This is an interesting (or ‘thought provoking’) article, and it linked to other articles (mostly on 80,000 hours) which in turn linked to others (e.g. B Tomasik’s blog), as well as the TEDTalk by MacAskill. I had skimmed some of the 80,000 hours articles before, but skimming them again I found clarified some issues, and I realized I had missed some points in them before .
(One point I had missed was the article by Tomasik on why many charities may not differ all that much in terms of their effectiveness. I think some cases can be distinguished—for example a ‘corrupt charity’ (which spends most of its money on salaries and fundraising—there have been many in my area and they make up data about how much good they have done; or some which do research on interventions that are ‘way out of the scientific mainstream’—and which typically are often not peer reviewed by other scientists even if they claim to be scientific approaches. There also cases of large charities which spend alot of money on ‘disaster releif’ often if foreign countries (i’m in US) , but on review , one cannot find out how most of the money was spent.
This is why my limited charity given mostly goes to small projects I’m somewhat familiar with; also big charities often have alot more resources and ways tio generate revenue, so even if they do reasonable work and could use more resources, i spread my donations—partly because of my study of ecology.)
So far, I don’t see a really succint formula which can capture the complexity of these issues (apart from the very basic ones in the paper—ie using INT framework you end up with Effectiveness = good done/$ spent).
I often hear ideas like its better to spend alot of money on issues like malaria or deworming because these appear to have ‘good’ returns in terms of QALYs, and also by saving the lives of alot of people you may then have some ‘potential Einsteins’ or ‘Newtons’ or ‘Hawkings’ or some other famous genius who may help save alot of future humanity. Bu then others say it would be better to spend the same amount of money on someone on the planet right now to fund their research on how to stop an asteroid from causing the extinction of all humanity.
It might cost as much to fund 5 people doing the research on asteroid hazards, as it would be to fund 1000s of people (i.e. ‘giving as consumption’) to avoid death in infancy, so its hard to calculate both scale and neglectedness , as well as tractability.
(e.g. the TEDtalk while discussing impressive gains over time in Human development indicators, sort of glosses over some ‘complicated issues’—such as the fact that while ‘democratization’ has increased, many democracies and semi-democracies (places with elections) such as Venezuela, Brazil, even USA and UK and rest of EU, Israel Kenya, Brazil, South Africa, India, Russia, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, etc. seem far from ideal. Also while life expectancy (and populations ) have gone up, these also cause demographic and environmental problems—including ethnic conflict, biodiversity loss, etc. )
So there appears to be some more research on this problem—I’m even working on my own model (and related research is being done by many people), though I don’t know if this is ‘effective’ (though at least its relatively low cost—some very powerful ideas were produced on a shoestring budget).
This is an interesting (or ‘thought provoking’) article, and it linked to other articles (mostly on 80,000 hours) which in turn linked to others (e.g. B Tomasik’s blog), as well as the TEDTalk by MacAskill. I had skimmed some of the 80,000 hours articles before, but skimming them again I found clarified some issues, and I realized I had missed some points in them before .
(One point I had missed was the article by Tomasik on why many charities may not differ all that much in terms of their effectiveness. I think some cases can be distinguished—for example a ‘corrupt charity’ (which spends most of its money on salaries and fundraising—there have been many in my area and they make up data about how much good they have done; or some which do research on interventions that are ‘way out of the scientific mainstream’—and which typically are often not peer reviewed by other scientists even if they claim to be scientific approaches. There also cases of large charities which spend alot of money on ‘disaster releif’ often if foreign countries (i’m in US) , but on review , one cannot find out how most of the money was spent.
This is why my limited charity given mostly goes to small projects I’m somewhat familiar with; also big charities often have alot more resources and ways tio generate revenue, so even if they do reasonable work and could use more resources, i spread my donations—partly because of my study of ecology.)
So far, I don’t see a really succint formula which can capture the complexity of these issues (apart from the very basic ones in the paper—ie using INT framework you end up with Effectiveness = good done/$ spent).
I often hear ideas like its better to spend alot of money on issues like malaria or deworming because these appear to have ‘good’ returns in terms of QALYs, and also by saving the lives of alot of people you may then have some ‘potential Einsteins’ or ‘Newtons’ or ‘Hawkings’ or some other famous genius who may help save alot of future humanity. Bu then others say it would be better to spend the same amount of money on someone on the planet right now to fund their research on how to stop an asteroid from causing the extinction of all humanity.
It might cost as much to fund 5 people doing the research on asteroid hazards, as it would be to fund 1000s of people (i.e. ‘giving as consumption’) to avoid death in infancy, so its hard to calculate both scale and neglectedness , as well as tractability.
(e.g. the TEDtalk while discussing impressive gains over time in Human development indicators, sort of glosses over some ‘complicated issues’—such as the fact that while ‘democratization’ has increased, many democracies and semi-democracies (places with elections) such as Venezuela, Brazil, even USA and UK and rest of EU, Israel Kenya, Brazil, South Africa, India, Russia, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, etc. seem far from ideal. Also while life expectancy (and populations ) have gone up, these also cause demographic and environmental problems—including ethnic conflict, biodiversity loss, etc. )
So there appears to be some more research on this problem—I’m even working on my own model (and related research is being done by many people), though I don’t know if this is ‘effective’ (though at least its relatively low cost—some very powerful ideas were produced on a shoestring budget).