Thanks Ben! I totally agree. The math in this post was trying to get at upper and lower bounds and a medianâbut for setting oneâs personal thresholds, the nuance you mention is incredibly important. I hope this post, and the Desmos tool I linked, can help people play with these numbers and set their own thresholds!
Spencer R. Ericson đ¸
Karma: 590
This was a difficult post, and my first post for SoGive as the Lead Researcher & Philanthropy Advisor! I hope it can be useful to our discussions on cost-effectiveness.
I hope my uncertainty comes though. I havenât been thinking about the size of the future for a very long time, but I learned a lot from writing this. As I mentioned at the beginning, please leave feedback on my assumptions, math, and methods, so I can write better posts about thresholds in the future.
It might be a while, but Iâd like to do some writing about cost-effectiveness thresholds for animal advocacy and multipliers as well. Feel free to leave your thoughts about those as a reply to this comment as well.
The repugnant conclusion does apply to animals, as long as you consider animals to be moral patients. (Will MacAskill does, which is illustrated in his previous book, Doing Good Better.)
If it were not possible to make humans happy on net, utilitarianism would also imply that it is worse for humanity to exist than not. But lots of people think is it possible to improve human life at scale.
Your post brings up two fundamental questions for me:
Are you a utilitarian? If youâre not, then it makes sense you wouldnât agree with the implications of biting the bullet on the repugnant conclusion.
Is it possible to make the many wild animals of the world happy instead of suffering?
If thatâs possible, it seems like we should do that. Then, the repugnant conclusion would applyâa world with many, somewhat happy animals would be better than a world with fewer, happier animals but less total utility.
If thatâs not possible, then the repugnant conclusion does not apply. The goodness of the extinction of suffering animals is a different, odd implication of utilitarianism. Their extinction would probably also cause the extinction of humans (unless we cease to be animals ourselves and become digital, or we can somehow rely on a synthetic world). But given how many more wild animals there are than humans, the humans are probably morally outweighed by the animals, meaning eliminating the animalsâ suffering is more morally important than preserving the happiness of the fewer humans.
Do you think we should try to make wild animals happy? How do you think we could make a plan to do that?
Is trying to change how wild animals go about their lives also steeped in colonialism? Does that make it worse than allowing wild animals to suffer?
Yeah, itâs a hard habit to kick when you almost always write with multiple authors! It seemed like a more effective use of my time to flag it than to try to edit it all out and miss some anyway. What makes you say using âweâ makes it hard to do good research?
Edit: That question might come from an incorrect interpretation. I interpreted the third sentence in your comment as a relationship like [pressure to use âweâ â pressure to be formal â harder to do good research]. But you might have meant [pressure to be formal â a. pressure to use âweâ b. harder to do good research]?
Anyway, I think I agree with you in that I donât think that necessarily people should use âweâ in formal writing, or that writing on the forum should be formal. This post just felt easier to write in a quasi-formal style, and I am used to writing formal pieces with multiple authors, so thatâs why using âIâ feels kind of forced for me. Definitely not an attempt to be ostentatious or use a âformalspeak norm.â :)
Thank you for your support, Constance!
Extremely cool! I was just saying to someone how nice it would be to have a mini degree specifically in impact analysis, with the bits of econ and stats that I would need to know⌠and here we are! I just started a research-y role with SoGive. I think the material from this course could be really helpful as I get started, but I wonât be able to take 11 weeks off for quite some time. I imagine the teaching and feedback is at least as useful as the reading material and assignments. Do you think youâd ever make this program available for part-time students?
I see how both are related to honestly saying things unprompted.
One difference is whether the honesty is necessary for someone to make an important decision.
If we want to increase our transparency as a community and reduce the risk of bad actors gaining undue influence, someone needs to say âI know no one asked, but I had a concerning experience with this person.â And then some people will hopefully say, âThanks, I was going to make a deal with this person or rely on them for something, and now I wonât.â
But if someone just came up to me and said âI like how your body looksâ or something, I would probably say, âI wasnât planning on making any decisions relating to you and my body, and I continue to not plan on doing that. Why are you telling me? Who is this supposed to benefit?â
Thank you, Iâm so glad it helped!
the difference in expectations vs reality regarding micro-aggressions and sexual advances is uniquely large in EA.
Weak agree vote! I definitely expect more ethical behaviour irl from EAs than I expect from other people. But I also get the good behaviour that I expect from almost every EA that Iâve interacted with in Vancouver and briefly in SF.
Itâs more distressing for me to hear reports of micro-aggressions and inappropriate sexual behaviour from people in EA than to hear similar reports in my other communities, because itâs more unpleasantly surprising and comes apart more from my expectations.
Do you mean to say theyâre âunique toâ EA, or that they âfeel uniquely bad inâ EA?
(I see that this is old) Etsyâs product reviews for every product in the sellerâs shop are all on every product page. There might be some fancy sorting bringing the more relevant reviews to the top, Iâm not sure. So with a model like this, you could review one job posting, and people could see that job posting review on all the companyâs other job postings.
Thank you so much for writing this post, Joey! I was one of the people who recently emailed you about the potential impact of a âCE light.â I was hoping it would be a way to take people who didnât have a lot of connection/âmoney constraints on founding (would likely found soon anyway) and make them much more impactful before launch.
But looking at it through the lens of competition for mid-level funding helps me see the weaknesses in that. Why move an 80%-good charity closer to launch, when 80%-good isnât what we need, and we would be much better served by putting more resources in a 100%-good charity?
Iâm glad other people had similar questions so you could make this post! Your post, especially the CE founder pool case study, answers all the questions I had at this point about the idea.
Thank you!
Here is some info related to recommendations #1 and #9 about lighting. https://ââmeaningness.com/ââsad-light-led-lux David Chapman has put quite a bit of research into maximizing lux per dollar. I intend to try a similar setup to him with some Jeep lights and a voltage transformer to get 40,000-60,000 lux in my room. Iâm going to add a smart plug so I can use an Apple Shortcuts automation to have the lights turn on with my wake-up alarm.
Thanks Matt!
My estimate was just one estimate. I could have included it in the table but when I did the table it seemed like such an outlier, and done with a totally different method as well, perhaps useful for a different purpose⌠It might be worth adding it into the table? Not sure.
Interesting consideration! If we expect humanity to at one point technologize the LS, and extinction prevents that, donât we still lose all those lives? It would not eradicate all life if there were aliens, but still the same amount of life in total. (Iâm not endorsing any one prediction for how large the future will be.) My formulas here donât quantify how much worse it is to lose 100% of life than 99% of life.
Sure, you could set your threshold differently depending on your purpose. I could have made this clearer!
Exactly as you say, comparing across cause areas, you might want to keep the cost youâre willing to pay for an outcome (a life) consistent.
If youâve decided on a worldview diversification strategy that gives you separate buckets for different cause areas (e.g. by credence instead of by stakes), then youâd want to set your threshold separately for different cause areas, and use each threshold to compare within a cause area. If you set a threshold for what youâre willing to pay for a life within longtermist interventions, and fewer funding opportunities live up to that compared to the amount of money you have available, you can save some of your money in that bucket and donate it later, in the hopes that new opportunities that meet your threshold can arise. For an example of giving later based on a threshold, Open Philanthropy wants to give money each year to projects that are more cost-effective than what they will spend their âlast dollarâ on.
Thanks, me too!