Ha I love this!

I'm interested that your cluelessness places you heavily on the "It's OK side". I think if I felt "clueless" here my vote might be slightly on the "Not OK" side, because I would would worry that eating honey could still be really bad. 

Thanks for posting  - I think it's pretty brave of you here to make this your first post where I imagine most will disagree.

Im drawn to your moral burden for the poor argument. I would be especially interested to hear people's arguments here against the creation of an inequitable moral landscape, which I think can often be the case. When I was studying in England I was shocked how many educated people took the moral high ground and derided poor brexit voters, even though many of them thought they were voting for what was best for them, same as the liberal elite were. I was really uncomfortable with the decision.

One argument against I can think of is that people who donate might not actually morally claim to be better than their who can't afford it. Perhaps our moral status is partly tied to our privelege and wealth "to whom much is given, much is expected". Maybe donating to offset with our riches doesn't put us "above" poorer people who can't afford to.

 But the perception and signals could be bad regardless.

Also yes, as a straightforward point sacrifice and moral offsetting aren't exclusive - sometimes arguments here on the forum might seem to make it seem that way, but I dont think it's people's intention most of the time.

Apologies for breaching forum norms. Corrected and please don't ban me.

Nice one! Read it as you will sir :D - perhaps I should have been more specific, but there are trade-offs to specificity on polls like this too.

Thanks @Bob Fischer those are all good points.

I agree its very difficult and probably impossible to "get right" with a small team of researchers, but I still think (as many people have commented) that there would be great value in truly independent work on this. I think there is too much upside to independent work here to continue with only collaboration, even if reductoin in quality might be a downside. 

If work continued with only collaboration, I think the Gravity Well effect mentioned by would be hard to avoid, credibility would be reduced, and that new researchers might find it hard to flesh out new methodology and ideas and in some cases be adversarial if RP's team was involved from the beginning of any new research.

Of course then collaboration and conversation would come later.

POLL: Is it OK to eat honey^[1]?

I've appreciated the Honey wars. We've seen the kind of earnest inquiry that makes EA pretty great. 

I'm interested to see where the community stands here. I have so much uncertainty that I'm close to the neutral point, but I've been updated towards it maybe not being OK - I previously slurped the honey without a thought. What do you think^[2]?
 

It's OK to eat honey

disagree

agree

1. ^{^}

   This is a non-specific question. "OK" could mean a number of things (you choose). It could mean you think eating net honey is "net positive" (My pleasure/health > small chance of bee suffering), or could mean "does no harm at all", or even "Morally acceptable" - which might mean you think it does harm but you can offset it, or that the harm isn't bad enough for you to stop or anything along those lines. 

2. ^{^}

   @Toby Tremlett🔹 said it was inappropriate for a poll not to have 2 footnotes so here it is...

Terminally on the terminal

But how certain are you about hedonic utilitariansm (maybe give a percentage?). If you're not completely sure then even considering another theory a little might make you almost disregard nematodes just because of the extreme uncertainty? One major point of this article seems to me that it is very hard to have much certainty about our prevailing moral compass which I completely agree with

Also your probability of negative lives for those animals is so close to 50%, I would have thought that the calculation (Probability of sentience x positive life percentage) would get most humans close to considering Ye Auld Pascall's Mug

But I know you don't mind a little bit of a mugging ;).

My initial hot-take off the cuff reaction is that it seems borderline implausible that USAID spending have reduced under 5 mortality by 1/3. With so many other factors like Development/Growth, government programs, Medical innovation not funded by USAID (artesunate came on the scene after 2001!), 10x-100x more effective AID like Gates/AMF etc how could this be?

The biggest under 5 effects caused by USAID might be from malaria/ORS programs, but they usually didn't fund the staff giving the medication, so how much credit are they taking for those? They've claimed credit for a 51% drop in malaria mortality?

Their basic method seems to be "We calculated the associations between different levels of USAID funding per capita and decreases in mortality by group of causes (figure 1)." which seems questionable at best.

Obviously they are not considering counterfactuals here, but even not considering those it still seems like huge calls.

I'll have a closer look later, might well be way off the mark here - the thing did get published in the Lancet after all and I'll certainly never get anything published in there...
 

What's the likelihood of DHS getting funded, and what do you think is the easiest forward for getting some form of it restarted again. Also are there ways we could do it more efficiently?

By the way your talk was fantastic at EAG. Was disappointed it was only 15 minutes!