In particular, I think it's valuable to get anyone who is already going to be donating to these animal nonprofits regardless this year to participate in this match.
My understanding is that much (most? possibly a large majority?) of Every.org's operating funds and funds for donation matches like this one come from billionaire Uber co-founder Garrett Camp.
While I don't know exactly what Camp and Every's philanthropic goals are, I had a couple conversations with Every's Executive Director a few years ago in the wake of one of their other donation matches that a bunch of EAs participated in, and, based on my understanding developed then, my guess is that someone at Every.org just had the thought "How about we do an animal welfare donation match this giving season. A lot of people from the effective altruism community have participated in our past donation matches and I bet many of them would participate in this one, making it a successful way to attract more donors to our platform and get more people donating."
Whether the decionmaker(s) at Every needed approval from Camp on this $500k precisely or whether he just delegated them the authority to decide how exactly to use these funds I don't know, but don't think it matters much for the expected impact of participating in this match.
Regardless, my guess is that if the $500k doesn't get used up during this match, it will just stay in Camp's hands (or his nonprofit's hands, whether Camp.org or Every.org's hands, unspent anytime soon). That is, I don't think the money is being planned to be donated to these animal nonprofits regardless. Also worth noting that unlike the old Facebook Giving Tuesday matches, I don't think there is a plan for the money to be given away to an assortment of other nonprofits if people don't allocate it to these animal nonprofits via participating in the donation match.
So my guess is that participating in this match increases the overall amount of Camp money going to nonprofits in the near future, and that it is unclear where the Camp money would eventually be spent if it's not allocated to these animal nonprofits as a part of this match.
(It's possible these matching funds are coming from somewhere besides Camp, so again note that this is just my guess.)
So I think there is a true counterfactual impact here, and that for example, if someone thinks that one of these animal nonprofits is the most cost-effective giving opportunity, then now may be a particularly worthwhile time to donate, even if one wasn't planning on donating $2000 more to the nonprofit now before year end, since it will seemingly indeed lead to the nonprofit receiving 3x your donation amount.
Note: If you think that one of the animal nonprofits is only, say, 50% as cost-effective as the best giving opportunity you can identify, I'd discourage you from giving to that animal nonprofit in this match despite the naive expected value calculation (3*50%=150%) suggesting that donating to the animal nonprofit with the match will lead to more good than donating to the best giving opportunity without a match. One reason I'd give for this is that I don't think that we should let large donors incentivize us to allocate our giving budgets to less cost-effective giving opportunities, since that seems like a bad incentiblve. Instead I'd say to the large donor, "It's nice that you are wanting to donate your money, including to these nonprofits that are very cost-effective, but I think it would be better if you donated your money to this other nonprofit instead that will use the money to do even more good. You could also donate to both if you want and that'd be completely fine, but in either case I am going to respectfully decline your match offer in order to allocate my limited donation budget to where I think it will do the most good." In other words, I'd decline to play the matching donor's game and let them know why in the hope that they might decide to change their behavior to support the more cost-effective giving opportunity. If we did a more sophisticated EV calculation than the naive one above, I'd expect this course of action of still donating to the most cost-effective giving opportunity you can identify despite the match offer for donating to the half-as-effective nonprofit with a 2:1 match to come out better. (Note that in addition to declining to participate in the match yourself, you could always find and reach out to the existing donor base for these 50%-as-effective nonprofits and encourage them to participate in the match, assuming they're not open to donating to the best giving oppotunity that you can identify that you're giving to.)
Fantastic job, Justin! I was very surprised by the quality of the video. FWIW I initially skipped watching it when I saw the title and thumbnail here because I assumed it wouldn't contain much information that was new to me or be particularly enjoyable to watch. (My assumption was wrong on both counts!) I suspect this means more experimentation with titles and thumbnails is warranted.
I was reminded of this comment of mine today and just thought I'd comment again to note that 5 years later my social-impact career prospects have gotten even worse. Concretely, I quit my last job (a sales job just for money) a year and a half ago and have just been living on savings since without applying anywhere in 18 months. Things definitely have not gone as I had hoped when I wrote this comment. Some things have gotten better in life (e.g. my mental health is better than it has been in over five years), but career-wise I'm doing very poorly (not even earning money with a random job) and have no positive trajectory to speak of.
Thanks! Are many of the ~14B new chicks each year coming from a relatively small number of breeding hens who have many offspring? Or is it mostly 2 chicks per hen?
4:30 "Most of the world's 8 billion egg-laying hens, roughly one for every person alive on Earth today, are confined right now in cages like these."
4:56 "The egg industry has no need for the 7 billion male chicks born annually, so it kills them on their first day alive in this world."
Just to check my understanding of the numbers here:
Google tells me "Egg-laying hens on factory farms typically live for 12 to 18 months, or about a year and a half, before they are slaughtered when their egg production begins to decline."
So I guess once each year on average the population of 8 billion egg-laying hens is replaced by a new population of 8 billion egg-laying hens. So the breeding hens are having about 15 billion chicks annually (7 billion male, 8 billion female). (Broiler chickens for meat are separate.)
It received 507,000 views, and at 27 minutes long, if the average viewer watched 1/3 of it, then that's 507,000*27*1/3=4,563,000 VM.
I don't recall whether the $20,000 Grand Prize it received was enough to reimburse Suzy for her cost to produce it and pay for her time, but if so, that'd be 4,563,000VM/$20,000=228 VM/$.
Not sure how to do the quality adjustment using the OP framework, but naively my intuition is that short films like this one are more effective at changing peoples' minds on the importance of the problem per minute than average videos of the AI Safety channels. How valuable it is probably depends mostly on how valuable shifting the opinion of the general public is. It's not a video that I'd expect to create AI safety researchers, but I expect it did help shift the Overton window on AI risk.
Donation matching makes me skeptical too, and if it was up to me to decide how Every should use $500k it would not be to set up a donation match like this. Nevertheless, I think participating in this match may make sense for some people, as I commented here (and also offered my speculation for why they do this): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vYgzjvwaS4t2Z8ZDB/counterfactual-2-1-match-for-usd250k-in-animal-welfare#aAmw4eR282By5TYW4
In particular, I think it's valuable to get anyone who is already going to be donating to these animal nonprofits regardless this year to participate in this match.
My understanding is that much (most? possibly a large majority?) of Every.org's operating funds and funds for donation matches like this one come from billionaire Uber co-founder Garrett Camp.
While I don't know exactly what Camp and Every's philanthropic goals are, I had a couple conversations with Every's Executive Director a few years ago in the wake of one of their other donation matches that a bunch of EAs participated in, and, based on my understanding developed then, my guess is that someone at Every.org just had the thought "How about we do an animal welfare donation match this giving season. A lot of people from the effective altruism community have participated in our past donation matches and I bet many of them would participate in this one, making it a successful way to attract more donors to our platform and get more people donating."
Whether the decionmaker(s) at Every needed approval from Camp on this $500k precisely or whether he just delegated them the authority to decide how exactly to use these funds I don't know, but don't think it matters much for the expected impact of participating in this match.
Regardless, my guess is that if the $500k doesn't get used up during this match, it will just stay in Camp's hands (or his nonprofit's hands, whether Camp.org or Every.org's hands, unspent anytime soon). That is, I don't think the money is being planned to be donated to these animal nonprofits regardless. Also worth noting that unlike the old Facebook Giving Tuesday matches, I don't think there is a plan for the money to be given away to an assortment of other nonprofits if people don't allocate it to these animal nonprofits via participating in the donation match.
So my guess is that participating in this match increases the overall amount of Camp money going to nonprofits in the near future, and that it is unclear where the Camp money would eventually be spent if it's not allocated to these animal nonprofits as a part of this match.
(It's possible these matching funds are coming from somewhere besides Camp, so again note that this is just my guess.)
So I think there is a true counterfactual impact here, and that for example, if someone thinks that one of these animal nonprofits is the most cost-effective giving opportunity, then now may be a particularly worthwhile time to donate, even if one wasn't planning on donating $2000 more to the nonprofit now before year end, since it will seemingly indeed lead to the nonprofit receiving 3x your donation amount.
Note: If you think that one of the animal nonprofits is only, say, 50% as cost-effective as the best giving opportunity you can identify, I'd discourage you from giving to that animal nonprofit in this match despite the naive expected value calculation (3*50%=150%) suggesting that donating to the animal nonprofit with the match will lead to more good than donating to the best giving opportunity without a match. One reason I'd give for this is that I don't think that we should let large donors incentivize us to allocate our giving budgets to less cost-effective giving opportunities, since that seems like a bad incentiblve. Instead I'd say to the large donor, "It's nice that you are wanting to donate your money, including to these nonprofits that are very cost-effective, but I think it would be better if you donated your money to this other nonprofit instead that will use the money to do even more good. You could also donate to both if you want and that'd be completely fine, but in either case I am going to respectfully decline your match offer in order to allocate my limited donation budget to where I think it will do the most good." In other words, I'd decline to play the matching donor's game and let them know why in the hope that they might decide to change their behavior to support the more cost-effective giving opportunity. If we did a more sophisticated EV calculation than the naive one above, I'd expect this course of action of still donating to the most cost-effective giving opportunity you can identify despite the match offer for donating to the half-as-effective nonprofit with a 2:1 match to come out better. (Note that in addition to declining to participate in the match yourself, you could always find and reach out to the existing donor base for these 50%-as-effective nonprofits and encourage them to participate in the match, assuming they're not open to donating to the best giving oppotunity that you can identify that you're giving to.)
This thumbnail is much better IMO:
Yet if I go to share the video on Reddit currently the thumbnail of you sitting on the floor still shows up as the only option.
Fantastic job, Justin! I was very surprised by the quality of the video. FWIW I initially skipped watching it when I saw the title and thumbnail here because I assumed it wouldn't contain much information that was new to me or be particularly enjoyable to watch. (My assumption was wrong on both counts!) I suspect this means more experimentation with titles and thumbnails is warranted.
I've re-read this post a few times over the last decade, and am commenting now to recommend it generally. A lot of important people in AI are still making the standard progress and prosperity argument that Paul counters in this post.
I was reminded of this comment of mine today and just thought I'd comment again to note that 5 years later my social-impact career prospects have gotten even worse. Concretely, I quit my last job (a sales job just for money) a year and a half ago and have just been living on savings since without applying anywhere in 18 months. Things definitely have not gone as I had hoped when I wrote this comment. Some things have gotten better in life (e.g. my mental health is better than it has been in over five years), but career-wise I'm doing very poorly (not even earning money with a random job) and have no positive trajectory to speak of.
Any update?
Thanks! Are many of the ~14B new chicks each year coming from a relatively small number of breeding hens who have many offspring? Or is it mostly 2 chicks per hen?
4:30 "Most of the world's 8 billion egg-laying hens, roughly one for every person alive on Earth today, are confined right now in cages like these."
4:56 "The egg industry has no need for the 7 billion male chicks born annually, so it kills them on their first day alive in this world."
Just to check my understanding of the numbers here:
Google tells me "Egg-laying hens on factory farms typically live for 12 to 18 months, or about a year and a half, before they are slaughtered when their egg production begins to decline."
So I guess once each year on average the population of 8 billion egg-laying hens is replaced by a new population of 8 billion egg-laying hens. So the breeding hens are having about 15 billion chicks annually (7 billion male, 8 billion female). (Broiler chickens for meat are separate.)
How would you evaluate the cost-effectiveness of Writing Doom – Award-Winning Short Film on Superintelligence (2024) in this framework?
(More info on the film's creation in the FLI interview: Suzy Shepherd on Imagining Superintelligence and "Writing Doom")
It received 507,000 views, and at 27 minutes long, if the average viewer watched 1/3 of it, then that's 507,000*27*1/3=4,563,000 VM.
I don't recall whether the $20,000 Grand Prize it received was enough to reimburse Suzy for her cost to produce it and pay for her time, but if so, that'd be 4,563,000VM/$20,000=228 VM/$.
Not sure how to do the quality adjustment using the OP framework, but naively my intuition is that short films like this one are more effective at changing peoples' minds on the importance of the problem per minute than average videos of the AI Safety channels. How valuable it is probably depends mostly on how valuable shifting the opinion of the general public is. It's not a video that I'd expect to create AI safety researchers, but I expect it did help shift the Overton window on AI risk.