Very interesting—I’ve been thinking about a generalized theory of bikeshedding that also applies to careers, where some people will have initial exposure to a career through, say, an internship, and because they then know that topic very well and are ambiguity averse, they’ll just continue with it until the end of their lives. Because they do value impact they’ll post-hoc rationalize their choice as very important and then fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy.
“The Gates foundation focuses on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), because diarrheal deaths are about 1m/year.
They invested quite heavily in this and also seem to routinely leverage money from governments, and influence the discourse on the relative priority of WASH within global development. This could be net negative because global health might not be as effective as other economic development interventions (c.f. the work by Lant Pritchett).
He seems to have spent an extraordinary amount of money on WASH and just generally global development.
What caused him to focus on this? And what is thus the more distal cause for the EA focusing on global health? Thinking about this might uncover non-optimal path dependency.
There seem to be a few causes:
because he read a NYT article by Nicholas Christofis on diarrheal disease, which because it affects people directly.
because he experienced burnout at Microsoft and wanted to do something more meaningful and direct
He personally went to India and vaccinated children himself giving him an emotional attachment to the cause
I used to be quite the fan of Gates until now, and though I thought his foundation could have done better if it were more flexible, I always thought he gets things roughly right.”
Yea. A whole lot of “charity founder” stories are a lot like that. Like,
“I, by chance, wound up in rural Kenya. And when I was there, I came across a kid without pencils. And this kid obviously would have been helped by pencils. So I devoted the next 20 years of my life to help kids in Kenya get pencils.”
Based on you description of the documentary, I wonder to what extent Gates’ explanations reflect his actual reasoning. He seems very cautious and filtered, and I doubt an explanation of a boring cost-benefit analysis would make for a good documentary.
Not that I think there necessarily was a good cost-benefit analysis, just that I wouldn’t conclude much either way from the documentary.
Good point- but it’s impossible to know if there are hidden reasons for his behavior. However, I find my theory more plausible: he didn’t think much about social impact initially, made a lot of money at Microsoft, then turned towards philanthropy, and then selected a few cause areas (US education, global health, and later clean energy), partially based on cost-effectiveness grounds (being surprised that global health is so much more effective than US healthcare), but it seems unlikely that he systematically commissioned extensive cause prioritization work OpenPhil style and then after lengthy deliberation came down on global health being a robustly good buy that is ‘increasingly hard to beat’.
The Gates documentary was part of what pushed me towards “okay, earning-to-give is unlikely to be my best path, because there seems to be a shortage in people smart enough to run massive (or even midsized) projects well.” I guess the lack of red-teaming is a subset of constrainedness (although is it more cognitive bias on the funders, vs lack of “people / orgs who can independently red-team ideas”? Prolly both).
Very interesting—I’ve been thinking about a generalized theory of bikeshedding that also applies to careers, where some people will have initial exposure to a career through, say, an internship, and because they then know that topic very well and are ambiguity averse, they’ll just continue with it until the end of their lives. Because they do value impact they’ll post-hoc rationalize their choice as very important and then fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy.
I had similar thoughts on Gates recently after watching his netflix documentary:
“The Gates foundation focuses on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), because diarrheal deaths are about 1m/year.
They invested quite heavily in this and also seem to routinely leverage money from governments, and influence the discourse on the relative priority of WASH within global development. This could be net negative because global health might not be as effective as other economic development interventions (c.f. the work by Lant Pritchett).
He seems to have spent an extraordinary amount of money on WASH and just generally global development.
What caused him to focus on this? And what is thus the more distal cause for the EA focusing on global health? Thinking about this might uncover non-optimal path dependency.
There seem to be a few causes:
because he read a NYT article by Nicholas Christofis on diarrheal disease, which because it affects people directly.
because he experienced burnout at Microsoft and wanted to do something more meaningful and direct
He personally went to India and vaccinated children himself giving him an emotional attachment to the cause
I used to be quite the fan of Gates until now, and though I thought his foundation could have done better if it were more flexible, I always thought he gets things roughly right.”
Yea. A whole lot of “charity founder” stories are a lot like that. Like,
That reminds me of a charity I was faux-promoting to friends in high school: Bookmarks for the Poor.
Based on you description of the documentary, I wonder to what extent Gates’ explanations reflect his actual reasoning. He seems very cautious and filtered, and I doubt an explanation of a boring cost-benefit analysis would make for a good documentary.
Not that I think there necessarily was a good cost-benefit analysis, just that I wouldn’t conclude much either way from the documentary.
Good point- but it’s impossible to know if there are hidden reasons for his behavior. However, I find my theory more plausible: he didn’t think much about social impact initially, made a lot of money at Microsoft, then turned towards philanthropy, and then selected a few cause areas (US education, global health, and later clean energy), partially based on cost-effectiveness grounds (being surprised that global health is so much more effective than US healthcare), but it seems unlikely that he systematically commissioned extensive cause prioritization work OpenPhil style and then after lengthy deliberation came down on global health being a robustly good buy that is ‘increasingly hard to beat’.
The Gates documentary was part of what pushed me towards “okay, earning-to-give is unlikely to be my best path, because there seems to be a shortage in people smart enough to run massive (or even midsized) projects well.” I guess the lack of red-teaming is a subset of constrainedness (although is it more cognitive bias on the funders, vs lack of “people / orgs who can independently red-team ideas”? Prolly both).