Jonas loves his wife, being in nature, and exploring interesting worlds both fictional and real. He uses his bamboo bike daily to get around in Munich. He’s currently a freelance software engineer, and was working at the Against Malaria Foundation and Google before that. Jonas enjoys playing Ultimate and dancing.
Sjlver
[Question] How to find *reliable* ways to improve the future?
Just wanted to assure you that this has been really useful for me, and will improve the way I’ll approach people at EA Global London.
To me, the message does not come across as entitled or status move at all. It is just plain helpful advice.
A name for every place
At Google, most employees who came in touch with EA-related ideas did so thanks to Google’s donation matching program. Essentially, Google has a system where people can report their donations, and then the company will donate the same amount to the same charity (there’s an annual cap, but it’s fairly high, like US$ 10k or so).
There is a yearly fundraising event called “giving week” to increase awareness of the donation matching. On multiple occasions during this week, we had people from the EA community come and give talks.
When considering starting an EA community, I might look for similar ideas to the ones mentioned above, in order to try making this part of company culture. There are selfish reasons for companies to do this sort of things (employee satisfaction, tax “optimization”). Also, there might be an existing culture of “tech talks” that you can leverage to bring up EA topics.
Just a quick question: You write that the cost for 1 year free from IPV is about US$194, and that this means the intervention costs US$78.4/DALY
If I understand this correctly, it would mean that 1 year free from IPV is about 2.5 DALYs? Is that correct? It seems to imply that experiencing IPV is worse than death… which might well be true, but the more likely explanation is that I misunderstand the DALY conversion. Could you clarify?
No Animals Were Harmed
I really liked this… the post made me think, and will continue to do that for some time. It doesn’t seem all that unrealistic to me 🤯
One little nit: you seem to write “century” when you mean “decade”.
These issues are of indeed difficult to talk about. And I admit that I haven’t been very friendly in this discussion so far. Apologies for that.
Even with nuance, the difference between FGM and male circumcision seems staggering to me. Here’s an example of a study that estimates a 3% life quality loss due to FGM. Over an entire life, that amounts to more than 1 QALY lost due to the mutilation. Granted, there are less severe forms… but I find 1 QALY a horrifying amount.
Male circumcision on the other hand has positive effects as well as negative. I don’t want to downplay the negative effects… but circumcision is probably legal nearly everywhere because these effects are small.
My experience is similar to Luke’s.
One of the main benefits of becoming vegan was that it removed a cognitive dissonance from my life—a sadness at the back of my head because my actions had been different from my values. After becoming vegan, my lifestyle and my convictions were more aligned. This was quite a liberating and joyful feeling.
I think that becoming vegan should be a win-win decision. If a vegan diet feels like a burden, or distracts from more important issues, or causes health problems, then by all means stop and eat whatever you like. But chances are that, after a while, you become a happier and healthier person.
My last bit of advice is to not be too dogmatic about veganism. The animal industry is surprisingly elastic*, and so each egg not bought will reduce demand and cause some fraction of a statistical chicken to not be born and not suffer. You don’t have to be 100% vegan to have an impact ;-)
* I wish I’d have good numbers to back this claim...
Thanks for the write-up, Michelle! You write about your “hope that other like-minded parents will share their lessons and suggestions”, so I decided to contribute a few thoughts.
I’m currently working as a software engineer for the Against Malaria Foundation (50%) and caring for our one-year old (50%). My wife also has a 50%-job.
Work time: Compared to what Michelle and Abby wrote, I have reduced my work time more strongly after becoming a parent. It felt important to me to experience my child growing up and to personally care for it. I can have 30 more productive years in my career, but seeing the first steps of one’s child is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I’m thankful that AMF made part-time work possible. It took some negotiation and insistence to make it happen. My life feels a lot more sustainable now than if I were to work full-time. I’d strongly recommend that everyone in a similar situation thinks carefully about their priorities and adjusts life/work accordingly.
Money: So far, our child has not increased our budget much, to my great surprise. We got tons of gifts and secondhand stuff (stroller, reusable diapers, 95% of her clothes), so there was little we had to buy. We don’t have to pay for childcare yet. Also, German’s social security is excellent, and partially compensates for the reduced salary during the first ~14 months of the child’s life.
Interestingly, having a child did so far not make us want to buy a house or care more about financial security (cf Geoffrey’s comment). This might come later… but so far the financial impact of having a child is far smaller than I expected.
Pregnancy can be tough: Absolutely. Also the time after birth, depending on how it goes. One year after giving birth, my wife still takes physiotherapy and has to refrain from some sports. Another tough point was that we had to stop breastfeeding after seven weeks due to complications… So although pregnancy and birth generally went well, the effects on the mother were hard. This topic isn’t talked much about, and I think both me and my wife underestimated the difficulties.
It’s OK to do things differently: More strongly, I think you have to do things differently, by necessity. Each family is unique. There’s a ton of contradicting advice. Fortunately, being a parent comes surprisingly naturally, and our species has done it successfully for thousands of years. My experience is that many of the “must-haves” and “must-dos” weren’t all that important.[1]
We benefited a lot from having trustworthy people close by. The midwives who supported us were fantastic, their visits throughout the first weeks of the baby’s life invaluable. This type of practical support and direct advice was much more important than the more indirect books, videos, etc.
Social aspects: I’ve been surprised by how much babies are a catalyst for interacting with other people. Everyone is attracted by them; starting conversations around babies is really easy. Being a young parent brings you in touch with other people at a similar stage in life; we formed several new local friendships thanks to our child.
- ↩︎
Note: one absolutely must take parenting seriously, and I don’t advise anyone to be careless. I wrote this paragraph because the advice I received, overall, made too strong claims, made parenting sound more difficult than it is, and made children seem more fragile than they are.
- ↩︎
This is an updated version of my initial comment, hopefully more polite and fact-based.
I would agree with Question Mark that it is worth exploring opportunities to reduce violence against men, in addition to what the present post does for violence against women. Like Question Mark writes, the scale of this problem is large. Presumably, males experience violence more often than females, albeit for different reasons.
That said, I think the comparisons put forward by Question Mark are creating a biased impression. Here are a few points to keep in mind for a balanced picture:
-
While this post focuses on interventions to prevent intimate partner violence, the homicide statistics by gender look at a different type of violence. This is not an apples-for-apples comparison. If we instead consider sexual violence and intimate partner violence, we find that 90% of (US) adult rape victims are female, and that women are more affected than men in all categories of intimate partner violence.
Keeping the focus on intimate partner violence rather than general violence also makes interventions more tractable. General violence / homicide are broad topics with complex reasons for why men are more affected, including reasons that have to do with male behavior.
-
Question Mark’s comment also compares female genital mutilation (FGM) with male circumcision. My impression was that the comment considered them comparably harmful (but maybe this is just an uncharitable reading of my part; apologies in this case). I believe that there are good reasons to think of FGM as a larger problem, such as:
Typical forms of FGM have a range of negative effects such as severe bleeding and problems urinating, and later cysts, infections, as well as complications in childbirth and increased risk of newborn deaths
In one study, women estimated that FGM led to a 3% decrease in life quality, which would amount to roughly one QALY lost due to the intervention.
While male circumcision is more prevalent, we should consider that it is often elective and that it has benefits as well as risks. The negative effects occur for the 1.5-6% of cases where there are complications (Wikipedia: Circumcision). In contrast, the 3% life quality loss due to FGM is an average, not an estimate for cases gone wrong, and not an estimate of only the most severe forms.
With these considerations in mind, I think that interventions focused specifically on violence against girls and women make sense. Girls and women often suffer from particularly gruesome forms of violence, which are also tractable to address, as shown by the interventions in this post.
- 8 Jun 2022 8:57 UTC; -26 points) 's comment on New cause area: Violence against women and girls by (
-
Jonas here, AMF software engineer.
Thank you for your research! I would really like to publish more of AMF’s PDM data to enable this kind of work. Unfortunately, we have to prioritize how we spend our time in the small AMF team, and this task hasn’t made it to the top yet.
If you were interested in doing a more in-depth analysis (and have the time required for this) it might be good to let Rob (our CEO) know. This can help in prioritizing this type of task.
Whether you’d enjoy the book and benefit from it depends strongly on your background, I think.
To me, this was a good read because I learned about a broad range of interventions for helping people—graduation programs and child sponsorships being probably the most notable examples. The book really changed my mind on child sponsorships. I had thought of them as a rather high-overhead intervention that was popular because it appeals to emotion to get donors’ money… but now I think they can be cost-effective when done well.
That said, if your goal is to learn about various effective interventions (beyond the few that GiveWell writes about), then a good and free resource would be the life you can save book.
The second reason to recommend the book is its good discussion on “flourishing”, that is, a holistic view of health, wellbeing, and prosperity. Finally, a third reason to read it is to get a Christian perspective on the subject, or give the book to Christian friends.
A bit more generally: I think we can look at religions as a set of Alt-EA movements.
Most religions have strong prescriptions and incentives for their members to do good. Many of them also advocate for donating a part of one’s income.
All these religions also have members that think hard about how to do the most good in a cost-effective way. Here, “good” follows the definition of the religion and might include aspects such as bringing people closer to God. However, it is usually correlated with EA notions of utility or wellbeing or freedom from suffering. And indeed one can find faith-based organizations with large positive effects: For example, AMF could not distribute its bednets without local partner organizations, and in that list are many faith-based ones like IMA or World Vision.
I’m not claiming that the effect of religion overall is robustly positive—that’s a very difficult question to answer—but that EA-like intentions, and sometimes actions, can be found in many religious people and organizations.
I’ve read one alternative approach that is well written and made in good faith: Bruce Wydick’s book “Shrewd Samaritan”.
It’s a Christian perspective on doing good, and arrives at many conclusions that are similar to effective altruism. The main difference is an emphasis on “flourishing” in a more holistic way than what is typically done by a narrowly-focused effective charity like AMF. Wydick relates this to the Hebrew concept of Shalom, that is, holistic peace and wellbeing and blessing.
In practical terms, this means that Wydick more strongly (compared to, say, GiveWell) recommends interventions that focus on more than one aspect of wellbeing. For example, child sponsorships or graduation approaches, where poor people get an asset (cash or a cow or similar) plus the ability to save (e.g., a bank account) plus training.
I believe that these approaches fare pretty well when evaluated, and indeed there are some RCTs evaluating them. These programs are more complex to evaluate, however, than programs that do one thing, like distributing bednets. That said, the rationale that “cash + saving + training > cash only” is intuitive to me, and so this might be an area where GiveWell/EA is a bit biased toward stuff that is more easily measurable.
In addition to the difference in VAWG burden, there are also differences in implementation costs. Interventions will be cheaper in low-income countries than in high-income countries.
A lot of what you have written resonates with me. I think it is amazing that you have thought so deeply about this decision and spoken with many people. In that sense, it looks like a great decision, and I hope that the outcome will be fulfilling to you.
After I’ve finished my PhD, I was torn between doing something entrepreneurial and altruistic, or accepting a “normal” well-paid job. In the end, I decided to accept an offer from Google for reasons similar to yours. It fit well with the growing relationship to my now-wife, and the geographic location was perfect.
I stayed at Google for three years and learned a lot during this time, both about software engineering and about effective altruism. After these three years, I felt ready for a job where I could have a more direct positive impact on the lives of people. I think I was also much better equipped for it; not only in terms of software engineering techniques… Google is also a great place to learn about collaboration across teams, best practices in almost any area, HR processes, communication, etc. One aspect that was absolutely fantastic: I had no pressure at all to leave Google. It was a good job that I could remain in for as long as I wanted, until the perfect opportunity came along.
I could imagine that a few years from now, you might similarly be in a good position to re-evaluate your decision. You will probably be much more stable financially, have a lot more negotiation power, and a lot less time pressure. Plus, I’m sure you’ll be so good then that IBM/Google/Amazon can no longer ignore you ;-)
Thanks for the thoughts!
I think we are getting closer to the core of your question here: the relationship between cases of malaria (or severe malaria more specifically) and deaths. I think that it would indeed be good to know more about the circumstances under which children die from malaria, and how this is affected by various kinds of medical care.
The question might partially touch upon SMC. Besides preventing malaria cases, it could also have an effect on severity (I’m thinking of Covid vaccines as an analogy). That said, the case for SMC (as I understand it) is that it’s an excellent way to prevent malaria infections. This is what the RCTs measure, and this is where its value comes from.
To answer the question, I believe it would be more helpful to do research into malaria as an illness, rather than doing an SMC trial replication. I continue to think that the evidence base for SMC is good enough. You have doubts since “most published research findings are false”, but “most published research findings” might be the wrong reference class here:
It includes observational studies, surveys, and other less reliable methods; here, we have RCTs.
It includes all published studies, also those with small samples and effect sizes. Here, we have >7 trials, >12k participants, and the effect (SMC’s reduction of malaria episodes) is >6 standard deviations away from zero.
It includes studies with effects that are multiple causal steps away from the intervention (e.g., deworming improves income) and have many confounding factors. Here, we are measuring the effect of a malaria medication on malaria, with clearly-understood underlying mechanisms.
You also ask about the settings in which SMC is rolled out. There is no specific answer here, since SMC is often rolled out for entire countries or regions, aiming to fully cover all eligible children. More than 30 million children received SMC last year. In their cost-effectiveness analysis, GiveWell looks at interventions by country and takes a number of relevant factors into account, such as the “mortality rate from malaria for 3-59 month olds”.
In general, malaria fatality (deaths per case) is trending downwards a bit, due to factors such as better access to medical care, better diagnosis, better education of parents, and certainly many others. It could make sense to make this explicit when doing a cost-effectiveness analysis.
I’d expect GiveWell to be mindful about these things and to have thought of the most-relevant factors. I don’t think additional RCTs would lead to large changes here.
Regarding the post-script about AMF: We are fortunate to have a board of trustees and leaders that think a lot about high-level questions and trends, both those closer to AMF’s work (e.g., resistance to insecticides used in nets) and those more peripheral (e.g., the impact of new vaccines). There is also good and regular communication between GiveWell and AMF. As for myself, the day-to-day preoccupations are often much more mundane ;-)
Thanks a lot for this profile!
It leaves me with a question: what is the possibility that the work outlined in the article makes things worse rather than better? These concerns are fleshed out in more details in this question and its comment threads, but the TL;DR is:
AI safety work is difficult: there are lots of hypotheses, experiments are hard to design, we can’t do RCTs to measure whether it works, etc. Thus, there is uncertainty even about the sign of the impact.
AI safety work could plausibly speed up AI development, create information hazards, be used for greenwashing regular AI companies… thereby increasing rather than decreasing AI risk.
I’d love to see a discussion of this concern, for example in the form of an entry under “Arguments against working on AI risk to which we think there are strong responses”, or some content about how to make sure that the work is actually beneficial.
Final note: I hope this didn’t sound too adversarial. My question is not meant as a critique of the article, but rather a genuine question that makes me hesitant to switch to AI safety work.
The disincentives listed here make sense to me. I would just add that people’s motivations are highly individual, and so people will differ in how much weight they put on any of these points or on how well their CV looks.
Personally, I’ve moved from Google to AMF and have never looked back. The summary: I’m much more motivated now; the work is actually more varied and technically challenging than before, even though the tech stack is not as close to the state of the art. People are (as far as I can tell) super qualified in both organizations. I’m happy to chat personally about my individual motivations if anyone who reads this feels that it would benefit them.