Interesting one nice observations. What do you mean when you say that the 23% mortality reduction has “extremely depressing implications”
I love the way you put this
”have you not considered the possibility that people have noticed the outsiders with clipboards asking personal questions seem to be associated in some way with their neighbours getting unexpected windfalls, and started to speculate about what sort of answers the NGOs are looking for...”
I think this is great and a pretty huge development. I have two broad strokes comments here.
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Few other interventions have the research clout to look at such a wide range of outcomes years after what they do, which may favor cash.
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I still think the survey based follow up (nearly all of the follow up) after cash transfers biases towards cash to an extent people underrate, including Interviewer bias (blinding is practically impossible), desirability bias and future hope bias. This is simply because people loooooove getting cash more than any other intervention.
In saying that I still think we should give loads more cash to everyone. Give Directly also becomes even more cost effective as almost all of their money comes from non EA sources.
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Its all I ever think about and what I have devoted my life to.
Wow...
Yeah I’m not sure we’re really disagreeing here? I agree people are less interested in as group that supports different areas and that orgs should mostly be cause specific. I’m talking about having a lot of grace for a wide range of “high impact’ causes under the broader EA tent depending on people’s epistemics and cost effectiveness calculation methods. I think this is more helpful than doubling down on prioritisation and leaving groups our causes feeling like they might be on the “outer” edge of EA or excluded completely
Maybe I’m being too vague here though...
I love this a lot. Something that often gets my hackles/Spidey sense up is when someone seems very confident about a particular cause being the “best” or “better”, especially when making difficult (arguably even impossible like you say) comparisons between animals/current humans/future humans. I think it is helpful to make these difficult comparisons but only with deep humility and huge acknowledged uncertainty.
Another benefit of plurality is that it’s easier to have a “bigger EA tent” both in human resource and funding. Us humans will always have different opinions not only about impact, but also the kind of things that we lean towards naturally and also where our competitive advantages are. The more we prioritize the more we may exclude.
All this is true, but I think alumni groups like I mentioned could actually add as little stability and consistency to the quality of university groups. My parallel could be something like the Oxford or Cambridge Union or a range of university associations or clubs. The management changes every year but they maintain quality and prestige. That model could transfer to EA groups too to some degree, especially once they have gained some pedigree after being active for 15 or 20 years.
I largely agree, although I don’t think we’re trying to leverage money that hard in some areas areas. I do think there needs to be some strategy for leverage as well as a lot of opportunism as you say. Collaboration as I mentioned opens up opportunities as well.
Sometimes also it’s not so hard to access pools of money, for example how many orgs are trying hard to access all that climate money?
This is an important argument and makes a lot of sense.
“I’d say there’s a decent number of highly effective charities with very valuable IP that are too leveraged on the output of very few staff members.”
I agree with this, apart from the word “too”. I’ve got no issue with a few talented people carrying an organisation—I think that’s just how both charity and business often work for a long long time. How much of Apple’s value was in Jobs and Wosniacki even after they were worth billions? How much of their current value is still a legacy of the style and philosophy they built?
This next statement though I think makes sense in theory and I agree to some extent. But I’ve seen the opposite happen most of the time.
“Increased cost effectiveness over time usually comes from investment in quality assets (I’d include staff costs as assets—for management accounting purposes not for external financial reporting purposes).”
I think this is more the case in the business world as incentives are unfortunately so cooked in the charity world that as organisations grow , it’s hard to avoid very poorly performing staff getting paid way too much and for too long. We need to invest in staff to grow an organisation, and it’s probably just the right thing to do by our fellow human, but unfortunately I’m not convinced it always makes us more cost effective. I would be interested to hear what examples your have of charities that you think have become clearly more cost effective through investing unusually heavily in staff? Although this might be an unfair question so it’s hard to separate that it out.
Often as well I’ve seen in my org in UgAnda, if I invest heavily in good staff (which we do) they are more likely to get a higher paying job in the NGO or government sector so often the investment doesn’t pay off for us. I’ve seen a number of cases too not in our org where super talented staff were funded for extra study which then directly enabled them to get a better paying job somewhere else. It’s complicated. In Western EA orgs where you might have the luxury of relying partly on value alignment this situation might be very different. There’s loyalty here but often more to to individual people than a value structure or org.
In my experience with NGOs, staff salaries and “investment” in staff usually end up increasing often to the detriment of the cost effectiveness of the org. Again I’m not saying it’s the wrong thing to do. Just observing.
I love the idea of alumni (and maybe even alumni groups) taking on responsibility for funding uni groups. This could be an inspiring and super sustainable way to keep then funded indefinitely and free up funding elsewhere. Imagine the inspiration when the two people who funded your group come to speak about the cool stuff they have thought/done/given since they left uni
I think the inspiration / comradery / multiplier effects here could hugely boost the cost effectiveness of alumni donations
Yep I agree with the Tech example, except even as you scale there you’re likely going to need to continue to invest in government partnerships etc. After the initial investment there might be a real spike in cost effectiveness, which might then level out as growth continues.
I would consider the Goverment advocacy and to some extent technical assistance project more of a “hits based approach” (which is great) more than thinking about the framing of long term cost-effectiveness
I like these examples. Maybe someone could do a series of Graphs to illustrate how cost-effectiveness over time could work with different types of orgs? This could help donors and investors understand how their investment functions at different stages of org growth.
The value of re-directing non-EA funding to EA orgs might still be under-appreciated. While we obsess over (rightly so) where EA funding should be going, shifting money from one EA cause to another “better” ne might often only make an incremental difference, while moving money from a non-EA pool to fund cost-effective interventions might make an order of magnitude difference.
There’s nothing new to see here. High impact foundations are being cultivated to shift donor funding to effective causes, the “Center for effective aid policy” was set up (then shut down) to shift governement money to more effective causes, and many great EAs work in public service jobs partly to redirect money. The Lead exposure action fund spearheaded by OpenPhil is hopefully re-directing millions to a fantastic cause as we speak.
I would love to see an analysis (might have missed it) which estimates the “cost-effectiveness” of redirecting a dollar into a 10x or 100x more cost-effective intervention, How much money/time would it be worth spending to redirect money this way? Also I’d like to get my head around how much might the working “cost-effectiveness” of an org improve if its budget shifted from 10% non-EA funding to 90% non- EA funding.There are obviously costs to roping in non-EA funding. From my own experience it often takes huge time and energy. One thing I’ve appreciated about my 2 attempts applying for EA adjacent funding is just how straightforward It has been – probably an order of magnitude less work than other applications.
Here’s a few practical ideas to how we could further redirect funds
EA orgs could put more effort into helping each other access non-EA money. This is already happening through the AIM cluster, but I feel the scope could be widened to other orgs, and co-ordination could be improved a lot without too much effort. I’m sure pools of money are getting missed all the time. For example I sure hope we’re doing whatever we can through our networks to help EA gender based violence orgs / family planning orgs to get hold of some of this 250 million dollars from Melinda.
When assessing cost-effectiveness of new interventions and charities (especially global health), I think potential to access non-EA future funding could be taken into account. If a new charity has a relatively smooth path to millions of dollars of external funding, should our cost-effectiveness bar be lower? Again this might well be happening already.
We might have a blind spot missing cause areas where cost-effectiveness might initially look sub-optimal, but huge available non-EA money-pools might shift the calculus. One example is climate mitigation, where Billions of dollars slosh around, wasted on ineffective interventions. Many “mitigation activities” I see here in northern Uganda might as well be burning money (in a carbon neutral way of course). GiveDirectly have made a great play here re-directing millions of climate mitigations funds to cash transfers. Could other “climate mitigation orgs” be set up to utilise this money better even if the end point of the money wasn’t strictly climate related?
I would imagine far smarter people have thought about this far more deeply, but there might still be room for more exploration and awareness here.
Brilliant I love this.
Give Directly driving attention and attitudes towards cash is good for pushing the aid worlds’ thinking in terms of cost effectiveness, normalizing benchmarking, which has positive spillovers to effective altruism in general