GiveWell have validated whether they are imposing a Western perspective when it comes to this moral weight judgement—they have surveyed people in Africa on this question.
People bring this up a lot, and I think it’s inaccurate. Although GiveWell has discussed the IDinsight survey as factoring into their moral weights, they do not actually incorporate its results, and the vast majority of their moral weights comes from surveys of donor preferences. From their 2020 update:
60% weight on donor responses
10% weight on James Snowden’s 2018 weights (as a proxy for 2018 GiveWell staff)
30% weight on YLLs (both as a commonly-used metric itself and as a proxy for the IDinsight survey)
They discuss their issues with the IDinsight survey:
Lots of respondents placed extremely high value (over $10 million) on life. That doesn’t necessarily imply lack of engagement with the question – it might be a true preference – but it’s not helpful for resource allocation. It’s an extraordinary result without extraordinary evidence to support it. If we believed this was an “accurate” representation of how the world should work, we expect that it would imply that low- and middle-income country governments and other institutions should be acting very differently than they currently are.
And conclude:
we don’t really trust the results as providing a coherent and accurate picture of people’s preferences.
So it’s not accurate to say that GiveWell’s moral weights have been “validated” by beneficiary preferences. GiveWell claims to be quite skeptical of the beneficiary preferences survey, so they just added a bit more weight on years of life lost (YLLs) to capture the rough idea of people valuing life more than they expected. In practice, this amounts to valuing the lives of under-5 children a bit more than valuing the lives of other people (since they have more YLLs):
our new weights value young children slightly more highly relative to people over the age of five, and essentially leave the relationship between averting a death and increasing consumption unchanged. (emphasis mine)
Given how much more people valued averting death over increasing consumption in the IDinsight survey, the fact that this relationship was unchanged makes it difficult to argue that GiveWell has really incorporated beneficiary preferences into their moral weights.
I know this wasn’t the main point of your comment, but it’s important to clarify because it comes up a lot as a defense when EA is criticized for being paternalistic, and I just don’t think that represents reality. GiveWell is absolutely imposing a Western perspective by having 70% of their weights be from donors and staff.
My understanding is that the IDinsight study had about 35 percent of beneficiaries choosing saving lives over any presented amount of cash transfers, while the respondents who switched based on the # of transfers per life saved expressed preferences that were (on the median) roughly similar to preexisting GiveWell weights.
So I think a model that gives about 35 percent weight to a lives-saved-only calculus and about 65 percent weight to a tradeoff calculus would accurately reflect the beneficiary preferences in the survey. That isn’t too far off from the 60/10/30 model.
Going solely by the preferences in this one survey might affect some GiveWell decisions on the margin, but the bulk of their top charities’ rated effectiveness already comes from saving lives under five.
That’s still not accurate because the YLLs adjustment mostly matters on the intensive margin (saving kids vs adults), and as GiveWell states, their lives vs income tradeoff was essentially unchanged compared to their previous moral weights.
People bring this up a lot, and I think it’s inaccurate. Although GiveWell has discussed the IDinsight survey as factoring into their moral weights, they do not actually incorporate its results, and the vast majority of their moral weights comes from surveys of donor preferences. From their 2020 update:
60% weight on donor responses
10% weight on James Snowden’s 2018 weights (as a proxy for 2018 GiveWell staff)
30% weight on YLLs (both as a commonly-used metric itself and as a proxy for the IDinsight survey)
They discuss their issues with the IDinsight survey:
And conclude:
So it’s not accurate to say that GiveWell’s moral weights have been “validated” by beneficiary preferences. GiveWell claims to be quite skeptical of the beneficiary preferences survey, so they just added a bit more weight on years of life lost (YLLs) to capture the rough idea of people valuing life more than they expected. In practice, this amounts to valuing the lives of under-5 children a bit more than valuing the lives of other people (since they have more YLLs):
Given how much more people valued averting death over increasing consumption in the IDinsight survey, the fact that this relationship was unchanged makes it difficult to argue that GiveWell has really incorporated beneficiary preferences into their moral weights.
I know this wasn’t the main point of your comment, but it’s important to clarify because it comes up a lot as a defense when EA is criticized for being paternalistic, and I just don’t think that represents reality. GiveWell is absolutely imposing a Western perspective by having 70% of their weights be from donors and staff.
This is a good point.
My understanding is that the IDinsight study had about 35 percent of beneficiaries choosing saving lives over any presented amount of cash transfers, while the respondents who switched based on the # of transfers per life saved expressed preferences that were (on the median) roughly similar to preexisting GiveWell weights.
So I think a model that gives about 35 percent weight to a lives-saved-only calculus and about 65 percent weight to a tradeoff calculus would accurately reflect the beneficiary preferences in the survey. That isn’t too far off from the 60/10/30 model.
Going solely by the preferences in this one survey might affect some GiveWell decisions on the margin, but the bulk of their top charities’ rated effectiveness already comes from saving lives under five.
That’s still not accurate because the YLLs adjustment mostly matters on the intensive margin (saving kids vs adults), and as GiveWell states, their lives vs income tradeoff was essentially unchanged compared to their previous moral weights.