Bio

Participation
4

How others can help me

You can give me feedback here (anonymous or not). You are welcome to answer any of the following:

  • Do you have any thoughts on the value (or lack thereof) of my posts?
  • Do you have any ideas for posts you think I would like to write?
  • Are there any opportunities you think would be a good fit for me which are either not listed on 80,000 Hours' job board, or are listed there, but you guess I might be underrating them?

How I can help others

Feel free to check my posts, and see if we can collaborate to contribute to a better world. I am open to part-time volunteering and paid work. In this case, I typically ask for 20 $/h, which is roughly equal to 2 times the global real GDP per capita.

Comments
1558

Topic contributions
25

Thanks for clarifying, Joey!

I think it depends quite a bit on the quality of the CEA. I would take a sub-5-hour WFM as more useful than a sub-5-hour CEA every time. At 50 hours, I think it becomes a lot less clear. CEAs are much more error-prone and more punishing of those errors compared to WFMs, thus the risk of weaker CEAs.

I agree the value of CEAs relative to a WFM increases with time invested.

I also think the assessment of GW as CEA-focused is a bit misleading. They have four criteria, two of which they do not explicitly model in their CEA, and many blog posts express their skepticism about taking CEAs literally (my favorite of these, though old).

Elie Hassenfeld (GiveWell's co-founder and CEO) mentioned on the Clearer Thinking podcast that (emphasis mine):

GiveWell cost- effectiveness estimates are not the only input into our decisions to fund malaria programs and deworming programs, there are some other factors, but they're certainly 80% plus of the case.

Isabel Arjmand (GiveWell's special projects officer at the time) also said (Isabel's emphasis):

The numerical cost-effectiveness estimate in the spreadsheet is nearly always the most important factor in our recommendations, but not the only factor. That is, we don’t solely rely on our spreadsheet-based analysis of cost-effectiveness when making grants.

Interesting question, David!

I think it is very unclear whether wild animals have positive/negative lives, so I guess it is fine to neglect the effects on wild animals of interventions aiming to improve the welfare of farmed animals or humans. I have posted about these effects, and I believe their discussion can still be useful as a way of raising awareness for wild animal welfare.

In addition, as with the meat-eater problem, I suspect the effects on wild animals are mostly a distraction for cause prioritisation. If one is confident the effects on wild animals are positive/negative, and that their magnitude is significant, then I would expect interventions explicitly aiming to improve the welfare of wild animals to be more cost-effective than those targetting farmed animals or humans.

To clarify for certain readers, I think that the right of the woman to family planning comes first and shouldn't be restricted. I think that foregone positive lives only has implications for prioritising among our positive obligations, not negative rights or liberties. I'm sure you agree.

My views are pretty close to Ariel Simnegar's.

Thanks, Joey and Ben.

  • Number of meaningfully different heuristics considered (the criteria in the columns of a WFM)
  • Number of meaningfully different solutions considered (the options to be evaluated in the rows of a WFM)

For cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) and a WFM covering the same variables and options, would the CEAs be preferable? I think so. For example, I like that GiveWell uses cost-effectiveness analyses of the most promising countries instead of a WFM.

You are welcome!

we should still be considering flow-through effects in questions of cause prioritization and which GHD interventions to support. I think there are also reasonable edge cases where we may be able to influence GHD interventions to have better positive flow-through effects, if the donor is not onboard with AW.

Agreed. By "I worry the meat-eater problem is mostly a distraction", I meant a distraction for cause prioritisation. My sense is that people (like me) who consider the meat-eater problem to be a relevant consideration for prioritising within global health and development value 1 unit welfare in humans sufficiently similarly to 1 unit of welfare in animals to conclude that the best animal welfare interventions are much more cost-effective than the best human welfare interventions.

Thanks for the good context, Jeff.

I don't think that would work very well

I think a good part of the appeal is that it is low cost strategy (relative to one where lots of context is provided).

Our main funders have a lot of context on our work, and so our grant applications are missing a lot of information that a typical Forum reader would need. This includes basic stuff like " what problem are you trying to solve?"

Note the target audience will be more familiar with the work than a random EA Forum reader. For example, if you were raising funds for the Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO), your target audience would be more familiar with bio and more likely to have read other posts about NAO.

There is a lot of information you can share in a private grant request that you can't make public.

Fair! Some information would have to be removed.

Thanks for the comment, Nithin. 

This may negate any decrease in human welfare, but I haven't seen a BOTEC of this that models the income increase on the meat eating problem.

As suggested by the graph below, the increased income of the helped families will tend to increase their consumption of animals, which is harmful if animals have negative lives.

However, since I think family planning interventions decrease human population, I believe they decrease the consumption of animals. Yet, I am not sure this is good because farmed animals' lives may become net positive in the next few decades, and the children who would be born from unwanted pregancies would live longer than that.

In any case, I worry the meat-eater problem is mostly a distraction. If one values 1 unit of welfare in animals as much as 1 unit of welfare in humans, and does not think Rethink Priorities' welfare ranges are wildly off, the best animal welfare interventions will be much more cost-effective than the best global health and development interventions. I estimate the cost-effectiveness of Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) is 43.4 k times that of GiveWell's top charities.

it does seem like some cows probably have net-positive lives right now

Agreed. I guess farmed animals have positive lives under the conditions required by the Naturland standard.

Thanks for the post, Jeff. Sharing lots of relevant information would take time, and I think applying to EA Funds and Open Philanthropy would raise funds more cost-effectively. However, orgs can simply share their applications to larger funders on EA Forum, and then add info about what they would do with marginal funding on top of funds received from the larger funders.

Thanks for the comment. Joey Savoie, the director of strategy of Charity Entrepreneurship, which incubated Lafiya Nigeria, said:

I am far less convinced that life saving interventions are net population creating than I am that family planning decreases it.

It looks like life saving interventions decrease fertility, but still increae population. So the above suggests family planning interventions do decrease population.

The section “How Many People Have Positive Wellbeing?” of Chapter 9 of What We Owe the Future mentions a few data points about neutral life satisfaction:

The relative nature of the scale means that it is difficult to interpret where the neutral point should be, and unfortunately, there have been only two small studies directly addressing this question. Respondents from Ghana and Kenya put the neutral point at 0.6, while one British study places it between 1 and 2.

I think Nigeria is more like Ghana and Kenya than the United Kingdom, so people in Nigeria may put the neutral point at around 0.6. From the 2024 World Happiness Report, Nigeria had a mean life satisfaction from 2021 to 2023 of 4.88, which is significantly higher than 0.6. I assume unwanted pregnancies will be more frequent in families with life satisfaction below the mean, but 4.88 is 8.13 times (= 4.88/0.6) as large as 0.6, so I expect a random child that would have been born from a prevented unwanted pregnancy to have a positive life.

My low confidence best guess is that Lafiya Nigeria decreases human welfare after accounting for the effect above. Difference assumptions may lead to different conclusions, but I believe one should at least discuss the potential loss of welfare of the children whose lives are prevented.

I would be curious to know your thoughts, @Klau Chmielowska. Thanks anyway for your hardwork.

Load more