Comments

@SofiaBalderson

Thanks for all the context, Sofia!

Yes, I am happy to be contacted later on.

I am glad you already have internal estimates of your benefit-to-cost ratio (excluding unreported impact). I think it would be nice if you made them public at some point.

I think the approach I used is conceptually similar to the one Animal Advocacy Careers is using, but theirs is more rigorous, as I just made up my numbers.

Thanks for sharing!

"Any contribution towards this amount will be greatly appreciated and help demonstrate the value of the forum to the EA community, thereby helping us to leverage further funding."

I hope Open Philanthropy and the Animal Welfare Fund decide on their funding of AASF based on other considerations besides you much funding you got on Manifund.

Thanks for sharing, Marine!

Do you have any plans to measure the outcomes of the course? For example, surveying people who participate later on to see of they got into job or volunteering placements as a result of your course.

Have you considered making the course available on a platform like Coursera once you fill you have iterated enough for it to be worth reaching a wider audience?

@Marine-Lercier

Thanks for the question, Jason! Thanks for clarifyng, Marine! I worry it may be difficult ti make a single course valuable for such a diverse audience.

Thanks for sharing, Caroline!

"When we ran an event like this in the past, many of our attendees found us through our social media."

Did you measure the outcomes of that event, for example, the new work or volunteering placements it caused?

Thanks for sharing, Sofia! How many of the 12 advocates who received funding, 26 that started a new job, and 11 that started a new volunteering or training position were funded by impact-focussed funders like Open Philanthropy and the Animal Welfare Fund, or hired by organisations funded by such funders? What was the spending to achieve this impact? These data can be used to determine a benefit-to-cost ratio. For example, if the funding per advocate was 10 k$, the annual salary for the new jobs was 30 k$, and people got there 1 year earlier than they would have without Hive, and 3 volunteering placements are worth 1 paid work placement, and funding and direct work were 10 % more cost-effective relative to the counterfactual hire or grant without the advocates supported by Hire, the total benefits would be 101 k$ (= (12*10*10^3 + (26 + 11/3)*30*10^3)*0.1). If so, the spending would have to be less than 101 k$ for your activities to be worth it. I think it would be great if you could assess your cost-effectiveness following a similar methodology with more accurate numbers.

Thanks for sharing, Steven! Do you have a sense of how many dollars you have to spend to cause one advocate to be hired by an organisations which has received funds from impact-focussed funders like Open Philanthropy and the Animal Welfare Fund?

Thanks for sharing, Nicoll! Have you tried to estimate the benefit-to-cost ratio of TMM's work from \sum_i{"relative increase in the cost-effectiveness of the organisation i you helped"*"annual spending of organisation i"*"duration of the effect you had on organisation i in years"}/"cost", or similar?

Thanks for sharing, Monica! Do you have a sense of how many dollars you have to spend to cause one advocate to be hired by an organisations which has received funds from impact-focussed funders like Open Philanthropy and the Animal Welfare Fund?

Thanks for sharing, Jessica! Do you have an estimate for the reduction in kg in the consumption of animals per $ spent on your program?

@Tomohaire

Thanks, Tom! You may want to link to your cost model in case others want to have a look.

I asked ChatGPT about the cost of twine, and the 1st result was "Polypropylene Baler Twine Wholesale for Agriculture" costing 1.70 $/kg (https://sdhmtextile.en.made-in-china.com/product/LZyfEOAvrwWp/China-Polypropylene-Baler-Twine-Wholesale-for-Agriculture.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com), which is cheaper than the lower bound of the range you provided for your system.

For reference, I would estimate the benefit-to-cost ratio of buying machines from "lifetime production of the machine in kg"*("$/kg with the machine" - "$/kg of the best alternative")/"cost of one machine in $". Do you preferred parameters imply a ratio higher than the value of 2.4 of unconditional cash transfers (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26600/w26600.pdf)?

Nice point, @Jason! Thanks for the information, @kankyoku! Given your projections for future funding, how many votes in favour of banning factory-farming would the 15 k$ you are requesting buy? What is your best guess for the probability of the ban passing without the 15 k$ of additional funding? Would the additional votes meaningfully move it up? If the baseline chance of winning is low, I think buying additional votes would barely move the chance of the ban coming to pass.

Thanks for sharing, Astrid!

It is great that you have estimated how many animals you saved. I think it would be even better to calculate how many animal-years you averted. Holding the living conditions constant, if these are bad, saving one animal who lives for 1 year is better than saving another animal who lives in the same conditions for 1 month. If each cow lives for 10 years, gives birth to the 1st calve after 2.33 years (= 28/12), and then has 1 calf/year, each cow has 8 calves (= 1 + FLOOR((10 - 2.33)/1)) over their lifetime, as you estimated. If each calf lives for 1 year, there are 18 cow-years per dairy cow (= 10 + 8*1), or 1.8 cow-years per dairy-cow-year (= 18/10).

The farmers may have transitioned without your support, so I think your impact is better modelled as accelerating their transition. Assuming you antiticaped their transition by 10 years (note this has to be less than the time until their farm closes for other reasons, such as farmers' retirement or bankruptcy), you avert 18 cow-years per dairy cow saved (= 1.8*10). Since each farmer has 45 dairy cows, that is 810 cow-years per farmer transitioning (= 18*45). You made 15 transition, so I estimate you averted 36.4 k cow-years (= 810*45). I suspect this is an overestimate because I have not accounted for new farms being created, or existing farms being expanded to offset the decrease in supply caused by you having made some farmers transition.

How much did you spend to achieve your impact? If 30 k$, which is "One year part-time salary + travel expenses", my estimate above implies you averted 1.21 cow-years per $ (= 36.4*10^3/(30*10^3)).

I estimate cage-free corporate campaigns improve 10.8 chicken-years per $, and increase welfare by 80.4 % (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8FqWSqv9AeLowgajn/cost-effectiveness-of-corporate-campaigns-for-chicken), which implies they have an impact equivalent to averting 8.68 chicken-years of chickens in conventional cages per $ (= 10.8*0.804). If 1 chicken-year of chickens in conventional cages was as bad as 1 cow-year, cage-free campaigns would be 7.17 (= 8.68/1.21) times as cost-effective as your project has been given by assumptions. I guess the conditions of chickens in conventional cages are 5 times as bad as those of cows, but I estimate chickens' welfare range is 64.4 % (= 0.332/0.515) that of cows (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Qk3hd6PrFManj8K6o/rethink-priorities-welfare-range-estimates), so I estimate 1 chicken-year of chickens in conventional cages is 3.22 (= 5*0.644) times as bad as 1 cow-year. As a result, I conclude cage-free campaigns are 23.1 (= 7.17*3.22) times as cost-effective as your project has been.

My analysis above neglects the indirect cultural change benefits of your program. Do you have a sense of how large they are? Based on my estimates, they would have to be 23.1 times as large as the direct benefits for your project to be as cost-effective as cage-free campaigns.

Thanks for your efforts helping animals!

Vasco

Thanks for sharing, Tom! Some questions that come to mind:

• How would the fibre produced by you machine be useful?

• How much would it cost? Is it cheaper than the alternative? If so, by how much?

• Is your solution competitive with unconditional cash transfer (https://www.givedirectly.org/)? In other words, assuming each machine costs 100 $, would be benefits caused by it be at least as large as those caused by giving 100 $ to the people who would benefit from using the machine?

I'd be open to a bet or prediction market of some kind like "will Alex raise further funding from an EA funder" if that seems cruxy to you.

@Austin , what do you think about the following bet. If Alex is not funded by Charity Entrepeneurship (one can apply to their incubation program with one's own idea) nor GiveWell until 1 year from now (i.e. until the end of 1 May 2025) in the context of his drone project, you send me 100 $. Otherwise, I send you 900 $ (= (1 - 0.1)/0.1*100), as I think that is less than 10 % likely.

Thanks, @Austin.

I don't expect people like Alex to look at a complicated calculation that concludes "and therefore gene drives are 10x as effective as anti-mosquito drones" and think "okay, so I should drop what I'm doing and work on gene drives"

My Fermi estimate compared Alex's project with Against Malaria Foundation's (AMF's) bednests in DRC, not with gene drives. I am also not expecting Alex to drop the project, but I would appreciate it if @ScottAlexander / @acx-grants could explain their rationale for funding this project. Is the project being funded because it could realistically be funded by GiveWell in the future, i.e. because it could be at least 10 times as cost-effective as donating to people in extreme poverty via GiveDirectly?

Alex might just not believe the calculations -- for plausible reasons! He has a bunch more insight into what's good about drones than an outside observer.

Note my conclusion of AMF's bednets distribution in DRC being 15.3 times as cost-effective as anti-mosquito drones relied on Alex's own calculations. Are you suggesting Alex does not believe in his own calculations, or that my comparison is flawed in some way? I guess the latter, but then it would be nice if you could be more specific. I basically just relied on GiveWell's numbers, which are usually considered quite trustworthy. It is also the case that the real cost-effectiveness tends to be much lower than what is suggested by preliminary results produced by the people proposing the project. One has to control for a thinker's big idea (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GW3cxBurTNKHs352S/controlling-for-a-thinker-s-big-idea). So, even if Alex's own calculations are uncertain, I think they will tend to overestimate the cost-effectiveness of the project.

I do think anti-mosquito drones have a realistic chance (eg >1%) of being sufficiently cost effective to be part of the fight against malaria

What do you think is the probability of GiveWell funding Alex's anti-mosquito drones this year? I guess it is around 1 %, and this seems to low to be worth funding. One could contribute to the seed funding of the charities incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/charity-entrepreneurship-incubated-charities), and I am much more optimistic about their chances of becoming at least as cost-effective as GiveWell's interventions. Charity Entrepreneurship is quite aligned with maximising impact, and their founders go through a very selective process (e.g. I am pretty confident they would understand the concept of marginal cost-effectiveness).

His current set of skills sets him up really well for doing this particular project; founder-market fit is super important in making projects go well

I agree. However, I am thinking a project going well is a necessary rather than sufficient condition for funding it. If a project has the main goal of saving/improving lives, it (or a future iteration of it) still has to do it more cheaply than the best alternatives (like bednets). To illustrate, I am quite confident GiveDirectly makes unconditional cash transfers go well, but I think people wanting to save/improve lives as much as possible had better donate to GiveWell's funds, which fund projects at least 10 times as cost-effective as GiveDirectly.

I think you're underrating "because it sounds cool", I guess. To shore this up a bit more, sounding cool is an important factor in getting buzz, being able to raise further funding, get stakeholders to agree to participate, etc.

As above, I agree these considerations are relevant, but they are not enough. PlayPump sounded like a cool cost-effective way of supplying water to people in low income countries, and it attracted lots of funding on this basis, but it turned out to be way less cost-effective that the best alternatives (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/playpump). I believe greater scrutiny would have revealed this earlier.

I think the general approach of analyzing cost effectiveness just doesn't really make sense for projects at this stage, or is at best one of many different lens. Cost effectieness is a reasonable sanity check, maybe; other than that, I'd look to other signals like founder quality and project velocity

I think cost-effectiveness analyses make sense for early stage projects if they are easy to produce, and I suppose it was quite easy for Alex to get the estimate of 50 $/person/year in his 1st comment in this thread. In addition, I would say it would be worth it to spend more time coming up with a better estimate, as this would very much inform the requirements of the drone. It may be that the requirements for the drones to save lives as cost-effectively as GiveWell's interventions are very unrealistic (e.g. the cost per drone would have to be unreasonably low), which may prompt rethinking or dropping the project.

I agree other considerations besides cost-effectiveness are also relevant, but I feel like you are underweighting it because it seems quite quantifiable in the case of Alex's project (as Alex nicely illustrated). Elie Hassenfeld, who is the CEO of GiveWell (whose evaluations are considered the gold-standard in global health and development), said (https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/096/elie-hassenfeld-why-it-s-so-hard-to-have-confidence-that-charities-are-doing-good/):

GiveWell cost- effectiveness estimates are not the only input into our decisions to fund malaria programs and deworming programs, there are some other factors, but they're certainly 80% plus of the case.

GiveWell said (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CDt5ShpdABZRn8Tvi/my-quick-thoughts-on-donating-to-ea-funds-global-health-and?commentId=CXspdihsLLSepbyjC):

The numerical cost-effectiveness estimate in the spreadsheet is nearly always the most important factor in our recommendations, but not the only factor. That is, we don’t solely rely on our spreadsheet-based analysis of cost-effectiveness when making grants. 

I assume I am also less optimistic than you about Alex. I get the impression Alex may want to go ahead with the project even if he was certain it would be less cost-effective than GiveWell's interventions, and his project absorbed funding which would otherwise go to GiveWell's interventions, which I think would be bad. I am also not sure Alex understands the concept of marginal cost-effectiveness based on his 2nd comment in this thread.

@alextouss Sorry for being too negative. I was assuming the goal of this project was preventing malaria deaths more cost-effectively than the most competitive alternatives (like bednets), but I appreciate others may want to fund the project for other reasons (e.g. because it sounds cool).

Thanks for the the feedback, @Austin . If I was proposing a project, I would find it super helpful if someone pointed out to me there are way more cost-effective interventions. I want to contribute to a better world as much as possible, so I would want to know if the money which would support my project could go towards other interventions that would e.g. save more lives. If I was persuaded by the arguments, I would consider halting the project, returning the money to the donors, and then encourage them to donate to a more promising project.

I agree one should account for the value of information of projects. However, do you think anti-mosquito drones have a realistic chance of being more cost-effective than GiveWell's top charities? If not, there is not much relevant information to be gained? Or are you referring to the value of information which is not related to the cost-effectiveness of the intervention, like Alex getting a better picture of what he wants to do in the future? Are there more cost-effective ways of gaining such other information (for example, for e.g. career plans, checking e.g. 80,000 Hours' career guide (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/))?

I understand Manifund has the goal of supporting early stage projects, I agree it makes sense to support novel interventions, and I personally do not think the platform should be restricted to cost-effective projects. However, I think users should also be welcome to point out whether they think a given project is cost-effective or not.

As a side note, I also think GiveWell's top charities are a pretty low bar. I believe the best animal welfare interventions are 1 k times as cost-effective (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vBcT7i7AkNJ6u9BcQ/prioritising-animal-welfare-over-global-health-and#Corporate_campaigns_for_chicken_welfare_increase_nearterm_wellbeing_way_more_cost_effectively_than_GiveWell_s_top_charities).

@acx-grants Could you explain your reasoning for donating 20 k$ to this project?

@alextouss To clarify, would you agree we should fund whatever is most cost-effective at the margin? If bednets save a life for 5 k$, and drones save a life for 76.5 k$ (= 5*10^3*15.3), then one should fund bednets until their marginal cost to save a life reaches 76.5 k$? GiveWell's current cost-effectiveness bar is 10 times that of unconditional cash transfers (https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/criteria), which means GiveDirectly still looks 1.53 times (= 15.3/10) as cost-effective as your intervention. GiveDirectly's unconditional cash transfers are supe scalable, and I am pretty confident GiveWell has hundreds of millions of $ of room to fund interventions better than GiveDirectly. So one would need to direct hundreds of millions of $ to GiveWell before your project becomes competitive.

@alextouss Thanks for following up, Alex! Your figure of 50 $/person/year is around half of what I estimated, but it still implies that bednets are much better. People with bednets in DRC (the data I provided above was also for DRC) have a 56 % lower malaria mortality (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18ROI6dRdKsNfXg5gIyBa1_7eYOjowfbw5n65zkrLnvc/edit#gid=1364064522&range=B93), so the effective cost for bednets would be 3.27 $/person/year (= 1/0.546/0.56). This means bednets would be 15.3 times (= 50/3.27) as cost-effective as drones even assuming these decrease malaria deaths by 100 % and have no development nor maintenance costs. You can argue your cost would decrease due to economies of scale, but there are also other factors which push it up. For example, I think malaria is more prevalent in rural areas, and rural areas in low income countries are much less dense than Paris.

I do not feel like your numbers are conservative as you say (feel free to link to sources supporting that). You say a drone can cover a square of side of side 2 m, but I assume the rotors do not cover an area of 4 m^2! So you cannot use your linear speed to 10 m/s to do the calculation. Also, 10 m/s (36 km/h) is pretty fast! Would people be happy with having thousands of drones flying at these speed in cities? Would it be safe? I assume drones would need to fly relatively close to people, because that is where the mosquitoes are? Maybe it would be better to just fly the drones in the sources of the mosquitoes (bodies of water, I think), but then gene drives just seem way more effective.

@vascoamaralgrilo From here (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18ROI6dRdKsNfXg5gIyBa1_7eYOjowfbw5n65zkrLnvc/edit#gid=1364064522), bednets provide 0.546 effective person-years of coverage per $ (= 54.6*10^3/(100*10^3)). So a drone costing 200 $ would have to provide 109 person-years of effective coverage (= 200*0.546) to be competitive. In other words, even ignoring maintenance costs, it would have to protect a family of 5 as effectively as bednets for 21.8 years (= 109/5). This seems super optimistic, so I am confused why people are donating so much to your project.

Hi Alex,

Do you any thoughts on how much one would have to spend on drones per year to decrease malaria deaths by 1 %? My intuition is that using drones is way less cost-effective than gene-drives.