I am looking for work, and welcome suggestions for posts.
Vasco Grilođ¸
Karma: 9,755
However, you can also quickly see that Vasco Grillo
Nitpick. It is âGriloâ, with just one âlâ.
Are you still planning to reply to my points about soil animals?
Do you have some thoughts, @mal_grahamđ¸?
I see. By default, I think the bet should resolve as specified, âas reported by the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)â. However, I would be happy to do as you suggested if we agree there was a significant change in the reliability or definition of the unemployment rate reported by FRED.
Hi Zach,
I would be curious to know your thoughts on my post Increasing the welfare of soil animals will remain much more cost-effective than increasing digital welfare over at least the next few decades?. You are welcome to comment there.
InÂcreasÂing the welfare of soil anÂiÂmals will reÂmain much more cost-effecÂtive than inÂcreasÂing digiÂtal welfare over at least the next few decades?
Thanks for the interesting questions too, Jim!
Thanks, Luke. I see. You are using > 600 M to mean 600 M to 700 M. > 600 M could also mean a value closer to 600 M. So I would use the best guess with more digits to provide more information (for example, 650 M$ for OP, and 220 M$ for GW).
Thanks. Just one note. There is no need for people to care about soil animals to help these. I estimate the cheapest ways of saving human lives increase the welfare of soil animals much more cost-effectively than interventions targeting farmed animals, and lots of people already care about saving children in low income countries. Saving humans increases the production of food, this increases agricultural land, and this decreases the number of soil animals, which is good for my best guess they have negative lives. If one guesses they have positive lives, one can advocate for cost-effective forestation efforts, which also population already, and does not require convincing people to care about soil animals.
Thanks, Matt.
On the code sharing. Yes, I thought about it, but it would take us a bit of effort to pull it all together and publish it online, I didnât want to spend that effort if no one was going to get value from it.
Got it.
On nematodes, I think 169x the total number of neurons compared to humans is a poor/âconfused way to attempt to measure total welfare.
Which metric would you use to compare welfare across species? âWelfare range (difference between the maximum and minimum welfare per unit time) as a fraction of that of humansâ = ânumber of neurons as a fraction of that of humansâ^0.188 explains 78.6 % of the variance in the welfare ranges as a fraction of that of humans in Bob Fischerâs book about comparing animal welfare across species. The exponent of 0.188 is much smaller than 1, which suggests the total number of neurons underestimate a lot the absolute value of the welfare of soil animals relative to that of humans.
And I think the second order effects of trying to convince people they should care about nemotodes (unless they are already diehard EA) is likely net negative for the animal suffering cause at large.
I estimate interventions targeting farmed animals change the welfare of soil animals way more than that of farmed animals. So I think advocating for soil animals (of which the vast majority are soil nematodes) would have to decrease the welfare of these for it to decrease global animal welfare.
Thanks for the update.
Your costs in 2022 and 2024 were 14.9 (= 6.66*10^6/â(446*10^3)) and 18.0 $/âengagement-hour (= 10.4*10^6/â(579*10^3)).
Weâve spun out from EV: On April 1, 2025, we spun out from EV into two new UK entities, each with their own board.
I know nothing about this besides what you say in the report, which is below, but why not a single entity? Should other organisations consider having 2 entities?
In December 2023, 80,000 Hours announced that we would be spinning out of the Effective Ventures Foundation, our former parent organisation. On April 1, 2025, we completed the spinout into two new UK entities:
80,000 Hours Limited, which houses our programmes and operations. Its board consists of:
80,000 Hours Foundation, which is the registered charity that will facilitate donations and own the 80,000 Hours intellectual property. Its board consists of:
Katie Hearsum, board chair
Anna Weldon, who is the overlapping member of both boards
We expect that becoming an independent entity will give 80,000 Hours more legal, financial, and reputational independence.
Nice points, MichaĂŤl.
Thanks for the great overview of the effective giving ecosytem, Luke and Sjir. Strongly upvoted.
Overall money moved is still largely dependent on Open Philanthropy (>600M) and GiveWell (>200M), but getting less so every year
Nitpick. I guess you have used >X to mean roughly X, but slightly above it. If so, I would simply say X or ~X to avoid ambiguity.
Thanks for the interesting post, Matt and Alejandro!
(Weâre happy to share all code and all datasets, etc. to interested parties. Just reach out!)
Would it be better to simply share the code and datasets to save people time, and do not accidentally dissuade some people?
In July, Nematode was a more popular keyword than existential risk. Is that appropriate? Idk⌠you tell me
Nice to know! Since you asked, yes. I estimate soil nematodes have 169 times as many neurons in total as humans, and â306 k times as much welfare in total.
I forgot to comment on your example about climate change. The question is not whether carbon dioxide (CO2) will remain in the atmosphere, but whether emitting 1 kg more today means there will be 1 kg more in e.g. 1 k years.
As an analogy, I think banning caged hens in a country may well imply there will be no caged hens there forever, but I still think the difference between the expected number of caged hens there without and with the ban still decreases over time. Animal welfare corporate campaigns have resulted in fewer hens in cages, and, more longterm, I believe technological development will lead to alternative proteins which decrease the consumption of eggs, or new systems which displace cages. In addition, economic growth means greater willingness to pay for animal welfare.
Likewise, blocking the construction of a farm which produces 10 t/âyear of chicken meat per year does not mean the global production of chicken meat will be 10 t/âyear lower forever. Existing farms can increase their production, and additional new farms be built to offset the initial drop in production.
The chance of the end goal being achieved via other means can be modelled with an annual discount rate. Any cost-effectiveness analysis estimating finite benefits necessarily assumes the benefits decrease over time. Otherwise, they would be infinite.
Thanks for the great post! Strongly upvoted.
Thanks, Jim.
Yes, that is a fair summary, with the caveat that I do not think the global population or agricultural land will stabilise after a certain date. I just believe they will be roughly the same longterm with or without intervention.
There is nothing in particular which is wrong about what you said. However, evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which are the best way to empirically assess causal effects, still shows these decrease over time.
Figure 4: Posterior expected value from forecast signal with expected value 1 and linearly increasing noise over time, 1,000,000 years, log-log scale
[...]
Figure 6: Posterior expected value from forecast signal with expected value 1 and non-linearly increasing noise over time, 1,000,000 years, log-log scale
[...]
Table 4: How long it takes until posterior expected value is some fraction of signal expected value
Years until posterior expected value is x% of signal x% Central fixed effects Upper bound, fixed effects Central, no fixed effects Upper bound, no fixed effects Increasing rate of increase Decreasing rate of increase 10% 561 158 187 84 68 13,276 1% 6,168 1,735 2,047 923 337 484,318 0.1% 62,233 17,507 20,651 9,307 1,571 15.5 million 0.01% 622,886 175,218 206,690 93,144 7,294 491 million We can see that under the preferred central fixed effects estimate, signals of the value produced with a horizon of 561 years produce a posterior expected value that is 10% of the expected value of the signal. Every order of magnitude increase in forecast horizon after that results in a posterior expected value roughly an order of magnitude smaller.
For the possibilities considered in David Bernardâs post, 90 % of the effects materialise in 68 to 13.3 k years. I think the timelines above are too long because David assumed âthe variance of the prior was the same for each time horizon whereas the variance of the signal increases with time horizon for simplicityâ. Without any information, I would guess my actions can have a much greater effect in 10 years that in 10 M years. So I would assume the variance of the prior decreases over time, in which case the signal would be more heavily discounted than in Davidâs analysis, and therefore the time until 90 % of the effects materialising would be shorter.
The decrease in soil-animal-years is proportional to the increase in agricultural-land-years, which is the increase in human population times the agricultural land per capita. I think both of these factors decrease over time, and therefore so does the decrease in soil-animal-years.
The agricultural land per capita in low income countries (LICs) has been decreasing.
Figuring out the increase in human population across time is tricky. The people whose lives were extended will tend to have more children as a result, but decreasing mortality also decreases fertility. From the paper The Impact of Life-Saving Interventions on Fertility by David Roodman:
[...] In places where lifetime births/âwoman has been converging to 2 or lower, saving one childâs life should lead parents to avert a birth they would otherwise have. The impact of mortality drops on fertility will be nearly 1:1, so population growth will hardly change. In the increasingly exceptional locales where couples appear not to limit fertility much, such as Niger and Mali, the impact of saving a life on total births will be smaller, and may come about mainly through the biological channel of lactational amenorrhea. Here, mortality-drop-fertility-drop ratios of 1:0.5 and 1:0.33 appear more plausible. But in the long-term, it would be surprising if these few countries do not join the rest of the world in the transition to lower and more intentionally controlled fertility.
Nothing special happens in 100 years. This is just a rough guess for when the future impact becomes smaller than 10 % of the past impact.
Thanks for the question, Jim. Yes.
I believe effects on soil animals are much larger than those on target beneficiaries. I am confident the exponent of the number of neurons [described here] is the parameter which affects the ratio between the effects on soil animals and target beneficiaries the most by far, and effects on soil animals dominate at least for values of the exponent up to 1, which are the ones I consider plausible. I get the following increase in the welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes as a fraction of the increase in the welfare of the target beneficiaries. For exponents of the number of neurons of 0.19, 0.5, and 1:
For cage-free corporate campaigns, 77.8 k, 1.15 k, and 1.48.
For buying beef, 4.92 billion, 32.4 M, and 12.1 k.
For broiler welfare corporate campaigns, 1.22 M, 18.0 k, and 23.3.
For GiveWellâs top charities, 263 M, 610 k, and 41.5.
For HIPF, 206 M, 477 k, and 32.5.
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Thanks for clarifying, InĂŠs!