Michael Plant

This year, for my birthday, I decided to take the @givingwhatwecan pledge to donate 10% of my income each year to whichever organisations do the most good. A 🧵on why I'm giving, why I didn't start sooner, and where I'm donating to. 1/13

The argument I find most persuasive for why we should help others is Peter Singer's 'Shallow Pond' thought experiment: you see a child drowning and can easily save them, but this will ruin your expensive new shoes. Are you required to jump in? 🤿 2/13

Nearly everyone thinks you are: the benefit to the other person is so much bigger than the cost to you. The twist: we face situations like this all the time. Rather than buy yourself a new hat, you could spend that money helping others, such as those in absolute poverty 🎩. 3/13

Another frame: if you're fortunate enough to be wealthy, you have a duty to help the less fortunate. If you're reading this, that's probably you. A UK median salary of £31k  puts you in the top 2% of *world* income 🪙 4/13 https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=31000&countryCode=GBR&household%5Badults%5D=1&household%5Bchildren%5D=0 

What's more, the reason you have a high income is largely because you were lucky to be born at the right place and time 5/13
https://x.com/MaxCRoser/status/1420671363375898627

Another consideration is the research that money has a surprisingly limited impact on happiness. Hence, it may even make you happier if you give it away, rather than spend it on yourself 6/13
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2021/06/can-money-buy-happiness-a-review-of-new-data/

But ... I've known all this for years. So why start now? Well, one thing I used to say to myself and was true until 2019, is that I was a student without a job, so it was barely worth thinking about.  7/13

The other is that I didn't know where to give. I'm a #happiness nerd. My frustration with the standard #effectivealtruism donation advice is that it wasn't really using happiness data, i.e. self-report surveys. This was a key reason was why I started @HappierLivesIns 8/13

However, when this birthday arrived, I realised that my team had now done enough research I couldn't justify to myself delaying donating any longer. 9/13

I'll be giving 10% of my income to @MakeStrongMinds, which treats women and children for depression in Africa. Depression is very bad, therapy is a cheap and effective treatment, and the effects of the treatment last a long time. 10/13

I won’t justify this decision here - this is more of a personal announcement - but will do so in the next couple of months when @HappierLivesIns releases our research into psychotherapy and cash transfers. 11/13

Maybe I'll regret taking the pledge - all the 🎩 I could have had - but, a week later, I'm happy with it. I’ve finally got around to doing something important I should have done years ago. And I no longer feel @PeterSinger is secretly judging me for my masterly inactivity. 😬😬

Maybe, just maybe, my donations will even make other people happier, too. That would be neat. 13/13

My review of @willmacaskill's What We Owe The Future has just been published in Utilitas! It's open access.

In it, I explain why, although I wanted to share MacAskill's enthusiasm for longtermism, I was left unconvinced. 1/5
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/utilitas/article/william-macaskill-what-we-owe-the-future-a-millionyear-view-one-world-publications-london-2022-pp-246/63384AFA013A89DC2B17A462E89A2192

The book is well-known and my review is short (6 pages), so here I'll just state the four challenges I raise.
1) The three-premise 'case' given for longtermism doesn't form a valid argument.
2) MacAskill presents his premises as simple and uncontroversial; they are not.

3) The book doesn't show it's possible to shape the future; in particular, there isn't a historical example in it that convincingly meets MacAskill's own success criteria (significance, persistence, contingency), so we should be sceptical that we can do so.

4) MacAskill says longtermism would result in a 'moral revolution' but it's not argued how, if true, it would change the priorities. Longtermism gives us more reason to care some things - eg AI, nuclear war - but we already have some reason to care about those now.

To close: MacAskill characterises longtermism as a bold, exciting expedition into the unknown. I agree with him on that - I'm just not sure we should go.

Can we trust happiness surveys? Is my 7/10 = your 7/10? Is going from a 2-&gt;3 = to 6-&gt;7?

While researchers assume yes, the evidence is scarce.

@HappierLivesIns, we ran a 50-question pilot survey (n=128) (https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/report/assessing-the-comparability-linearity-and-neutrality-of-subjective-wellbeing-measurements-a-pilot-study/)
Researchers: are we asking the right Qs?🧵1/10 

Context: in analysing subjective wellbeing (SWB) questions, researchers often assume that self-reports are:
1. comparable: my 6/10 means the same thing as your 6/10
2. linear: that going from 4/10 to 5/10 represents the same size change as going from 8/10 to 9/10

Yet, evidence on these is very thin, and it would be a problem if these assumptions are false, because it would mean we'd interpreted the data wrong. 
They are the🐘 in the room.
Here's what could go wrong with comparability: 

Another issue, if we want to trade-off quality VS quantity of life - crucial for e.g. healthcare - is:
3. 'neutrality', where on the wellbeing scale is equivalent to non-existence?
There's been almost no discussion of this in the literature.

We've tried to think really hard about how to collect data that will test these assumptions. 
In the report, we set out lots of different methods and over 50 questions (see below). 
The aim is to get some answers and move the debate forward, so we're not just swapping intuitions. 

We didn't have a big enough survey to test comparability.
We do find evidence for linearity. 
We're not sure what to make of the answers re neutrality: people think 5/10 on 0-10 scale means zero life satisfaction but life is 'worth living' unless you're very dissatisfied 🤷‍♂️ 

We see these results as indicative only.
What we REALLY want now is for SWB - and other - researchers to weigh in and tell us if we're asking the right questions. 
Once we're happy with the Qs, we'll run a much bigger survey - and hopefully address this 🗝️ scientific issue

Sorry if you hoped for the answers in this🧵.
If can give us feedback that helps us get the answers,  I would be so grateful!
PDF: https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Comparability-linearity-and-neutrality-Pilot-report.pdf
You can email me (michael@happierlivesinstitute.org), reply here, or comment on the EA forum (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cpYR9TsG8BdtETo6u/assessing-the-comparability-linearity-and-neutrality-of-1)

Fair warning: these issues are complicated and the report is not light reading!
Finally, thanks to my heroic co-authors who, as ever, did all the real work: Conrad Samuelsson, @Karakaai and @caspar_kaiser.

Oh, should said this about the feedback we're after 👇
And that @Karakaai (samuel@happierlivesinstitute.org.) is a better person to send comments to than me! 

Just listened to @tobyordoxford's opening presentation at EAG. Was really curious to see what he thought EA needed to learn from SBF. Hot take: a missed opportunity to talk about governance. Thread.

Toby's main point was that we should avoid naive utilitarianism (eg don't be simple maximisers, pay attention to common sense morality). In particular, he emphasised character. Idea seemed to be that if SBF had had better character, FTX blow up would have been avoided.

I welcome a re-emphasis of character, but we don't stop crimes, or run societies well, just by encouraging people to have more integrity! We have systems, governance, policing, etc.

The problem with FTX was that it was tight-knit group of idealistic, inexperienced people with loads of money and no guardrails. I don't see how exhorting SBF to be a good chap would have changed things.

The issues for FTX - inexperience, lack of governance - are tangible in the EA movement too. All the central EA orgs are run under the umbrella of the effective venture foundations, which has a really confusing structure. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GoWNiPbrEb6NHD3MF/announcing-interim-ceos-of-evf

Charity trustees are accountable to no one, yet EVF speaks for the whole movement. Where are the public discussions about what EA should learn from FTX? Where are the plans to add or improve transparency, accountability, democracy, governance? That's what I hoped Toby would raise

The lesson EA should learn, IMO, from its many recent crises, is that we can't and shouldn't expect people to be angels. As the saying goes, don't let a crisis go to waste. I don't see EA learning from what's happened. There needs to be more than a focus on integrity.