As I said on my final para, I do see global health interventions as probably being net positive, despite potentially saving more net negative lives, so my argument definitely wasn’t to “defund GiveWell”. It was more that “saving lives” is a bad metric and bad thing to feel good about.
My cherry picking of negative phenomena was in response to the cherry picking of the original post. I think boring/ useless school (I didn’t quote anything but… most African rural schools are boring and useless...), unpleasant labour, hunger/ stunting and poor mental health are very relevant variables, as they define a lot of the waking hours of the poorest people in the world.
FGM and child marriage are probably less representative of general welfare—I was responding to the “first kiss” idea in the post.
I chose Burkina Faso at random. For central African countries I might have stressed sexual violence, which seems to be lower in Burkina Faso.
As I said on my final para, I do see global health interventions as probably being net positive, despite potentially saving more net negative lives, so my argument definitely wasn’t to “defund GiveWell”. It was more that “saving lives” is a bad metric and bad thing to feel good about.
My cherry picking of negative phenomena was in response to the cherry picking of the original post. I think boring/ useless school (I didn’t quote anything but… most African rural schools are boring and useless...), unpleasant labour, hunger/ stunting and poor mental health are very relevant variables, as they define a lot of the waking hours of the poorest people in the world.
FGM and child marriage are probably less representative of general welfare—I was responding to the “first kiss” idea in the post.
I chose Burkina Faso at random. For central African countries I might have stressed sexual violence, which seems to be lower in Burkina Faso.