My ideas for posts (I'll try to write at least one):

• I recently learned that malaria causes about as many miscarriages and stillbirths as it causes live infant deaths, but we only count neonatal deaths in most cost-effectiveness estimates. Intermittent preventive treatment with Sulphadoxine-Pyrimethamine (IPTp-SP) for pregnant women seems to be more cost-effective than bed-nets for preventing malaria-related stillbirths and miscarriage. Unsure whether to write a narrow post on that, or a deeper post on "What are the most effective charities, given worldviews where unborn children have similar value to new-borns?"
• Some Europeans have been asking me a lot about what people in smaller countries can do to make AI go better (or slow down) - especially with regards to China. I think we've got a lot of lessons from (especially Cold War) history about third countries using their relations with superpowers to increase existential safety, but I don't think anyone's written an EA forum post about it.
• I wrote a blog post on what I call "The Great Happiness Stagnation" - looking at the flattening of happiness in many rich countries since they became rich. I've been thinking about converting it to a forum post, but it currently seems insufficiently rigorous to be worthy of the forum! 

Agree with your point about the Chinese study reference, about healthy aging for elderly Chinese people. The OP uses it to make three separate points, about cognitive impairment, dose-response effects and lower overall odds of healthy aging, but it's pretty clear that the study is basically showing the effects of poverty on health in old age. 

Elderly Chinese people are mostly vegetarian or vegan because a) they can't afford meat, or b) have stopped eating meat because they struggle with other health issues, both of which would massively bias the outcomes! So their poor outcomes might be partly through diet-related effects, like nutrient/protein deficiency, but could also be sanitation, malnutrition in earlier life (these are people brought up in extreme famines), education (particularly for the cognitive impairment test), and the health issues that cause them to reduce meat.

The study fails to control for extreme poverty by grouping together everyone who earned <8000 Yuan a year (80% of the survey sample!), which is pretty ridiculous, because the original dataset should have continuous data...

The paper also makes it very clear that diet quality is the real driver, and that healthy plant-based diets score similarly to omnivorous diets "with vegetarians of higher diet quality not significantly differing in terms of overall healthy aging and individual outcomes when compared to omnivores". 

Probably less importantly, it conditions on survival to 80, which creates a case of survivorship bias/collider bias. So there could be a story where less healthy omnivores tend to die earlier (you get effects like this with older smokers, sometimes), and the survivors appear healthier.

I agree with the upfront tagline "Having children is not the most effective way to improve the world", but feel I disagree pretty strongly with a bunch of these takes:

1. "Owing" it to your parents. This feels a little straw-manned. Wanting to have kids for your parents' sake might be about feeling grateful for 16+ years of love & care, or just making someone you care about happier in their old age. From an EA perspective, you perhaps shouldn't weight this too highly. But when choosing to have kids or not, especially if your parents really want grandchildren, you are making this trade-off. One of my explicit considerations when considering having kids was thinking about my in-laws and extended family.
2. Donating to AMF to increase population. Don't strongly disagree with the principle here, but donating to AMF is probably not optimal. I think it would be cheaper to incentivise births directly than donating to AMF, if that's your goal. I've written about this: (Who should we pay to increase birth rates?), where I make a toy model about choosing where you might want to generate new lives. I suggest lower-middle income countries other than Sub-Saharan Africa, mainly because of quality of life concerns.
3. It’s a bad idea to make ethical arguments either way about having children. This one surprised me the most.  Do you mean we shouldn’t make these arguments at all, or simply that we should avoid certain impolite judgements of others’ choices? My take: of course you shouldn't overdo it and rant to expectant mothers about the meat-eater problem, risk of population collapse, and negative utilitarianism, but it's still one of the biggest ethical decisions in a human's life. There's no reason why this should be less suitable for ethical debate than what job you choose or what charity you donate to. 

I'm very torn on this question, so let's shoot for 60%.

Many people are probably thinking about the impact on animals, which most EA forum readers will probably agree is a far stronger argument for anti-natalism than climate. 

There's a set of arguments, recently articulated by Bentham's Bulldog, which looks like this:

1. High birth rates are good because human lives tend to be good
2. But humans kill animals for food and incentivise factory farming, which clearly overwhelms the positives of a human life, therefore high human birth rates might be bad (meat-eater problem)
3. But humans also incidentally prevent the lives of billions of insects and fish, and insect lives are net-negative, therefore this clearly overwhelms both farmed animals and the value of a human life, therefore high birth rates are actually good!
4. And more humans are likely to make the far future even better for animals, so high birth rates are even more good!

Of course we should take this argument seriously, but:

1) Having children seems an incredibly inefficient way of maximising your destruction of insects! If insect suffering does overwhelm other effects, this fails to provide an effective utilitarian argument for human pronatalism.

2) Based on current human values and preference for environmental protection/rewilding, it seems plausible to me that the marginal human may not decrease wild insect numbers. Similarly, I can see a far-future where more humans make the world worse for both farmed and wild animals. 

3) Practically, I suspect you'll lose most ethically minded individuals, or people who have very low estimates of insect/fish consciousness, at step 2 - the meat-eater problem. Step 3 requires taking quite a bitter pill in terms of cross-species anti-natalism and the disvalue of existence more generally. "Open Phil-brand EA", which generally disregards insect and wild animal welfare, would also have to reject step 3, and may therefore have to conclude that anti-natalism is good.

4) More personally, it does seem a bit weird feeling that my wonderful little baby's main source of value in the world is his insect-destroying potential. 

Maybe you read it, maybe just a coincidence, but I wrote a blogpost that (using a toy model) found Uzbekistan to be the most promising country for incentivising birth rates!

I'll push against this post a little bit, despite agreeing with a lot of the ideas. 

Firstly, I think we can avoid the moral discomfort of "hoping for warning shots" by reframing as "hoping for windows of opportunity". We should hope and prepare for moments, where, for whatever reason, policymakers and the public are unusually attentive to what we're saying. 

Secondly, while you're more arguing against the hand-wavy "warning-shot as cavalry" claims, there seems to be another claim- that we should act in a similar way regardless of whether or not the "warning shot" model is correct, i.e. whether we expect the policy and discourse battle to take the form of a gradual grind of persuasion vs. a very lumpy, unpredictable pattern shaped around distinct windows of opportunity. 

Our strategy might look similar most of the time, and I agree that a lot of the hard persuasion work in the trenches needs to go on regardless. But I suspect there are a few ways you might act differently if the "warning shot/windows of opportunity" model is correct. For example:

• Strategic preparedness - keep some things in reserve, have a bunch of ready-to-go policy proposal binders or communication strategies deliberately for when a window opens
• Take a slightly more cautious approach to preserving credibility capital. There are ways of talking about risks now that might cost you influence today, but look appropriate in the correct window.
• Build relationships in anticipation of a window of opportunity opening, rather than pushing directly for change. 

I spent some time researching this topic recently (blog post link). It seemed an odd paradox - why does the one-child policy not seem to have that much of an impact on the birth rates? 

The answer is quite simple but weird that no-one knows about it. It's mainly that the pre-One Child Policy population control policies in China in the 1970s were more restrictive than you think, and the 1980s policies were de facto more liberal. You can see this 1970s crash on any visualisation- from 6 to 2.7 births per women in 7 years! (1970-1977). A big chunk of this was because the legal marriage age shot up in most areas, to 25/23 for rural women/men, and 28/25 for urban. You get a big gap where people, especially in villages, would previously be having kids at 18 and suddenly weren't. 

Thanks to Deng's reforms, the 1980s were more open in many ways, marriage was restored to the normal age, divorce was liberalised, so the one child policy was implemented partly to stop a resurgence of the birth rate! So alongside a big wave of sterilisations, you also get the "catch-up" of people now allowed to marry and have kids. Also, after some pushback, the OCP wasn't that strictly enforced in the late 1980s, especially in rural areas, so you get some provinces where 3 or 4 kids stayed normal. Some people also took advantage of Deng's reforms to leave their village, get divorced and have a kid with someone else. So you don't see a big crash in the birth rate in the 1980s, and China averaged 2.5 kids per woman in the mid 1980s. 

The OCP was more strictly enforced in the 1990s, so you see the crash from 2.5 to 1.5 births per women then. You also start seeing the extreme sex ratio imbalances. Now that the 1990s (56% male) cohort has reached parent-age, that's one reason the current crash in the birth rate is so extreme. China would probably be seeing drops in the birth rate in the absence of any population control policies, but there's no chance it would be this extreme.

Yeah, this is a big challenge in the corporate campaign space, especially in places with weak legal systems and low enforcement. But this links to why corporate campaigns can be more effective than policy campaigns. Getting policy commitments on paper in a country with poor rule of law might have very limited impact because no-one's incentivised to uphold the laws, but there's a decent chance that an international, or niche company with high reputational awareness is incentivised to try and maintain a higher welfare supply chain. 

So you might get a high-end hotel chain in a lower-income country that genuinely wants to shift to cage-free eggs after a campaign. They make a commitment, you arrange meetings with them and their suppliers to help them meet these commitments, and track whether their numbers match up. This can work even if the legal system functions poorly.

People in the Bharat Initiative for Accountability (BIA) and Global Food Partners (GFP) are doing stuff like this in India and Southeast Asia. It takes loads of work on both the supply and demand side, as you might expect, which might cut against the higher-end effectiveness estimates, but it's definitely something people have in mind.  

People from these teams spoke about this recently on the How I Learned To Love Shrimp podcast (here and here).

https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/obesity-drugs-food-industry This study doesn't make Semaglutide look especially promising for animal welfare (increase in poultry and fish), but I'm not sure how rigorous the research is, so I'd be excited to read other sources.

Thanks for both of your responses (@Jacob_Peacock and @abrahamrowe). I was going to analyse the podcast in more detail to resolve our different understandings, but I think @BruceF 's response to the piece clarifies his views on the "negative/positive" PTC hypothesis. The views that he would defend are: (negative) "First, if we don’t compete on price and taste, the products will stay niche, and meat consumption will continue to grow." and (positive) "Second, if we can create products that compete on price and taste, sales will go up quite a lot, even if other factors will need to be met to gain additional market share.” 

I expect that these two claims are less controversial, albeit with "quite a lot" leaving some ambiguity. 

My initial response was based on my assumption that everyone involved in alt protein realises that PTC-parity is only one step towards widespread adoption. But I agree that it's worth getting more specific and checking how people feel about Abraham's "how much of the work is PTC doing- 90% vs 5%?" question.   

I assume if you surveyed/ interviewed people working in the space, there would be a fairly wide range of views. I doubt if people have super-clear models, because we're expecting progress in the coming years to come on multiple fronts (consumer acceptance, product quality, product suitability, policy, norms), and to mutually reinforce each other, but it would be worth clarifying so that you can better identify what you're arguing against. 

From my own work on alt-protein adoption in Asia I sense that PTC-parity is only a small part of the puzzle, but it would also be far easier to solve the other pieces if we suddenly had some PTC-competitive killer products, so PTC interact with other variables in ways that make it difficult to calculate. 

Overall, I stand by my criticism that I don't think the positive PTC-hypothesis as you frame it is commonly held. But I'd like to understand better what the views are that you're critiquing. It would be interesting to see your anecdotal evidence supported- what people actually think when they say they (previously) bought into PTC, and who these people are. It could be true, for example, that people who work in PBM startups tend to believe more strongly that a PTC-competitive product will transform the market, but people working on the market side tend to realise how many barriers there are to adoption beyond these factors.