Bio

Participation
4

I am open to work.

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
1857

Topic contributions
26

I believe the effects of Cool Earth on animals can easily dominate those on humans

I estimate the harm a random person caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals in 2022 was 217 times the harm their GHG emissions caused to humans.

Thanks a lot, Ulf!

I am very curios about how you would like the world to look like, what would your utopia be?

Thanks for the question! I strongly endorse expectational total hedonistic utilitarianism (maximising happiness, and minimising suffering), so my ideal world would have as much expected total hedonistic welfare as possible.

Nearterm, I would like people to consider digital sentience, factory-farming, and wild animal suffering the most pressing issues of our time (I have ordered them alphabetically). More importantly, I would like people to donate more to the Arthropoda Foundation, SWP or WAI. I think these are the organisations which more cost-effectively increase welfare. In addition, I believe increasing the donations to those organisations is the best strategy to maximise impact for the vast majority of people, even among people working in impact-focussed organisations.

Longterm, I would like the world to be filled with beings which have the most welfare per energy consumed. I estimate bees can experience 4.88 k times as much welfare per calorie consumption as humans. My estimates for the 5th and 95th percentile are 0 and 31.7 k, so I am not confident filling the universe with bees would be better than filling it with humans. Moreover, there may be other species or non-biological beings which experience even more welfare per energy consumed than bees. However, I would be surprised if humans were the beings experiencing the most welfare per energy consumption. 

Thanks for another insightful comment, Ulf!

I think your thoughts about cause prioritisation are very interesting, and they have made me talk about animal suffering and effectiveness when I hold a lecture for my students in public health.

Great to know!

I donate money to Cool Earth because they address biodiversity, climate change and poverty.

I worry efforts to preserve biodiversity may be harmful due to encouraging wildnerness preservation, and therefore increasing wild animal suffering. I also think fighting climate change may be harmful due to increasing wild animal suffering. I would even say helping people in poverty may be harmful via increasing factory-farming. I believe the effects of Cool Earth on animals can easily dominate those on humans, and there is lots of uncertainty about whether the effects on animals are positive or negative, so I do not know whether Cool Earth is overall beneficial or harmful. Relatedly:

I believe the large uncertainty about the effects of human welfare interventions on wild (and farmed) animals should push one towards prioritising:

  • Animal welfare interventions improving the conditions of animals instead of decreasing the number of animals with negative lives, or increasing the number of animals with positive lives. I recommend donating to the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP), which I estimate has been 64.3 k times as cost-effective as GW’s top charities (neglecting their effects on animals).
  • Learning more about helping invertebrates, whose total capacity for welfare vastly exceeds that of vertebrates. I recommend donating to (I ordered the organisations alphabetically):
    • The Arthropoda Foundation. Their research priorities are humane slaughter protocols, stocking densities and substrate research, and automated welfare assessment.
    • The Wild Animal Initiative (WAI). For instance:
      • They intend â€œto use current and new funding” for, among other activities, “Conducting an analysis of agricultural pest control to better understand the best targets for welfare interventions — first identifying scientific gaps and then developing research plans to help fill them”.
      • I estimate paying farmers to use more humane pesticides to decrease the suffering of wild insects is 23.7 k times as cost-effective as GW’s top charities.

First of all, I want to thank you for your posts. Many of them have given me new perspectives and knowledge that I appreciate.

Thanks, Ulf! I appreciate you sharing relevant links too. I strongly upvoted your comment.

I cannot open the above link.

Many rich people use tax havens (but most don't) for avoiding taxes.

Even then, in the United States (US), "The top quintile funded 90.1 percent, or $1.6 trillion, of all government transfers in 2019".

Another problem is when rich people use their wealth for lobbying, changing public opinion, changing politics in ways that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer.

I do not know whether taxing people with higher income more heavily would increase human welfare. I agree it would nearterm, as 1 $ results in a greater increase in welfare for people with lower income. However, my sense is that economists tend to agree that income and capital taxes decrease the growth of real gross domestic product (real GDP) per capita, which is strongly correlated with median income across countries. At least in the US, there has also been a strong correlation between mean and median income. So I expect taxing people with higher income more heavily via income and capital taxes would lead to a slower growth of the median income, which may decrease welfare longterm.

An example below is a comparison between the United States and Sweden.

I would need a more comprehensive analysis to be persuaded. Singapore's tax revenue was 11.5 % of its GDP in 2022, less than US' 26.8 %, and much less than Sweden's 43 %, but Singapore is much closer to Sweden than the US in terms of social outcomes.

There is a good correlation between self-reported life satisfaction and real GDP per capita across countries. So, since I think taxing people with higher income more heavily via income and capital taxes would slow down the growth of real GDP per capita, I worry it may lead to less welfare longterm.

Zooming out, I also care about the effects on animals. So I would want to know how taxing people with higher income more heavily would affect the consumption of animal-based foods, and development of alternative proteins to come to an overall view about whether people with higher income should be taxed more or less. I believe the 3 animal-based foods which account for the most animal suffering, ordered from the least to the most expensive, are chicken meat, fish, and shrimp. In high income countries, where even people with low income eat lots of animal-based foods, I guess taxing people with higher income more heavily would tend to decrease the consumption of chicken, but increase that of fish and shrimp (and beef, but I am not worried about this one).

Given my large uncertainty about how taxes affect welfare, I am currently deferring to the libertarian intuitions described in another post from Michael Huemer, Tax Breaks for the Rich.

The current system is like this: Five friends go out for dinner. Say they have some expenses that are common to the group (e.g., a shared appetizer) plus some items ordered by and for specific individuals. At the end of the meal, someone suggests that one of the friends, the one with the most money, should be forced to pay for everyone, even though he doesn’t want to.

In the US, "The top quintile funded 90.1 percent, or $1.6 trillion, of all government transfers in 2019". So, if each of the 5 friends corresponded to one quintile, the richest one would pay for 90.1 % of the meal. I agree with Michael that:

Intuitively, a fair division would be like this: Everyone pays for the items that he himself ordered, plus 1/5 of the common items.


I am happy to answer if you have any questions.

Thanks for that! I think donations are the best way for people to increase their social impact. So, instead of discussing the effects of taxes, I would be curious to know your thoughts on my cause prioritisation. In particular, my view that the best animal welfare organisations are over 100 times as cost-effective as the best ones in human welfare. Have you considered donating to animal welfare?

Hi Nick.

Unfortunately this comment (rightly or wrongly) has made me think less of you and doubt the integrity of some of your other arguments and comments. I feel like its important for someone here to say publically that I strongly disagree with this line of thinking and find it abhorent and a horrible way to look at the world, and people who are far worse of than us.

I have published 2 posts arguing for people to donate to people in extreme poverty, and I have donated to organisations helping them too. I only started worrying about the meat-eating problem much later.

Many of the poor are not pulling their own weight, while the wealthy are pulling much more than their weight.

This sentence of the post relates to the following earlier claims.

Wealthy people — say, the top 20% of income earners — are paying almost all of the net tax burden. The bottom 40% are consuming much more government resources than they are paying in, and that’s paid for by the top quintile.

These are accurate at least for the United States. "The top quintile funded 90.1 percent, or $1.6 trillion, of all government transfers in 2019".

Overall US Tax and Transfer System Is Highly Progressive

The bottom quintile receives 1.27 $ from the government, 90.1 % of which come from the top quintile, for each 1 $ they spend. I am thankful to people who give me money regardness of their income. I do not know why this would not apply to people with low income.

I see no reason why my super poor friends here in the village in Uganda should be "thanking the rich". The world has developed around them, and their quality of life has not improved to the extent that it should have, given how many resource there are in this world.

I do not know about the situation in Uganda. It may not be analogous to that in the United States.

Thanks, Nick.

At the level of the nation state, which is what matter socially, inequality has drastically increased - especially right at the top end of wealth.

I would say hapiness is more important than wealth, and it looks like hapiness inequality has decreased within countries (see graph in my 1st reply).

Hi there. The Gini coefficient of gross income has decreased a little over the last few decades globally, which means decreased inequality, and I believe the Gini coefficient is one of the best indicators of inequality due to accounting for the whole income distribution.

Our World in Data did not have data on the global trend of the Gini coefficient of net income, which is more relevant than gross income. However, hapiness is even more relevant, and hapiness inequality has apparently been decreasing.

Hi Dan,

Some people may think superintelligent AI as defined by Metaculus does not necessarily imply money ceasing to existing or have value. I am also open to bets where I transfer the money now to the person worried about AI.

I noted Table 1 of the doc does not have the probability of sentience of shrimp, although I guess it is similar to that of crayfish, 45.3 %.

Thanks for sharing, Holly!

There was an increase in survey respondents’ self-reported likelihood to support our cause after engaging with our campaign materials, with a 28.6% increase for “very likely” and a 3% increase for “somewhat likely.”

It would be great if you eventually estimated how much campaigns like this increase donations to the organisations recommended by ACE.

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