I accept your point about life satisfaction vs happiness measures not being equivalent. But if GiveWell recipients think that their life is significantly closer to the worst possible life than the best possible life, this still makes my point pretty well. Doesn’t seem obvious to judge the net welfare of someone who is, say, 3⁄10 for life satisfaction and ‘rather happy’. I haven’t seen good studies on GiveWell recipients’ happiness or moment-to-moment well being (using ESM etc.), or other ways of measuring what we care about, but I would appreciate better info on that.
My (implicit) estimates for child marriage, stunting and mental illness should be adjusted for the fact that average GiveWell charity recipients in Burkina Faso have worse lives than the average citizen, but I acknowledge my language was imprecise. Stunting might plausibly cross the 50% threshold in that category, but might be under. The median marriage age for Burkinabe girls is 17, and is probably lower in the GiveWell pop. Some orgs define child marriage as <18.
Mental illness thresholds seem to vary a lot, but this
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0164790 article is a good example of how bad mental health is for ‘ultra-poor’ kids in Burkina Faso. My thinking would be that 20-30% of the kids in this study have lives clearly on the net-negative side, which I think would be unlikely to be outweighed by the more neutral/ positive lives. Don’t know exactly how this would match with a typical GiveWell population.
“To answer your comment “you have to work out whether you think this life you’ve saved is more likely or not to be net positive. ”—We have worked it out, and the answer YES, a resounding yes”
I consider this just obviously false. I just don’t believe that you/ global health people have disproven negative-leaning utilitarian or suffering-focused ethical stances. You might have come to a tentative conclusion based on a specific ethical framework, limited evidence and personal intuitions (as I have).
I’d say that there’s probably a fairly fundamental uncertainty about whether any lives are net positive. There’s definitely not a consensus within the EA community or elsewhere. It depends on stuff like suffering happiness assymetry and the extent to which you think pain and pleasure are logarithmic (https://qri.org/blog/log-scales).
Most of us will acknowledge that at least some lives are net negative, some extremely so, and that these lives are far more likely to be saved by GiveWell charities. I suspect any attempt to model exactly where to draw the line will be very sensitive to subtle differences in assumptions, but my current model leans towards the average GiveWell life being net negative in the medium term, for the reasons I’ve mentioned.
In terms of language, I think “great care and dignity” are suitable for most contexts, but I think that it’s important that the EA forum is a safe space for blunt language on this topic.
Thanks for responding.
I accept your point about life satisfaction vs happiness measures not being equivalent. But if GiveWell recipients think that their life is significantly closer to the worst possible life than the best possible life, this still makes my point pretty well. Doesn’t seem obvious to judge the net welfare of someone who is, say, 3⁄10 for life satisfaction and ‘rather happy’. I haven’t seen good studies on GiveWell recipients’ happiness or moment-to-moment well being (using ESM etc.), or other ways of measuring what we care about, but I would appreciate better info on that.
My (implicit) estimates for child marriage, stunting and mental illness should be adjusted for the fact that average GiveWell charity recipients in Burkina Faso have worse lives than the average citizen, but I acknowledge my language was imprecise. Stunting might plausibly cross the 50% threshold in that category, but might be under. The median marriage age for Burkinabe girls is 17, and is probably lower in the GiveWell pop. Some orgs define child marriage as <18.
Mental illness thresholds seem to vary a lot, but this https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0164790 article is a good example of how bad mental health is for ‘ultra-poor’ kids in Burkina Faso. My thinking would be that 20-30% of the kids in this study have lives clearly on the net-negative side, which I think would be unlikely to be outweighed by the more neutral/ positive lives. Don’t know exactly how this would match with a typical GiveWell population.
“To answer your comment “you have to work out whether you think this life you’ve saved is more likely or not to be net positive. ”—We have worked it out, and the answer YES, a resounding yes”
I consider this just obviously false. I just don’t believe that you/ global health people have disproven negative-leaning utilitarian or suffering-focused ethical stances. You might have come to a tentative conclusion based on a specific ethical framework, limited evidence and personal intuitions (as I have).
I’d say that there’s probably a fairly fundamental uncertainty about whether any lives are net positive. There’s definitely not a consensus within the EA community or elsewhere. It depends on stuff like suffering happiness assymetry and the extent to which you think pain and pleasure are logarithmic (https://qri.org/blog/log-scales).
Most of us will acknowledge that at least some lives are net negative, some extremely so, and that these lives are far more likely to be saved by GiveWell charities. I suspect any attempt to model exactly where to draw the line will be very sensitive to subtle differences in assumptions, but my current model leans towards the average GiveWell life being net negative in the medium term, for the reasons I’ve mentioned.
In terms of language, I think “great care and dignity” are suitable for most contexts, but I think that it’s important that the EA forum is a safe space for blunt language on this topic.