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PRELIMINARY DRAFT — This page is under development. Questions and response formats are subject to change. Feedback welcome.

Technical subquestions (CM_12-20)

the most pivotal and tractable question for animal welfare funding decisions.

Following our evaluation of Rethink Priorities' cultured meat forecasting work and ongoing TEA evaluations, this workshop focuses on what the evidence tells us about cultivated meat's production cost trajectory. We recognize that consumer acceptance, regulatory pathways, and environmental implications also matter — but we're centering on costs because this seems among the most pivotal and tractable questions right now, and we want to bring focused expertise to bear. Pivotal Questions Initiative → 📊 Cost Modeling Dashboard → EA Forum: CM Viability → CM_01 on Metaculus → RP Evaluation →

Async Discussion & Suggestions

rkshops in 2026: Wellbeing Measurement WELLBY reliability & DALY conversion · March 2026

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Note: This workshop is still in early planning. We're gathering initial interest and availability. Final dates and agenda will be confirmed once we have responses from key participants.

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Other Pivotal Questions Workshops 🧠 Wellbeing Measurement (held Mar 16)

Plant-Based Alternatives (May 2026)

Risner et al. (2024)"Environmental impacts of cultured meat," ACS Food Science & Technology. Life cycle assessment finding CM's global warming potential could be 4–25x greater than retail beef if pharmaceutical-grade purification is required. GFI published a formal critique. — ACS Food Sci & Tech. LCA raising environmental cost concerns.

our

more

showing Humbird's AA costs were 2–10x too high.

. The 10x gap

The paper’s object is an abstract characterization of strategy-proof social choice rules for selecting a public-good level. While public decision rules can matter in principle, the abstract theorem is not tied to a concrete policy domain, institution, or implementation setting. There is no evident link to a specific decision-maker, welfare question, or operational policy lever where an evaluation would affect choices at scale.

This is a strong Unjournal candidate: it is directly about improving job recommendation systems used by a public employment service, has clear welfare implications for job seekers, and uses randomized field experiments rather than purely predictive metrics. The paper addresses a decision-relevant policy question—how to design algorithms that improve worker outcomes rather than platform clicks/applications—and appears to offer actionable guidance for public and private labor-market intermediaries. As a working paper with experimental evidence and a model-based welfare metric, it has high timing value and likely benefit from independent evaluation.

Environmental & broader context

🔬 Upcoming Workshop: Cultivated Meat Cost Trajectories We’re organizing an online expert workshop (late April / early May 2026) to dig into the key cost cruxes — media costs, bioreactor scale-up, and the gap between TEA projections and commercial reality. This model is one of the tools we’ll use. Workshop details & signup → · State your cost beliefs → 💬 We Want Your Feedback! Comment directly on this page using Hypothesis — click the < tab on the right edge. Highlight any text, parameter, or result to annotate it. We actively monitor comments and will respond to questions, incorporate suggestions, and improve the model based on your feedback. 🎧 Listen: Technical Review (22 min MP3) — Audio walkthrough of model architecture and areas for review

Comment directly on this page using the Hypothes.is sidebar (look for the < tab on the right edge of the page). Highlight any text and add your annotation — visible to all Hypothes.is users. You can also use the feedback buttons on each paper card.

We're continuing the discussion asynchronously and will be publicly sharing key materials soon. This site is evolving into a resource page.

1. WELLBY Reliability and Value

Join the discussion (Google Doc)

Evaluation: Cash Transfers vs Psychotherapy in Liberia (McGuire et al.) Unjournal Evaluation Summary Applied Comparison Direct experimental comparison of cash transfers and psychotherapy in an LMIC context. Particularly relevant because it measures multiple outcomes—psychological distress, consumption, life satisfaction—allowing cross-metric comparison. Evaluation Summary

Essential

The Controversy: Happier Lives Institute estimated StrongMinds a

otentially more cost-effective than AMF. GiveWell's 2023 assessment disagreed, citing concerns about: (1) mapping depression scales to LS, (2) assumed effect duration, (3) demand effects in self-reported outcomes, and (4) publication bias.

Peasgood et al. (unpublished)

Unit-change comparability

📚 Further Reading: Unjournal Evaluations The Unjournal has commissioned independent evaluations of papers relevant to this debate: → StrongMinds & Friendship Bench Evaluation — Critical assessment of HLI's meta-analysis and cost-effectiveness claims → Long-Run Effects of Psychotherapy on Depression — Cuijpers et al. meta-analysis on therapy durability → Cash Transfers vs Psychotherapy: Comparative Impact — McGuire et al. direct comparison in Liberia → Mental Health Therapy as a Core Strategy (Ghana) — Barker et al. on scaling community-based therapy

mortality-focused interventions

Practical guidance for funders now Given the uncertainties above, what should funders actually do? This section offers a decision-oriented framework, not a single prescription.

Zoom chat for quick reactions;

Segment structure is set; timing may adjust slightly. Updated March 11, 2026

calibrated

Consider the value obtained when using the best feasible measure for cross-intervention comparison in contexts like the focal context. What share of this value is obtained, in expectation, from using the simple linear WELLBY measure (as defined above) for all interventions?

Consider the value obtained

We're organizing the discussion around four key questions:

The neutral point is the life satisfaction level representing neither positive nor negative welfare—essentially the boundary between "life worth living" and "suffering." Estimates range from 2-5 on the 0-10 scale. Peasgood et al. (2018) tentatively estimate ~2.

evaluation summary

QALYs (quality-adjusted life years)

instruments like EQ-5D

Other measures include QALYs (quality-adjusted life years), income-equivalent measures, and multi-dimensional poverty indices. QALYs are similar to DALYs but measure health gained rather than lost.

—and what would change their minds?

Unlike WELLBYs, DALYs are based on expert-derived disability weights rather than self-reported wellbeing—weights are constructed through surveys of health professionals rating hypothetical health states.

Vignette exercises: respondents rate hypothetical people's life satisfaction based on descriptions, revealing how individuals anchor the scale and enabling cross-person calibration.

Calibration questions ask respondents to rate well-defined scenarios (e.g., "How satisfied would you be if you won $1,000?"). By observing how people rate the same reference points, researchers can estimate individual differences in scale use.

Cost-effectiveness estimates vary by an order of magnitude depending on how WELLBYs are valued relative to DALYs.

Open Philanthropy

Each scale point represents an equal welfare increment. If violated, summing is invalid and interventions targeting different baselines become incomparable.

nterpersonal Comparability LSA = 7 ≈ LSB = 7 implies UA ≈ UB When two people report the same score, they experience similar welfare. Scale-use heterogeneity violates this assumption.

equires four implicit assumptions

1 WELLBY = 1-point increase on a 0-10 life satisfaction scale × 1 person × 1 year W = Σi Σt LSit

We'll produce a practitioner-focused summary document, belief elicitation results with confidence intervals, and structured notes.

Participants can opt out of recording for specific segments if needed

(Note: QALYs may be more directly comparable than DALYs for this purpose.)

scale?

Where is the "neutral point" on the scale?

When comparing a mental health intervention (measured in WELLBYs) to a physical health intervention (measured in DALYs)

but more work is needed.

Each has strengths and limitations—and how they relate to each other, and whether either reliably captures what matters for human welfare, directly affects which interventions get prioritized.

adversarial manipulation.

Our results support AI as structured screening and decision support rather than full automation,

xhibiting consistent failure modes: compressed rating scales, uneven criterion coverage, and variable identification of expert-flagged concerns.

often approach the ceiling implied by human inter-rater variability on several criteria,

high-quality but noisy reference signal

narrative critiques

overing economics and social-science working papers

Peer review is strained, and AI tools generating referee-like feedback are already adopted by researchers and commercial services—yet field evidence on how reliably frontier LLMs can evaluate research remains scarce.

“high” reasoning effort

OpenAI Responses API

returned file id keyed by path, size, and modification time.

d the best performance from top reasoning models

Zhang and Abernethy (2025) propose deploying LLMs as quality checkers to surface critical problems instead of

but still recommend human oversight.

emphasize

The population of papers