A post about when we should and should not use “lives saved” language in describing EA work.
I find that telling people they can save a life for $5000 often leads to a lot of confusion: Whose life is being saved? What if they die of something else a few months later?Explaining QALYs isn’t too hard if you have a couple of minutes, but you often have a lot less time than that.
Is there some shorthand we can use for “giving 50 healthy years, in expectation, across a population” that makes it sound anywhere nearly as good as simply “saving a life”? How important is it to be accurate in this dimension, vs. simply allowing people to conflate QALY/VSL with “saving a specific person”?
A post about when we should and should not use “lives saved” language in describing EA work.
I find that telling people they can save a life for $5000 often leads to a lot of confusion: Whose life is being saved? What if they die of something else a few months later?Explaining QALYs isn’t too hard if you have a couple of minutes, but you often have a lot less time than that.
Is there some shorthand we can use for “giving 50 healthy years, in expectation, across a population” that makes it sound anywhere nearly as good as simply “saving a life”? How important is it to be accurate in this dimension, vs. simply allowing people to conflate QALY/VSL with “saving a specific person”?