It looks like the total number of lives saved by all Singer- and EA-inspired donors over the past 50 years may be small, or even zero
This conclusion from the first half of the letter seems unjustified by the prior text?
You seem to be arguing that there’s a credit allocation problem, where there’s actually many actors who contribute to a bednet saving a life, but Givewell style calculations ignore this, and give all the credit to the donor, which leads to over counting. I would describe this as GiveWell computing the marginal impact, which I think is somewhat reasonable (how is the world different if I donate vs don’t donate), but agree this has issues and there are arguments for better credit allocation methods. I think this is a fair critique.
But, I feel like at best this dilutes the impact by a factor of 10, maybe 100 at an absolute stretch. If we take rough estimates like 200,000 lives saved via GiveWell (rough estimate justified in footnote 1 of this post), that’s still 20,000 or 2,000 lives saved. I don’t see how you could get to “small or even zero” from this argument
‘small or even zero’ refers to two different conclusions using two different accounting methods.
‘small’: from the method which spreads out ‘lives saved’ across all contributors in the chain of causality
‘zero’: from the method which only attributes ‘lives saved’ to the final actor in the chain of causality.
Leif provides both accounts, which is why he provides ‘small or even zero’ as his description of the impact.
I agree that it is a little unclear. I think Leif’s argument would be clearer if he omitted the ‘zero’ accounting method, which I don’t think he places much credence in but nonetheless included to illustrate the potential range of accounts of attribution.
Overall, I think that it is accurate of Leif to characterise the impact as ‘small’ if we ought to decrease impact by multiple orders of magnitude is correct.
Sure, I agree that under the (in my opinion ridiculous and unserious) accounting method of looking at the last actor, zero is a valid conclusion.
I disagree that small is accurate—I feel like even if I’m being incredibly charitable and say that the donor is only 1% of the overall ecosystem saving the life, we still get to 2000 lives saved, which seems highly unreasonable to call small—to me small is at best <100
This conclusion from the first half of the letter seems unjustified by the prior text?
You seem to be arguing that there’s a credit allocation problem, where there’s actually many actors who contribute to a bednet saving a life, but Givewell style calculations ignore this, and give all the credit to the donor, which leads to over counting. I would describe this as GiveWell computing the marginal impact, which I think is somewhat reasonable (how is the world different if I donate vs don’t donate), but agree this has issues and there are arguments for better credit allocation methods. I think this is a fair critique.
But, I feel like at best this dilutes the impact by a factor of 10, maybe 100 at an absolute stretch. If we take rough estimates like 200,000 lives saved via GiveWell (rough estimate justified in footnote 1 of this post), that’s still 20,000 or 2,000 lives saved. I don’t see how you could get to “small or even zero” from this argument
‘small or even zero’ refers to two different conclusions using two different accounting methods.
‘small’: from the method which spreads out ‘lives saved’ across all contributors in the chain of causality
‘zero’: from the method which only attributes ‘lives saved’ to the final actor in the chain of causality.
Leif provides both accounts, which is why he provides ‘small or even zero’ as his description of the impact.
I agree that it is a little unclear. I think Leif’s argument would be clearer if he omitted the ‘zero’ accounting method, which I don’t think he places much credence in but nonetheless included to illustrate the potential range of accounts of attribution.
Overall, I think that it is accurate of Leif to characterise the impact as ‘small’ if we ought to decrease impact by multiple orders of magnitude is correct.
Sure, I agree that under the (in my opinion ridiculous and unserious) accounting method of looking at the last actor, zero is a valid conclusion.
I disagree that small is accurate—I feel like even if I’m being incredibly charitable and say that the donor is only 1% of the overall ecosystem saving the life, we still get to 2000 lives saved, which seems highly unreasonable to call small—to me small is at best <100