Tag: effectivealtruism

T-Shirt Fundraisers Less Dumb Than Previously Thought

I had always assumed t-shirt based fundraisers raised absolutely nothing, because t-shirts are so expensive.  I knew because I ran my old dojo’s zazzle store, and to keep the prices even vaguely plausible I had to keep our profit margin below 10%.  Throw in the time to administer them, and they’re basically a wash, right? Turns out, nope t-shirts are extremely profitable.  A $4 shirt to let you signal virtue seems like a reasonable trade for $65 cash.

The good news is that the bullshit floor for t-shirt fundraisers is actually much lower than we thought (although bad organizations can still dilute their effectiveness, and cash is still better).  I thought the bad news was we were all overpaying for novelty nerd t-shirts, but it turns out prices on those have come down substantially since I left the market.  I guess capitalism worked?

Effective Actions Post-Mortem

Last week Sydney and I organized a meetup/presentations on accessible effective actions.  Overall: it was a good idea, but the wrong audience for it.  Signs of this include people saying “but if you’re giving up some meats why not just give up all of them?” in the talk on reducatarianism and “signing up to be a marrow donor is really easy” in the blood donation section.  Meanwhile we totally forgot that not everyone spent five years reading academic research and wishing for a charity that did direct cash transfers, so we were not prepared to explain GiveDirectly as much as it needed to be.  Which is not to say we didn’t try.  When a new person asked “but isn’t giving cash directly to people bad?”, the room almost cracked with the energy of six people preparing to explain that no, it was actually the best idea ever.  This turns out to be not nearly as good as one person preparing to explain it ahead of time.

There were also concerns it ran long, but we didn’t time it, so the lesson there is “time your presentations.”

My Suggestions For Studying Vegan Advocacy

So if the current studies on leafleting effectiveness are unhelpful, what would be better?

First, we need a better way to determine what people are eating.  People are notoriously terrible at remembering exactly how often they did a common thing over a prolonged time period, even if there’s no social pressure to answer a particular way. Possible solutions:

  • Ask people what they ate yesterday.
  • Monitor food consumption directly.
    • Bring people into the lab and observe what they eat.
    • Track dietary choices at individual level via dining cards (probably requires more detail than those cards currently provide)
    • Track dietary choices at population level by measuring total consumption in the cafeteria.
  • Give surveys asking people would like to eat, out of N specific options.  Make all answers equally appetizing.  Frame as cafeteria planning to avoid social pressure towards veg*n answers.
  • Use various established tricks for mitigating social desirability bias

Another difficulty with the leafleting studies is that it is very difficult to asses who was in the treatment group 2-3 months later.  Possible solutions:

  • Track individuals who received your pamphlet (and a control group).
    • At a college where you can track purchases by dining card: deliver pamphlets by mail to a randomly chosen half of your sample.
    • Use control and treatment colleges or dorms, rather than individuals.  Will require finagling to avoid other confounds.
  • Hand out pamphlets in front of cafeteria or restaurant, see how consumption patterns change that night.
  • Have pamphlets be a call to action to something trackable, such as visiting a website,  requesting a free veganism kit, or attending an on-campus event.  Number who visit or call is an upper bound on number of people influenced by pamphlet.
  • Humane League is apparently trying this with facebook ads: I predict I will find that data much  more compelling.

While we are at it, here are some interventions I think would work better than leafleting at reducing total meat consumption (although not necessarily the number of self-identified vegans or vegetarians):

  • Pay-per-click ads.  To the extent “it’s super cheap and it has to convince someone” applies, it has to apply here too, and this way you’re not paying for pamphlets that go straight in the trash.  Also I expect vegans to care a little more about paper waste.
  • Host discussion groups where brainstorm how to reduce meat consumption.  In WW2 this worked much better than lectures on increasing consumption of organ meat.  This could focus on vegan meals, or even Asian-style cooking where meat is a supplement rather than the focus.
  • Lobby colleges to provide attractive no-animal-product options.  This reduces meat consumption even among people with no ideological commitment to doing so.  It also helps college students build a palate for vegan options that may continue into adulthood.
  • Host low meat/veg*n meals yourself.  College students love free food.  At a minimum, that’s one meal’s worth of animal you’ve saved.  Plus the palate building benefits of the cafeteria option.
  • Talk to the food science people and steal their secrets for making food appetizing.

Leaflets are Ineffective, Tell Your Friends

7679534638_59865527ef_oSomehow the meme got established in Effective Altruism communities that convincing people to go vegetarian or vegan is cheap and easy, and the only question is whether doing so as a substitute for reducing consumption yourself was ethical.  Me, John, Jai, and one shy friend dug deep into the research and discovered so many problems with the design of the studies showing this that we wrote them off entirely.  I wrote up a whole blog post explaining how Animal Charity Evaluator’s analysis was wrong, and leafleting was not effective.  In an act of thoroughness I would soon be very grateful for, I went to ACE’s website to make sure I was representing the studies exactly right.  Turns out ACE made essentially the same criticisms we did, and also concluded the studies were insufficient to show any net effect from leafleting.  If you go to the slate star codex link and follow the link to his sources, one has since renounced his math and the other says that his numbers are not meant so much to be “true” as to be “motivating in their concreteness”.

I did eventually find some organizations claiming leafleting was genuinely effective.  Vegan Outreach cites Farm Sanctuary, which uses the exact study Animal Charity Evaluators criticized.  ACE doesn’t go quite as far as I would: they note the 95% confidence interval of the effect and then the systemic biases of the study, whereas I would say “if you can’t get an effect size bigger than .001 in a study so egregiously biased towards your view, there is no effect.”  But the criticisms have always been there.

It’s not like anyone’s default belief is “lots of humans can be convinced to make enormous  permanent changes by one glossy 8.5×11 piece of paper,” so how this belief become established with so little data?  How did I dig into ACE’s data deeply enough to understand the design flaws myself without noticing they saw the flaws too? (partial answer: their calculator still shows leafleting having an effect ).  Unless there’s data I don’t know about, there doesn’t appear to be any support for the idea that leafleting reduces animal suffering.  We really need to figure out how this spread in a movement dedicated to quantification so we can fix the systemic issue.

EDIT: I’ve had a couple of requests to include the specific criticisms.  I originally didn’t because it felt mean to rehash ACE’s criticisms, but since the whole point is you can read their documentation without realizing them, that reasoning seems dumb now.

Everyone knows there’s a social desirability bias (reporting converting to veg*nism when you haven’t).  This is especially an issue for the people who report reducing but not eliminating animal products- it’s easy to lie about that, to yourself or others.  But the denominator (how many people received flyers total) is also unreliable, because there are a lot of reasons people who received a pamphlet will report they didn’t when asked two months later.  Maybe they threw it out without looking at it.  Maybe they read it and forgot.  Maybe they totally remember it and realize that if they say yes to the surveyor there will be a long conversation that implies they torture animals, and they would like to not do that.

We don’t have to assume this is a problem: one of ACE’s studies attempted to use a control group, and flat out couldn’t, because no one reported receiving the control flyer.  The lack of control group is a big problem, because it means you will give flyers credit for people that would have gone veg*n anyway.

Then you have to predict how long they stay veg*n.  ACE’s numbers are outlined here, and there’s several problems.  There’s social desirability bias again, and the samples are representative neither of the population at large or the population being leafleted.  I have a strong prior that people who make changes based on a flyer are less likely to stick with them than the general population

This is minor, but ACE doesn’t count the value of the leafleters time when calculating effectiveness.  Even if they’re volunteers, you need to consider the value of what else they could be doing with that time.

More ways to make to the world better

Seattle Effective Altruists just got a bunch of new potential members from the very different spheres of “Peter Singer’s talk” and “the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality wrap party”.  I am planning an event targeted at these new people, with the dual goals of “make them slightly more effective even if they never come back” and “induce them to learn and do more about effective altruism”.  The specific plan is to present actions one can do right now to make the world a better place.  “Donating to GiveWell” will be there, but so will donating blood.  I am looking for things that run the full spectrum of cheap/expensive, difficult/easy, time consuming/not, so that everyone has something that is doable for them.  That especially means not having too many things that run on money, because not everyone has a lot of money to spare and we already spend a great deal of time on options for those that do.  Any other suggestions for what to include?  The list so far is:

  • Have you considered just giving money?
  • Use Amazon smile and a Charity Science referral link to buy from Amazon
  • Hold a birthday fundraiser
  • Donate blood, sign organ donor card
  • Reduce animal consumption/buy humane animal products.

I’ll add more as suggestions come in.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Effectiveness

The biological/scientific definitions of heredity and heritable differ slightly from the popular usage.  Lay people tend use it  to mean “how much is this caused by genes?”  In science, heredity is how closely people resemble their parents, divided by the total variation in the population.  Biological sex has almost zero heritability because knowing someone’s parents sex does not allow you to predict their own sex.*  Number of arms is barely heritable, because there’s almost no variation in number of arms among humans, and what variation exists is overwhelmingly caused by environment, not genetics.

A corollary to this is that a measure of heredity is only valid for the exact environment you measured it in.  If you plant a variety of seeds in identical pots and give them identical water and supplements, most variation will be due to genetics, and a small amount to chance (which will be counted as environment), so traits like height and time to flower will be highly heritable.  If you plant those same seeds in widely varying pots and vary the water and nutrients they get, a lot of the variation will be due to environment, and the heredity values of the same traits will be much lower.  Skin color in Norway is more heritable in the winter than in the summer, because teenagers deliberately tan more than their parents.

I have struggled before to make effectiveness estimates when the intervention’s usefulness depends on multiple factors.  Blood for car accident victims is only helpful in the context of emergency rooms and medical schools and sterile gauze.  Suicide hotlines require phones and electricity and suicidal people at a bare minimum, and active rescues require police and mental hospitals and often pharmaceutical research.  I think I’m just going to have to put effectiveness in the same category as heredity: the quantification is only valid for the environment in which it is measured.

I’ve worried before about Effective Altruism’s tendency to take the existing system as a given.  That was a reasonable simplification when the movement was first starting, and there was plenty of low hanging fruit that didn’t require more sophisticated analysis.  But I’m really happy to see organizations like the Open Philanthropy Project branch into studying how to change systems and how to measure the effectiveness of attempts to do so.

*Intersexuality confounds this a little but my impression is it’s mostly not a genetic issue, in part because intersex people generally have difficulty reproducing.

Is Blood Donation Effective? (Yes)

Seattle is apparently not the only Effective Altruism group to talk about doing volunteering meetings, only to remember that the traits that make volunteering useful are almost antithetical to the traits that make it fun and doable to for a group on a drop-in basis.  I am kind of hoping that blood donation can bridge that gap.  So here’s my math on how effective donating blood is.  The Red Cross estimates a single donation can save three people, but what they mean is “a single donation can go to three different people.”  To get the actual value we need to see how many units of blood were donated and how many deaths they prevented.

The most recent data I could find was the 2011 National blood Collection and Utilization Survey Report (PDF), which couldn’t make it harder to do this kind of calculation if it tried.  They were extremely loose with what “unit” referred to, so I’m going to stick with the whole and red blood cell transfusions, so my numbers are consistent.  There were 15,721,000 units collected, of which 14,589,000 were deemed usable.  13,785,000 were used, of which 37,000 were directed to a specific patient, and 65,000 were self-donations, which are less effective for various reasons.  The collections numbers don’t call out general vs. specific donations and the numbers are small, so I’ll just use the total number used.  If some blood donations are also generating plasma and white cells in addition to the red blood cells counted here, that would only increase effectiveness.

A single donation is one pint.  Health and Human Services fails to define what they mean by unit, but it appears to mean “whatever you get from one donation after some filtering“, so let’s assume it’s 1:1.  The average recipient receives 2.75 units.  If you assume each person who received a transplant would otherwise die (supported by this sourceless FAQ), that means each donation saves ~1/3 of a life (discounting for donations that are rejected).  Using GiveWell’s $5,000/life number, that’s still equivalent to donating $1,667.   That is overstating the case, because some portion of recipients (I can’t find out how many) have diseases like sickle cell anemia that require chronic transfusions, and the fair thing is to count their lifetime transfusion count, not their per treatment count.  To get an upper bound I’ll use the Red Cross’s number that a car accident victim can use up to a 100 pints of blood, which means each donor saves 1% of that life, which is equivalent to $50 to an extremely effective charity.

But the question isn’t “what is the average value of donated blood?” but “what is the marginal value of your potential donation?”  I can’t find any direct numbers for this, but we have the following evidence:

  • Very little blood is thrown out.
  • People are spending lots of time and money developing artificial blood substitutes.  Despite this there are no generally accept substitutes for blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity.
  • The Red Cross spends a lot of time and money harassing people to donate.  They called my parents’ house for years after my one donation (I’m O-).
  • Some blood is able to reach the “too old” state, but then used to ill effect, indicating lumpy supply or demand.  Unless you can predict demand spikes you should use the average efficacy.  If you can predict demand spikes, there are probably more effective things to do with that power.

So I’m just going to use the average effectiveness as the marginal effectiveness for now.

What are the costs to the donor of donating?  The one time I donated it was high because I slept for the next two days.  If you’re my friend Elena who went into shock after donating, it cost you days and several thousand dollars in ER visits.  So it is probably not worth it for either of us to donate.  But for a typical person with no side effects, it’s plausibly useful.  If it’s replacing work time, then effectiveness depends on their hourly wage.  Multiple websites list the time to donate as 60-90 minutes, which translates to a minimum psuedowage of $33/hour and a maximum of $1667.  The average hourly American wage is $24/hour, although I would estimate the average wage of people earning to give as somewhat higher than that.  So that’s extremely plausible on its face.  But if the time isn’t coming out of work, and is made rewarding to the participant, blood donation is hugely effective.  This suggestions that an event that induced people to donate without replacing work would be effective, more so if it could be made into a positive experience.  So a blood donation event could be a huge win for an EA event.

[Side note: if you decide to do this yourself, I would recommend donating anywhere but the Red Cross if at all possible.  I’m going to try for Bloodworks NW, because if I get enough people they will send a truck and we can make it an actual party]

Bloody cupcakes
Do not GIS “blood donation party” with safesearch off

Video Games for Good

Extra Credits is a video series on game design and the game industry.  It has interesting insights I don’t see elsewhere, but it is also… low density.  You could compress most episodes into a single written paragraph and lose nothing.  I tend to watch them when being told the same thing over and over with completely unnecessary accompanying graphics is calming, rather than annoying, which isn’t very often, so I only just caught this video on whether games can induce empathy.

If you are not in the mood to be reassuringly talked down to, they helpfully provide a summary:

Many studies have investigated whether or not there is a link between video games and violence, but few have looked at the bigger picture. What is the correlation between video games and empathy? Since games put us, as players, in the role of characters who are not ourselves, asking us to understand their situation and the problems that they face, they have the potential to teach us about how to empathize with others. While many gamers have anecdotal evidence about games that made them feel a character’s pain, there’s a disappointing lack of formal studies into that side of the question.

Examples: This War of Mine, Cart Life

I didn’t think anything of it until a week later at my Effective Altruism meetup, when we were discussing egalitarianism/maximization.  In a nutshell, EA believes that all lives are equally valuable, so if you can save two lives for $n each or one life for $2n, the most moral thing to do is to save the two lives.  Phrased that way I don’t understand how it’s at all controversial, but in practice it comes up against many people’s instinctive priorities.  For some, passing over a homeless person to give to GiveDirectly doesn’t just give them fewer warm-fuzzies, it feels actively immoral.  Someone at the meeting suggested it was a matter of empathy- people naturally feel more empathy the more often they see someone, or the more they have in common with them.

This is  of course obvious, which is why so many charities try to up the empathy you feel for their beneficiaries, by implying you’re helping a particular person when you’re not, or just sending a letter with a few heartwarming stories of all the injured dogs they’ve saved that year.*  They do it because it get donations, but it’s very hard not to slide into poverty porn. I find those examples really manipulative, but I loved the ability to choose out specific recipients when donating to Modest Needs so clearly I’m just as susceptible.

This is where I thought of that Extra Credits video.  What if instead of telling people how awful extreme poverty is, we gave them a video game demonstrating both the difficulties poor people faced and the resources they used?  Some things I would like to include:

  • Trade offs, trade offs, trade offs.  Do you invest in your child’s schooling or new farming equipment?
  • Bee Sting theory– demonstrating how it is easy to do the right long term thing when you have a few problems, but when too much is wrong sometimes palliatives are all you can manage.
  • The importance of social capital.  The poor (both in the US and the 3rd world) get a lot of criticism for spending so much on alcohol and ceremonies, but the fact is that that builds social relationships that can be crucial later on.  This doesn’t mean spending a lot on booze and parties is optimal, but that the change must come at a societal level.
  • How many well intentioned NGOs fail.  E.g. my continuing hate for the play pump.
  • Ideally you’d like to convey the scope of preventable deaths.  I don’t know how to do that respectfully.  You could do something like Shelter or The Oregon Trail, where you go in knowing some characters will die and the goal is to save as many as possible, but that seems a little horrifically callous.

I have several ideas for how to do this.  You could do the trade offs with a choice mechanism like that of Depression Quest or Long Live the Queen.  Soha Kareem has has apparently done some great work with video games to express her experience of microaggressions and sexual abuse.

EA strikes me as having a real comparative advantage when it comes to producing video games, relative to other charitable movements.  And by “real comparative advantage”, I mean “lots of programmers”.**  None are games programmers specifically, but it might be a skill worth picking up.

*Pro-tip for my local humane society: this may not work as well on cat owners as you were hoping.

**We were up to two non-programmers at the last meeting.  High five.

How effective is volunteering at a suicide hotline?

EDIT: 2023-05-10: I changed my thinking on this within a year or two of writing, and never updated because AFAIK no one was reading it. The post was linked to recently, so just in case: I don’t have better numbers than what I came up with here, but the overall rationale seems very similar to that of vegan leafletting, and I just don’t believe their numbers. I think people are in general likely to overestimate the effect of conversations they just had.

None of this means volunteering can’t be effective, or is worse than a given volunteer’s best alternative, but I don’t think “I felt helpful” is strong data.

Months ago my local EA group had a meeting around the concept of Effective Volunteering.  EA is not opposed to volunteering anymore than it it’s opposed to working directly for a cause, but it is more skeptical than the general population that this is the most effective way to help the world.  This doesn’t mean volunteering is bad, it can have all sorts of benefits outside of helping the world- building community, buffing one’s resume, and generally feeling good.  But if you want to justify volunteering on its helping-the-world merits, you have to compare it to the standard option of “work more, donate money.”

[I’m ignoring the argument that most people aren’t paid hourly because “learn skills to boost wages, donate excess” is an equally valid plan]

Based on the local discussion plus this post by Ben Kuhn, I propose that volunteering is most effective when some critical mass of the following are met:

  1. The product produced by volunteers is not the same as that produced by minimum wage workers (e.g. food kitchen volunteers are generally more cheerful than McDonalds workers)
  2. The volunteer has some comparative advantage in the task (e.g. pro bono work by lawyers)
  3. The activity does not take away from paid work (e.g.I have more hours in the week total than hours in the week I am capable of programming).

The problem is that 2 and 3 are often in conflict.  People’s comparative advantage tends to be used at work, either because that’s what led them to the work or they developed the talent there.  So it either has to be someone not capable of working regularly, or the person has to have two different comparative advantages.  I happen to think I fall into this category, because I’m very good at both programming and crisis chat counseling and they use entirely different parts of my brain.  And actually crisis chat makes a good play for having trait 1 as well: it’s heavy emotional work, and there are a lot more people capable of doing it 4 hours a week than 40.

Which got me thinking: how effective is crisis chat?  I’m fully prepared for the answer to be “not very”, it really seems like it’s on the less efficient side of things, but let’s run the numbers.

First step: how much does running a suicide hotline cost?  The first posting I found that listed a salary said $16.00/hour, and that’s for bilingual workers in an area with a cost of living 60% higher than the national average.  Let’s say $20/hour to include taxes, phones and computers, vacation time, etc.  GiveWell considers anything under $5,000 per life saved to be extremely cost effective, so to be competitive a hotline worker would have to save one life every 250 hours worked.  Statistics on chat line effectiveness are hard to come by because they’re anonymous by design, but I worked ~170 hours last year and I know for a fact I was 1/2 of a team that saved one life, and find it plausible that I saved more.  I work on the text line, which for various reasons is less likely to attract people who are imminently suicidal, so I suspect the phone line workers are more effective.  By this measure, suicide hotlines are competitive with GiveWell’s top charities.

The complication is that the hotline doesn’t do this alone.  I gave myself half a life because I called in a rescue for a phone worker who contacted me via chat, but that success depended on emergency workers finding the person and a mental hospital to take him in.  Malaria nets don’t work alone either (they can’t solve famine or war), but this seems more like evaluating the cost of the nets without the cost of employees to distribute them.  On the other hand, some percentage of chats may talk people out of suicide without requiring an active rescue.  If I help a person form a plan to keep themselves safe until the urge passes, that’s incredibly effective.

The other way to look at it is what would people pay for the service.  My gut feeling is that the service I provide is more valuable than anything the visitors could buy with $20*.  The most comparable services, therapy and psychiatric visits, start at $60/hour.  Crisis lines are not a substitute for psychiatry or counseling, but a marginal hour of chatting may be a reasonable substitute for an hour of either, given how much of their sessions is empathetic listening.    Even if hotline workers are not as effective at listening because they are lower status, that’s still substantial savings.  Plus we get a good chunk of people are uncomfortable talking to a real professional because they are so high status, but feel okay talking to us.  On the other hand, I’m pretty sure most of the bottom billion would take the $20, or even $2, over an hour talking with me.  Competitive within the sphere of 1st world interventions is not the same as competitive.

Still, that’s a much higher effectiveness rate than I was anticipating.  And it manages to hit all three of my criteria above (for people who are good at listening but don’t do it professionally), which is a pretty neat trick.  Unfortunately it does not work for Kuhn’s use case at all, since he was looking for things EAers could do as a group on an ad hoc basis.  I suspect this is not a coincidence.

*Testing this directly would be hard, since there’s nothing to stop someone who wants two hours of chatting to say they want five, but will accept two + $60.

Locks of Love

I have mixed feelings on this criticism of Locks of Love.  They do appear to deliberately mislead people that the hair is going to pediatric chemo patients, when most of the wigs they make go to alopecia patients.  The cancer patients that do get wigs are those rendered permanently bald, not temporarily so.   I think it’s completely fair to criticize LoL for that mislead.

But the article also criticizes Locks of Love for throwing away hair that is grey, moldy, or too short for wigs (even though the guidelines on the website are pretty clear on what’s required), and for selling most of the hair that is donated.  The author derides this as getting a haircut for no purpose.  I think that criticism is not only unfair, but reveals a fundamental problem in the way the author views charity.  If your goal is to help bald children, you should want them to throw out unsuitable hair, and be agnostic as to whether your hair ends up in a child’s wig, or in a wig made by a commercial company that paid LoL for it.  You’re helping just as much.  Deriding this implies that having your hair on the head of a child is more important than a system that gets the most children.  If that’s true you’re welcome to pay for the privilege, but don’t pretend it’s the same as donating to help people.

Of course the chemo bait-and-switch is still dubious, and if you have a preference for helping that population it’s totally valid to go with one of the other orgs listed in the article