If this is the justification for having a pet, it would seem that a pig would be the best choice (for someone living where pigs are allowed). They can be healthy without eating meat and they are likely more effective at promoting veganism.
RandomEA
Given the large number of animals who would be spared the suffering involved in factory farming by making the transition to CAP happen slightly more quickly, even a small chance of the additional funding making the difference would justify donating to CAP research over vegan advocacy.
For example, let’s consider someone with $1,000,000 to give away. According to the ACE impact calculator, if you spent that amount of money purchasing leaflets for volunteers to distribute, you would spare 4,000,000 animals from factory farming. What about if you spent it on grants for academics researching cultured chicken meat? If you think that there is at least a one in one hundred chance that you will make each point in the transition away from eating factory farmed chicken in the United States occur just one month earlier, then you would expect to spare at least 7,000,000 chickens from factory farming (8,800,000,000 chickens slaughtered in the US last year divided by 12 months in a year multiplied by 0.01 probability). I did leave out wild caught fish in my estimate of the total number of animals spared by leafleting (which makes it an underestimate), but I also left out factory farmed chickens outside the United States in my estimate of the total number of animals spared by CAP research (which also makes it an underestimate).
Because of the large number of animals that would be saved by even a slightly quicker transition away from factory farming, I think the top donors focused on animals should seriously consider grants for CAP research when the research is likely to meaningfully advance the transition to CAP.
I think an open access academic journal focused on effective altruism could also have significant benefits including:
-increasing dialogue between the EA community and academic philosophers
-creating a formal mechanism for receiving thoughtful feedback on new ideas
-allowing readers to find the most important new contributions in one location
-incentivizing serious research on topics that are important to the movement
-signalling the openness of the community to changing its mind on key issues
It could complement a database by highlighting the most important articles within the database.
I explore the idea of a journal in greater depth in this comment: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/us/call_for_papers_for_a_special_journal_issue_on_ea/7ud
I think the barrier to greater publication is that there are many EAs outside the academy with publishable articles who just feel like an academic journal would be the wrong place for their article. If there was a journal dedicated specifically to effective altruism and read by many in the movement, there would probably be more EAs submitting articles.
I would agree that most EAs currently learn about EA ideas in places other than journal articles, and I actually want that to continue even if a journal is started. However, I would imagine that many more people would read academic journal articles about EA if we have a single journal than in the current situation where EA articles are in many different journals.
It would probably be a good idea to make it free to submit and free to read, but that does require an EA organization to pay for the costs.
There does seem to be a tradeoff here: the more acceptable the journal is to the EA community, the less acceptable it will be to the academic community. For example, allowing the majority of the articles in the journal to be from nonacademics, allowing some reviewers to be nonacademics, and having an EA organization host the journal are steps that would make it more acceptable to EAs and less acceptable to academics.
“By contrast, no analogous mechanism ensures that an improvement in the welfare of one animal results in the improvements in the welfare of other animals.”
Do you count ensuring an animal who would have lived a net negative life never comes into existence as “an improvement in the welfare of one animal”? If so, it’s possible that an improvement in the welfare of one animal could result in improvements in the welfare of other animals by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change mitigation may also help animals living in the far future.
One potential counterargument to this is that the primary constraint on the adoption of cultured animal products is a lack of demand rather than a lack of supply. If nobody wants cultured animal products for the next half century, then bringing them to market at a competitive price in one decade instead of two decades has no effect for the next half century. There does seem to be some evidence for this view: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/04/PI_2014.04.16_TechFuture_driverless_cars.png
However, while more animal advocacy now could increase the demand for CAP thirty years from now, introducing CAP a decade from now instead of two decades from now will also do that. Specifically, technology adoption tends to follow a pattern with some people adopting it immediately, some people adopting it after a few years, some people adopting it after most of their friends have adopted it, and some people never adopting it. Because earlier introduction of CAP will shift the adoption date for more than just those who adopt it immediately, it may have a very significant effect on demand several decades from now.
Is there any data out there on the amount of money that EAs as a whole have given to each cause area? I know the 2014 survey asked about how much money EAs gave and which causes they supported financially, but it seems like there was no question on the specific amounts given to each cause. Perhaps it would be a good idea to include a question about this on future surveys.
Here are a few ideas for improvement that may be worth considering:
This Year’s Survey Results Document
1) Add page numbers for ease of reference
2) Revise the document so that the Key Findings on page 2⁄3, the table on page 11⁄12, the table on page 12⁄13, the table on page 18⁄19, the table on page 28⁄29, and the abbreviations on page 31⁄32 each display on a single page
3) Add percentages to the age histogram on page 14, the location table on page 15, the career table on page 18⁄19, and the graph on page 22
4) For the table on page 26, add a “Total” column and a “Total” row that show both the number and the percentage of respondents choosing each option for each of the two questions
Future Surveys
1) Ask people for the dollar amount they donated to each broad cause area to get an estimate of what percent of money donated by EAs goes to each cause area
2) Ask people who changed their career or career plan because of EA which career type (earning to give, direct work, research) they are now pursuing instead
3) It might be interesting to ask people whether they tell non-EAs about EA and if yes, the number of non-EAs they have convinced to become an EA
4) It might be interesting to have a marital status question as well as a question about whether those who are married are married to another EA
Overall it’s a great survey with very useful information. Thank you for all of your effort!
Have you ever considered a version of the Speed Giving Game where the participant is instead asked whether individual charities have a negative effect, no effect, or a positive effect?
Here’s how it could work:
Before the event, you prepare several sheets of laminated paper, each for a specific charity.
On the front of each sheet, it says the name of the charity and a description of its intervention.
On the back of each sheet, it says whether the charity has a positive effect, no effect, or a negative effect as well as a citation to the relevant study.
You also prepare a big sign: “We will donate up to $5 to charity if you play this 5 minute game.”
You ask each person to randomly draw five of the laminated sheets of paper.
For each one they guess correctly, you donate one dollar to charity.
The reason I feel this might be better is it more directly establishes that some charities are better than others, whereas the current version of the Speed Giving Game seems to imply that it is simply up to the subjective judgment of the donor.
Would it be possible to combine individual stories and general statistics? If I tell you there are X number of children dying from malaria, you may want to know what it is like to die from malaria. If I show you a video of one child dying from malaria, you may want to know how many other children are in a similar situation. If individual stories do have some usefulness, then would it be a good use of money for an EA organization to make some short films about the stories of individual children dying from malaria? It could bring people into the movement the same way that undercover videos of factory farms bring people into the animal movement. If people who are already in the movement are more likely to respond positively to a different type of appeal, could we target different types of appeals to different audiences? I did a quick search on YouTube for videos about malaria, and I found way fewer videos than I know are out there about factory farming.
I agree that cosmopolitanism in altruism would lead to prioritizing the global poor, but I would like to point out that one can rationally choose to donate to the global poor while believing that Americans should be given substantially more weight than those living in sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, while it may be good that effective altruists are cosmopolitans, we should attempt to convince those who reject cosmopolitanism that their existing values also lead to donating to the global poor. I’m just afraid that sending the message that you have to reject granting more weight to those close to you, reject granting more weight to those who are the same species as you, or reject granting more weight to those who live in the present in order to be an effective altruist will push away people with different beliefs who would otherwise donate to highly effective charities.
[Edited]
What do you think is the most important document to translate in terms of explaining basic ideas of the movement to people who speak other languages? I’m inclined to think it would be Effective Altruism Handbook. How much would it cost to pay a professional translator to translate a document like that into a language like Spanish? An EA organization could do it for one language to see the number of monthly views that the translation gets. Based on that, it could decide whether it would be worth translating the document into additional languages.
What is the most effective charity at saving lives in the U.S.? The reason I’d like to know is to tell people who are considering EA just how much more good they can do by donating to charities working in developing countries. I’m thinking the most effective U.S. intervention would either be a campaign against smoking, a campaign against drunk driving, or a child mortality reduction program.
Do we have a rigorous estimate for the cost effectiveness of any intervention aimed at encouraging people to join the EA movement? This could be very useful information when deciding how to allocate money between movement building organizations and direct work organizations. This is obviously only one consideration, but an RCT that gives us a cost effectiveness number would be quite valuable.
I initially thought that ACE-recommended charities might be the most effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but they turned out to be much less effective than I expected.[1] According to Giving What We Can, the most effective charity in this area is actually Cool Earth.[2] However, you should consider the effect of rainforest preservation on wild animal suffering before donating.[3]
[1] I no longer have the numbers I used to do the calculation. If anybody else attempts this calculation, please publish it so that there’s no need for it to be done over and over.
[2] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/report/cool-earth/
How do you think donating to CFAR compares in terms of effectiveness with donating to organizations explicitly spreading EA? It seems like the benefits of making non-EA people more rational are relatively small if they never become EAs. Assuming that few of the non-EAs attending CFAR workshops become EAs, it would seem that donations to CFAR do less good than donations to organizations explicitly spreading EA. Perhaps it would be a better idea to donate to a scholarship fund that helps verified EAs pay for CFAR workshops.
Note: I understand that the question of whether it is a good idea to attend a CFAR workshop is different than the question of whether it is a good idea to donate additional money to CFAR.
How many users does this website have? The effective altruism subreddit now has 1,000 subscribers, and I’m wondering how this website compares.
That link does not work because it has a comma at the end.
Here’s the correct link: http://www.effectivealtruism.org/organizations/
[Edited]
It may also be a good idea to a) change “meta” to “movement building” because the latter term is clearer and b) change “prioritization” to “prioritization (causes, careers, and charities)” to clarify that it is more than just cause prioritization.
Would it be a good idea to create an open access journal dedicated specifically to effective altruism? From what I understand, it would cost relatively little to run a website where papers could be submitted by authors, assigned to referees, evaluated by editors, and published for anyone to read. There also seems to be enough technical expertise in the community to design a website like that if there are volunteers interested in doing it. Of course, it would be a big time commitment on the part of whoever serves as the editor, but it could have significant benefits to the movement including:
-increasing dialogue between the EA community and academic philosophers
-creating a formal mechanism for receiving thoughtful feedback on new ideas
-allowing readers to find the most important new contributions in one location
-incentivizing serious research on topics that are important to the movement
-signalling the openness of the community to changing its mind on key issues
The journal could complement the various ways that new ideas are currently shared. An EA could still write a blog post to share her views, and online forums could still be considered legitimate places for serious discussion. It’s just that the author of a post would now have the option of developing the idea in greater depth, a process during which she may significantly improve her argument.
The journal could be slightly different in its willingness to publish articles from authors outside the academy and select referees outside the academy. As long as the editor is an experienced academic, she should be able to ensure that the papers still meet the standards of normal philosophy journals.
Since there is currently a large unpublished literature on effective altruism, there should be enough material for the first several issues. After that, you would probably have enough submissions from people who devise arguments with the intent of getting them published in the journal.
[Edited]