This is great and I’m glad you wrote it. For what it’s worth, the evidence from global health does not appear to me strong enough to justify high credence (>90%) in the claim “some ways of doing good are much better than others” (maybe operationalized as “the top 1% of charities are >50x more cost-effective than the median”, but I made up these numbers).
The DCP2 (2006) data (cited by Ord, 2013) gives the distribution of the cost-effectiveness of global health interventions. This is not the distribution of the cost-effectiveness of possible donations you can make. The data tells us that treatment of Kaposi Sarcoma is much less cost-effective than antiretroviral therapy in terms of avoiding HIV related DALYs, but it tell us nothing about the distribution of charities, and therefore does not actually answer the relevant question: of the options available to me, how much better are the best than the others?
If there is one charity focused on each of the health interventions in the DCP2 (and they are roughly equally good at turning money into the interventions) – and therefore one action corresponding to each intervention – then it is true that the very best ways of doing good available to me are better than average.
The other extreme is that the most cost-effective interventions were funded first (or people only set up charities to do the most cost-effective interventions) and therefore the best opportunities still available are very close to average cost-effectiveness. I expect we live somewhere between these two extremes, and there are more charities set up for antiretroviral therapy than kaposi sarcoma.
The evidence that would change my mind is if somebody publicly analyzed the cost-effectiveness of all (or many) charities focused on global health interventions. I have been meaning to look into this, but haven’t yet gotten around to it. It’s a great opportunity for the Red Teaming Contest, and others should try to do this before me. My sense is that GiveWell has done some of this but only publishes the analysis for their recommended charities; and probably they already look at charities they expect to be better than average – so they wouldn’t have a representative data set.
Yeah I think this is a really good question and would be excited to see that kind of analysis. Maybe I’d make the numerator be “# of charitable $ spent” rather than “# of charities” to avoid having the results be swamped by which areas have the most very small charities.
It might also be pretty interesting to do some similar analysis of how good interventions in different broad areas look on longtermist grounds (although this necessarily involve a lot more subjective judgements).
This is great and I’m glad you wrote it. For what it’s worth, the evidence from global health does not appear to me strong enough to justify high credence (>90%) in the claim “some ways of doing good are much better than others” (maybe operationalized as “the top 1% of charities are >50x more cost-effective than the median”, but I made up these numbers).
The DCP2 (2006) data (cited by Ord, 2013) gives the distribution of the cost-effectiveness of global health interventions. This is not the distribution of the cost-effectiveness of possible donations you can make. The data tells us that treatment of Kaposi Sarcoma is much less cost-effective than antiretroviral therapy in terms of avoiding HIV related DALYs, but it tell us nothing about the distribution of charities, and therefore does not actually answer the relevant question: of the options available to me, how much better are the best than the others?
If there is one charity focused on each of the health interventions in the DCP2 (and they are roughly equally good at turning money into the interventions) – and therefore one action corresponding to each intervention – then it is true that the very best ways of doing good available to me are better than average.
The other extreme is that the most cost-effective interventions were funded first (or people only set up charities to do the most cost-effective interventions) and therefore the best opportunities still available are very close to average cost-effectiveness. I expect we live somewhere between these two extremes, and there are more charities set up for antiretroviral therapy than kaposi sarcoma.
The evidence that would change my mind is if somebody publicly analyzed the cost-effectiveness of all (or many) charities focused on global health interventions. I have been meaning to look into this, but haven’t yet gotten around to it. It’s a great opportunity for the Red Teaming Contest, and others should try to do this before me. My sense is that GiveWell has done some of this but only publishes the analysis for their recommended charities; and probably they already look at charities they expect to be better than average – so they wouldn’t have a representative data set.
Yeah I think this is a really good question and would be excited to see that kind of analysis. Maybe I’d make the numerator be “# of charitable $ spent” rather than “# of charities” to avoid having the results be swamped by which areas have the most very small charities.
It might also be pretty interesting to do some similar analysis of how good interventions in different broad areas look on longtermist grounds (although this necessarily involve a lot more subjective judgements).