Imagine a relay race team before a competition. The second-leg runner on the team thinks—let us assume correctly—‘If I run my leg faster than 12 seconds, then my team will finish first; if I don’t, then my team won’t finish first.’ She then runs her leg faster than 12 seconds. As the fourth-leg runner on her team crosses the finish line first, the second-leg runner thinks, ‘I won the race.’ Is she right?
Yes, of course she’s right. Even if she’s the weakest member of the team. They don’t give Olympic relay teams 1⁄4 of a medal each.
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For the record I don’t describe myself as an EA and don’t really hang out in EA circles. I’m far too old to be susceptible to arguments that I’m going to save the world with the power of my intellect and good intentions. If the founding fathers of EA’s bios are accurate I discovered Peter Singer’s solution to world poverty slightly before them, thought he had a [somewhat overstated] point and haven’t done anywhere near enough to suggest I absorbed the lesson. I think utilitarianism’s utility is limited but don’t have the academic pedigree to argue about it for any length of time, and I think a lot of EA utilitarian maths is a bit shoddy.[1] So I don’t think I’m making a particularly partisan argument here.
But you aren’t half leading with your weakest arguments[2] GiveWell’s estimation that if x bednets are distributed, on average about y% Malawian mothers receiving the nets will succeed in using them to protect their kids, so z% fewer kids will die isn’t stealing credit from Malawian mothers or Chinese manufacturers in a zero sum karmic accounting game, it’s a simple counterfactual (with or without appropriate sized error bars). Or put another way, if a Malawian kid thanks her mother for going hungry for two days to pay for a malaria net herself,[3] the mother shouldn’t feel obliged to say “no, don’t thank me, thank the Chinese people that manufactured it and the supply chain that brought it all the way here, and the white Westerners for doing enough research into malaria nets to convince vendors in my village to stock it.” The argument that installing a few more stakeholders in the way introduces a qualtitative difference between donating and diving into a pond might make Peter Singer’s thought experiment a little bit trite, but it isn’t an argument against the quantitative outcomes of donating at all.
in particular, the tendency to confuse marginal and average costs and wild speculative guesses with robust expected value estimation. I don’t actually think this is bad per se: people overestimating how much their next fiver can help a chicken or prevent Armageddon certainly isn’t worse than people overestimating how much they want the next beer. I just think it looks a lot like the “donor illusion” certain leading EAs used to chastise mainstream charity for; actually the average “child sponsorship” scheme is probably more accurate, in accounting terms, about how much your recurring contribution to the charity pool is helping Jaime from Honduras than many EA causes. (I guess not liking that type of charity either is where you and the median EA agree and I differ :))
Judging by your book reviews, you’ve researched sufficiently to be able to offer more nuanced criticisms of development aid. So I’m not sure why you’d lead with this, or in other articles with anecdotes how about profoundly the whinging of a single drunk teenage voluntourist crushed your dreams of changing the world. It’s not even like there aren’t much better glib criticisms of EA or charity in general....
Yes, of course she’s right. Even if she’s the weakest member of the team. They don’t give Olympic relay teams 1⁄4 of a medal each.
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For the record I don’t describe myself as an EA and don’t really hang out in EA circles. I’m far too old to be susceptible to arguments that I’m going to save the world with the power of my intellect and good intentions. If the founding fathers of EA’s bios are accurate I discovered Peter Singer’s solution to world poverty slightly before them, thought he had a [somewhat overstated] point and haven’t done anywhere near enough to suggest I absorbed the lesson. I think utilitarianism’s utility is limited but don’t have the academic pedigree to argue about it for any length of time, and I think a lot of EA utilitarian maths is a bit shoddy.[1] So I don’t think I’m making a particularly partisan argument here.
But you aren’t half leading with your weakest arguments[2] GiveWell’s estimation that if x bednets are distributed, on average about y% Malawian mothers receiving the nets will succeed in using them to protect their kids, so z% fewer kids will die isn’t stealing credit from Malawian mothers or Chinese manufacturers in a zero sum karmic accounting game, it’s a simple counterfactual (with or without appropriate sized error bars). Or put another way, if a Malawian kid thanks her mother for going hungry for two days to pay for a malaria net herself,[3] the mother shouldn’t feel obliged to say “no, don’t thank me, thank the Chinese people that manufactured it and the supply chain that brought it all the way here, and the white Westerners for doing enough research into malaria nets to convince vendors in my village to stock it.” The argument that installing a few more stakeholders in the way introduces a qualtitative difference between donating and diving into a pond might make Peter Singer’s thought experiment a little bit trite, but it isn’t an argument against the quantitative outcomes of donating at all.
in particular, the tendency to confuse marginal and average costs and wild speculative guesses with robust expected value estimation. I don’t actually think this is bad per se: people overestimating how much their next fiver can help a chicken or prevent Armageddon certainly isn’t worse than people overestimating how much they want the next beer. I just think it looks a lot like the “donor illusion” certain leading EAs used to chastise mainstream charity for; actually the average “child sponsorship” scheme is probably more accurate, in accounting terms, about how much your recurring contribution to the charity pool is helping Jaime from Honduras than many EA causes. (I guess not liking that type of charity either is where you and the median EA agree and I differ :))
Judging by your book reviews, you’ve researched sufficiently to be able to offer more nuanced criticisms of development aid. So I’m not sure why you’d lead with this, or in other articles with anecdotes how about profoundly the whinging of a single drunk teenage voluntourist crushed your dreams of changing the world. It’s not even like there aren’t much better glib criticisms of EA or charity in general....
maybe because donations dried up...