scottweathers

Karma: 322

scottweathers Mar 17, 2016, 5:46 PM
2 points
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on: Call for papers for a special journal issue on EA
Thanks, Will!

I have several ideas in mind but wouldn’t feel confident submitting right now, because I don’t know the norms of philosophy publication. I’d love to have someone who’s written for philosophy journals (preferably an EA) provide a guide to EAs who might want to submit articles. Is there anyone who might be able to address these kinds of questions?

scottweathers Mar 6, 2016, 11:18 PM
17 points
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on: Accomplishments Open Thread—March 2016
Again, I love this, Gleb!

1) I wrote a response piece in openDemocracy defending EA that got 218 shares on Facebook. I also reached out to Lisa, who wrote the original article, and we had a good chat—definitely friendly and I think the debate helped both of us advance our goals/interests.

2) I finally published an article on the EA forum covering the “meat eater problem” that I’ve been trying to publish for ages. This represents a ton of hard work and thinking that I’ve done over the last several months. I intend to follow it up with another blog post on many of the questions that I still don’t have answers to.

3) The Reach Every Mother and Child Act, the bill I’m working on, just reached 100 co-sponsors! This is a major achievement—many of the co-sponsors were added on after I met with representatives’ staffers.

4) I was accepted into global health masters programs at Harvard and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine! I haven’t decided which program to do yet, but that’s probably what I’ll be doing next year :)

scottweathers Mar 3, 2016, 2:37 PM
4 points
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on: Charity Science 2.5 Year Internal Review and Plans Going Forward
This is an excellent article, Joey. Every single non-profit could learn a ton about transparency, measurement, and estimating impact from the approach you’ve taken. I’m impressed by Charity Science’s impact, but far more impressed by your approach to figuring out the marginal value your organization adds. I’m going to send this article to organizations in the future.

Full disclosure, I’m an advisor to Charity Entrepreneurship’s project and have been very impressed by the approach they’re taking on that project as well.

scottweathers Mar 2, 2016, 9:25 PM
0 points
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in reply to: Gleb_T’s comment on: The Meat Eater Problem: Developing an EA Response
Thanks, Gleb! I definitely struggle with the PR aspect of this—it’s certainly a weird topic but one that I think matters a lot.

Definitely think that we should include increased meat consumption in our cost-effectiveness analysis for interventions that increase income. My guess is that this amount is much smaller than for interventions that save lives, like bed nets, but that’s certainly an open question.

I agree with Brian’s remarks on chicken consumption in India—it didn’t seem the case when I looked at the data.

scottweathers Mar 2, 2016, 9:20 PM
0 points
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in reply to: zackrobinson’s comment on: The Meat Eater Problem: Developing an EA Response
Thanks, Zach! Point 3 seems especially important to me and something that I may highlight more in future articles.

I wanted to dive more into point 1 about environmental stress, but it’s so difficult! I genuinely don’t know whether eating beef is unethical or not—Compassion by the Pound’s welfare numbers are pretty positive for cows but their climate impact is much larger than chickens/pigs. I think it’s fairly clear that veal is bad, but hamburgers? It’s one question I’d like to see someone dive into.

scottweathers Mar 2, 2016, 9:13 PM
2 points
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in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: The Meat Eater Problem: Developing an EA Response
Yep, I think the discussion around how much we value different animal lives is pretty central to this. I think it deserves a post on its own—perhaps that’s the next thing I’ll write!

I think you’re right in theory about interventions with constant returns, but I’m not sure many interventions actually behave this way. To take GiveDirectly, I see one of the most large (potential) benefits being that developing countries may begin cash transfer systems after seeing GiveDirectly’s success. To that end, $50 million looks very different from $150 to $300 in how quickly countries will hear about their successes, how much media attention GiveDirectly receives, etc. It’s probably very impossible to predict where these cut-offs are—I’m just trying to highlight that optimizing our donations is of course what we should aim for, but pretty hard when many of the benefits come from policy changes from a diverse set of actors.

Good points, Carl!

scottweathers Mar 1, 2016, 12:05 PM
3 points
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: The Meat Eater Problem: Developing an EA Response
Thanks, Kbog! Responding to a few claims:

I agree we won’t ever have a single response, but that’s not my intention. I just think this is an important enough problem that far more EAs should be taking it seriously and considering it as they donate/work (the EA response).

On chickens—yes, most chicken lives currently are probably very net-negative. However, the authors’ numbers say cage-free and market (non-breeder) chickens raised for meat live net-positive lives. If you disagree with the authors’ numbers, that’s a totally fair argument and I’d love to hear it. However, given the huge movement towards cage-free just in the past year and the numbers above, we may have many chickens living net-positive lives in the immediate future. This seems important to me as we discuss predictions about the next 50-100 years.

Re: shaky ethical assumptions: I agree that this is controversial and a view not held by many people. I’d love to hear arguments about why this ethical view is not correct!

Thanks for your link, I meant to put it in my post but forgot.

I was using a broader “we” as in “humanity will develop meat alternatives,” not that any particular Effective Altruist will do it. I don’t much care who does it.

scottweathers Mar 1, 2016, 11:53 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Vidur Kapur’s comment on: The Meat Eater Problem: Developing an EA Response
Thanks, Vidur! I didn’t make it totally clear, but I don’t think that individuals should split their donations. The main argument that I’m trying to make is that the distribution of our donations across the EA movement are heavily human-centered, and that’s a mistake based on expected value. I didn’t want to dive too deep into this but that’s the claim I was trying to make.

Broadly speaking, I’d like to see a much higher proportion of our dollars go to animal organizations. I could see this being fixed from a decent sized group of people moving their donations over or a major organization like OPP fixing it.

scottweathers Feb 29, 2016, 10:04 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: The Meat Eater Problem: Developing an EA Response
Thanks, Buck! You’re definitely right in the short term. However, I think that the time frame we need to operate on is likely at least 1 generation, considering that’s about the amount of time someone will be eating meat if their life is saved by a health intervention. Perhaps even longer depending on the extent to which health interventions influence fertility.

You’re absolutely right on wild animal suffering, and I hope someone with more knowledge on this will chime in. I didn’t include it in the article because I find most of the arguments extremely speculative, but it’s not fair to entirely remove that from the equation, either.

scottweathers Feb 12, 2016, 8:05 PM
2 points
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in reply to: kierangreig🔸’s comment on: Requesting feedback to shape research into possible conditional cash transfer charity
This all sounds great! I can see your reasoning on why CCTs might have a larger counterfactual impact. Your 3rd and 4th bullet appear quite strong to me—CCTs give you flexibility that other interventions wouldn’t.

The demand/supply question is an important one. Like a lot of these questions, however, demand/supply will probably come down to the specific communities you decide to work in, which makes it hard to predict at the outset.

Thanks, Kieran!

scottweathers Feb 12, 2016, 2:16 AM
3 points
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on: Requesting feedback to shape research into possible conditional cash transfer charity
Why would CCTs have a larger counterfactual impact than other interventions? This seems like an important point to make explicit, both for you and for everybody else.

I second @Telofy’s point—I’m sure there are plenty of drawbacks to CCTs over other programs, but this seems like a question best addressed by a specialist. My gut says that administering the costs & monitoring the behavior you’re promoting in a CCT program (depending on what that is) may cost more than simply giving out vaccines, vitamin-A supplements, etc. It also seems like there are more ways to mess up a CCT intervention than a simple direct service intervention. HOWEVER, all of this is bracketed with a huge disclaimer: just go talk to an expert who knows more.

I’d add “graduating additional grades” to the list of potential conditions.

scottweathers Jan 8, 2016, 3:33 AM
13 points
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on: Accomplishments Open Thread
This is a great idea, Gleb!

1) I published a blog on the Life You Can Save about the Reach Every Mother and Child Act, a bill many EAs should love. I also coordinated with students in North Carolina to write several letters about the bill, which I’m delivering to Senator Burr’s office. A staffer for Burr, who I spoke to over the phone, said he was considering the bill.

2) I became an adviser to Charity Entrepreneurship, helping Joey Savoie and their team pick which intervention they should focus on in India.

3) I used Charity Science gift cards to spread ideas about effective giving to my friends/family, gave a significant amount of money to a ton of great EA organizations, convinced my family to donate to the Humane League, and wrote a year-end giving piece that exposed people who aren’t Effective Altruists to the kinds of ideas we think about a lot.

4) Finally, I made personal progress in finishing and submitting all of my grad school apps! :)

scottweathers Jan 3, 2016, 11:29 PM
3 points
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on: Intentional Insights and the EA Movement – Q & A
One of the reasons I like Intentional Insights is that it has the potential to spark interest in EA among people who probably wouldn’t become interested in EA otherwise—the counterfactual argument here is stronger than for GWWC or other meta-charities because Gleb is reach out to a group that’s less close to EA.

I also think that we should really encourage and incentivize projects like this—we need more people doing EA outreach. There is absolutely no guarantee that this project will succeed, but Gleb has shown evidence of success and the expected value seems fairly large.

scottweathers Dec 22, 2015, 3:18 AM
2 points
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on: Support Promoting Effective Giving—Intentional Insights
Happy to see this project. It’s a useful experiment and think it could have value in moving non-EA money towards effective projects!

scottweathers Dec 18, 2015, 4:53 PM
3 points
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on: Effective Altruism Outreach winter fundraiser
Done! Donated.