Michael Dello-Iacovo

On funerals and death

“Imagine at the next funeral you go to, you hear in the eulogy that they died because people at a previous funeral didn’t donate their time or money instead.”

I just returned from a funeral where I thought some long thoughts. This essay is them, and also serves as an informal will, seeing as I don’t have one.

As I sat in the pew of that church, I couldn’t help but wonder at how many people were present; it must have been at least 200. My thoughts quickly turned to what I would want if it were my funeral. And I realised that I don’t want a funeral at all, and not just because I’m not religious.

Like most people, I care a lot about others, and I want to reduce the amount of suffering and loss in the world. One of my earliest motivations for this was when a friend’s mum passed away from cancer. When I offered my sincere condolences, they told me that there was nothing I could have done. That stopped me. Why? Perhaps there was something I could have done. I started to think about ways to stop cancer, but I quickly realised that suffering can come in many forms, and it is the suffering that I want to end, not necessarily just cancer.

So eventually I realised that I could donate $4,000 AUD to the Against Malaria Foundation and save a life. One whole life for the cost of a holiday. It suddenly seemed hard to justify ever going on a holiday again. If my reaction to death is wanting to stop it, and I have the opportunity to easily stop it, how could I possibly turn that down for some leisure?

Back to the funeral – 200 people in a room for 90 minutes. Assuming that many people would come to my funeral, that’s a lot of person hours (300 to be precise). In my funeral, they are offering my family their condolences and remembering my life, sure, but what if they could use that 300 hours to save another life. Let’s say those people are able to earn $20 an hour on average. If they each spent 90 minutes working instead of being at my funeral, they could make $6,000, enough to save 1.5 lives.

Of course, people can’t always just work at moment’s notice, so this is meant to be illustrative only. But now we’re getting at something – death is awful, but what if you could prevent a death in the time you spent mourning a life? I foresee getting some criticism at this point, so let’s try a thought experiment.

Imagine you’re on your way to a funeral and you see a person lying on the side of the road bleeding out. You stop your car and spend the next 90 minutes performing CPR until the ambulance arrives. You miss the funeral, but the paramedic tells you that you quite literally saved a life. Do you think you were justified in missing the funeral? Do you think the person who died, or their family, would forgive you?

Ah, you say, but I can’t make $4,000 in 90 minutes, so this is an unfair analogy. Ok, well let’s now ask whether you would do the same for a cat you had just driven past. Same situation, CPR until the vet rocks up, and you’re told that you saved the cats life. This is probably a trickier choice, but I imagine a number of people would still pick the cat over the funeral. As readers of this blog would know, a donation to one of the animal charities recommended as being highly effective by Animal Charity Evaluators can reduce one year of animal suffering for just 60 cents (USD). And so if you make $20 an hour, in 90 minutes you could spare 33 animals from a year of suffering.* Even if you would drive past a single cat, you probably wouldn’t drive past a truck full of 33 cats bleeding out.

Of course we can go 1 step further to organisations working to reduce the chance of existential risk where estimates of the impact of a dollar donated range from saving 1 to 1,000,000 lives at some point in the future (albeit with significantly more uncertainty – but on expected value this may check out).

So while people can’t necessarily spend 90 minutes working extra for money at will, they could do a range of other things, like doing some high impact volunteering (I don’t mean working at a local soup kitchen or handing out blankets, which wouldn’t have anywhere near the kind of impact I’m talking about). Add onto that the $5,000 that I estimate a funeral of that size to cost, and it seems quite perverse for me to ask people to come and honour my life for 90 minutes.

So in lieu of having an actual will, I formally request here that, in the event of my death, if you would have come to my funeral, please instead donate 90 minutes of your salary to [insert whatever I think is the most effective charity at the time here – at the moment I suspect it’s one of Machine Intelligence Research Institute, ACE, Foundational Research Institute or Raising for Effective Giving**] and ensure that the $5,000 that would have otherwise been spent on the funeral goes there too.

Of course, I fully accept that we don’t keep promises or go to funerals for the dead, we do it for the living (and I don’t think that not going to a funeral to make $4,000 would be anywhere near as socially acceptable as saving a life on the road, even if you donated it to AMF, and even though I think it should be***). And yet, I can’t imagine that spending 90 minutes mourning in a group is really a better thing to do than to arrange to save so many lives.

Imagine at the next funeral you go to, you hear in the eulogy that they died because people at a previous funeral didn’t donate their time or money instead.

* I use ‘year of suffering’ instead of ‘lives saved’ here because the charities tend to either reduce the amount of suffering experienced by farm animals or reduce animal product demand/create vegans to remove animals from being brought into a life of suffering. But this is still valid, and since many farm animals live for less than a year, I feel justified in using this example.

** The best cause/organisation to give to will almost certainly change over time. In case I don’t update this (or get around to making an actual will), I would be comfortable with giving either Michael Dickens or Brian Tomasik the right to decide where these donations (and any leftover assets I have) end up going. I don’t know them very well, but they are two of the few people I trust to make a mostly rational decision, and to care sufficiently about both non-human animals and the far future.

*** At this point, one might reasonably ask why I go to funerals. I don’t have a great answer. I personally think that my going to funerals is more selfish than staying home and working on some problem, because by not going people would think less of me.

Should you donate to Animal Charity Evaluators even if you’re not vegan?

If you haven’t heard of Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) yet, there’s a really neat summary of them here, but in short, they are doing research on the most effective ways to help animals and reduce their suffering. They perform foundational research on a range of things from the effectiveness of various interventions, such as leafleting to encourage people to go vegan or eat less meat, to the scale of wild animal suffering (it’s huge).

They also produce recommendations on which charities to donate to in order to reduce animal suffering. Perhaps counterintuitively, they don’t recommend animal shelters. This is because the impact of creating one extra vegan on animal wellbeing is so high that it makes the impact of sheltering one extra animal look tiny in comparison. ACE estimates that Vegan Outreach, one of their standout charities which does leafleting at universities, can spare 1.87 animals from a life on a factory farm per dollar donated. By reducing the demand for meat, the animals are, in theory¹, never brought into existence in the first place. If you believe like I do that a life of immense suffering is worse than no life at all, this is surely a good thing.

Let’s suppose that rescuing and sheltering one animal costs $50. I have no idea what it costs but I think this is a safe underestimate. Therefore, for the same cost that it takes to shelter an animal, Vegan Outreach can spare 93.5 animals from a life of suffering. Unless you value shelter animals much more than you do food animals, you should donate to Vegan Outreach (or better yet, ACE, to multiply your impact). I don’t think you should value shelter animals more than food animals though. They can all suffer, and in fact pigs are more intelligent than dogs, so if capacity to suffer is what you care about, you should probably care about pigs a little more than dogs.

So this is why I would argue you should donate to an effective animal charity rather than a shelter, but what about the original question? There are many great reasons to go vegan, and it’s really easy, yet many have still decided to not go vegan because they enjoy the taste of animals too much. Even if this is you, I think you should still donate to ACE. Most people who eat animals still claim to care about animals, so if you want to be at least partially consistent with that belief, the very least you could do is donate to a charity which is reducing their suffering. Of course, I think being vegan is far easier than people think, and you should do this as well because it’s not one or the other (see this video for how to literally go vegan overnight). I’m also not saying that anything but a vegan lifestyle is ethically justified, and don’t want to make it sound like I’m supporting that. But if you can’t bring yourself to be completely vegan, at least donate a chunk of your money to ACE². Last estimate I heard was that it costs $500 to create one vegan through Vegan Outreach, so you should donate at least that much³. But why stop there?

Let’s go one step further and say that you currently donate to charities that focus on humans. Arguably the most effective charity working on poverty and global health, the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), saves a human life for around $3,300 USD. In effect, you would have to value human life something like 3,000+ times more than the life of an animal to donate to AMF instead of a top animal charity.

Footnotes

¹I say in theory because other factors such as market elasticity are at play which dilute your effect.

² I’m wary that such a stance will make people less likely to go vegan and to just donate a bit of money to ACE and think they’re ok. I think, on balance, this article is more likely to have a net positive effect than a net negative effect (otherwise I wouldn’t have posted it), but I want to make it doubly clear that I think you should do both.

³ An interesting conclusion comes out of this which might be uncomfortable for those who aren’t consequentialist in their ethical beliefs. If donating $1 is expected to save 1.87 animals from a life of suffering, that means that by not donating, you have confined 1.87 animals to a life of suffering, because there is no morally relevant different between an action and an inaction (think walking past a drowning child in a shallow pond when you could easily save them). By extension, if you’re vegan (or even if you’re not) and you spend $20 on a nice restaurant meal when you could have eaten for $5, having spent $15 on yourself needlessly instead of donating it to a top animal charity, you have consigned 28 animals to a life of suffering. Consider that next time you dine out. This leads to questions like ‘well where does it end then?’ Maybe it doesn’t. Living on less is easy and arguably better for your wellbeing, and you get to save a ton of lives. Why wouldn’t you?

Disclosure: While Michael has worked with ACE in the past, he has never been an employee or an official volunteer.

How you should vote in the Australian federal election (to maximise wellbeing)

Multi-issue analyses of which party is the best one to vote for from an objective point of view are seriously lacking. In fact, we couldn’t find a single one for Australian parties in the lead up to the 2016 federal election, which prompted us to perform this research.

In this article, Hugo Burgin and myself have attempted an analysis of which of 6 parties are the best to preference, and what order they should be placed in, based on how their policies make the world a better place generally. That is to say, we have attempted to select the party that is ‘best’. We say ‘attempted’ because such analyses are incredibly complex (which is possibly why none exist), although we believe that some attempt at picking the best party is better than no attempt.

We intend to sway your opinion, though we ourselves are open to being swayed. If you believe we have erred in our analysis or missed something crucial, we want to know so we can change our analysis and our own vote. Thus, this will be a living document until the election. Please also leave any comments below that you believe are useful or add to the discussion.

The parties analysed are:

Liberal
Labor
Greens
Animal Justice Party
Science Party
Nick Xenophon Party

This is a long piece, and we suggest reading the policy by policy summaries or skipping to the conclusion if you are time poor (and trust us).

Important edit: There seems to have been a bit of confusion from some people about what we’re trying to prioritise here. A lot of questions have been of the nature “Well, it’s all well and good that some people care about animal issues, but I don’t, and you haven’t really convinced me that working on animal issues or foreign aid will increase the wellbeing of Australians.”

This kind of response misses the point. We have not chosen to focus on these issues solely because of the impact they have on humans. We chose to focus on animal issues because of the enormous impact they have on animals. We chose to focus on foreign aid because of the enormous impact they have on foreigners. We didn’t choose these issues just because of the impact they have on Australians (although both have positive flow on effects for Australians anyway, e.g. human health and climate change for animals, and international relations and security for foreign aid). Animals and foreigners alike can experience wellbeing just as Australians can, and so we should consider their wellbeing too when thinking about who to vote for.

Introduction

People often say that you’re unlikely to have any impact when voting, or that the impact of your vote is so small that it’s not worth thinking about, but this is only true if you only care about yourself. In Doing Good Better, Will MacAskill simplistically estimates that the expected value of voting for a US citizen, when spread out across all citizens in USA, is around $5,200 USD (~$7,000 AUD at the time of writing). That is to say, on average, $5,200 of the budget will be spent differently as a result of your vote (see the appendix for a more detailed explanation of why this is so). This means it’s very important to vote for the party that will spend the budget in the best way possible.

The impact of your vote on you personally, however, is worth significantly less than $1 (see the appendix). So unless you think you’re really, really important, you should probably vote for the best party for others in general. By the best way possible, we mean the way that will improve the happiness and wellbeing of humans and non-humans alike globally, which means we also consider things like foreign aid budgets.

Because of this exceptionally high value of voting, it’s worth spending a reasonable amount of time deciding who to vote for. In the lead up to the Australian federal election, we wanted to do this transparently. In addition, it seems reasonable to argue that, if one is pretty sure they know which party is the best, they should encourage other people to vote for them as well to maximise their impact. This is our attempt at doing so.

As we have said, if you disagree with anything we’re saying or our conclusions, we obviously want to know, because we’re trying to maximise our impact, so we urge you to tell us in the comments or contact us directly. This kind of analysis is exceptionally difficult because of the vast range of interrelating issues to cover, and we freely admit that this is not comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination. Also, policies can be changed, and promises can be broken, a fact which we’ve attempted to account for. We’ve tried to break down policies into several key areas. There are also a lot of parties (57 total, not including independents), and we clearly haven’t covered them all. Please also let us know if a particular party is worth covering here. We do urge you to use rational, evidence backed responses where possible. If you disagree with, say, a left-wing policy or party, you should have a brief rationale for why that policy in particular is bad.

Please also let us know if you’ve changed who you’re voting for because of this work. We love measuring impact. If you agree with our recommendations, please share this to increase your impact even more. If you don’t, tell us why ASAP!

One more disclaimer: Whilst we have taken an Effective Altruist approach to this, the research and recommendations made here don’t necessarily represent the opinion of the Effective Altruism community in general, or of any organisations that we are affiliated with.

On voting generally

First, it’s important to understand how the Australian voting system works, especially since the rules for voting for the upper house have changed recently, so check out this video or this article.

So does this mean one should just vote for the party they wish was running the country? Not necessarily. Here is an example of where you wouldn’t do that. If there was a small/new party that focussed on a specific issue, you might assume rightly that they wouldn’t do a good job of running the country if they won the majority of seats. However, since they almost certainly won’t win a majority of seats, it could still be worth voting for them to try and get them a few seats so they can make progress towards that specific issue. As they gain popularity and funding, they might branch out into other issues in the future and gain the expertise necessary to cover all issues. So really we have to try and think about our marginal impact – “What is the impact of my individual vote?”

We also highly recommend you plan your vote before arriving to reduce the chance of you being swayed by a smiling face with a ‘how to vote’ card at the booths, or to make an uninformed decision due to pressure or forgetfulness. This is a tool to plan your senate vote.

To judge the parties, we use a utilitarian approach. That is, we pick the party that we believe will lead to the greatest wellbeing for the greatest number of individuals. We do this on a policy by policy basis, then attempt to weight these policies against each other to come up with a final recommendation. We have covered 3 broad policy areas which we believe are the most important for increasing wellbeing. These are:

Non-human animal policies
Foreign aid
Climate change

On to some policies.

Non-human animals

The amount of suffering experienced by (non-human) animals as a result of human activity is enormous, and probably many times greater than that experienced by humans. Around 60 billion land animals and 90 billion marine animals are killed annually (including by-catch from fishing this is argued to be over 1 trillion by some), most of which experience an enormous amount of suffering. If you care about animals close to as much as you care about humans (which most people do judging by the way they treat their pets, and which you should because they have a capacity for suffering and wellbeing that, while not equal to humans, is in the same ballpark), you should care about what your vote does for animals.

The issue of where to vote for non-human animals is complicated by the distinction between animal welfare (wellbeing vs. suffering) and animal rights (giving animals the right to not be exploited). I personally argue that the thing that we should be valuing for animals is wellbeing (or a lack of suffering). Giving animals the right to not be exploited might be the best pathway to this (or it might not be – there is still much debate here), but the fundamental goal should be to reduce animal suffering as much as possible.

No party has a primary policy of promoting or encouraging a vegan lifestyle (the closest to this is the Animal Justice Party). That is to say, most parties encourage reducing the suffering experienced by farmed animals rather than stopping them from being exploited in the first place. It is difficult to say whether welfare reforms make lives better or worse for animals in the long run. They arguably make them better in the short term, by improving their living and slaughter conditions, but they may make people more comfortable with exploitation, thus prolonging their use and therefore suffering. For the sake of recommending the best party for animals, we suggest that the party with the best intentions towards actually eliminating animal suffering for the sake of animals (not for any flow on effects to humans) will be more inclined to change their mind with new evidence in the future.

Liberal

The Liberal party does not have a formal animal policy, however they do have some policies that affect animal welfare. They propose a plan to ban the sale of new cosmetics tested on animals. They don’t support an Independent Office of Animal Welfare or an end to live exports. They advocate for a removal of tariffs on exports of dairy, beef and seafood, which is expected to increase the exploitation and suffering of animals.

Labor

http://www.farmweekly.com.au/news/agriculture/general/politics/alp-animal-welfare-policy-slammed/2752727.aspx

Labor, like Liberal, advocate for a removal of tariffs on exports of dairy, beef and seafood.

Greens

Despite having a detailed animal welfare policy, the Greens don’t advocate veganism or a push towards encouraging veganism to reduce animal use. Instead, they focus on increased regulation and legislation to protect animals from suffering, including:

“An end to cruel or unnecessary use of animals for teaching and research purposes” (as argued by Gary Francione in Rain Without Thunder, there is reason to mistrust the use of ‘cruel’ or ‘unnecessary’, as all research can be argued to be necessary)
“Make any act of animal cruelty subject to criminal penalties”
“Regulate conditions for the captivity, transport and slaughter of animals”
End the “export of live animals for consumptive purposes”
“The establishment of an independent national regulatory body to provide national oversight and coordination of animal welfare”

Despite the overarching party policy, we suggest that voting for certain senate candidates within the Greens over others may be effective. For example, from conversations with senator candidate Jody Moate (SA), she is interested in supporting pro-vegan campaigns despite the Greens themselves not explicitly supporting them. Senator candidate Lee Rhiannon (NSW) appears to support similar campaigns for reasons of animal suffering, public health burden and climate change. We suggest that preferencing Moate, who is not the primary candidate for Greens in SA, might be an impactful thing to do.

AJP

The Animal Justice Party have a large number of policies relating to animals. In summary:

AJP claim to advocate a plant based diet (their candidates must all be vegan or vegetarian), but it does not appear to be a key policy, or well planned for how this will happen
AJP is open to supporting cultured meat, which is expected to be a positive, but there are currently no strong policies in place to do so
AJP advocates an end to live animal exports
AJP appears to be against animal experimentation as it is misleading to extrapolate animal testing results to humans. As an interim, they advocate for reducing the suffering of animals in research.

Science Party

The Science Party has a number of policies relating to animal welfare, including:

Supporting in vitro meat (lab meat) production to reduce animal use
Establishing an Independent Office for Animal Welfare
Restricting (but not eliminating) live exports
Ending the use of battery cages and sow stalls
Improving regulation around animal use in racing (but not necessary abolishing it)
Improving food labelling
“The Science Party supports the use of animals for scientific and research purposes.”

Nick Xenophon Party

The Nick Xenophon Party does not have an animal welfare policy, but support strict controls on live animal exports, and prefer that meat is processed in Australia and exported chilled.

Conclusion

It appears that no party is currently advocating for a reduction in animal suffering as much as they could be, though this could be a strategic move (too hardline a stance may mean losing votes). In terms of perceived intentions towards non-human animals and promises, we recommend the preferencing Animal Justice Party first, followed by Greens, then (closely) followed by the Science Party, followed by the Nick Xenophon Party/Labor then Liberal last.

Also, a brief summary of animal policies for 21 parties is available here.

Foreign aid

One of the areas where the value of your vote may have the largest impact is within Australia’s contribution towards overseas aid. Taking a snapshot of current figures, Australia currently spends $5.03 billion dollars on foreign aid, amounting 0.32% of our countries gross national income (GNI).

Liberal

The policies found on the Liberal Party of Australia’s website contain no mention of contributions to foreign aid. However, recent plans by the Coalition are to progressively reduce this figure by almost a third to 0.22% of NDI placing Australian foreign aid at its lowest level for 60 years, while most other developed nationals contribute close to four times this amount. Additionally, during their most recent term the Liberals have introduced performance benchmarks for national aid programs, incorporated AusAID into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and prioritised aid spending such that the priority of foreign aid expenditure shall be ‘Australia’s national interest’. The benchmarks are expected to be a positive, as they come with claims of being more outcome oriented.

Labor

A mark above the Liberals, the ALP is supposedly dedicated to “Tackling inequality and disadvantage”. Their policies include an immediate reversal of the $224 million cut to overseas aid outlined within the most recent budget including the on-going investment of $40 million a year to help Australian Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) deliver frontline service to some of the world’s poorest communities. All up, over a four-year period the ALP claim, that if elected they will provide around $800 million more for overseas aid that the Liberals. Additionally if elected Labor would improve the overall effectiveness of Australia’s overseas aid programs, legislating for transparency and accountability. We feel it is important to note that, whilst providing a more comprehensive approach to foreign aid on paper, as with the Liberals the ALP have a history of reducing Australia’s foreign aid contribution.

Greens

The standout of the major three parties when it comes to investment in foreign aid is the Greens. With a number of policies ranging from assisting developing nations affected by climate change through re-settling and re-housing to the promoting of debt cancelling schemes for developing economies where debt re-payment results in increasing poverty. Additionally the Greens want to see: an increase to a foreign aid contribution of 0.7% GDI (on par with the UK and other western nations), transparency and accountability in the purpose of all Australian aid programs, non-commercial aid programs and the establishment of AusAID as an independent department with its own dedicated cabinet minister. On top of these is the Greens policy to preference multilateral trade agreements, except where bi-lateral agreements may favour a developing country. Please visit the Greens website for a more comprehensive view of their foreign aid policies.

Science Party

The Science Party want to see an increase in Australia’s humanitarian intake in proportion to other migration schemes. This includes additional places in the short term allocate to recognised refugees from Malaysia and Indonesia to reduce smuggling.

The Nick Xenophon Party

The Nick Xenophon Party provides no policy regarding to foreign aid on their website.

The Animal Justice Party

The Animal Justice Party believe in a compassionate approach to migrants and refugees while keeping the home grown component of our population growth at or below zero.

Conclusion

Once again, we are assuming that increasing Australia’s foreign aid and its overall effort to assist developing countries is a good thing. Based on policy alone the recommendation here is to place The Greens 1, ALP and Science Party 2 or 3, Animal Justice Party 4, NXP 5 and the Liberals 6.

Climate change

While climate change is a highly important issue, I think several other issues (e.g. those listed above) are more pressing and have a larger impact on wellbeing, even after considering flow on effects.

Liberal

Liberals support a Renewable Energy Target at 23% of Australia’s total energy use by 2020. They support a transition to clean energy through the $1 billion Clean Energy Innovation Fund and $2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund. They claim they will double renewable energy in Australia over the next 4 years. And Liberal have a target of reducing emissions by up to 28% by 2030 based on 2005 levels. These are modest targets, but are low compared to the other parties.

Labor

Labor have promised that at least 50% of Australia’s electricity production will be sourced from renewable energy by 2030. They will expand the investment mandate of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, provide $206.6m to ARENA to support solar thermal, establish a Community Power Network and Regional hubs ($98.7m over 4 years), implement an electricity emissions trading scheme and reinvigorate the Carbon Farming Initiative.

Greens

The Greens want a net zero or negative greenhouse gas emissions in Australia within a generation.

The Greens don’t support natural gas, which I believe is a mistake, due to its proven ability to reduce emissions in USA (Full disclosure, I have previously worked at an oil and gas company, and currently hold shares in several). They also don’t support nuclear energy, which on the whole is expected to have prevented significantly more deaths than it has caused. To put things into perspective, nuclear is expected to have killed less people per unit energy produced than wind and solar.

AJP

The Animal Justice Party have the following key objectives for climate change; to transform to a carbon free infrastructure, to allow reforestation by reducing grazing animal agriculture, to prohibit the expansion of fossil fuel industries, to implement a carbon tax for both coal and animal agriculture, to direct carbon taxes towards a number of climate change solutions, and to protect existing forests and marine habitats in general.

AJP also recommend that natural gas be phased out over the next 15-20 years.

Science Party

The Science Party support carbon pricing mechanisms as their primary solution for climate change. They propose that more work needs to be done on mitigation and adaptation, and fund increased research for geoengineering (with the caveat that no major geoengineering will actually be undertaken until thorough research on its safety has been undertaken).

They propose zero net carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2030 and have plans to support this, and will seek to end all subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. They also propose small scale nuclear power generation to take place in Australia as a trial, with the plan to scale this up if successful. They also seek to support research on nuclear fusion. The Science Party propose some policies to improve animal welfare (discussed below), but do not recognise the role that large scale animal agriculture plays in climate change.

Nick Xenophon Party

The Nick Xenophon Party support a 50% renewable energy target by 2030. They have been against wind energy in the past for ungrounded fears about the health implications, but not without other good reasons.

Conclusion

To simplify this analysis, we suggest that, all else being equal, reducing the effects of climate change on humans and in general is a good thing. On this issue specifically, the Science Party and the Animal Justice Party have the most ambitious targets, but don’t have a proven political track record of effecting this change. The Greens have an operational track record, however support neither nuclear energy, natural gas or a reduction of livestock related emissions. Labor appears to have more ambitious policies than Liberal. The tentative recommendation here is to put AJP and Science Party 1 or 2, Greens 3, Labor 4, NXP 5 and Liberal 6.

Existential risk

The impact a political party has on the likelihood of human extinction, even if very small, probably dominates all of the other factors (see this site for an explanation of why). Having said that, the impact of policies and parties on X-risk is significantly more uncertain than on other categories.

Increased research into the likelihood and potential solutions to X-risk concerns are likely to be the best way to have an impact in this issue, but no party to our knowledge is either for or against this work.

It seems likely that increasing international ties and cooperation/collaboration will reduce the chances of catastrophic extinction. Increasing foreign aid is a possible way of doing this, which has been discussed above.

It is expected that certain trade-related policies or other foreign relations policies could be a good way to increase (or decrease) international collaboration, but an analysis of these policies were beyond the scope of this draft due to time considerations, and the authors are very open to suggestions here.

Final recommendation

We have clearly missed out a lot of important categories, and haven’t addressed the economic, political or social viability of any of the policies (the likelihood they will be implemented successfully). This was meant to be a more extensive project but due to the number of people involved and time availability, it fell short. From this limited analysis, however, we tentatively suggest voting in the upper and lower house in the following order:

Greens
Science Party/Animal Justice Party
Labor
Nick Xenophon Party
Liberal

A suggestion has been made that, since the Animal Justice Party and Science Party are unlikely to elect many or any members, despite being ranked 2/3 you should still list them 1/2 and Greens 3. If a party receives at least 4% of ‘1’ votes, they receive extra funding for every ‘1’ vote. Further, if the AJP or Science Party don’t win, the vote will just go to the Greens. We think this is a valid way of strategic voting, and so would suggest voting Science Party or AJP 1, followed by the other and Greens, even though we think the Greens party has a more comprehensive and better overall policy than the Science Party and AJP.

Also, to be clear, this is a relative listing. That is to say, we think Labor is better than Liberal, but we don’t necessarily think they should be your 4th and 6th preference. We think that there are likely many more parties not covered here that are better than Liberal, and that you should probably these parties above them to minimise the chances of a Liberal member being elected.

This ranking is based qualitatively on the following ranking system of policies in terms of relative importance.

1 – Existential risk
2 – Non-human animals
3 – Foreign aid
4 – Climate change

You might note that a discussion of ‘jobs’ is broadly lacking. This is because we believe that, relative to the other issues here, jobs per se aren’t a particularly important policy. This is sure to rustle some feathers, so for a brief analysis of why we think this is the case, please see the appendix.

Not all of these parties have candidates in each state. If you are unable to vote for a party recommended here, we suggest simply moving to the next on the list. If there are other parties that you think would benefit humans and animals generally, we would recommend placing them between the Animal Justice Party and the Nick Xenophon Party. Please also tell us about them in the comments.

Thanks to those who reviewed early versions of this work and provided useful input.

To get in touch either leave a comment or send me an email at mdello@hotmail.com.

A lot of people have been quick to criticise me of being biased. This is possible, but for what it’s worth, I am not a member or volunteer of any political party (nor have I ever been, I make a point to not get involved to retain partiality), and I have changed my personally preferred party several times since starting this analysis.

Appendix – The value of voting

The estimate of the value of voting being $5,200 USD as calculated by MacAskill is briefly described here.

Political analyst Nate Silver, Professor Andrew Gelman (Statistics) and Professor Aaron Edlin (Law) calculated that the odds of an individual changing the outcome of the 2008 USA presidential election was, on average, around 1 in 60 million, which is a low probability, but we have to also look at the potential impact.

Estimating simplistically that the benefit per person of the $3.5 trillion annual US budget being spent 2.5% more effectively ($1,000 per person per 4 year election term), the benefit that you would expect to receive personally over an election term based on your vote is 0.0016 cents. However, looking at the benefit received by all Americans ($1,000 multiplied by 314 million), the expected value of voting is $5,200 ($314 billion of value multiplied by a 1 in 60 million chance of swaying the outcome).

This is further simplified by the fact that the policies of parties aren’t always opposite, and there is significant overlap, however it does demonstrate that the value of one person voting, when spread over the population of a country, can be big.

Appendix – The value of jobs

The number of unemployed Australians as of August 2015 was just over 800,000, or around 6.3 %. A target of spending part of the budget on ‘jobs’* might be to bring unemployment to 4% (the lowest it’s been since at least 1980), a lofty goal indeed. Let’s now suppose that the government spends $20 billion of the budget in making this happen. Therefore they will have created one job per $68,478**. And let’s now that having a job increases an Australians’ wellbeing by double.

For a comparison, the world’s top rated charity focusing on poverty/global health, the Against Malaria Foundation, can save a life for around $4,000 AUD. That’s 17 times cheaper than the job creation. And these lives saved tend to last a while, whereas jobs are often lost again quite quickly (national average tenure in a job is around 7 years). While AMF is an exceptional charity, and many charities are orders of magnitude less effective, this example should at least highlight that foreign aid (let alone the two policies listed above it in importance) is arguably much more impactful than a focus on ‘jobs’***.

*In reality governments tend not to spend money just on ‘jobs’, but jobs come about as part of other spending which might be focused on jobs.

**A point was made that, if you come at this analysis from another direction, and argue that one could create a job if given $X, you could arrive at a similar answer to our estimate.

***We also recognise that there are flow-on effects of ‘jobs’, but there are flow-on effects for everything, and so we have ignored them to simplify our analysis.

Edit history

Edit 1 (8:20 pm, 28/06) – After reassessing the individual policy recommendations, we adjusted the final recommendations from Science Party 1, Greens/AJP 2/3, NXP/Labor 4/5, Liberal 6; to Greens 1, Science Party/AJP 2/3, Labor 4, NXP 5, Liberal 6.

Edit 2 (3 pm, 29/06) – Several miscellaneous points added.

The morality of having a meat-eating pet

In this article I examine the relative impact on the environment and animal suffering of having one pet compared to eating an average omnivorous diet instead of a vegan diet. Note that this analysis is relative, with the final results in terms of animals consumed in both cases to allow for a rough comparison. I time-limited this research to 1 hour on purpose and so the study is not as in-depth as it could be, and I assume that I have not missed any major unforeseen factors in my work. If I have, I want to know, so please tell me in the comments.

My family has two cats and one dog, all of whom eat canned pet food every day, which is mostly meat. After going vegan for ethical reasons, it occurred to me that my pets were also consuming animal flesh, which presumably led to some non-zero amount of suffering. Therefore, by having a pet, I was still contributing a good deal to suffering. I wanted to determine just how much suffering.

Let us first assume that each pet consumes one can of pet food per day for the sake of argument. I am using a 400g can of Whiskas cat food for this example. The can states that the ingredients are ‘Meat including chicken, beef and/or lamb and/or pork and turkey; gelling agents; vegetable oil; colouring agents; flavours; vitamins and minerals; taurine; plant extracts’. It does not state which meats are used, nor in what quantity to the non-meat components. I will conservatively assume that only half the can is meat (i.e. 200g of meat per pet per day) and examine two cases; all beef and all chicken.

An important question here is whether the meat is factory farmed or not, as this makes a significant difference to the amount of suffering experienced by the food animals. According to Ethical Consumer, Whiskas pet food contains factory farmed meat, dairy and eggs. I believe that it is safe to assume that most pet food is factory farmed. Another important question is whether the meat is primarily ‘waste product’. If it is, reducing the demand for it may not have as strong an effect on suffering as if ‘human grade’ meat is used, though I expect the effects to be similar.

Edit (08/06/18) – One of the biggest critiques of this post was indeed that animal-based pet food is mostly waste product. According to Ryan Bethencourt, this might have been the case 10 years ago, but not anymore. As much as 1/3rd of the meat consumed in the US is consumed by pets.

Chicken

The average chicken has a 2.26 kg market weight after 5 weeks, which I have interpreted to mean the amount of usable meat at time of sale. In this case, an average pet will consume 1 chicken in just over 11 days, or 33 chickens per year.

Beef (cow)

This article estimates that 490 pounds (222.26 kg) of usable meat is retrieved from a cow. In this case, an average pet will consume 1 cow in around 1,111 days, or 0.33 cows per year.

Average omnivorous diet

According to the Vegan Calculator, the average American eats 11 cows and 2,400 chickens over their life (as well as 27 pigs, 80 turkeys, 30 sheep and 4,500 fish). Using the average US citizen life expectancy of 79 years, this amounts to around 0.14 cows and 30.38 chickens per year. Comparing this to the average number of cows or chickens consumed by a pet in a year, we can see that, for one type of animal at least, the impact of having a pet is comparable to the impact of eating an omnivorous diet over a vegetarian (or vegan) diet. Thus I argue that having a pet that consumes meat is about as unethical as consuming meat yourself.

Some argue that there is a difference as some pets need to consume meat to live, while humans don’t. This is true, however an alternative is to simply not get a meat eating pet in the first place. This argument also places the wellbeing of a single pet animal as being orders of magnitude higher than that of a food animal, which is speciesist. On the topic of rescuing animals from shelters, perhaps it is better to let the animal die so that hundreds of others may live.

Some people claim to need animals for reasons of mental wellbeing, and I make no comment on whether or not this is true. However there are many pets that don’t require meat to live a healthy life, and I would strongly recommend having such a pet, like a pig, over one that does require meat. I also make no comment as to whether certain pets like cats can live on a meat free diet. I have heard that this is possible, but do not recommend it without further research.

A video version of this is available here.

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 now	Proportion of vegans in USA
0	0.5
3	1
6	2
9	4
12	8
15	16
18	32
21	64
24	128

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.

	Cost	Schedule
Best	0.9 - 1.15	0.9 - 1.15
Good	0.95 - 1.2	0.95 - 1.25
Fair	1.0 - 1.3	1.05 - 1.4
Poor	1.05 - 1.45	1.1 - 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.