If I offered you a free solar panel upgrade, in return for 1⁄3 of the additional revenue it generates, would you accept?
One-time pad
Karma: 74
“We estimate with medium-high confidence that the Spark intervention generates about $28 in village-level income per dollar spent over the first 10 years of the program when villages purchase livestock.”
This screams bullshit. If you believe this to be true, why don’t you invest in this for profit? You could subsequently donate 10x more in just 10 years even if you only capture 1⁄3 of the value added.
Depression =/= low mood. Its just one of a plethora of ways to have sustained periods of low mood. The real question is how larger proportion of mood is determined by the top genes
I think this post would do a better job of furthering your (laudable) aims if it was written more concisely.
People should do shit like this more often!
Very nice!
Core argument isn’t convincing and the interventions suggested don’t seem to have much of an evidence basis.
If I were to guess, I’d say that’s why this and the other post has been downvoted and not really the writing style.
“The team advised a group about a local person with many reports about them making people uncomfortable at events. The person currently isn’t attending, but the group now has steps they plan to take if the person expresses interest in attending.”
Who else recently stopped attending their local group and is now paranoid this is about them?
“Well I don’t know about the fire but you’re being a bit cringe about this whole thing”
^ Laughed out loud at this
Beautifully written summary
The changes between each section are highlighted in bold, as it is in every section before and after. The bolded section is literally 14 words long; the tl;dr would be longer than the text.
My instinct is that the 5th and 95% percentile estimates might differ by several orders of magnitude
This is really interesting. It’d be good to see more people do a cost-effectiveness analysis of a given topic to see how large the variance is and to see the shape of the distribution.
Step 3 masterfully executed
You write better than most natives I’ve had the misfortune of reading!
This talk is probably the most efficient and entertaining way to get better at writing concisely and entertainingly, given by Harvard linguist Stephen Pinker:
I started writing this comment at 7:31.
The original was 454 words. The edited version is ~40% shorter at 288 words. I have no writing experience, and I had to take the time to understand your post. It’s likely you could have done this in a mere fraction of the time. “Weeks or months” is a gross exaggeration.
Edited Version (all caveats kept in)
Context and conclusionsI’ve spent months trying to find a wild animal welfare (WAW) intervention that is:
Tractable (can in principle be funded >$100K/yr starting in 2023 even if we choose not to do so),
Non-controversial (>40% support and <30% oppose in a US poll), and
Directly cost-effective (10%+ as cost-effective in expectation as chicken welfare corporate campaigns).
Reducing aquatic noise seemed most viable. It’s probably less than 10% as cost-effective as chicken welfare reforms, but there’s a small chance the best interventions trump corporate chicken welfare campaigns. I’ve arguably set the bar too high; some of the last EA-funded animal welfare interventions (arguably) don’t meet it
I think Aquatic noise is most promising of all WAW interventions available right now, but it might be better to wait for something better. Experts told me that testing how noise impacts the most populous species would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and might have inconclusive results. Academic research in aquatic noise (if no-one else is doing this already) and general WAW outreach seem more promising at present.
Why aquatic noise seemed promising
The main sources of aquatic noise are:
Ships and boats
Seismic surveys (usually to find oil and gas)
Sonar
Pile driving and other offshore construction
Wind farms
Acoustic deterrent devices used by fish farms
Dynamite fishing
Note: Deep-sea mining may become an important noise source in the future. More speculatively, so might underwater GPS (Ghaffarivardavagh et al. (2020).
This list is in the order of importance that many articles seem to give to each source (e.g., Duarte et al. (2021), Širović et al. (2021), Hildebrand (2004), Williams et al. (2018)), often implicitly. I haven’t yet seen any analysis of the relative importance of each.
It is currently 7:07 AM for me. To test your claim that it would take weeks to write more concisely and for a general audience, I’m going to edit the first 5 paragraphs of the report and see how long it takes. I’ll even keep the caveats in.
What percentage of the people on the panel are longtermists? It seems, at first glance, that almost everyone is, or at least working in a field/org that strongly implies they are. If so, isn’t this a problem for the impartiality of the results? Even if not, how is an independent outsider (like the people making submissions) supposed to believe that?
This is likely to have the opposite effect; it will reinforce the current thinking in EA rather than challenge it, while monetarily rewarding people for parroting back the status quo.
This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
Don’t get me wrong, it sounds like a really interesting and important question with big implications for EA. Perhaps an executive summary would be helpful?
Can you elaborate more on how this affects your career decision? We’ll be able to give more useful feedback with this context