To clarify, centering people's preferences here refer to centering their telic desires / fundamental moral weights, the implications of which (when used in a CEA to assess various individual actions/philanthropic interventions/government policies) may imply that people's actions are irrational or non-maximizing.
Hi Kristof, if the steelman case is that autonomy is valuable and we should be averse to using coercion unless there is strong justification, then I do agree. However, I would add that I - and many others - see public health (i.e. saving lives and preventing unnecessarily disability/pain) as pretty good justification. Also, in this case, we're talking about taxation and regulatory interventions; people aren't banned from e.g. eating salty good or drinking sugary drinks. A key point too is that because our tastes are adaptive, people don't even notice reduced sodium/sugar content if done slowly; there's also empirical evidence of this from studies on reformulation (i.e. the consumer literally doesn't notice), in which case it's not even clear one has reduced freedom in terms of "being able to eat/drink food that tastes X to a certain extent".
I authored CEARCH's deep report on hypertension, which informs both our own grantmaking in GHD and Charity Entrepreneurship's recommendation of salt reduction policy as a promising idea to be incubated. CEARCH's report was cited by the OP Kristof in his post. Kristof says "The survey was administered to EAs, who were then noted to be disproportionately libertarian due to their high education levels, and their autonomy concerns are discounted on those grounds. The framework ends up treating the strength of someone's concern about autonomy as a reason to give that concern less weight."
(1) To address to Kristof's criticism of CEARCH's methodology - Applying a discount to the estimate obtained from surveying EAs is necessary because we aren't concerned with how EAs value freedom of choice, but how the average human values freedom of choice. And because EAs are disproportionately highly-educated relative to the global average, and education correlates with liberal values, that means the valuation of freedom of choice here as elicited from EAs is going to be higher than (and biased above) the global average - hence necessitating adjustment. To elaborate, I'll just copy-paste Stubager's (2008) summary:
"In this regard, previous analyses (see e.g. Van de Werfhorst and de Graaf 2004) have pointed to the important role played by education as a determinant of authoritarian–libertarian values. The unequivocal finding of these analyses has been that high education groups tend towards the libertarian pole while low education groups tend towards the authoritarian pole. Indeed, this finding seems one of the most resilient results in analyses of this value domain (for older studies, see Nunn, Crockett, and Williams 1978; Hyman and Wright 1979; Lipset 1981; Pascarella and Terenzini 1991)"
Additionally, even if you controlled for education, EAs are very likely to to be disproportionately high scoring on openness to experience, which is another empirical predictor (if not conceptually linked) to liberalism.
(2) More broadly, on whether we should have an autonomy prior, as opposed to treating it like any other benefit or cost in a CEA: I'm liberal, and have strong libertarian instincts on certain things (e.g. freedom of speech; I don't even think libel or slander should necessarily be illegal), but I'm highly sceptical of an autonomy prior - that seems to privilege one value above others, particular life/health, which doesn't seem defensible to me a priori.
Moreover, people generally prefer life to freedom (they wouldn't choose the death penalty as a punishment over prison or even modern slavery), and if you go out and talk to people in LMICs, you'll largely find they prioritize the lives and health of their kids and themselves + having a job & escaping poverty over abstract notions of freedom. If you want to centre people's preferences, you have to take that into account.
(1) The 100k figure from GWWC is unadjusted; once you apply the per annum discounts, GWWC estimates a pledge to be worth USD 15k. So CEARCH's estimate is higher, but not by much.
(2) Similarly, GWWC's 35.1 is unadjusted; in comparison, when we report a 16 year giving lifespan, that adjusting for various temporal discounts (e.g. attrition amongst pledgers).
(3) The 0.35 counterfactual adjustment (and all the estimates from that bulletpoint list) are for the global average / predominantly western pledger. The Asia-specific estimates are different; we don't go into detail here, but we expect the counterfactual coefficient for Asian pledgers to be 0.62, or almost twice as much.
Impactful Giving was incubated by CE, and its founders Chetan & Jesse are currently working on effective giving promotion in India. I understand that it's been challenging, and getting the general public to give has been particularly difficult, though the HNWI side of things has shown more promise.
We introduced them to Upadhyaya Foundation earlier in 2025, and they've worked together (with India Animal Fund) to start a new India Animal Welfare Funding Circle, which brings donors together to promote both evidence-based giving in AW and also more coordination/information sharing between grantmakers. I'm fairly excited to see how things develop from here.
I will say that the difficulty of promoting effective giving to the (relatively poorer) public in India informed our decision to focus on high-income East Asia, where it's plausible that the man on the street (if sold on the ideas of effective giving) is able and willing to give a few thousand a year.
Every charity that uses Players Philanthropy Fund as a 501c3 fiscal sponsor in the US (so CEARCH, most Charity Entrepreneurship incubatees, plus some other EA organizations) is capable of accepting crypto donations through Engiven.
There's very strong empirical evidence that taxes reduce alcohol consumption (price elasticity is about -0.5, so a 10% increase in price reduces consumption by 5%), and the evidence that alcohol harms health is well-established enough that I won't belabour the point
It's probably also cost-effective. Rough rule of thumb is that policy interventions are highly cost-effective due to large scale of impact (policy has national level reach, while is hard to beat), and low cost per capita (particularly due to leveraging less impactful government spending). GiveWell estimates that alcohol policy may be more cost-effective than its top charities, and Charity Entrepreneurship estimates that it's potentially competitive with GiveWell top charities. Uncertainty is very high, of course.
The other posters have also rightly pointed out the conflict-of-interest reasons you should distrust this Snowdon fellow, but also the fact of the matter is that the scientific consensus is what it is for a reason, and even without conflict-of-interest reasons you shouldn't put too much stock in what some rando says over what experts as a whole say.
Object level I agree, though ironically I think we would agree this also falls into the entertainment category (as evinced by myself and a whole bunch of people posting on this)
Object level I agree, though ironically I think we would agree this also falls into the entertainment category (as evidenced ny myself and a whole bunch of people posting on this)
To clarify, centering people's preferences here refer to centering their telic desires / fundamental moral weights, the implications of which (when used in a CEA to assess various individual actions/philanthropic interventions/government policies) may imply that people's actions are irrational or non-maximizing.
Hi Kristof, if the steelman case is that autonomy is valuable and we should be averse to using coercion unless there is strong justification, then I do agree. However, I would add that I - and many others - see public health (i.e. saving lives and preventing unnecessarily disability/pain) as pretty good justification. Also, in this case, we're talking about taxation and regulatory interventions; people aren't banned from e.g. eating salty good or drinking sugary drinks. A key point too is that because our tastes are adaptive, people don't even notice reduced sodium/sugar content if done slowly; there's also empirical evidence of this from studies on reformulation (i.e. the consumer literally doesn't notice), in which case it's not even clear one has reduced freedom in terms of "being able to eat/drink food that tastes X to a certain extent".
I authored CEARCH's deep report on hypertension, which informs both our own grantmaking in GHD and Charity Entrepreneurship's recommendation of salt reduction policy as a promising idea to be incubated. CEARCH's report was cited by the OP Kristof in his post. Kristof says "The survey was administered to EAs, who were then noted to be disproportionately libertarian due to their high education levels, and their autonomy concerns are discounted on those grounds. The framework ends up treating the strength of someone's concern about autonomy as a reason to give that concern less weight."
(1) To address to Kristof's criticism of CEARCH's methodology - Applying a discount to the estimate obtained from surveying EAs is necessary because we aren't concerned with how EAs value freedom of choice, but how the average human values freedom of choice. And because EAs are disproportionately highly-educated relative to the global average, and education correlates with liberal values, that means the valuation of freedom of choice here as elicited from EAs is going to be higher than (and biased above) the global average - hence necessitating adjustment. To elaborate, I'll just copy-paste Stubager's (2008) summary:
"In this regard, previous analyses (see e.g. Van de Werfhorst and de Graaf 2004) have pointed to the important role played by education as a determinant of authoritarian–libertarian values. The unequivocal finding of these analyses has been that high education groups tend towards the libertarian pole while low education groups tend towards the authoritarian pole. Indeed, this finding seems one of the most resilient results in analyses of this value domain (for older studies, see Nunn, Crockett, and Williams 1978; Hyman and Wright 1979; Lipset 1981; Pascarella and Terenzini 1991)"
Additionally, even if you controlled for education, EAs are very likely to to be disproportionately high scoring on openness to experience, which is another empirical predictor (if not conceptually linked) to liberalism.
(2) More broadly, on whether we should have an autonomy prior, as opposed to treating it like any other benefit or cost in a CEA: I'm liberal, and have strong libertarian instincts on certain things (e.g. freedom of speech; I don't even think libel or slander should necessarily be illegal), but I'm highly sceptical of an autonomy prior - that seems to privilege one value above others, particular life/health, which doesn't seem defensible to me a priori.
Moreover, people generally prefer life to freedom (they wouldn't choose the death penalty as a punishment over prison or even modern slavery), and if you go out and talk to people in LMICs, you'll largely find they prioritize the lives and health of their kids and themselves + having a job & escaping poverty over abstract notions of freedom. If you want to centre people's preferences, you have to take that into account.
Hi Lorenzo,
(1) The 100k figure from GWWC is unadjusted; once you apply the per annum discounts, GWWC estimates a pledge to be worth USD 15k. So CEARCH's estimate is higher, but not by much.
(2) Similarly, GWWC's 35.1 is unadjusted; in comparison, when we report a 16 year giving lifespan, that adjusting for various temporal discounts (e.g. attrition amongst pledgers).
(3) The 0.35 counterfactual adjustment (and all the estimates from that bulletpoint list) are for the global average / predominantly western pledger. The Asia-specific estimates are different; we don't go into detail here, but we expect the counterfactual coefficient for Asian pledgers to be 0.62, or almost twice as much.
Hope that's helpful.
Hi Sanjay!
Impactful Giving was incubated by CE, and its founders Chetan & Jesse are currently working on effective giving promotion in India. I understand that it's been challenging, and getting the general public to give has been particularly difficult, though the HNWI side of things has shown more promise.
We introduced them to Upadhyaya Foundation earlier in 2025, and they've worked together (with India Animal Fund) to start a new India Animal Welfare Funding Circle, which brings donors together to promote both evidence-based giving in AW and also more coordination/information sharing between grantmakers. I'm fairly excited to see how things develop from here.
I will say that the difficulty of promoting effective giving to the (relatively poorer) public in India informed our decision to focus on high-income East Asia, where it's plausible that the man on the street (if sold on the ideas of effective giving) is able and willing to give a few thousand a year.
Cheers,
Joel
Every charity that uses Players Philanthropy Fund as a 501c3 fiscal sponsor in the US (so CEARCH, most Charity Entrepreneurship incubatees, plus some other EA organizations) is capable of accepting crypto donations through Engiven.
However, the charity will need to get set up an Engiven page first, which can be done fairly quickly (e.g. see CEARCH's Engiven page for illustration).
CEARCH global health policy fund
There's very strong empirical evidence that taxes reduce alcohol consumption (price elasticity is about -0.5, so a 10% increase in price reduces consumption by 5%), and the evidence that alcohol harms health is well-established enough that I won't belabour the point
It's probably also cost-effective. Rough rule of thumb is that policy interventions are highly cost-effective due to large scale of impact (policy has national level reach, while is hard to beat), and low cost per capita (particularly due to leveraging less impactful government spending). GiveWell estimates that alcohol policy may be more cost-effective than its top charities, and Charity Entrepreneurship estimates that it's potentially competitive with GiveWell top charities. Uncertainty is very high, of course.
The other posters have also rightly pointed out the conflict-of-interest reasons you should distrust this Snowdon fellow, but also the fact of the matter is that the scientific consensus is what it is for a reason, and even without conflict-of-interest reasons you shouldn't put too much stock in what some rando says over what experts as a whole say.
Object level I agree, though ironically I think we would agree this also falls into the entertainment category (as evinced by myself and a whole bunch of people posting on this)
Object level I agree, though ironically I think we would agree this also falls into the entertainment category (as evidenced ny myself and a whole bunch of people posting on this)