I am open to work. I see myself as a generalist quantitative researcher.
Vasco Grilođ¸
Karma: 7,985
Thanks for the post! I think the best interventions in animal welfare are much more cost-effective than the best decreasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. I estimated Founders Pledgeâs (FPâs) Climate Change Fund (CCF), which I consider to be the best donation option to decrease GHG emissions, has a cost-effectiveness of 0.0326 DALY/â$. I calculate this is only 0.710 % (= 0.0326/â4.59) as cost-effective as cage-free campaigns helping hens, and 0.00510 % (= 0.0326/â639) as cost-effective as the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been.
Thanks for the great context, Aaron! Strongly upvoted.
I think the impact from FWI you are alluding to falls under their 3rd and 4th best arguments to donate to FWI, âTackling some of the animal movementâs hardest questionsâ, and âMovement building in Asiaâ (see details below). FWI rates these as less significant than their âfuture potential for impactâ and âcurrent impactâ, which I assessed in my post, so my conclusions would hold if FWI is right about which arguments for donating to them are more significant. I assume the 3rd and 4th best current arguments used to be more important earlier on when there were fewer organisations working on aquatic animals, and fewer organisations working in Asia.
On the one hand, FWIâs historical influence on SWP seems like a good argument for their cost-effectiveness not to differ astronomically. On the other, I tend to agree with FWIâs ranking of their best arguments for donating to FWI. I believe donating to SWP is more cost-effective than donating to FWI with the goal of increasing the cost-effectiveness of SWP. SWPâs funds can always be used to leverage FWIâs position in a targeted way that would be most informative to SWP, whereas FWIâs funds would also necessarily go towards activities which are not optimally informative to SWP.
What are the best arguments for donating to FWI?
The following are some arguments in favor of donating to FWI, roughly in descending order of our view of their significance:
FWIâs future potential for impact: About 67% of our current budget (specifically our R&D, exploratory programs, and China budget items) goes towards developing more cost-effective interventions in the future rather than having a direct impact. We conduct this intervention research in what we believe is an unusually rigorous and ground-proofed way. For examples, see our recent studies focused on developing interventions on satellite imagery and feed fortification.
FWIâs current impact: We currently estimate that weâve improved the lives of over 2 million fishes. This makes FWI one of the most promising avenues in the world to reduce farmed fish suffering, and likely the most promising avenue in the world to reduce the suffering of farmed Indian major carp, one of the largest and most neglected species groups of farmed fishes.
Tackling some of the animal movementâs hardest questions: If we are ever going to bring about a world that is truly humane, we will need to focus on the more neglected groups in animal farming, particularly including farmed fishes and animals farmed in informal economies. We believe that FWIâs work is demonstrating some avenues of helping these groups, and will thus enable other organizations to work more effectively on them. For instance, some of the lessons we learned in implementing our own farmer-centric work later inspired the model that Shrimp Welfare Project is pursuing in their Sustainable Shrimp Farmers of India.
Movement building in Asia: Almost 90% of farmed fishes, as well as the majority of farmed terrestrial animals, are in Asia. We thus believe it is critical to launch movements in Asian countries to address the suffering these animals face, and to expand the animal movement by bringing in new people. We are proud to have hired a local team of about 20 full-time equivalent staff in India as well as contractors in China and the Philippines. We are also proud that most of these people did not work in animal protection previously, and are now more likely to have careers helping animals even after they leave FWI.
capsules are 23.5 $/âyear cheaper under my assumptions
My financial cost of capsules was 3 times as high as it should be. I thought the 3 g of creatine mentioned in the nutritional composition were the amount per capsule, whereas they were the amount per 3 capsules. Now powder looks 116 $/âyear cheaper than capsules for a time cost of 30 s/âd (instead of my original assumption of 20 s/âd).
I have updated to reflect using powder with the updated time cost. The updated break-even net income is 15.5 k$/âyear, 1.46 (= 15.5*10^3/â(10.6*10^3)) times my original value.
Thanks, Michael. I have added 2 sentences to the start of the last bullet of the summary.
FWI says âmost additional funding right now supports our R&D [research and development] work [not their farm program], which will enable us to become more cost-effective in the futureâ. Moreover, FWI highlights its future potential as the best reason for supporting them. [...]
I agree, but unspecified grants being neutral in expectation would still be very pessimistic for someone enthusiastic about the specified grants.
I think a reasonably independent reviewer who is not perfectly trustworthy would still be better than no reviewer at all.
Thanks, Guy. I am very much for transparency in general[1], but I do not think it matters that much whether I know what happens with 70 % or 100 % of AWFâs funds. Even in a worst case scenario where there was no information about 30 % of the money granted by AWF, and the enspecified grants had a cost-effectiveness of 0, AWFâs cost-effectiveness would only decrease by 30 %. This would be significant, but still small in comparison with other considerations. In particular, I estimate the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been 173 times as cost-effective as cage-free campaigns. AWF has funded both SWP and cage-free campaigns, so they implicitly estimate the marginal cost-effectiveness of SWP and cage-free campaigns has not been that different[2]. I suspect our disagreement is mostly explained by me believing excruciating pain is more intense, and lack of scope-sensitivity in AWFâs grantmaking decisions, which is based on grantmakersâ ratings of grants (from â5 to 5) instead of explicit cost-effectiveness analyses.
Hi Tobias.
If we accept that AI is likely to reshape the world over the next 10â15 years, this realisation will have major implications for all cause areas.
I think donating to the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) would still have super high cost-effectiveness even if the world was certain to end in 10 years. I estimate it has been 64.3 k times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities (ignoring their effects on animals) for 10 years of acceleration of the adoption of electrical stunning, as used by Open Philanthropy (OP). If the acceleration followed a normal distribution, SWPâs cost-effectiveness would only become 50 % as high if the world was certain to end in 10 years. I think this would still be orders of magnitude more cost-effective than the best interventions in global health and development and AI safety.
There is also the question of whether the world will actually be radically reshaped. I am happy to bet 10 k$ against short timelines for that.
Hi Michael,
I discuss that from the following sentence on.
FWI says âmost additional funding right now supports our R&D [research and development] work [not their farm program], which will enable us to become more cost-effective in the futureâ. [...]
Cost-effecÂtiveÂness of the fish welfare inÂterÂvenÂtions recomÂmended by AmÂbiÂtious ImÂpact, and Fish Welfare IniÂtiÂaÂtiveâs farm program
As in youâre 100% certain, and wouldnât put weight on other considerations even as a tiebreaker?
Yes.
(If, say, you became convinced all your options were incomparable from an ETHU perspective because of cluelessness, you would presumably still all-things-considered-prefer not to do something that injures yourself for no reason.)
Injuring myself can very easily be assessed under ETHU. It directly affects my mental states, and those of others via decreasing my productivity.
Thanks, Jaime!
In the case where we have then that the expected value is , which is exactly the geometric mean of the expected values of the individual predictions.
I have checked this generalises. If all the lognormals have logarithms whose standard deviation is the same, the mean of the aggregated distribution is the geometric mean of the means of the input distributions.
Thanks for the comment, and welcome to the EA Forum, Katrina! Great point. I speculated the effects on target species make cost-effectiveness 50 % as large[1], but I have little idea about how accurate this is, and which pesticides achieve a better combination between effects on target and non-target species. I assume WAI is doing research which can inform this.
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This can be thought of as the mean of a uniform distribution ranging from â0.5 to 1.5.
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Thanks, Michael! Nitpick, E((X)) in the 3rd line from the bottom should be E(u(X)).
Thanks, David! That makes sense to me.
Thanks, Michael.
If you allow arbitrarily large values and prospects with infinitely many different possible outcomes, then you can construct St Petersburg-like prospects, which have infinite expected value but only take finite value in every outcome. These violate Continuity (if itâs meant to apply to all prospects, including ones with infinitely many possible outcomes). So from arbitrary large values, we violate Continuity.
Sorry for the lack of clarity. In principle, I am open to lotteries with arbitrarily large expected utility, but not infinite, and continuity does not rule out arbitratily large expected utilities. I am open to lotteries with arbitrarily many outcomes (in principle), but not to lotteries with infinitely many outcomes (not even in principle).
Weâve also discussed this a bit before, and I donât expect to change your mind now, but I think actually infinite effects are quite plausible (mostly through acausal influence in a possibly spatially infinite universe), and I think itâs unwarranted to assign them probability 0.
I think empirical evidence can take us from a very large universe to an arbitrarily large universe (for arbitrarily strong evidence), but never to an infinite universe. An arbitrarily large universe would still be infinitely smaller than an infinite universe, so I would say the former provides no empirical evidence for the latter. So I am confused about why discussions about infinite ethics often mention there is empirical evidence pointing to the existence of infinity[1]. Assigning a probability of 0 to something for which there is not empirical evidence at all makes sense to me.
There are decision rules that are consistent with violations of Completeness. Iâm guessing you want to treat incomparable prospects/âlotteries as equivalent or that whenever you pick one prospect over another, the one you pick is at least as good as the latter, but this would force other constraints on how you compare prospects/âlotteries that these decision rules for incomplete preferences donât.
I have not looked into the post you linked, but you guessed correctly. Which constraints would be forced as a result? I do not think preferential gaps make sense in principle.
You could read more about the relevant accounts of risk aversion and difference-making risk aversion, e.g. discussed here and here. Their motivations would explain why and how Independence is violated. To be clear, Iâm not personally sold on them.
Thanks for the links. Platoâs section The Challenge from Risk Aversion argues for risk aversion based on observed risk aversion with respect to resources like cups of tea and money. I guess the same applies to Rethink Prioritiesâ section. I am very much on board with risk aversion with respect to resources, but I still think it makes all sense to be risk neutral relative to total hedonistic welfare.
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From Bostrom (2011), âRecent cosmological evidence suggests that the world is probably infiniteâ.
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Great point, David! I strongly upvoted it. There are lots of possible utility functions, so I think VNM-rationality imposes very few constraints.
Thanks, Anthony.
2. Incomplete preferences have at least one qualitatively different property from complete ones, described here, and reality doesnât force you to violate this property.
I read the section you linked, and I understand preferential gaps are the property of incomplete preferences which you are referring to. I do not think preferential gaps make sense in principle. If one was exactly indifferent between 2 outcomes, I believe any improvement/âworsening of one of them must make one prefer one of the outcomes over the other. At the same time, if one is roughly indifferent between 2 outcomes, a sufficiently small improvement/âworsening of one of them will still lead to one being practically indifferent between them. For example, although I think i) 1 $ plus a chance of 10^-100 of 1 $ is clearly better than ii) 1 $, I am practically indifferent between i) and ii), because the value of 10^-100 $ is negligible.
3. Not that youâre claiming this directly, but just to flag, because in my experience people often conflate these things: Even if in some sense your all-things-considered preferences need to be complete, this doesnât mean your preferences w.r.t. your first-order axiology need to be complete.
Both are complete for me, as I fully endorse expectational total hedonistic utilitarianism (ETHU) in principle. In practice, I think it is useful to rely on heuristics from other moral theories to make better decisions under ETHU. I believe the categorical imperative is a great one, for example, although it is very central to deontology.
The mean annual deaths per capita from natural disasters from 2010 to 2019 was 2.42 % (= 0.64*10^-5/â(26.5*10^-5)) of that from 1920 to 1929.
2.4 refers to the integral of the increase in local real GDP over the 29 months after the transfer as a fraction of the transfer. The integral of an investment in global stocks over 29 months as a fraction of the initial investment is 2.56 (= ((1 + 0.05)^(29/â12) â 1)/âLN(1 + 0.05)) for the annual real growth rate from 1900 to 2022 of 5 %. So, over 29 months, I think investing in global stocks increases the integral of global real GDP 1.07 (= 2.56/â2.4) times as much as GiveDirectlyâs cash transfers to poor households in Kenya increase the integral of local real GDP.