Author: Michael Dello-Iacovo

An open letter to the Government of Australia

To the Australian Government and its representative members,

I write to you as a concerned member of the public about a critical issue related to the health and environment of Australians.

In the lead up to the Federal Government elections this year, the major parties are putting out campaigns about their plans to tackle climate change. However, I thought it was odd that none of the major parties have mentioned the number one leading cause of climate change – animal agriculture. If they truly cared about climate change, they’re focusing on the wrong thing.

A full 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the livestock industry, with some estimates including related sources placing the figure at over 50%, compared to just 13% for the transport sector. In western nations it takes 2-2.5 acres of land to grow one cow in a factory farm, while free range farming is even worse, requiring 10 or more times the land usage. Farms also produce significant amounts of waste which ends up in waterways and eventually in the ocean, producing dead zones and harming marine life. Howard Lyman, a former cattle rancher from USA, has stated that “You can’t eat meat and call yourself an environmentalist.”

Further, there are boundless health reasons to adopt a plant based diet, and for a government to promote one. Most chronic health diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity can be cured with a vegan diet, and the risk of cancer is significantly lower. Diet related issues in 2010 contributed to the burden of disease in USA more than smoking, high blood pressure and high blood sugar.

The NHMRC claims to be the peak body for health advice and medical research in Australia; however they are out of step with the other major organisations in the world in advocating meat and dairy consumption as part of a healthy diet. They are, willingly or otherwise, harming Australia and costing tax payer billions of dollars a year. I have written an article about the economic benefits of a government run public health campaign around diet with a focus on encouraging a vegan diet, and the low case benefits run into the billions of dollars within a few years (michaeldello.com/?p=802).

Finally, supporting the livestock industry is cruel and unjust. A growing number of your electorate has decided to adopt a vegan lifestyle in order to not be a part of animal exploitation. The average human eats 7,000 animals in their lifetime. In a world where we abhor treating others because they are different (different skin colour, race, gender, sexuality, religious choices etc.), it is unacceptable to continue to treat animals the way we do simply because they are different. Cows are forcibly impregnated in order to produce milk, and their babies are often taken at birth so they don’t take their mother’s milk so that it can get to a human’s mouth. As a result, this is also a feminism issue.

“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” – Jeremy Bentham.

I appreciate that a lot of support to the major parties comes from the livestock industry, and people are concerned about jobs, however, no one could justify protecting the tobacco industry because of its support or its jobs. Here I have demonstrated that the industry is worse than tobacco and cigarettes. We must transition if we claim to respect the lives of human and non-human animals in Australia. This election, I will be urging all of my friends, family and colleagues to not vote for those parties that still support animal agriculture.

Vegan Australia has released a report demonstrating how the Australian agricultural system can be adapted to avoid the necessity for animal farming, which I encourage you to look at.

Many of the facts from this article are taken from the documentary Cowspiracy, which I urge you to watch if any of this is surprising to you.

Please feel free to call or arrange a meeting to discuss.

Yours faithfully,

Michael Dello-Iacovo

Feel free to use the material here to send to your own representative in the lead up to the Australian federal election if the issues I’ve discussed are important to you.

On veganism and morality

I believe that exploiting animals for their flesh is fundamentally wrong.

If you know me, that shouldn’t be a surprise; I’m a vegan for ethical reasons, so it logically follows that I think eating meat is wrong, and therefore that anyone who does eat meat is doing something wrong. I’m occasionally told that this view makes people feel uncomfortable, and that I should be more respective of the personal choice of others. Let’s look at what a personal choice is.

A personal choice is choosing not to exercise, or choosing to watch one movie instead of another. Physically harming and exploiting a human for pleasure is not a personal choice. If you believe, as I do, that non-human animals can feel and suffer almost as much as humans can (science believes this too – even for fish and (maybe) insects), then you should also hold the view that paying someone to physically harm and exploit animals is not actually a personal choice.

Now let’s think about discomfort. If you lived in a society of people who harm humans for pleasure, you would, presumably, feel justified in making people feel uncomfortable and telling them they are doing something wrong, and making it clear that you do not condone their actions, even if they only have slaves several days a week. Again, as animals can suffer just like humans, there should be no qualms with making it clear that harming animals for pleasure is wrong in an assertive manner. There is probably nothing to be gained by being overly aggressive, but there is also probably nothing to be gained by being overly passive (a view shared by Dr Casey Taft, who wrote Motivational methods for effective vegan advocacy: A clinical psychology perspective).

There are those who choose to remain passive for the sake of their own immediate wellbeing, and that of those around them, but I don’t believe this to be the right choice. For the same reasons we tell loved ones that they can’t sing to save them happiness in the future, despite the short term discomfort, we should be comfortable telling those close to us that their actions are not ethical. Imagine a friend or family member reaching the end of the life and realising they did something wrong for the last 80 years, despite multiple opportunities to change. Would you not prefer that you had helped them realise that earlier? Not to mention it places a very low weighting on the wellbeing of the 7,000 animals that the average human eats in their lifetime.

As recently as 150 years ago the majority of the world believed that it was acceptable to use and abuse humans who were sufficiently different to them. Presumably we are quite happy there were those who stood up and made the slave traders uncomfortable. However, today we still use and abuse other beings simply because they are different. Very little has changed – we are just a little kinder to 1 species amongst millions.

For an anecdote, I recently attended a strategy meeting with an environmental organisation in Australia. The focus was on effective means of advocating for climate action in the lead up to the Federal election in July. I mentioned that I was seriously concerned that so many individuals and organisations claimed to care about the environment, and would actually harass people who don’t (they spent 10 minutes insulting the personal character of a local politician who was not present), and yet still don’t make the one lifestyle change which makes the biggest difference of all; going vegan. Further, the same organisations and people refuse to make vegan advocacy a priority for mitigating climate change. Everyone in the room averted their eyes. I don’t feel bad for making them uncomfortable. If I was in a room of climate change deniers I would happily tell them they are wrong about that. This exchange was different in topic, but not in theme.

This is mostly a piece on what I believe. The most effective means of advocacy, and therefore what I should do in practice, is another question entirely. To that end, I’m currently writing a review paper on the effectiveness of different actions that individuals and organisations can take to reduce and hopefully eliminate the suffering and exploitation of human and non-human animals. However, in conclusion, I don’t believe there is anything to be gained by being passive in the face of atrocities.

“The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept.” Lieutenant General David Morrison

If you are reading this and thinking that you are too old to change because of habit, I’d like to dissuade you of that notion. There are more and more examples of people of all ages making the change. But even if you believe that change gets harder as you get older, that should be reason to make the change now, not to wait.

The problem with so many advocacy groups

Recently I’ve become somewhat jaded with typical advocacy groups, which are usually in the form of non-profit organisations. These organisations are very often single issue groups – they pick a side in a debate (sometimes for great reasons, sometimes not), and stick to it. In fact, they are bound to stick to it – a point I’ll return to shortly.

Take an extreme example like the Anti-Nuclear Alliance of Western Australia. They are clearly committed to being against nuclear. Without actually taking sides here and completely ignoring the science (because for this thought experiment it’s irrelevant), let’s say that we know for a fact that nuclear use is unsound – the ANAWA would therefore have very good reasons to be against nuclear in (Western) Australia. But let’s now say that the state of science has changed. We realised we were wrong, and now we’re very certain that nuclear usage is not only safe, but beneficial and necessary to tackle climate change (these scientific flips really aren’t that uncommon, even today). In this hypothetical world, we’re now more sure that nuclear is safe and beneficial than we are that smoking causes lung cancer. What happens to the Anti-Nuclear Alliance of Western Australia?

In all honestly, I dare say they would most likely stick to their policy line. Their organisational mission, strategy and vision all dictate that they fight against nuclear in Australia. They owe it to their stakeholders, the donors who are giving money to them to fight nuclear, to continue their path. I see this as a fundamental flaw of such an organisation.

I often joke about a charity called the ‘Do The Right Thing Society’, or the ‘Best Possible World Organisation’, whose mission is simply to make the world as good a place as possible. Such an organisation might not be as appealing to the majority of the public as something more punchier, even if they happen to have the same mission at the time because the science aligns with public sentiment that way. The advantage with DTRTS though is that they are committed to updating their mission and actions with new evidence. If we expect individuals to do this, why can’t we demand the same of charities, or political parties for that matter?

In essence, I do believe that Effective Altruism seeks to plug this gap. At its core, it’s a movement of people seeking to find the most effective ways to maximise well being while being neutral to individual causes.

There are some things that we can be quite confident will not change, like the fact that non-human animals, women and other groups persecuted in the past and present should not be exploited. However, society did once believe that it was right to keep slaves, right for women to not vote, and many still believe that it is right to exploit animals. People should be open to changing their minds, even on their most closely held beliefs.

I have a nightmare that historians a mere 200 years in the future will look at my actions with horror, or kindly explain to each other that my actions were a product of the time and there’s nothing I could have done about it. What do we do today that will be abhorrent in the future? I think the only thing we can do is stay open minded about morality, whilst accepting that there is a right answer out there somewhere, and we are always striving towards it.

Rate of growth of veganism

I heard a statistic right at the end of this video from 2014 by vegan advocate and psychologist Melanie Joy.

In the United States, the number of vegans and vegetarians has doubled in the past three years.

This got my attention. Even with a low starting point, if that rate of increased continued, it would quickly hit 100%. How quickly? The answer might surprise you.

Estimates of the proportion of vegans within countries vary greatly from year to year, and even between studies, probably due to small or biased samples. One only needs to look at three surveys produced by the Vegetarian Resource Group in 2011, 2012 and 2015. The number of vegetarians (including vegans) goes from 5%, to 4% to 3.4%. It seems unreasonable to believe (though I wouldn’t quite fall off my chair if I’m wrong) that the proportion of vegetarians in a developed nation is dropping over recent years. The sample sizes of these studies (and many similar ones) is around a few thousand, which might give statistically significant results, but they are still uncertain. As such, I don’t believe the number is actually decreasing, and I’m happy to take a doubling of vegans over 3 years at face value for the purpose of this estimate.

If we take a lower bound and say 0.5% (which seems highly likely to be a lower bound for USA), and model in a 100% increase in proportion every 3 years, we get this.

Years from nowProportion of vegans in USA
00.5
31
62
94
128
1516
1832
2164
24128

So we might expect to see a full population of vegans, at least in USA, barring some outliers, after around 21-24 years. We assume a constant rate of growth here, which is highly unlikely to be true. But will it get faster or slower over time? When we look at many social justice movements (e.g. black rights, abolition of slavery), they follow an exponential growth rate [do they?]. We might also expect veganism to hit a run away critical mass. We should probably also expect that there will be some people who will simply take much longer to change their underlying beliefs if not their actions, just like we still have some people who wish minority groups are still treated differently in secret. In the same way, animal exploitation will probably be illegal long before all humans disagree with it. If we’re off on the growth rate by double, as in it is only doubling every 6 years, we’d still simplistically expect to see a vegan USA within 48 years.

This is incredibly simplistic and possibly over optimistic, but it does serve to bring some hope. We might be closer to the end of exploitation than we think. We’re winning the fight, but we can’t let up.

The Vegetarian Resource Group studies for 2011, 2012 and 2015.

Reducing the public health burden of Australia

Given the health benefits of eliminating meat and dairy consumption, I’ve often wondered whether a public health campaign around diet, similar to those performed historically around the world for tobacco and other damaging substances, could result in a net positive for a society. The rationale is that the costs, presumably spent by a government, would be outweighed by the gain from the reduced public health burden. Here I’ve attempted a simple estimate of this. There is already a vast body of research available for the health benefits of a plant based, whole foods diet, and so I haven’t spent too long on this.

90% of all deaths in Australia in 2011 were the result of chronic disease according to the Institute of Health and Wellness. 50% of the Australian population has at least 1 chronic disease, and 20% have 2 or more. Populations with a diet full of plant based food have a lower blood pressure,  lower risk of type 2 diabetes, and a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD). A plant based diet can even prevent and reverse erectile dysfunction. Diet related issues in 2010 contributed to the burden of disease in the US more than smoking, high blood pressure and high blood sugar.

From 2004-2005 total health expenditure in Australia was $81.1 billion, $52.7 of which is attributable to specific disease categories. 29% of this expenditure was through admitted patient hospital services, 16% of out-of-hospital medical services, 11% for prescription pharmaceuticals and 7% for optometry and dental services. CVD accounted for $5.942 billion alone.

Given such high costs to society from chronic diseases that are treatable through dietary changes, might it be reasonable to assume that a public health campaign focused on diet, similar to the campaign against smoking, could yield significant returns to the government and a tax payer? Several similar campaigns have existed (e.g. Shape Up Australia), though these have lacked the focus and intensity the anti-smoking campaigns had. To determine whether this might be reasonable may take a major study. But we can take a series of assumptions, applying a worst case scenario for each, to estimate the costs and returns of such a campaign.

If we assumed that the only cost to society of chronic disease is the cost to public health, and the only chronic disease related to diet is CVD, then there is a cost of $5.942 billion. The first assumption here isn’t true, as chronic disease leads to decreased productivity and lost time in the workforce. Let’s assume now that only 50% of CVD can be treated through dietary changes (this is not true, and in fact almost all cases of CVD are treatable through diet change – see the end of this piece for a full list of related references). Therefore $2.971 billion of the cost from CVD can be eliminated.

The next step is to ask how much a public health campaign around diet might cost. A campaign that covered Sydney and Melbourne from 1983 to 1987 cost $620,000 ($1,560,700 in 2015 dollars) for the media and a ‘Quit Centre’ in Sydney. The population of Sydney in 1986 was 3,472,000. Assuming, accounting for inflation, that it costs the same to provide similar services per person today it would cost $10,768,800 to implement a national program for 4 years (population of 23,958,000 today, which is 6.9 times higher than the population of Sydney in 1986, so the cost is multiplied by 6.9). Again, this is likely conservative as it assumes there is no benefit from economies of scale in reaching the entire nation compared to just one city.

Now we can ask how effective such a campaign might be. The pilot anti-smoking campaign in Sydney and Melbourne immediately reduced smoking prevalence by 2.6%, and by a further 0.75% each consecutive year. Note that these percentages refer to the drop in smoking prevalence of the entire population, not just the smokers, which were around 38% of the population in Sydney before the campaign. As the percentage of people who don’t eat a plant-based whole food diet in Australia is significantly higher (over 90%), this estimate is even more conservative. We might assume that the dietary campaign would only be 50% as effective as the anti-smoking campaign, which is conservative as smoking is addictive and harder to quit than dietary practices. So we have a campaign that we estimate will reduce poor dietary practices by 1% immediately and an additional 0.375% each year. Going back to our figure of $2.971 billion for treatable CVD, we get an initial benefit of $29.71 million, with an ongoing benefit of $11.14 million per year. After 4 years, this results in a total benefit of $82.36 million for a cost of $10.77 million. This is a return on investment of over 7 times even with the generous assumptions.

The figures for cost and effectiveness of the anti-smoking campaign used here are around the same order as similar programs undertaken in USA from 1989 to 1996. This assumes that the reduction in smoking from the Sydney and Melbourne campaigns are entirely attributable to the campaign, though this assumption is supported by the data.

The estimates presented here are relatively rough, but given the generous assumptions made, it is clear that a detailed study on the costs and benefits of such a program is long overdue, and that it’s time to have a conversation about implementing a public health campaign that advocates for a plant-based, whole food diet.

The road to such a campaign is expected to be long, as Australia’s peak body for health advice and medical research, NHMRC, still recommends meat and dairy consumption as part of a healthy diet despite evidence otherwise. However, given the great expected reduction in Australia’s public health burden and the other benefits of it being significantly better for the environment (the livestock industry is responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions of any sector) and drastically reducing unnecessary animal suffering, it is a cause worth promoting.

The last two points I have covered previously here.

Thanks to Micaela Karlsen for providing references, working with me and reading early drafts of this work.

References

Esselstyn CB, Jr., Ellis SG, Medendorp SV, Crowe TD. “A strategy to arrest and reverse coronary artery disease: a 5-year longitudinal study of a single physician’s practice.” [In eng]. J Fam Pract 41, no. 6 (Dec 1995): 560-568.

Esselstyn CB, Jr., Favaloro RG. “More than coronary artery disease.” [In eng]. Am J Cardiol 82, no. 10B (Nov 26 1998): 5T-9T.

Esselstyn CB, Jr. “Changing the treatment paradigm for coronary artery disease.” [In eng]. Am J Cardiol 82, no. 10B (Nov 26 1998): 2T-4T.

Esselstyn CB, Jr. “Updating a 12-year experience with arrest and reversal therapy for coronary heart disease (an overdue requiem for palliative cardiology).” [In eng]. Am J Cardiol 84, no. 3 (Aug 1 1999): 339-341, A338.

Esselstyn CB, Jr. “In cholesterol lowering, moderation kills.” Cleveland Clinic journal of medicine 67, no. 8 (Aug 2000): 560-564.

Esselstyn CB, Jr. “Resolving the Coronary Artery Disease Epidemic Through Plant-Based Nutrition.” Preventive cardiology 4, no. 4 (Autumn 2001): 171-177.

Esselstyn CB, Jr. “Is the present therapy for coronary artery disease the radical mastectomy of the twenty-first century?” [In eng]. Am J Cardiol 106, no. 6 (Sep 15 2010): 902-904.

Ornish D, Scherwitz LW, Billings JH, et al. “Intensive lifestyle changes for reversal of coronary heart disease.” [In eng]. Jama 280, no. 23 (Dec 16 1998): 2001-2007.

Expert opinion or simple model: Which is better?

I saw a very interesting talk at work today about decision making in oil and gas businesses, and thought it had some pretty neat applications for decision making in general. I’d just like to summarise the research by David Newman who is studying his PhD at the University of Adelaide in the Australian School of Petroleum. He has 35 years experience in the oil and gas industry and in decision making. Unfortunately I don’t have full references for a lot of the work due to the format of the presentation and have tried to provide credit where possible.

The premise is that oil and gas projects (the exploration, development, drilling and production of petroleum) struggle to achieve promised economic outcomes in hindsight. Research has shown that a good predictor of outcomes is the level of front end loading (FEL), or exploration, feasibility studies and analysis, completed at the final investment decision (FID), when the full blown project is given the final go-ahead.

The value of FEL is well known and many individuals and companies advocate its use, but in reality it is not used or used poorly. More commonly, expert opinion is used. A common situation is expert opinion overruling a work of analysis because they claim that this project in particular is somehow ‘different’ or ‘unique’ compared to other projects.

As we know from research in the non-profit sector, expert opinion is very often wrong, and is not a substitute for data and analysis, and so it is no surprise that it holds little value in other industries as well.

However, Newman proposes that expert may be a viable substitute if and only if it passes 4 tests:

  • Familiarity test – Is the situation similar to previous known examples?
  • Feedback test – Is ongoing feedback on the accuracy of the opinion good? If evidence is received that expert opinion is not working for the given situation, immediately review. This is notoriously difficult for projects with multi-year lifespans, such as oil and gas projects and charity programs.
  • Emotions test – Is there a possibility that emotions are clouding the expert’s judgement?
  • Bias test – Is there a possibility that the expert is succumbing to some kind of bias? It is hard to be a dispassionate expert on an issue.

There is a belief that data and models are only better at predicting outcomes than expert opinion if they are complex and advanced. Meehl’s work shows that even simple models are better than expert opinion in the majority of cases. 60% of comparisons showed that the simple model was better, and the majority of the remaining 40% showed something close to a draw.

To understand the phenomena at play, Newman and his colleagues interviewed 34 senior personnel from oil and gas companies with an average of over 25 years experience in the industry. The personnel were a mix of executives (vice president level or equivalent), managers and technical professionals (who were leaders in their own discipline).

The survey data showed that ~80% saw FEL as very important, ~10% as important, with none saying it was not important.* However, none of those surveyed use the results from FEL as a hard criteria. That is to say, none are willing to approve or reject a project based on FEL data alone. Many used FEL as a soft criteria, in that it guided their final decision, but had no veto power. The results of this survey are not statistically significant due to small sample size, but according to Newman may be seen as indicative.

Interestingly, the executives tended to rate their understanding of the technical details of projects higher than the actual technical experts. Either the executives are over confident, the technical staff are under confident, a combination of both, or, seemingly less likely, the executives really are more competent in technical matters.

Newman proposes the following set of solutions to overcome the problems discussed here.

Apply correction factors to predict likely outcomes based on FEL benchmarking (comparison to other projects). This is difficult in oil and gas due to the differing nature of projects, and is expected to be a problem in charity programs as well. It might be worthwhile looking at programs that have done similar work in an attempt to benchmark, or at least previous programs within the same organisation.

Benchmarking can be a checklist to score against a certain criteria. For example, a dispassionate outsider can be brought in to answer pre-determined questions and provide an assessment based on data (and only data, without interpretations) from the team. They might also rate individual categories as poor, fair, good or best.

The adjustment factors will vary significantly between different types of projects, however the table below provides an example for two factors, cost and schedule, which have been rated by an external auditor. If the schedule has been rated as poor, as in the schedule pressures are likely applying pressure and biasing results (being behind schedule makes staff more likely to say the project is complete), you should adjust the appropriate data by a scalar of 1.1-1.5 (or inverse). My interpretation of this is that if long term costs are expected to be $100/week, and the scalar of 1.4 is selected due to the project being behind schedule, the true cost should be estimated as $140/week. The ranges are examples only, and the ideal values for a given type of project can only be determined through extensive analysis of that type of project, which can make this type of analysis difficult to be meaningful if substantial data isn’t available.

CostSchedule
Best0.9 - 1.150.9 - 1.15
Good0.95 - 1.20.95 - 1.25
Fair1.0 - 1.31.05 - 1.4
Poor1.05 - 1.451.1 - 1.5

Apply post-mortem analyses, or reviews of projects after completion.

Apply pre-mortem analyses. This involves asking everyone involved in the project to imagine that the project has concluded its life, and a disaster has occurred. They are then asked to propose why the project failed. This increases the chances of identifying key risks by 30% (no source beyond Newman for this unfortunately, but it’s a huge result). The reason being that it legitimises uncertainty, and makes staff more likely to think of obscure lines of thought or things that might be considered rude to bring up under different circumstances. Calling a team members work a risk would be uncomfortable in other situations.

I’d be interested to see some of these techniques being applied in non-profits and EA organisations more if they aren’t already, especially the pre-mortem technique. If the data is to be believed then it is a highly effective exercise. Also interested to hear your thoughts as to how they could be applied, or whether you think they are useful in the first place.

Again, there are several references to the work of other researchers that I would love to have referenced, however was unable to as the reference was not provided.

*In my personal opinion, the way these surveys are structured may lead to some bias themselves. For example, the 4 choices for this part of the survey were ‘very important’, ‘important’, ‘neutral’ and ‘not important’. It doesn’t seem likely that anyone perceived to be an expert would say a concept known to be important is important.

Peter Singer’s 70th birthday

This post is a bit of a plug, but it’s for a great cause so I’m ok with that.

As you might know, the Effective Altruism Adelaide group is hosting Peter Singer, Australian moral philosopher, for a presentation and Q&A about his work on the 13th of April. Peter has made massive contributions to the field of ethics through his work on poverty, animal rights and in co-founding the Effective Altruism movement.

July the 6th is Peter’s 70th birthday, and for an early birthday present we are hoping to raise an enormous amount of money for one of the most effective charities in the world, the Against Malaria Foundation. Peter himself has donated $100 to the cause, but imagine his surprise when he finds out we have raised tens of thousands of dollars for a cause he is so passionate about.

$25,500 worth of donations are being matched by anonymous donors, so this is a great way to double your impact as well.

So why not make a small contribution to show how Peter has affected your life through his work. As for me, he’s literally changed my life.

NB: If you’re interested in the Against Malaria Foundation’s effectiveness, they are estimated to be so effective that they can save a life for on average less than $4,000 AUD. A$40,500 achieved = 12,000 nets bought = 22,000 people protected = 44 ENTIRE villages protected.

Causality in altruism

You might hear stories of someone who influenced someone else to be vegan or to donate 100 dollars and then claimed to have caused X animal lives to be saved or $100 to be donated, which are very good things indeed. But the person who donated that $100 can also claim responsibility for donating that money, because they were an integral step in the outcome, without which the money wouldn’t have been donated.

But if both parties are claiming full responsibility for causing $100 to be donated, shouldn’t that imply that $200 was donated? So who can claim responsibility here? Are they both equally responsible? Is it reasonable to say that they were both fully responsible after all? Or is it, as many things are in the real world, much more complicated than that? This is important if we, as individuals and organisations interested in maximising impact, are going to be rigorous about measuring the impact of individuals.

A friend once told me a story that poses an ethical riddle. It goes like this:

A married woman had been growing bored. Her husband wasn’t paying her attention anymore, and had stopped treating her well. She started sneaking away at night to go and sleep with other men across the river from her house. There was a bridge but she took the ferry to reduce the risk of being seen. One night, she went across the river but the man whom she had arranged to sleep with didn’t show. She went back to the ferry, but the boat master had heard of what the woman was doing from a friend and didn’t want to ferry her anymore. The woman, desperate, went across the bridge, where a drunken man killed her in a fit of rage. Whose fault was it that the woman died?

Another, more complicated riddle is presented:

There were four men in a military camp in the middle of the desert. Three of them hated the fourth, John, and wanted to kill him, but they wanted it to look like an accident. One day, when it was John’s turn to go on patrol, one of the others took his chance and put poison in John’s water flask. A second soldier, not knowing what the first had done, poured out John’s water and replaced it with sand. The third then came and poked small holes in the bottle so its contents would slowly leak out. When John was halfway through his patrol and looked for a drink, he realised his flask was empty, and he died of thirst. Who killed John?

In safety, there is a concept known as the ‘root cause’. For example, take the Air France Flight 4590 in 2000 which involved a Concorde plane outside Charles de Gaulle International Airport in France. The plane crashed, killing all crew and passengers, and some bystanders on the ground. Was it the crew’s fault? No, because the plane’s engine had caught fire shortly before take-off. So was it the fault of the engine manufacturers?

No, as it was revealed that a tyre had ruptured during take-off which hit the fuel tank, which resulted in the flame. This in turn was caused by a piece of metal found on the runway, which had fallen off of another airplane that day. This led back to the operator who had replaced that particular piece of metal, who had incorrectly installed the piece. This was interpreted as the root and primary cause of the accident.

But even so we can go back further. Someone must have trained this operator – did they do a bad job? Is it the fault of the management of that company for not putting the correct practices in place to eliminate the occurrence of such events? Maybe someone had just upset the operator and he wasn’t thinking straight.

If we go back to our first example and apply the root cause logic, that suggests that the woman died because of her husband. But this is an uncomfortable result, as the one who is most at fault is surely the man who actually killed her. Some might argue that the root cause is really just the drunken man, but it has to be said that all individuals in that story played an integral part in the woman’s death.

It might even be argued that the man was not thinking straight. What if he was drugged through no fault of his own? To be clear here, I don’t mean to imply that each player in this chain of events should be held responsible, or indeed be ‘guilty’, but they did play an unknowing role.

Bringing this all back to the original question, I confess I don’t have an answer. But I’m convinced that the answer isn’t as simple as we think, and if we want to be rigorous about measuring the impact that individuals have through an action or over their life, we should consider this further. At the very least, we should define very clearly what we mean when we say “I/we caused $100 to be donated.”

Choosing charities carefully is hard but necessary

The below comments are taken from my response to an article featured on www.adelaidenow.com.au. This article contained several fundamental flaws which are potentially harmful and need to be addressed, as The Advertiser has not made a move to issue a correction.

—

On December the 17th, Anthony Keane wrote a piece titled ‘Why you should choose charities wisely’ with quotes from Fausto Pastro and John Oliver suggesting reasons for vigilance when choosing which charities to support. Unfortunately, this article contained several major errors and misconceptions which should be cleared up.

Pastro says that “With donations, there is no right way or wrong way. Anything you do is right.” This claim is objectively wrong, and even potentially dangerous. Not all charities and programs are equally effective. In fact, some turn out to produce more harm than good. For example, the Scared Straight program has been run in USA since the 1970s and places teenage delinquents in a jail for several hours, where they are threatened and yelled at by guards and inmates. The idea is that the students will be so scared of prison they will stop committing crimes. Unfortunately, what sounds like a good idea doesn’t work, and is in fact outright harmful. Of nine studies performed on this program, two suggest that it has no impact, and seven suggest a negative impact. The teenagers would have been better off if they had not been in the program to begin with. Donating to a program like this would not be ‘right’.

In addition, some methods of improving societies are hundreds of times more effective than others, even for producing the same outcome. For example, take the following three methods of preventing or treating HIV and AIDS; surgical treatment for Kaposi’s sarcoma (an illness characteristic of AIDS), antiretroviral therapy, and education for high-risk groups. On a dollar to benefit basis, antiretroviral therapy is 50 times as effective as treating Kaposi’s sarcoma directly, while education is 1,400 times more effective. If one were to decide between supporting a program that treats Kaposi’s sarcoma and one that provides effective education, the choice should be clear. When we buy a new car, we shop around to find the best value for money. It’s surprising how little this is done with charities, and how often we trust the money is being spent well.

The article also criticises charities with high administration costs (staff salaries etc.), but in reality a high admin cost does not always mean an ineffective charity. Admin costs are an important and necessary part of running a charity, and if a charity spends an extra 10% on salary to attract a top management team which boosts effectiveness by 50%, this shouldn’t be vilified. With the example above, a charity providing education with 10% of their costs being admin would still be far more effective than one treating Kaposi’s sarcoma with admin costs of 1%.

To be fair, it’s hard to figure out which programs work. It takes randomised controlled trials and a lot of analysis. Luckily, a new breed of organisation is doing this work for us. Meta-charities such as GiveWell analyse the cost-effectiveness of charities to provide, free of charge, a list of the very best from across the world.

Unfortunately, 75% of charity programs end up having little to no impact, or even a negative impact. It’s not enough to pick the charities that seem good and have low administration costs. So when you donate, don’t just do your homework, do the right homework.

Salvation and Salivation – Part 3

As soon as Sta’bek left she pulled out her hexalink crystal and downloaded every political journal in reverse chronological order to physical storage. Just 30 seconds into the download her connection went dead. She was lucky he hadn’t just accessed the house computer with his neural implant the moment he left the room. No matter, she had the last 3 weeks of every political article written on human agricultural policy to play with.

She read through each article, almost all of which were pro-human consumption (those that weren’t were ridiculed and published in less mainstream news outlets), and thought of ways to counter each claim being made. The nutrition part was easy. There was plenty of research that linked human consumption to long term health issues, and it was surprisingly easy to show that the studies which ‘show’ that human is healthy were funded by the regional planetary government or humaneries. The environmental part was a little harder, but it was still true that it took hundreds of kilograms of food to make just one kilogram of human, not to mention the extra water, fuel and land required. Some of the newer colonies had stagnated and couldn’t afford the exorbitant prices charged for human exports, and would certainly benefit from the extra resources.

Law’bek glanced up at the window – already dark. Curse the short days on this forsaken rock. She rubbed her eyes and went searching for food. On phasing into the cold room, an overwhelmingly pungent scent ambushed her senses. Leftover human. Her appetite evaporated, she slid back through the meta-wall and ran back to her room. She reached for her crystal to bury herself once more in research, but it wasn’t there. Icy tendrils crept down her neck. What if he had seen-

“Not bad so far Law.” Law’bek jumped to her feet and whirled around.

“Drak’sah Rin,” she cursed, “how did you get in here?”

“The old fool’s security system could do with an upgrade.” Law’bek went orange. She despised her father, of course, but he was hers to despise. “With a bit of flourish it might be worthy of one of the top outlets.” By ‘we’ he meant ‘I’, of course. Why are the most gifted ones such glandings? Somehow she was able to swallow her pride and calm herself until the orange dissipated. For the humans, she reminded herself.

“Well, let’s get to work.” She said, smiling frostily.

—

Alex squeezed through the front door, sweating slightly under his own weight. “Take care of your sister, won’t you?” Alex wasn’t really looking for an answer; he was too caught up in his own ecstasy. Without looking back, he strutted proudly down the road towards the slaughterhouse. Jealous eyes with murderous glints followed him the whole way. Tony held back his tears for a moment, building a painful pressure, before succumbing to loud, violent sobs. Lucy looked up at him in innocent confusion. Not that she didn’t know her father was going to be eaten shortly; she was confused about Tony’s reaction.

“Itsa natural Tony.” As if that made everything better.

Later, at his lunch break, he sat apart from the rest of the farm gang, aimlessly sloshing his bread through the thin nutri-gruel. He was on water duty again today. Jim was absent, probably put down for disrupting the work gang, and his pusher-partner had been reassigned to fertilising. He was startled by the sound of the bench creaking across from him. He looked up and recoiled. The taskmaster only sat across from you if you were in trouble.

“Tony, I’m not here to hurt you.” She said in a surprisingly gentle voice. Tony didn’t believe it; he had seen her lull workers into a false sense of security before. She touched his hand. He looked up and saw her smiling. “I know how you feel.” Her voice went softer, almost impossible to hear. “And I feel the same.” His heart almost stopped. He felt dizzy and could hardly respond. “I’ve felt the same way as you since I was your age, and I’ve been working my way up from the inside ever since. I’m so close to being able to do something, but I need your help.” Tony was incredulous. It was all he could do to nod. Her gaze went from kind to serious. “But this sulking won’t help anyone. You need to be strong, or you won’t be of any use to me. Eat your food Tony. For me. For us all.”

She released his hand and sat back. Tony smiled up at her and raised the sopping wet bread to his mouth. He gingerly placed it on his tongue and swallowed. He closed his eyes, allowing himself to enjoy the flavour. When he opened them, they felt puffy. He tried to blink but found that he couldn’t, his eyes were slowly expanding and his eyelids wouldn’t reach around anymore. He struggled to his feet and knocked over the rest of the gruel in panic. He writhed on the ground as the pain took hold of his whole body. The taskmaster stood over him. He reached his hand up to her, silently begging, hoping. But she didn’t take it. The gruel was already a distant memory. All he could taste was the dust.

—

The sound of metal on metal was occasionally punctuated by a polite exclamation of wonder and compliments to the chef at the discovery of some subtle new flavour. Steak, sausages and pate were brought out in varying configurations and combinations for Sta’bek and his guests to enjoy. Law’bek sat sullenly at the end of the table. Her father gave her a reproaching look as she piled her plate with boring legumes which were supposed to be a garnish, but otherwise ignored her, focussing his charm and guile on the off-world delegates.

“Exquisite Sta’bek, simply exquisite. I’ve tasted human in holo but the reality is just so… enthralling. My delegation and I were just this week wondering why it’s so hard to come at Parliament Central on Gron’lek.”

“I’m actively campaigning for an increase in production. Our new breeding program has increased output by-”

“Yes very clever I’m sure, but we were wondering why no one has implemented farms on other worlds.” Sta’bek almost dropped his skewer. He had been dreading this moment. The exclusivity of humans being bred on this world was what had helped it grow so rapidly from a border colony to a bustling economy. If they were to lose the monopoly their way of life would surely end.

“Ah yes, the Minister for Finance and I were just the other day discussing how we might get financing for such a venture. All it would take is-”

“Minister Foy’gra.” Said the delegate, his smile hardening. An old political opponent. “Well I think that’s a terrible idea. Humans obviously belong on this world. You’re a fool for even listening to such nonsense.”

“Yes, of course Minister Grep’san, it was foolish of me to say.” Sta’bek averted his gaze and felt his face burn blue. Grep’san took this as embarrassment and turned away.

“Young Law’bek, you are saving the human for last I see?” Sta’bek’s colour flashed a panicked purple. Law’bek looked at Sta’bek, perhaps begging for reprieve.

Don’t make me say it. Her face seemed to say, a complex mix of colours swirling. But Sta’bek did not yield. “Show Minister Grep’san how much you enjoy our fine produce Law’bek.” For what seemed like an eternity, Law’bek held her father’s gaze. Finally she could suffer it no longer.

“This food is not what you think it is!” she blurted. “The humans are intelligent, they are treated cruelly and-”

“My dear Law’bek is suffering from protein deprivation.” Sta’bek announced, signalling to the guards. “Will you escort her upstairs?”

Law’bek rose to her feet before the surprised guards could start towards her. “No no, I’m old enough to escort myself.” As she turned to leave she noticed the younger, quiet delegate looking at her with wide eyes, which were averted so quickly she couldn’t be sure he was looking in the first place. As she left, the conversation gradually returned to normal.

Law’bek woke later from a fitful, broken slumber to a loud ping emanating from her crystal. Message. As she reached for it, she remembered that her hexalink access had been revoked. Odd, only ministers could override such a block. There was an item on her crystal from an anonymous author titled ‘The Truth’. She watched it, then re-watched it, then laughed. From footage of human working and living conditions taken the day before to old health publications that had been covered up, it was all the evidence she needed to convince Parliament Central to abolish human breeding. Of course, she would have to forge the author’s credentials, but she did have access to a certain minister’s hexalink account. She had never met a live human, but she knew how overjoyed they would be when they found out they would never end up on the plate of a Gorgesk politician or bureaucrat again.

—

That’s the end… for now! Drop your thoughts in the comments below.