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Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...
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TL;DR:
The movement has an evidence problem. To solve it, for each intervention we need to know:
* What types of evidence that intervention needs
* What types of evidence different sources can give us
In this post, we outline a framework for evidencing an intervention through five stages:
...
Recent opportunities to take action
I increasingly realize just how emotionally inaccessible the concept of ethical offsetting is to most people. With regard to climate, the figure I remember from William MacAskill is that he estimates one dollar donated to Clean Air Taskforce to save 1 ton of CO2. If you take this seriously, then you basically don't need to bother with any efforts to have less waste in your personal life. (With the possible exception being your image, but only if you're a public figure.)
I think most climate people are very suspicious of charities like this, rather than or in addition to not believing in ethical offsetting. See this Wendover Productions video on problematic, non-counterfactual, and outright fraudulent climate offsets. I myself am not confident that CATF offsets are good and would need to do a bunch of investigation, and most people are not willing to do this starting from, say, an 80% prior that CATF offsets are bad.
This article just made HN. It's a report saying that 39 of 50 top offsetting programs are likely junk, 8 "look problematic", and 3 lack sufficient information, with none being found good.
re: CATF, you can look at FP's cost-effectiveness analysis of CATF's work (past, future), along with their non-cost effectiveness-based reasoning (see Why do we trust this organisation?) and their general methodology for evaluating relative impact in high-uncertainty contexts like climate (where they argue that "bottom-up cost-effectiveness analyses as well as bottom-up plausibility checks... are fundamentally insufficient for claims of high impact"), and judge for yourself. I personally think that the notion of "CATF offsets" doesn't make much sense once I drilled down to that level; if I donate to them it won't be for ethical offsetting reasons.
re: the vast majority of offsetting-oriented climate charities, I'm skeptical myself.