I am very surprised to read that GiveWell doesn’t at all try to factor in deaths caused by the charities when calculating lives saved. I don’t agree that you need a separate number for lives lost as for lives saved, but I had always implicitly assumed that ‘lives saved’ was a net calculation.
The rest of the post is moderately misleading though (e.g. saying that Holden didn’t start working at Open Phil, and the EA-aligned OpenAI board members didn’t take their positions, until after FTXFF had launched).
The “deaths caused” example picked was pretty tendentious. I don’t think it’s reasonable to consider an attack at a facility by a violent criminal in a region with high baseline violent crime “deaths caused by the charity” or to extrapolate that into the assumption that two more people will be shot dead for every $100,000 donated. (For the record, if you did factor that into their spreadsheet estimate, it would mean saving a life via that program now cost $4776 rather than $4559)
I would expect the lives saved from the vaccines to be netted out against deaths from extremely rare vaccine side effects (and the same with analysis of riskier medical interventions), but I suspect the net size of that effect is 0 to several significant figures and already factored into the source data.
I don’t think you incorporate the number at face value, but plausibly you do factor it in in some capacity, given the level of detail GiveWell goes into for other factors
I think if there’s no credible reason to assign responsibility to the intervention, there’s no need to include it in the model. I think assigning the charity responsibility for the consequences of a crime they were the victim of is just not (by default) a reasonable thing to do.
It is included in the detailed write-up (the article even links to it). But without any reason to believe this level of crime is atypical for the context or specifically motivated by e.g. anger against the charity, I don’t think anything else needs to be made of it.
I don’t agree that you need a separate number for lives lost as for lives saved, but I had always implicitly assumed that ‘lives saved’ was a net calculation.
Interesting! I think the question of whether 1 QALY saved (in expectation) is canceled out by the loss of 1 QALY (in expectation) is a complicated question. I tend to think there’s an asymmetry between how good well-being is & how bad suffering is, though my views on this have oscillated a lot over the years. I’d like GiveWell to keep the tallies separate because I’d prefer to make the moral judgement depending on my current take on this asymmetry, rather than have them default to saying it’s 1:1.
I tend to think there’s an asymmetry between how good well-being is & how bad suffering is
This isn’t relevant if you think GiveWell charities mostly act to prevent suffering. I think this is certainly true for the health stuff, and arguably still plausible for the economic stuff.
This is an important point. People often confuse harm/benefit asymmetries with doing/allowing asymmetries. Wenar’s criticism seems to rest on the latter, not the former. Note that if all indirect harms are counted within the constraint against causing harm, almost all actions would be prohibited. (And on any plausible restriction, e.g. to “direct harms”, it would no longer be true that charities do harm. Wenar’s concerns involve very indirect effects. I think it’s very unlikely that there’s any consistent and plausible way to count these as having disproportionate moral weight. To avoid paralysis, such unintended indirect effects just need to be weighed in aggregate, balancing harms done against harms prevented.)
I don’t think it can be separated neatly. If the person who has died as a result of the charity’s existence is a recipient of a disease reduction intervention, then they may well have died from the disease instead if not for the intervention.
I am very surprised to read that GiveWell doesn’t at all try to factor in deaths caused by the charities when calculating lives saved. I don’t agree that you need a separate number for lives lost as for lives saved, but I had always implicitly assumed that ‘lives saved’ was a net calculation.
The rest of the post is moderately misleading though (e.g. saying that Holden didn’t start working at Open Phil, and the EA-aligned OpenAI board members didn’t take their positions, until after FTXFF had launched).
The “deaths caused” example picked was pretty tendentious. I don’t think it’s reasonable to consider an attack at a facility by a violent criminal in a region with high baseline violent crime “deaths caused by the charity” or to extrapolate that into the assumption that two more people will be shot dead for every $100,000 donated. (For the record, if you did factor that into their spreadsheet estimate, it would mean saving a life via that program now cost $4776 rather than $4559)
I would expect the lives saved from the vaccines to be netted out against deaths from extremely rare vaccine side effects (and the same with analysis of riskier medical interventions), but I suspect the net size of that effect is 0 to several significant figures and already factored into the source data.
I don’t think you incorporate the number at face value, but plausibly you do factor it in in some capacity, given the level of detail GiveWell goes into for other factors
I think if there’s no credible reason to assign responsibility to the intervention, there’s no need to include it in the model. I think assigning the charity responsibility for the consequences of a crime they were the victim of is just not (by default) a reasonable thing to do.
It is included in the detailed write-up (the article even links to it). But without any reason to believe this level of crime is atypical for the context or specifically motivated by e.g. anger against the charity, I don’t think anything else needs to be made of it.
Interesting! I think the question of whether 1 QALY saved (in expectation) is canceled out by the loss of 1 QALY (in expectation) is a complicated question. I tend to think there’s an asymmetry between how good well-being is & how bad suffering is, though my views on this have oscillated a lot over the years. I’d like GiveWell to keep the tallies separate because I’d prefer to make the moral judgement depending on my current take on this asymmetry, rather than have them default to saying it’s 1:1.
This isn’t relevant if you think GiveWell charities mostly act to prevent suffering. I think this is certainly true for the health stuff, and arguably still plausible for the economic stuff.
This is an important point. People often confuse harm/benefit asymmetries with doing/allowing asymmetries. Wenar’s criticism seems to rest on the latter, not the former. Note that if all indirect harms are counted within the constraint against causing harm, almost all actions would be prohibited. (And on any plausible restriction, e.g. to “direct harms”, it would no longer be true that charities do harm. Wenar’s concerns involve very indirect effects. I think it’s very unlikely that there’s any consistent and plausible way to count these as having disproportionate moral weight. To avoid paralysis, such unintended indirect effects just need to be weighed in aggregate, balancing harms done against harms prevented.)
I don’t think it can be separated neatly. If the person who has died as a result of the charity’s existence is a recipient of a disease reduction intervention, then they may well have died from the disease instead if not for the intervention.